North Korea: China’s First “Official” Bona Fide, Fully-Fledged, Full-Service Colony. That’s Right, I Said It: A Colony, Folks!
Pictured above is North Korea’s Rajin (Rason) Port which borders the Tumen (Duman) River, a key crossing point between Russia and North Korea for refugees from the Hermit Kingdom.
A Chinese company recently gained a 10-year lease on the port’s full-time use (kudos and nice catch NKeconWatch!) which now enables manufacturers in the PRC’s Jilin Province – a strongly ethnic Korean part of the country — direct access to the Pacific Ocean. Yay! Incidentally, Russia also gained a 50-year lease on the same facility, but that didn’t score as much fanfare. Wonder why…
Revisiting the Resplendent, Wind-Bending, Mighty Sword Clanging, and Colorful Cinematic Glory and Mastery of Zhang Yimou’s “Hero/Ying xiong” (circa 2004)
Okay, so now that we’ve got that windbag blog title out of the way (how did I do, folks?), let’s get down to the brass tacks of the matter: the iconic and often-imitated-rarely-duplicated cinematographic marvel which was once Zhang Yimou’s Hero/Ying xiong, the 2004 swashbuckling flicker picture that dazzled and titillated, yet somehow didn’t intellectually connect.
To All You "China Bloggers” Out There: There Is *No Such Thing* As An “America Blogger”
Most of my regular readers here at ADM.com are well-aware of colleague Damjan DeNoble’s Sino-following pedigree and of our strong China-centric collaborations. For those others of you who are relatively fresh to this piece of online real estate, you might want to click on through to Asia Health Care Blog, its sister China Health Care Blog, or Damjan’s LinkedIn profile to acquaint yourself a wee bit better with the man behind the lexical magic and a hint of an explanation why I am honored to call myself Damjan’s friend and fellow China traveler.
Warning: don’t shoot the messenger (read: me) if you end up spending more than a couple of hours at any of his sites. On offer: a hot heap of snappy content like news, videos, opinion pieces, and a collection of comments of general interest to the blogging professional.
Peter Hessler Strikes Thrice…And This Time “Dangerously” Behind the Wheel
The picture above depicts how vehicular traffic is regulated on the road heading into China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region: plastic “dummy” cops standing sentinel adorning the soft-shoulder, meant to resemble the genuine article to deter traffic violators, wanton drunken driving, and reckless acts behind the wheel across the wide, flat expanses of the barren steppes of the wind-battered Mongolian plain.
Well, yesterday afternoon I finished off native-Missourian Peter Hessler’s third installment in his “angels abroad” China series, Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory, and I’m giving the book a very tall two thumbs up. This is 424pp of lean and mean non-fiction prosaic gold which you’re going to regret not reading. Did I mention you should go out and snag a copy today?
Would You Declare War Over Chocolate? Hell Yeah, Some Would!
I’m happy I listen to people when they strongly suggest titles to read. In the case of Lawrence L. Allen’s Chocolate Fortunes: The Battle for the Hearts, Minds, and Wallets of China’s Consumers, this was a particularly sweet suggestion and many thanks to Dan Harris of Harris & Moure Law, the perennial award-winning blogmeister and commentator at China Law Blog, or as we Generation Xers like to call it, CLB.
Damjan DeNoble and I Talk China | Part II
Damjan DeNoble and I come together via email, over a period of weeks, to talk China marketing, Korea, hummer, Yugo’s, randomized processes and more. The common thread of the piece is trying to figure out, how exactly, the Chinese are going to create home-grown brands that can compete globally.
If you can bear to read along with this monster of a post, know that we had a lot of fun writing it. The first marathon conversation can be found, here. Read the rest of this entry »
With Cheekbones That Can Slice Turnips…
Yet another evening of Hong Kong classic cinema, this time with King Hu’s Shaw Brothers classic from 1966 Come Drink With Me/Da zui xia/Big Drunken Hero, starring drop-dead gorgeous (and Shanghai-born!) Cheng Pei-Pei/Zheng Peipei, as Golden Swallow, prancing around the screen like a prima ballerina and applying a major bad-ass hurt-on to all the baddies.
Dragon Dynasty’s Bey Logan, American Expats Who Speak Pitch-Perfect Mandarin Chinese, and the Ageless Stars of Hong Kong’s Breakthrough Cinema
I had the good fortune to get my hands on a number of Hong Kong DVDs lately and last night I finished off Mo gong/Battle of the Warriors, starring HK pop sensation and A-List actor Andy Lau/Lau Tak Wa.
The Ten Commandments, North Korea-Style
The time will eventually come – sooner or later — when the Kim Farm will be dismantled, pieced off, and sold to the highest bidder. When the present emperor – Kim “Bam Bam” Jong-il — will be forced to abdicate his throne, former “enemy” South Korean archivists will be permitted into that sacred Holy of Holies, the Kim Clan State Archives and Repository of Personal Papers and Enlightened Documents (so where does Kim keep all of his closeted skeletons anyways?), where they’ll discover the following “Ten Commandments” Parent Leader, Kim Il-sung only wished could have become the Highest Law of the Land. If only North Korea could avoid that pesky little problem: being a part of the world…
Like Christianity itself with its strong and ancient historical ties to paganism, the Korean Decalogue, as it would famously come to be known, would pilfer willingly from Christian doctrine, co-opting it for domestic Korean use and willingly accepted by a society with a built-in strong affinity towards religious themes already.
North Koreans would come to learn their version of the Decalogue by rote, supplanting knowledge of the real Decalogue.
So without further fanfare, here’s what South Koreans would find:
Stop Feeding That Kim Bogeyman His Sweet Treats and The Dastardly DPRK Demon Will Wither Away Like A Self-Decomposing Plastic Bag!
Kongdan Oh & Ralph Hassig’s The Hidden People of North Korea: Everyday Life in the Hermit Kingdom was my third consecutive and deeply-meaningful North Korean primer.
It reinforced several of the messages and theories I’d honed in the previous two reads on the theme (here and here) and I’ve got two more works in the pipeline in this as-yet inexplicable full-court North Korean press I’m doing as I swiftly get up-to-date on the political machinations of the Kim-ists and its (debatable?) clear and present danger to the rest of the world.
So, first, let’s summarize its premise:
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