Customized Lady Gaga Barbie dolls, designed by a 29-year-old Beijinger

I’ve made no secret of my hatred for Graydon Carter’s society rag Vanity Fair, so guess what happened when I opened its September 2010 issue? I sliced my finger open on a subscription card; not off to a good start. I was only interested in this issue because of the feature story devoted to Lady Gaga, who you may know as an artist of particular interest to me.

Vanity Fair’s profile on Gaga has little to recommend it save some exquisite photography from Nick Knight (which nevertheless fits perfectly into my Vanity Fair Cover Nudity Theorem). The piece comes off as an insubstantial primer on Gaga for the fearful and clueless; I’m sure the cover blurb “Should you worry?” was supposed to be tongue-in-cheek but the article seems to take it at face value. To reassure its readers of Gaga’s corporatist credentials, the article starts off with a barrage of pull quotes from top music executives, as if they could be trusted to be the arbiters of anything of importance.

However, the Vanity Fair article manages to bumble into inadvertent insight with the title “Lady Gaga’s Cultural Revolution,” a configuration of words with the right balance of senselessness and pretension. Yet there’s a bit of truth there—it’s a title that wouldn’t fly in the PRC, but by recalling one of the most traumatic and important events that shaped modern China, it makes one think about Gaga’s influence in that country.

The Gaga phenomenon has a worldwide reach, but the response to it is always local. Amid the recent explosion of academic interest in Gaga and her work, there’s been an intriguing exploration into how Gaga’s status as a native New Yorker has shaped her artistic development, and how she’s been influenced by, and in turn influences, the Byzantine cultural sphere of that city. (It’s a point Vanity Fair touches on with thinly veiled condescension when it breathes a sigh of relief that Gaga wasn’t one of those unwashed tourist-bumpkins continually invading their city.)

But let’s talk Gaga area studies: her reception in Beijing is necessarily going to be different from her reception in Manhattan. Mobs of adoring fans may look the same from a distance, but their perceptions as they engage with Gaga will be entirely different. In the West she exists in well-developed, sophisticated and jaded media spaces. Chinese pop culture, on the other hand, is in a period of rapid transformation, and injecting Gaga into the mix has had some interesting results.

While it’s not the whole truth, it’s a useful generalization to say that Chinese media consumers and producers take a great deal of their cues from Western media, gleaning the broad strokes and amplifying them. Modern Chinese pop music builds on the foundations laid in Hong Kong and Taipei, which were heavily influenced by American and British styles. International response to Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon led to a decade of domestic and for-export wuxia fantasy epics, and probably made the formerly-realist director Zhang Yimou the man he is today. For now and into the near future, there is a premium in China on what American trendsetters think.

The Gaga phenomenon, which originated in a combative and conflicted American media environment, is entering practically uncontested into China. The result is what I only half-jokingly call Total Gaga Dominance. In my stay in Beijing, her work was ubiquitous; constant play on the radio and at bars and clubs goes without saying, but I’d get a haircut and hear “Bad Romance” over the speakers while someone’s phone rang to the tune of “Paparazzi.” My local supermarket put The Fame and The Fame Monster on loop over their PA system and left it like that for five months. Unscrupulous concert promoters can claim Lady Gaga’s going to be performing and sell out in hours. There’s even a talk show host on Chinese television named “Lady Guagua” whose star is unsurprisingly on the rise.

Elizabeth Lynch of China Law and Policy noted this too, musing that this may come from the accessibility of both Gaga’s music and fashion. She also delightfully points out that

Lady Gaga is so popular right now that her name is barely ever translated into Chinese characters, much to the chagrin of Chinese officials (if it is translated, it is usually translated as 雷帝嘎嘎 ["Lei Di Ga Ga"], meaning “Thunder Emperor Gaga”).

Language has a great deal of power, and the fact that Gaga goes untranslated in Chinese culture puts her above a host of other foreign celebrities. Lynch also notes—and I’ve seen firsthand—that the current Chinese net expression of surprise is not “OMG” but “OMLG”: Oh My Lady Gaga. In the officially atheist People’s Republic of China, Lady Gaga has replaced God.

Pop culture and commercialism serve as social glue; in early 20th century America, Hollywood pictures created an idealized version of the American that the working classes, especially a generation of recent immigrants, could aspire to. This weakened the cultural hold of ethnic enclaves and reduced the isolation of certain social groups by giving them a common language and set of desires. Although there were large swaths of the population excluded from these developments, they still had a noticeable effect.

The same developments are happening in China right now. American writers in China, such as Peter Hessler and Leslie T. Chang, have examined the conflicts generated by the massive social upheaval caused by the past decade of Chinese industrial development. Although the average Chinese citizen has intense loyalty to China as a national idea, there is still a great deal of parochialism and provincialism in play; China’s unity disguises the fact that it is heavily regionalized. Although Mandarin is proclaimed as the official language, it may not necessarily get you far with the locals in southern Guangzhou, or even heavily commercialized and modern Shanghai. (A friend of mine mentioned that on a trip to Shanghai, she received a much better reception speaking her decent-to-good English as opposed to her flawless Mandarin.) And these are urban cores we’re talking about—rural China is fractured into thousands of isolated villages with their own dialects and flavor of culture.

But millions and millions of Chinese are traveling to the cities to work, and they’re experiencing the full force of mass media, pop culture, and commercialism. One of the consequences of pop culture’s attempt to reach the largest audience possible is that it transcends provincialism, and a generation of working-class Chinese is rejecting their parents’ old ways for the perceived values of modernity, glamour, and sophistication offered by urban culture. And if pop culture is social glue, Gaga’s the stickiest of them all. There are more people in China studying English than the entire population of Great Britain, and for them Gaga’s lyrics are surprisingly easy to sing along to. She carries foreign glamour and no cultural baggage; her beautiful alien aesthetic seems divorced from anything else her fans have ever known, and thus a place to build a new culture and identity.

In the new Karate Kid film, Chinese actress Han Wenwen performs an energetic dance to Gaga’s “Poker Face.” The funny thing about it is that it doesn’t feel like a forced needle-drop—it’s emblematic of something real in China. Han’s standing in for millions of Chinese girls doing the same dance.  In a sense, Gaga’s values are the values of a new Chinese pop culture. At the moment, Gaga is irrepressibly cool in the PRC, and this moment is very, very important in a lot of ways. When she finally deigns to perform there, the reaction will be intriguing, to say the least.

Many believe the film’s release was pushed back to allow Feng Xiaogang’s Aftershock to play uncontested.  As a result Aftershock has broken domestic box office records but I can’t help wondering how well it would have done against competition.  Last December the World Trade Organization rejected China’s appeal to maintain strict control over foreign film distribution and China has until this December to implement the law.  But with less than six months left, China still seems intent on protecting domestic releases.

Some domestic releases, I should say.  Aftershock was the Chinese film industry’s summer tentpole and with its sensitive subject matter and tacit approval of the Communist Party, its no wonder the government tried so hard to protect it.  But China Film Group, the association that controls all movie distribution in China, has no qualms about throwing Inception in with several, less important Chinese films that also premiere in September.

EDIT: For reasons unknown, the release date for Inception has been moved up to September 2nd.

—

Sources:

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE55O0OG20090625
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/film/news/e3i9b1395cce9be0a2e41fb96653bbdeeaf
http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90001/90782/90872/7027413.html

I was walking through the entrance line like we did yesterday and approached the security check.  After passing through the metal detector, an Expo volunteer gave me the usual pat-down.  But after I turned around the volunteer noticed several lines of script on my shirt.  I was wearing a black t-shirt with something like, “The world is one; life is one,” written in multiple languages on the back.  The volunteer wasn’t sure what to do and called over a policeman who was standing nearby.  The policeman studied my shirt and asked me what the script in other languages meant.  I told him I didn’t know but that it was probably the same as the Chinese.  The policeman didn’t recognize any of the languages and the volunteers who had gathered around could only identify certain languages like French, German, and Arabic, but couldn’t confirm what was written.  At this point the first policeman called another policeman and some more volunteers over.

The second policeman studied my shirt for a while and then said that I would have to change my clothes.  I asked if I could turn my shirt inside-out.  He said no.  My father, who had passed through security unmolested, came over and said that our clothes were in the hotel and we didn’t have time to go back.  The policeman said that I would have to change my shirt before he let me in.  I asked him why.  He said that the writing on my shirt was “too sensitive.”  ”Sensitive in what way?” I asked.  He chose not to answer my question and told me not to wear that shirt outside again.  I said that I wore this shirt every summer, even to the Olympics in Beijing.  ”Beijing and Shanghai are different,” came the reply.  The policeman then asked for my identification number and other personal information.  He jotted it down in his notebook.  The volunteers snapped a picture of my identification card and told me to continue on.  As he policeman walked away I heard him say to the volunteers, “Next time something like that happens, don’t tell me.”

What do you think about this story?

Beside the fact that the policeman made a deal out of something he didn’t even want to be informed of, for me the greatest irony is that a gathering of hundreds of cultures ostensibly aimed at understanding and tolerance fails before one can even enter the grounds.  My cousin did not wear his shirt on purpose, nor is he an ideologue of universalism—he’s just a college student who is actually excited about the Expo.  I can’t fault the policeman for being vigilant; to him and others in the Chinese security apparatus, anything foreign could potentially pose a threat and they can’t take any chances.  (Never mind that a dissident trying to display incendiary rhetoric probably wouldn’t wear it on his person to the security check.)  Usually this is understandable, but at the Shanghai Expo, it is self-defeating.

It’s regrettable that none of the policemen or volunteers could recognize any words of the other languages but is it right to punish someone for your own ignorance?  I imagine that other people from other countries will wear clothes emblazoned with their own languages.  Would they be turned away as my cousin almost was?  My guess is that will be let through because they look foreign.

And that’s the way it goes sometimes.  Even though “foreign” things are looked on with suspicion, Chinese people live under stricter rules and regulations than people from other countries.  It gets me angry just thinking about it.  The next time something like this happens, I hope my cousin just doesn’t tell me.

But I don’t want to spend these lines complaining—far from it.  For me, the Shanghai Expo raises many questions about the face of modern China and its citizens.  My posts in the following days will investigate the conundrums that arise when half a million people a day from 200 countries, but mostly China, decide to congregate in an area just over five square kilometers.

—

The first day was bad.  Not unbearable, but not nearly enticing enough to make me want to go back.  Throughout the day, one question kept running through my mind: what is the purpose of this Expo?

I came home and looked for a mission statement but was unable to find any coherent statement of purpose from the official site.  I was left to wonder.

CULTURAL EXCHANGE?

The Expo is a grand gathering of over 200 countries and organizations, each with their own culture or interests.  Looking at the interminable lines of people queuing to visit the pavilion of a country they had probably never heard of, I joked to my mother that to enter a country’s pavilion one should have to be able to locate that country on a map to which she replied that the purpose of the Expo was to give people the chance to understand the countries that they didn’t know and had never been to.

Fair enough.  The Expo is a great opportunity for the majority of Chinese who might never have the chance to travel abroad to explore and learn about the myriad other countries with whom they share the world.  But at times, the Expo seems more like a mad scramble for passport stamps and pictures of impractical architecture than any sort of cross-cultural understanding.  Indeed, in the Russian pavilion hundreds of flashbulbs captured the Pandoran landscape that scaled the walls but I didn’t see a single person listen to or watch the videos explaining Russia’s technological developments.

At the end of my first day, I watched a performance at the World Expo Cultural Center, which is arguably the most impressive building on the grounds, resembling the alien spaceship from Independence Day.  The purpose of the show was ostensibly to showcase the world’s musical culture and included everything from Riverdance to flamenco to folk songs about the Communist Party but all the performers were Chinese.  A few songs were performed in foreign languages—a Japanese ballad and an aria from Turandot—but the rest seemed like Chinese interpretations of foreign culture, which was interesting and informative in its own way.  We are all familiar with Western interpretations of Chinese culture, from Enter the Dragon to Rush Hour to Kung-Fu Panda, but seeing the Chinese interpret other cultures was a rare delight.

There was a quartet that played “famous” songs from every country.  The choice from the Americas?  Kenny G’s “Going Home.”  Granted, it is a fairly common song in China, especially when a store is trying to get people to leave.  Another was a Bollywood number that to me, who has only seen two Bollywood movies and Slumdog Millionaire, seemed pretty on the mark.  There were two African numbers, one vaguely Egyptian and the other sub-Saharan.  In the latter, a group of men wearing skintight black shirts and leggings stomped out with spears.  For some reason the music in both African numbers began with chanting and drumming but ended with a techno beat.  In the end it was hard to know if I was watching a burlesque show or a harmless attempt to encapsulate culture.  Even more I wondered what most Chinese would take away from this and if they would realize that this show, and the Expo in general, was just an approximation of a country’s culture.

COMMON HUMANITY?

Maybe the Expo isn’t about understanding countries, but rather appreciating the diversity of human beings.  In the opening video of the USA pavilion, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton celebrates what she calls “core American values,” which apparently include, “diversity, innovation, and optimism.”  (I will not go into detail about the USA pavilion; it will be singled out for especial ridicule in a later post.)  I can stand by that.  The world is composed of many different cultures and traditions but in the end we are, for better or worse, human.

Because each pavilion employs workers from its own country, there are literally people from all over the world at the Shanghai Expo.  On the one hand it is heartening to see Chinese people taking pictures of people of different races, tacitly taking an interest in the world’s diversity; perhaps some of the visitors have never met anyone from many of the countries represented at the Expo.  But taking pictures of someone because of their race or nationality or skin color can be horribly demeaning for the subject.  It’s one thing to take a picture with someone as a gesture of bonding, and quite another to take someone’s picture because they are an oddity.  Fellow blogger Abby Fitzgibbon, who has been to the Expo twice against her will, confided that she saw one African volunteer plead with visitors to stop taking her picture.

At moments, far from unifying mankind, the Expo is distinctly dehumanizing.  In the morning as I was walking along one of the elevated walkways that criss-cross the Expo, I looked down to see a line for a pavilion.  People were packed into three rows, cordoned off by metal railings.  As the gates were opened, the people flooded into another holding pen, pushing and trampling each other.  While the Expo serves to bring many different kinds of people together, the sheer number of them leads the mind to abstraction.

DICKWAVING?

If there was ever an original purpose to the World’s Fair, the original name for these expos, then it was to showcase technological and cultural superiority.  The first World’s Fair, held in London in 1851, was a testament to the British Empire’s wealth and glory.  Perhaps in this sense the 2010 Shanghai Expo is a worthy successor.  Following shortly on the heels of the Olympics, this Expo is a symbol of Shanghai’s, and by extension, China’s greatness.  Superlatives are everywhere: the largest Expo site with the most countries represented; the most expensive and expected to be the most visited.

Case in point: the China pavilion.  Costing 1.5 billion Yuan ($220 million) and built on a base which is already taller than most of the other pavilions, the China pavilion towers far above all other comers.  It is a pity only a fraction of the people who make the pilgrimage to the Expo will be able to see the inside.  Tickets are either alotted to tour groups or distributed at 9AM, when people rush in to snag the limited tickets given out each morning.

The other original aim of the expo, displaying technology from around the world, has been largely jettisoned.  Apart from the Japan pavilion and a few others, newfangled gadgets are nowhere to be seen.  Perhaps anticipating the number of visitors, most countries decided not to allow visitors to handle objects, as anything that 70 million people touch is likely to break.  In this age, and especially in China, new technology doesn’t remain new for long; fake iPads came on the market about a week after the official release.  Perhaps if Apple or Sony had their own pavilion there would be some interesting toys but with copyrights and patents, anything that can be displayed by a country is either outdated or a state secret.

—

So dickwaving it is.  The expo is part popularity contest, part beauty pageant, and, with all the interests and money involved, part political primary.  It’s hard not to wonder what the nearly $50 billion that went into making the expo could have meant for China, not to mention what other countries could have done with the money for their individual pavilions.  But that’s not fair for me to say.  If there is an intended audience for this Expo, I’m not it.  Comically large IMAX screens and Bolivian folk bands do not move me.  I have heard of all of these countries and, with the exception of North Korea, could go there if I wanted to.  I wonder what it would be like if I were a child or a villager.  Maybe my mom was right.  Maybe this expo is just an opportunity to see new things, not necessarily to understand them.  It’s a chance to realize that there’s a big world out there.  It’s a chance to learn or be reminded of common human principles: diversity, hope, wonder, and perhaps most of all, patience.

Just the opposite.  Xia Lin, the deputy editor-in-chief of Xinhua, the mouthpiece of the Communist Party of China, was giving a lecture entitled “Understanding Journalistic Protocols for Covering Breaking News” at the Tianjin Foreign Studies University in which he defended the practice of massaging the truth when it comes to news, citing the critical role of media to maintain societal stability.  The examples he gave were shocking, but only confirmed what most skeptical human beings believe: that their government lies to them on a daily basis.

All the news that's fit to print.

Lin recounted the “live broadcast” of the Shenzhou 5 landing, in which Chinese viewers saw astronaut Yang Liwei emerge from the space capsule smiling and flashing a victory symbol.  But actually when the capsule was opened Yang had blood all over his face due to a cut on his lip.  Workers wiped the blood off his face and shot the second reveal for the country to see.  Lin also mentioned the “July 5th incident” in Xinjiang when state media underreported Han deaths for fear of mob reprisal and, when the reprisal happened anyway, omitted mention of Uighur casualties.

The revelations are startling not because of the obvious fact that news in China is manufactured, but that its top officials are unrepentant about it.  In fact, they see careful management, or manipulation, of the truth as not only justified but integral to their job.  Reporting is not in the service of facts but rather facts serve reporting, and can be airbrushed and edited to benefit those in power.

Though this seems immoral and propagandistic, there are two cultural factors that contextualize the government’s mentality.   First is the Chinese preoccupation with face, and no one is more vain than the government.  Chinese leaders, from emperors to demagogues to its current politicians, have always taken pains to appear irreproachable and by now it has become a part of the fiction.  Every misstep is seen as potential ammunition for those who might want to challenge the incumbent power.  Thus, mistakes are admitted only posthumously, for fear of damaging the reputations or political fortunes of those still alive.

Second, the Chinese government is willing to sacrifice much for stability: ideals, lives, even fundamental tenets of their own party ideology.  If they are willing to abandon their own beliefs for stability, then why shouldn’t every branch of the government, including the media, the military, and the legal system, be used toward that end?

Recently, one can see their point.  In March, the state media reported the first of what has now become a rash of kindergarten stabbings.  Likewise, the reports of factory suicides in Shenzhen have led to nothing but more suicides and a belated pay increase.  If suppressing the news of that first stabbing could have saved the lives of children who died in subsequent attacks, wouldn’t we all think twice?  But denial of death is on some level a negation of life.  Not reporting the deaths of those children would mean they died for nothing and would be an affront to their memory and the grief of their families.  And yet, what is the point in honoring death when it only leads to more of the same?  Truth is lofty and eternal; lives are earthly and transient.  How does one weigh the two?

We can’t.  And maybe we don’t have to, because the news itself is not as important as how we act in response to it.  If we look for easy answers to tragedies, then those who died did so in vain.  If we settle for easy explanations—the killers were mentally ill; the young people who jumped from buildings were heartbroken—then we should not be surprised if these things continue to happen and have one to blame for their proliferation but ourselves.

The furor over the factory suicides have made amounted to some small victories—a pay increase at Foxconn and in Beijing—and has raised awareness of issues like poor factory conditions, the growing income gap, and the dark side of economic development.  However, the response to the epidemic of kindergarten stabbings has been and will continue to be characteristically simple.  The murderers responsible for the stabbings will be executed.  Their point of view will not be reported.  Their reasoning will be lost along with their lives and we will get no closer to knowing, let alone understanding, what would drive them to take the lives of defenseless children.  Even if we are reluctant to understand their reasons, aren’t they the most important piece of this puzzle?

The worst thing about edited news is not the deception or the misinformation—it is the lack of information.  Information that can help us prevent further incidents.  Information we can use to ensure long-term stability, instead of settling for short respites.  Instead of knowing less about these tragedies, we need to know more.  We need to know, truly, why these things happened, because only then can we ask the right questions, the hard questions.  And though we might not like the answers, at least they’d be honest.  People want the truth; the government just needs to believe that they can handle it.

—

Sources:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/04/world/asia/04china.html
http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2010/06/xia-lin-夏林-xinhua-deputy-chief-editor-reveals-secret-details-of-old-news-stories/

In a lecture he gave to a group of journalism students last month, a top official at Xinhua, the state news agency, said that the [Shenzhou 5] mission was not so picture-perfect. The official, Xia Lin, described how a design flaw had exposed the astronaut to excessive G-force pressure during re-entry, splitting his lip and drenching his face in blood. Startled but undaunted by Mr. Yang’s appearance, the workers quickly mopped up the blood, strapped him back in his seat and shut the door. Then, with the cameras rolling, the cabin door swung open again, revealing an unblemished moment of triumph for all the world to see.

- New York Times

It’s difficult for me to judge just how Orwellian China’s carefully groomed, state-run news coverage is: in America, coverage of the news is centered around the image of the news program or network; not the state.  I do follow the BBC, therefore state-run media is not entirely out of my experience; but the BBC news website has not reported this story…

Jacobs’ article finishes with what is meant to be a hopeful note: perhaps those who leaked the lecture and have kept it on the Internet despite the government’s best efforts are China’s hope for journalistic integrity.  Unfortunately, I find their point to be smug at best.  Granted, the New York Times is not some sort of Hearstian conglomerate, rife with sensationalism and personal politics; however, it’s no secret that the past 5 years have been very difficult for the Times financially.  Their most recent financial report showed a profit, but they are hardly out of the woods.  Is fighting the good fight a losing battle?

What about the rest of American news—the media that does seem to follow the infamous designs of Mr. Hearst (who inspired Citizen Kane and supposedly the character Gail Wynand in The Fountainhead).  News networks may not employ textbook Yellow Journalism (except Fox News and their weepy demagogue Glenn Beck), but they essentially take a day’s worth of attention-grabbing news and filter it through a variety of different personalities.  The news is tailored to various demographics, and each network has a different image: MSNBC, “the leader in breaking news,” provide news for people who want today’s news yesterday; CNN, “the worldwide leader in news,” is for the people who appreciate the weight and the legacy of CNN as a world news “leader”; Fox News is “fair and balanced” for people who think the other news networks have a far-left bias.  American news is not run by the state—it is run by the bottom line.  The news citizens need takes a back seat to the news citizens will buy, and the news the program’s/network’s advertisers and corporate sponsors will buy.

Journalistic integrity is important.  I hope this leaked lecture inspires Chinese journalists to want to expose the truth and fight ignorance in their country no matter what.  And maybe it will rub off on American news media.

A common ritual for expatriates in China is the visa run. Because of the limited number of days a tourist can spend in one “visit” to China (in our case it was sixty days), those staying in China for longer durations must make the trek out of the country and back in to get a new stamp on their passport and reset the timer. Common destinations include Mongolia, South Korea, and Hong Kong, whose special status counts as leaving China. Often it’s used as an excuse to take a vacation every couple of months, and that’s what Michael and I did for our first run to Hong Kong—we made a weekend of it. This time, however, was supposed to be a formality: take the train from Beijing to Hong Kong (a twenty-four hour trip), then immediately get on the return train and head back. Clean, simple, and efficient.

However, there was one snafu to trip us up. We didn’t book our return train ahead of time, and after arriving at the station, we found that the return trip was already completely sold out. The next train from Hong Kong wouldn’t leave for another two days, meaning we would be stuck on the other side of the border until then. This was unacceptable to Michael, and because of obligations back in Beijing, he opted to take a plane ride back the next afternoon, at the cost of around 2000 Hong Kong Dollars (about $256 USD). I, on the other hand, had no such deadline, and so there was another option. Tomorrow, a train would leave from neighboring Shenzhen. I could cross the border on foot, then take the Shenzhen train to Beijing. This would only cost me around 400 HKD ($50 USD). “That sounds pretty good,” I say to the attendant.

“It’s a hard seat,” she replies.

“Are there any sleepers?”

“No, no sleeper, only seat.”

On the train to Hong Kong, Michael and I had tickets for a “hard sleeper” coach, meaning that we had bunk beds to sleep in for the duration of the trip. The first time we took a train ride in China, I was filled with trepidation, having read some horror stories online: cramped cattle cars… no running water… angry baijiu-swilling migrant workers who would slit their mamas’ throats for a nickel. And it’s true that the “soft sleeper” cars on the train seemed like wonderlands of luxury (Doors that can close! Western-style toilets!) but the hard sleeper cars were pleasant enough. The train rides were soothing in their own way.

However, on this trip, my only option was to get a “hard seat” ticket, meaning I would have only one space on a bench of seats in a crowded train car to call my own for an entire twenty-four hours. Or I could get a plane ticket like Michael, but I’m not made out of RMB. “Get the seat, Oscar. Come on, get the seat!”

And so frugality won out. I pushed the button.

—

Even with our new plans, we still had an evening to kill in Hong Kong. Rather than staying in a hostel for the night, Michael had another great idea: just power through and stay up until the next day. As I was on a frugality kick, I foolishly agreed. This led to a Lost Weekend-style journey throughout the city, which included eating at the Tsui Wah cafe, getting kicked out of three Starbucks over a period of three hours, and spending much of the night drinking in front of 7-11. (This is not as cheap and degenerate as it may sound. If Hong Kong is the West’s idea of China transformed into a theme park, 7-11s are the concession stands. They’re everywhere, and every night you can see I-bankers in expensive suits and dolled-up club girls standing in front of 7-11s pounding Bacardi Breezers before heading to their next venue. Alright, that does sound cheap and degenerate.)

Around 4 AM, Michael and I head to an all-night McDonald’s where he immediately passes out in a chair. It seems we’re not the only ones doing that, as every other seat is filled with men sitting around, sleeping upright, or staring off into space. The girl at the register comes over to the table we’re at and cleans up the trays and trash left by its previous occupant. She gives a look to me and Michael. “You’re here in Hong Kong to work?” she asks me.

“No, we’re just visiting.”

She looks at us askance, as she sees all the other men in here who are probably “just visiting.”

“Are you from Malaysia?”

I shake my head. “No.”

“Indonesia?”

“No, we’re from America, but we came here from Beijing.”

She takes another look at Michael. I can see the wheels turning in her head. She finally asks, “Are you from Vietnam?”

—

The next day, Michael heads off to the airport, where I have no doubt his trip back to Beijing included buckets of Cristal and back massages from cute flight attendants. I, on the other hand, cross the border to Shenzhen and board my train. After the group of over a thousand people are herded through the station, I take my seat in a compartment that says it’s designed for 150 people; but with the number of people standing around and crammed into the seats, there’s probably a lot more than that. Soon thereafter, another passenger comes in and tries to stuff a colorfully-designed bag three sizes too large into the overhead compartment right above my head. Its gargantuan size means that if it fell off and hit me in the head, the sheer force of the blow would probably snap my neck. Luckily, a conductor comes by and waves him to take it down. Meanwhile, I begin to zone out. It’s been two full days since I’ve taken a shower, and the accumulated fatigue is beginning to take its toll on me. But at least I have a seat, and I’m on my way back to Beijing. The worst seems over.

Hour 1: Having found my seat, more people continue to pour into the train. A girl stands beside my seat to the right, just standing in the middle of the aisle. I wonder if there’s a problem with our seats, but she seems content to just stand there. I begin reading the book I brought on the train, Peter Hessler’s Country Driving. I consider the poetic nature of reading about traveling across the Chinese countryside while actually traveling across the Chinese countryside. However, it’s interrupted by the girl to my left, who starts playing music from her cell phone like it’s a boombox. It’s a Jay Chou song that I don’t recognize. This continues, and when there’s a pause, a boy on the other side of the aisle plays another Jay Chou song from his phone. I don’t know how common this is, or if this is some sort of Chinese flirtation.  It’s cute for about six or seven minutes.

Hour 2: Train attendants walk up and down the aisles with carts of snacks and fruit to sell. This is something I have seen before. However, one of these hawkers carries a tray of beads with him, and plops it down on a table. He gets everyone’s attention, and starts launching into what must be a sales pitch, talking at lightning speed. Basically this man is the human equivalent of those SkyMall catalogs on planes. This would be the first of many attempts to hawk his wares to his captive audience. If this were a market, I would just walk away; but here, to walk away would mean walking through the nearest window of a speeding train. Later on, I will seriously consider this.

Hour 4: The police on the train check everyone’s identification cards. I’m the only one who pulls out a foreign passport. Phone Girl points and talks to Standing Girl in Chinese. “That’s why he doesn’t understand! He’s a foreigner!” These are the only words of Chinese I comprehend during the entire ride. Phone Girl and Standing Girl talk to each other, and then Phone Girl stands up and gives Standing Girl her seat. My theory is that these two are friends who bought one ticket together and are switching off for the duration of the ride. I consider this ludicrous, but then some passengers will end up standing for the entire duration of the trip. This breaks my brain.

Hour 6: I get over my fear of potentially losing my seat to the pack of standing passengers and attempt to use the restroom, navigating around the crowd and the woman passed out near the sinks crouching in a puddle of water. I am sure you have an intellectual conception of what one train toilet used by over three hundred people over a period of twenty-four hours must be like. It is times like these, like the Hundred Flowers Campaign, where intellectual notions are quickly outstripped by reality. Also like the Hundred Flowers Campaign, I feel like purging. I resolve to not eat or drink  for the rest of the ride, in the hope of avoiding a return trip.

Hour 7: Phone Girl and Phone Boy keep switching off Jay Chou songs. When Phone Girl plays, she also sings along to the sound of her phone. It would be nice, I suppose, if I weren’t stuck between these people for what seems like the entirety of Jay Chou’s career. I begin to hate Jay Chou, and if you must know, I loved Initial D.

Hour 10: Almost halfway there. In Country Driving, Peter Hessler describes a factory manager writing an ad for workers. “Must eat bitterness,” the ad says. This is a literal translation of the word 吃苦 (chiku), which means to endure hardship. I consider for a moment that while I feel broken down and beaten by the cramped quarters, the poor hygiene, the constant noise and distraction, and the marathon of physical and mental endurance that comes with experiencing all of these, everyone around me seems content to bear these conditions. In reading about Chinese cultural mores, Western writers often mention how it seems ingrained in the Chinese mindset that pain and suffering are inevitable, and so one must just endure it—eat bitterness. I consider, as my editor George Ding put it, the consequences of uneven economic development without social development. It’s a moment of self-reflection. The moment soon passes.

Hour 12: The train stops. It’s too dark to read any signs about where we are. More passengers come onto the train, and considering there weren’t enough seats already, it seems that cartoon physics will soon need to be applied to fit these people on the train. Seeing a fresh batch of customers, Mr. SkyMall launches into another sales pitch, carrying a tray of plastic things that look like dinosaur sponges. I have no idea what they could be, and without understanding what he’s saying, I will never know.

Hour 13: They don’t shut off the lights. They don’t even dim the lights. The Pentagon’s internal review of enhanced interrogation techniques revealed several methods which fall under that umbrella. 1: Yelling. (I dread the return of Mr. SkyMall.) 2: Loud music and light control. (The interrogators at Camp X-Ray preferred Slayer; here, it’s Jay Chou.) 3: Environmental manipulation. (Because the lights are never turned off, looking outside the window is literally looking into a black void of darkness. I have no idea where we are. I could be in deep space.) 4: Sleep deprivation. (Well, duh.) 5: Stress positions. (Does being stuck in a hard seat for twenty-four hours count? I think it should.) 6: 2o-hour-long interrogations. (Ditto.) 7: Controlled fear. (Well, six out of seven ain’t bad.)

Hour 14: It is literally the middle of the night. Mr. SkyMall returns. This time he’s selling anti-radiation bracelets. The box features a smiling white couple on the cover. I begin to wonder whether they’re laughing at me.

Hour 15: Dehydration and fatigue, compounded with the clouds of cigarette smoke wafting in from the other side of the car, have induced a hallucinatory experience. Everyone around me seems to stop speaking Chinese. Instead, they’re speaking English, except I no longer understand English. Does that make any sense? Every time I start drifting off, I hear a snippet of speech above the cacophony that sounds like I should understand it, except I don’t, and its only purpose is to keep me awake and confused. This persists for the rest of the trip.

Hour 16: I begin to consider welcoming death. I attempt to maintain my sanity by constructing this article line-by-line in my head. (The original “train draft” version of this piece concluded with an elaborate revenge fantasy where I re-enacted the ending of Inglourious Basterds on Michael.)

Hour 19: For a couple of hours, I manage to get some sleep, as my body feels like it’s just shutting down due to sheer exhaustion. I am awakened by Mr. SkyMall walking the aisles, selling more crap. This time, it’s toothbrushes, which are the only products he has which seem to make logical sense to sell on a train. The train makes another stop, and Phone Girl and Formerly-Standing Girl leave. They are replaced by an older woman, a younger man, and a little girl. When the woman holds the girl on her lap and looks out the window, the light makes her look exactly like that one famous Dorothea Lange photo of an Okie family.

Hour 21: During the ride, I’ve been keeping George and Michael informed of my progress on the train. “Don’t worry, it will be over soon,” Michael texts as if I’m losing a battle with terminal cancer. George adds, “You should write an article about your experience.” Across from me, a baby throws up all over itself. Spittle and vomit drip down to the floor and onto the mother’s shoes as she tries to clean the child up. Beside me, the Okie family are eating sunflower seeds and tossing the shells onto the floor. To be fair, they’re aiming for a tray of trash, but the floor keeps getting in the way.

Hour 23: At the rear of the compartment, a small audience forms as two of the passengers, an old man and old woman, put on a show. The woman sings in what I think is a traditional Chinese style. Kids run down the aisle towards the wailing. It’s difficult to see through the crowd, but I believe there are puppets involved. Even Mr. SkyMall stops hawking his wares for a minute to let the show go on. It’s a genuinely interesting moment.

Hour 24: Sweet, sweet release. The train pulls into the Beijing West train station, and as the doors open, people flood out of the car and merge with the masses outside. It will still take me an additional hour to get back to my apartment, but at least I’m back on familiar ground. I know I should have no right to feel as if I’ve really eaten bitterness, considering how everyone else in that compartment handled the experience, but stepping off the train I really do feel like a war veteran coming home. “Poor kid, you had to ride the subway for an hour? Let me tell you a story about the night train to Beijing…”

Well, you’re wrong. I don’t need to lay down any Roger Ebert-style preaching to pull the rug from under this colossal waste of time that has inexplicably grossed over $46 million and counting domestically. Kick-Ass, in my view, is the most overrated film of the last decade. Rather than just embark on a mindless, meandering rant, I will attempt to disprove some of the utter, utter drivel spouted in praise of this celluloid cockrot by using the critics’ words against them.

“…enough biting wit and bone crunching action to justify the title.” Dan Lybarger, eFilmCritic

OK, Dan, name me a single witty line in the entire movie. Go on. A single original one-liner. Something Billy Wilder or Mel Brooks would be proud of.

Hmm? Nothing comes to mind? How’s about I help you out with some stand-out howlers:

“Okay you cunts… Let’s see what you can do now!”; “Fuck this shit, I’m getting the bazooka!”; “Mindy, no more homework, babydoll. Time for Frank D’Amico to go bye-bye.”

You get the idea. I cannot recall, even with a re-watching and a trawling of IMDB, a single goddamn laugh-worthy line in the ENTIRE MOVIE. Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but unless you’re Buster Keaton, a film tipped as a “comedy” should have amusing dialogue, no? Or am I too wedded to the past, when comedians actually had to make people laugh in order to be considered funny? So, in that case, I can only assume the film was replete with sidesplitting PHYSICAL comedy. That must be the aforementioned “bone crunching action.”

Flesh-piercing would be more like it. Aside from the lead getting hit unexpectedly by a car (and by “unexpectedly” I mean “utterly predictably”) after his tussle with street hoodlums, most of the action in Kick-Ass revolved around sharpened pieces of metal being pushed in, or up, human beings. Hurr hurr.

Which brings me to my second point: being stabbed by muggers, however you dress it up, is NOT FUNNY. I will grant that Dave Lizewski’s ill-fated attempt to foil two car thieves had comic potential, but his being beaten up and stabbed before being left for dead was not only in poor taste, the stabbing added NOTHING to the intended focus of the scene—namely, our “hero’s” ineffectual attempts at heroism. Even a giant neon sign blaring “YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO LAUGH AT THIS” every three seconds across the screen would have left me confused as to whether the filmmakers actually thought this was even a remotely amusing situation. If Lizewski had been dressed in a bunny suit, this would still have been a horrific attack on a largely defenseless teenager. Ditto all subsequent “action” scenes involving the lead character.

And don’t try and argue that these were “serious moments.” The scene was shot and played as if what was occurring was funny. Even superhero movies with pretensions to comic moments don’t attempt to get cheap laughs out of the kind of violence that 90% of people are actually afraid might happen to them on their way home. This is why Batman, Spider-Man, Iron Man et al. are quick to show the terror felt when someone’s alone and defenseless in a dark alleyway. Even Joel Schumacher doesn’t trivialize the horror of Bruce Wayne witnessing his parents being gunned down in front of him by an opportunistic thief, and he made Batman and Robin. In Kick-Ass, little Brucie would probably have been forced to witness their rape and beheading to the tune of Benny Hill’s “Yakkety Sax.”

As for the “hilarious” moment where Mark Strong kicks the living hell out of a Kick-Ass impersonator in a case of mistaken identity—this again might have been funny had he discovered his error PRIOR to shooting the innocent person repeatedly in the head. But no, the mistake is only revealed in the following scene, where we discover the bodybag contains the corpse of a popular children’s entertainer. In terms of situation comedy, this scene surely ranks alongside the opening scene of American History X. I’m only relieved the guy wasn’t viciously beaten and shot to death in front of the screaming toddlers at the kiddies’ party to which he’d been en route.

Here’s another common notion that is three types of misguided.

“Moretz ultimately stands as the film’s most valuable asset” - David Nusair, Reel Film

Too right. A foul-mouthed mass-murdering child. Box-office gold. This is the level the film finally has to punch at in order to wring laughs from its soggy screenplay. I have no doubt that Ms. Moretz is a talented actress, and would not be so gauche as to suggest she doesn’t give the role her all. My issue is that, considering how inherently awesome the notion of a father-daughter crimefighting duo seems on paper, the fact that the screenplay’s relationship between the two is at best abusive and at worst borderline incestuous drains the character of all weight. Moretz is not playing a strong-willed, aggressive child “doing it for daddy.” She’s a little girl systematically abused from birth, whose infinitely better father figure of the blink-and-you’ll-miss-him-token-black-guy Omari Hardwick is sidelined by Nicolas Cage’s utterly selfish and completely charmless mustachioed ex-cop. The reason Moretz is a “valuable asset,” is that the shock value inherent in Hit Girl means that, essentially, it doesn’t matter what she says or does, so long as it’s offensive. Bingo—zero input, massive output. In terms of a well-crafted role, Hit Girl has less dimensions than Roobarb and Custard, and none of the childish twinkle. In fact, by the end of the movie, I’d have been happy to see her shot in the face. Not a sentiment I often have about eleven-year-old girls.

“The best comic book screen adaptation since The Dark Knight!” – Kam Williams, theloop21.com

Fuck you, Kam.

Here’s a condensed selection of why the other platitudes I’ve overheard to describe this film are totally, totally wrong.

“There’s a great quirky love story.”
Oh—the “she only loves him because she thinks he’s gay then fucks him when she finds he’s not” classic? Original as a Chinese Bentley and about half as appealing, the love story that flicks in and out of the narrative is so unwanted that it feels like the entire sub-plot only made the cut because nobody noticed it was there as they were too busy ogling the girl’s norks. It’s such a pathetic attempt at substance that the filmmakers don’t even bother to return to it after a while. The only reason Katie is present at all is to be the only person in Dave Lizewski’s life who’s enough of a nonentity to care about what happens to him.

“The lead is a great geeky antihero.”
Absolutely not. He’s a handsome, voluptuous American jock with a Keanu Reeves torso and what comedienne Pam Ann might describe as “cold cock-sucking lips” who has been put in a daft wig and specs to make him look like be belongs in the comic book store his infinitely better-cast friends spend their time instead of receiving hand jobs from a cheerleaders. At least Tobey Maguire looks like an underdog.

“It’s great to see Nicolas Cage playing against type.”
He’s not playing against type—he has played a badly-drawn father figure in almost every movie he’s made since The Rock. And, in Kick-Ass, he does what he’s paid to do as Nic Cage—deliver his lines in a Nic Cage way. Honestly, these days I’m wondering if he’s done some kind of Face/Off identity switch with a non-English speaking immigrant who does his scenes while the real Nic trims his Bath mansion’s rose bushes in a sombrero. Not that it matters in a role so poorly fleshed-out as Damon Macready—they pretty much took Johnny Depp’s Sweeney Todd and made him slightly less approachable.

“The soundtrack is ace!”
No, it’s the mix tape Quentin Tarantino lost under his car seat and didn’t enjoy enough to bother fishing out. The tracks range from American Pie reject teen anthems to Ennio Morricone’s back catalog, all deployed as if it were Quentin himself in the editing booth, but with his heart elsewhere. OK, there’s some good music in this film. None of it belongs where it’s placed. All the makers did was pay the copyright. That is not crafting a movie soundtrack—that’s buying the copyright for every track that results in people going, “Oh, I love this song” when it comes on in a nightclub. Basically, the film was scored on iTunes. In one afternoon. Between wanks.

“Christopher Mintz-Plasse is hilarious!”
Christopher Mintz-Plasse is Fogel from Superbad. He trades on the fact that he is Fogel from Superbad. He has no other acting skills than those which would be required of Fogel from Superbad. He’s essentially building a career out of appearing slightly retarded. Try and find an expression he pulls in Kick-Ass that we didn’t see already in Superbad. The downside of this casting choice is when his character is called on to be afraid for his life as Hit Girl mows down untold numbers of his father’s goons in a variety of gory ways, he simply gives us more of his Fogel-flipping-out-in-case-his-ID-gets-rejected-at-the-liquor-store. Christopher Mintz-Plasse has a squeaky voice, an awkward physique and a speech impediment that requires him to gurn when he speaks. He can do loud, or quiet. This is the extent of his range as an actor. What you’re laughing at is someone who looks and sounds disabled.

For those who still think that I’m just a stick-in-the-mud who can’t take a bit of tongue-in-cheek filmmaking, let me state that I don’t object to ultraviolence, bad language or dubious sexual ethics. I’m a huge fan of South Park. The difference is that South Park places its broader social or cultural messages behind violence; bad language and fart jokes to add weight to its agenda. Kick-Ass, from what I can gather, has no agenda. What is its moral? What is it spoofing? Who are they poking fun at?

My main objection is to cynical, manufactured cinema. And, in that ever-growing pantheon, we’ve got a new supervillain. Kick-Ass is not a film made by people who love cinema. Hell, it’s not even a film made by people who hate cinema. It’s a film made by people who couldn’t give a shit as long as cinema’s making money. In other words, the Uwe Boll school, the Disaster Movie school. To make a good film, you have to be responsible to the conventions of cinema—narrative, character, execution—the entire enterprise has to be a labor of love. You take responsibility for entertaining and illuminating your audience. This is the Family Guy approach to filmmaking—”Let’s string together some situations that might be funny, but not bother to flesh them into no-holds-barred quickfire satire with a tightly-structured narrative as that requires effort, and to be honest, we’re more going for the Meet the Spartans generation.” Films such as Kick-Ass lack the power of satires and comedies past—the power to profoundly influence, rather than merely attempt to reflect, popular culture.

But, as Dave Lizewski says, “With no power, comes no responsibility.”

Strangely, the the story of Kim’s visit was only reported ex post facto, perhaps at the behest of the hermit kingdom’s king hermit or perhaps because Beijing feared criticism from their economic ally, South Korea.  After all, who can get flustered about a meeting that’s already happened?  Either way, the visit was a poorly-kept secret, with South Korean media tracking Kim’s every move from Dalian to Tianjin and finally to the Diaoyutai diplomatic compound for dinner with Chinese president Hu Jintao.

Though there has been much conjecture, the exact purpose of the trip remains unclear.  The preferred theory is that Kim wants China’s help in shoring up his country’s battered economy in return for cooperating in nuclear disarmament talks.  But the unannounced and brief nature of Kim’s visit belies this simple explanation.

There is little to be gleaned from the footage and reports of the visit, as information is tightly controlled, but what is clear is the tension between the growing superpower and its erstwhile political ally.  In the video (EDITOR’S NOTE: the video has since been removed from the CNTV website) released about Kim’s visit, we see Hu showing the North Korean leader the fruits of development and Kim looking duly impressed.  Though Kim expressed admiration at China’s development over the last three decades, it remains unclear if he can or even wants to improve condition of his own country.  Many Chinese look at North Korea and see their own country thirty years ago; I wonder if Kim has made the same connection.

North Korea’s continued obstinacy places China in the unenviable role of broker between the West and North Korea, it being the only country that needs the favor of both to protect the status quo.  China relies on the West to power its export-based economy, while North Korea is historically a buffer state to keep Western influence in the form of South Korea and Japan at bay.  (Though a nuclear buffer state is as likely to injure China as it is South Korea.)  Conversely, North Korea finds itself increasingly isolated internationally, with China the only ally it can turn to.

As the economic, political, and social gaps between China and North Korea’s increase, their relationship based on outdated alliances will become more and more strained, and, as with any codependent relationship, there will be a breaking point.  Strangely, the United States finds itself entwined in similar relationships, with Hamid Karzai’s questionable government in Afghanistan and growing tensions with Israel.  Perhaps this is the face of multipolarity in the early twenty-first century.  Any country that has superpower ambitions needs allies.  But as second- and third-world nations become more advanced, autonomous, and agile in diplomacy, we will see more smaller countries taking advantage of their stronger allies, drawing them into a relationship that is less than symbiotic. The question for these stronger nations will be: what do you do when the allies you need stop towing your line?

The recent spate of school stabbings across China is further evidence of the increasingly desperate attempts by the downtrodden to draw attention to China’s vast income gap. While Zheng Minsheng, the perpetrator of the Nanping stabbing, appears to have acted independently, the subsequent rash of attacks have the unmistakable whiff of the copycat. While it may seem crass to label these grisly incidents as a case of follow-the-leader, the international media seem unable to come to any more satisfying conclusion.

Yes, all of these men were poor. Yes, all were unemployed or unhappy in their jobs. Some, such as Zheng Minsheng, had reportedly failed in relationships, others may have been mentally disturbed. Their life histories have a million parallels in China’s developed regions, where the rich are filthy rich and the poor are filthy poor. With the exception of the Hepu attack, all of these men lived in China’s success-story provinces, the industrial and economic heartlands across the eastern coast. However, their low status placed them at the very bottom of an income-based pecking order. They were the least consequential of the inconsequential—unmarried, unemployed, too young to be respected and too old to be hopeful for change. These were men who’d played the game of life and lost out, just a handful of the many casualties of rampant capitalism and China’s wholesale sell-off of the “iron rice bowl.”  And so they should have remained—forgotten, overlooked, the kind of men nobody thinks about, much less talks about.

However, every single one of these men became infamous overnight, their names bounced between chatrooms and blogs, their deeds told and retold in grisly detail and with much head-shaking by people across the length and breadth of the world’s most populous nation. Nobodies one day, arch-villains the next. There is little doubt that every one of them (apart from Wang Yonglai, who died from his injuries) will receive the treatment meted out to Zheng Minsheng—a swift conviction and a bullet to the back of the head. Considering the miserable lives they all led, priced out of their own housing, jobless, unmarried, and generally hopeless, this seems like the best kind of euthanasia. Suicide paid for and carried out by the nation’s alarmingly efficient system of capital punishment. No lengthy death-row languishing, no protracted Amnesty-led appeals. These men all wanted to be caught in the act.

Why? Well, we only have to look at the grassroots response to see that all of these men have gained immortality through notoriety. For mere minutes of effort, they have gained fame to rival that of most mid-level pop stars, and also a permanent solution to their personal problems. Even China’s top blogger Han Han is talking about them. Perhaps it was just a rumor that one of Zheng Minsheng’s disgruntled neighbors, an elderly woman who later presented a petition to reporters warning that poverty and anonymity would drive others to follow his example, told the Nanping killer to “do something horrifying. You’ll be remembered for it.” However, this rumor seems to illustrate with horrific accuracy the thought that may have occurred to a middle-aged, unemployed, unmarried man reduced to sleeping on his parents’ balcony.

It’s the same story for all the subsequent perpetrators. Their crimes are being studied and analyzed by psychiatrists, their mental states pored over by media and netizens. Their names have become synonymous with the problems created by China’s income gap. They have sent shockwaves through the country, with parents turning out in droves to drop off and collect their children from school—children who, a few weeks before, were trusted to walk or cycle anything up to several miles by themselves to school every day. Their crimes have called attention to the plight of China’s countless, faceless, unemployed, unmarried, and unsatisfied. The Internet has prevented the government from concealing their crimes, though some have cast doubt on the zero body counts of the Leizhou, Taizhou and Weifang attacks as government spin. Indeed, the Internet has been these criminals’ largest source of publicity.

Maybe China’s impotent majority, long denied solutions to some of China’s biggest problems, have found the perfect way to make their voices heard. They face a selectively deaf media, a winner-takes-all social race, a massive gender imbalance and an insurmountable income gap. Perhaps the Western media have been too quick to sneer at China’s official labeling of these crimes as “one-person terrorism.” They have inspired fear and unsettled society and made themselves known to the world with a single action. Is that not the motive of every terrorist? What sets these men apart from suicide bombers? In China, committing a murder in open view of dozens of witnesses then allowing yourself to be caught is suicide. And for those who decry these men’s failure to find another outlet for their grievances against the society that they feel rejected them, please offer up a situation in which these men would be listened to. Even China’s Internet rumor-mill is dominated by the loudest, most eloquent voices. The beautiful, the smart, the well-educated, the well-connected, and, above all, the wealthy, have a public voice in China. That’s where it stops.

Denied a niche, these men have created one. And the victims, as is so often the case, are the innocent. With the places at the top already filled, there’s plenty of room at the bottom.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Another stabbing occurred yesterday morning, May 12. From the Telegraph: “Wu Huanmin, 48, broke into a nursery school in Hanzhong city, in northern Shaanxi province, soon after 8am on Wednesday. Officials say Wu killed himself after murdering seven children and two adults, and wounding 11 other children, two severely. The motive for the attack was not immediately clear. Chinese censors quickly removed any mention of the attack from the internet and banned the story from the main state television news broadcast, possibly fearing more copycat attacks.”