招财童子 (the wealth-bringing-seeking children) are a suite of Chinese-themed, adorable, cartoon characters. For example:
Since I profiled their Opera-themed siblings in 2007 (here), they’ve become famous enough to appear on T-shirts, silly Flash animations and phone cards:
“Live like the pleasant goat, and marry someone like the big big wolf.” That’s one of China’s most well-known catchphrases since the cartoon “The Pleasant Goat and the Big Big Wolf” (喜羊羊灰太狼), the first domestically produced Chinese cartoon, was broadcast in 2005. The characters starring in nearly 600 episodes, broadcast by 65 TV stations, of curious-looking goats and wolves, made themselves household names across China and count children as well as their parents among their fans.
I watched a couple minutes of the actual cartoon, impressions:
The story is unspectacular, but not below the standard for children’s cartoons in general (say in the US). The plot and characters are relatively sterile and child-friendly.
The animation and sounds are simple, but generally without flaws.
Overall, it’s not a product for cultural export, but as a domestic product it does its job.
Frog in a Well has an interesting article about print culture and publishing in historic China:
Happily, China had a thriving printing culture for a good thousand years before the introduction of western-style printing machinery in the late 19th century created a modern publishing industry, so we know something about this. The Chinese reluctance to adopt movable type is even now sometimes presented as a puzzling example of the anti-technological bias of those silly people, but actually there was no great need for it.
Woodblock printing had already begun revolutionizing Chinese culture by at least the Song dynasty, and movable type did not add much. One of the big advantages of woodblock printing was that it cheaper and required less capital. To print a book with movable type need a set of type with many copies of each letter (expensive in the West, more so in China) and literate typesetters. Since the type is broken up up after printing a page you need to have the capital to buy enough paper (usually a major expense) and to wait for the things to sell or to swallow the loss if they don’t. With Chinese block printing you needed a literate author to write the book, but then you could paste the paper on a woodblock and have an illiterate (and cheap) carver cut it out.
Storing all the woodblocks could be a pain, but since you did not break them up you could print as many copies as you needed (print on demand!) and then keep the blocks. At least some literati would leave their woodblocks in their wills. (I know Yuan Mei did, and I would guess others did too.) There was far less need for the work publishers do and the capital they provide.
The New York Times has an interesting article about various artists who have chosen to go to China to maximize their creativity. Reasons include the cheap costs of materials and (other people’s) labor, an escape from the spotlight of the New York art scene, and China’s gritty lawless feeling that accompanies its rapid development.
The Financial Times has a narrated slideshow that speaks about the displacement of migrant workers during the ongoing rapid expansion of the city of Beijing.
While none of the facts are spectacular, the narration is low-key and subtle (in a good way) and the photographs do tell a rich emotional story.
I hadn’t noticed that the human flesh search phenomenon (moarality-driven smart mobs in China) had spawned its own search engine + news site. See above.
Interesting to see that the phenomenon has persisted for so long — I’d love to see where it goes in a few more years.
LEG3s is an award-winning mobile job hunting service specifically targeted at China’s 200 million migrant workers. The service informs those people about open positions, salary levels, the current situation in the job market etc. in over 100 cities in China. LEG3s has so far attracted 3 million end users who have to pay reasonable fees and can access the service through low-end mobile phones (LEG3s is pre-installed on some of those). CEO Jason Liu expects the user base to grow to 5 million by year-end.
Nowhere is it more engaged than in the triptych, where three panels show different views of a rock band playing on a club’s stage, fronted by a young female singer. In the lower left quadrant of each view, illuminated by stage lights that variously blare into your eyes, a uniformed soldier or policeman is seen from behind, intently watching the musical performance.
Song keeps shifting our point of view on the nightclub action, but it’s the official watching the free-spirited woman who seems to be the work’s true subject. Whether a performer merely being checked out by an unexpected fan, a symbol of youthful rebellion under the watchful eye of an authorized representative of government control or perhaps art being metaphorically monitored by shadowy proscriptions, the triptych mesmerizes. The show is Song’s U.S. gallery debut, and it represents a big step forward.
CNNGo, CNN’s Asia travel guide, recently published top “people to watch” lists for Asia, Shanghai and Hong Kong. The lists include an interesting mix of artists, entrepreneurs and corporate heavyweights, which gives a good albeit skewed flavor of what is going on at the fringes of (the well-polished side of) society.
88 Bar is about finding bits and pieces in virtual China and examining them from the various lenses of our authors:
Lens 1: Designer
Jason Li is an associate at Node. Originally from Hong Kong, he has also lived in Canada, the US and Spain. He's writing a graphic novel in his spare time.
Lens 2: Cultural anthropologist
Lyn Jeffery is a research director at the Institute for the Future. She has spent more than 20 years living, working, and doing research in China.
Contact us if you're interesting in becoming one of our lenses.
