Gen Me in China: A Nintendo Wii comes way ahead of democracy

from the new article on Time:

The rise of China's Me generation has implications for the foreign policies of other nations. Sinologists in the West have long predicted that economic growth would eventually bring democracy to China. As James Mann points out in his new book, The China Fantasy, the idea that China will evolve into a democracy as its middle class grows continues to underlie the U.S.'s China policy, providing the central rationale for maintaining close ties with what is, after all, an unapologetically authoritarian regime. But China's Me generation could shatter such long-held assumptions. As the chief beneficiaries of China's economic success, young professionals have more and more tied up in preserving the status quo. The last thing they want is a populist politician winning over the country's hundreds of millions of have-nots on a rural-reform, stick-it-to-the-cities agenda.

read more on china's Me gen

today AH sent me an article on how to choose good phd advisors from sciencemag. i think we know more or less the things it's talking about, but it is nicely organized and systematic. makes a good read.

To Choose an Adviser, Be an "Armchair Anthropologist"

impressions: guilin

i'm just back from the tour to guilin with my mom... a few take home points:

1. tour groups are terrible terrible things. they rush the tourists through places of interests like cattle.

2. traveling with mom is a bad bad idea. somehow the trip can get too depressing at times.

3. guilin is an extremely pretty place, but something needs to be done to this place to improve its economy. there's only this much it can earn by conning tourists, and the money is not going to its people.

4. zhang yimou is a fucking genius. we need more people like him to transform concepts and ideas, and create values.

more to come.

chinese tv stations are just getting worse and worse. i couldn't seem to find anything worth watching all day long. so today i was flipping channels forever as usual, until i stop at this weird taiwanese tv series called the eighth pawn shop.

it is about an imaginary pawn shop to which customers could pawn any possession including tangible things such as a leg and intangible things such as talent, soul, love. for an example, in the show, a mother pawned her love for the child for the success in fashion. the grown up child, agonizing over the lack of maternal care, in turn pawned her talent in fashion design for her mother's love. then, the guilty mother pawned her eyes to take back the child's talent. things like that. you get the point.

it is a very strange concept. almost shocking at first. can we really rank the things in our lives and decide which we could lose indefinitely in order to gain the other? can we really say, i don't want the love, i just want my career, and here, you can have my love, please give me a high flying career? how could we make any of these choices when we don't really know what is to come, and from which we are to gain more? it's tempting to think, if i were to go to such a pawn shop, what would i pawn for what? and i shudder as if it was such a terrible thing.

but a little more thought reveals that it is nothing new. we are defining priorities all the time. we are disgarding some things over others every time we make a choice. ordinary choices such as spending the night at the laboratory or a nightclub and whether or not to take our eyes off the computer monitor to pay more attention to our naggy moms. the pawn shop owner just lets his customers do it a more calculative, explicit and irreversible way. we in reality, might not even weigh things as carefully. we just go ahead and decide. on what basis are we making these decisions?

what would you pawn, and for what, my friend, if the 8th pawn shop really existed?

blogger seems to have been blocked again. in china. i am so tired of this censoring thing..

on a brighter note, as i blast my stack of cds from the sound system at home, life has never been so good..

back to square one

home, parents, reality check. i have probably mentioned this a thousand times but here it is again: moving always feels unreal. areoplanes make time space change happen too quickly, i can't adjust to it. one moment i was in a carpeted apartment in la jolla, the other i'm at home, taking care not to scratch the newly polished wooden floor(mainly so that mom doesn't scream at me). i was abruptly disconnected from the previous life, but am nowhere near being connected to the next. i feel like i'm still living in the void, just like when i was in the dark aeroplane cabin traveling in between countries but not really in any, my mind phasing in and out of state of wakefulness and sleep but dreaming of nothing.

but things need to be ended and things need to begin. for a start, i should probably stop drinking. alcohol merely leaves me with dulled and mistaken sensory system, uncoordinated motor sysem and utterly chaotic central nervous system. on the other hand, like marco said, i should probably start looking at groups now. and i need to get reading for the project with ingham started. and gre is around the corner. seems like a lot of things to do.