All posts by David Feng

Current Events

“Occupy China”? No Thank You

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First big question to throw you: In case China does get “occupied”… what will you do to the 99% of 1.3 billion?

Like it or not, reality sets in: the current “system” is pretty much the only “thing” out there that will keep 1.3 billion tummies full. That’s a little bit of harsh reality for ya.

China does have a myriad of social issues (the political ones, of course, are those that everyone understands). Here’s just a sprinkling:

  • Farting coal mine bosses in First Class. By that I mean folks who get rich — literally overnight. The Chinese term bao fa hu (暴發戶) are what I’m after. These guys suddenly get a million or even a billion overnight. They spend it all on luxury goods reserved for the rich and the noble, but unlike the real noble folks, they don’t have the manners that the nobles “come equipped with” by default. Such as — not farting in First Class. I don’t think Gaddhafi died “just because” he farted in an interview with Larry King, but that was one heck of a disgusting move by the dead dictator.
  • Farting coal mine bosses in First Class miles — removed from the poor. There are the newly-rich fart machines, and then, there are also the disadvantaged. China’s in this pretty disillusioning state right now where the richer are increasingly richer, but the poorer are also much less well-off than before. The gap between the rich and poor is so big now that it’s spilt on over into the streets. Beggars now roam the Beijing CBD (all too often controlled by criminal organizations), and there’s no more real “harmony” between the farmers and the urbanites: If an urbanite happened to “do something bad” to a farmer, the entire village of all those farmers out there would basically kill the invading urbanite with every last rake, knife, fork, whatever they can find.
  • A pretty skanky Labour Contract Law. I have to say, Deng Xiaoping was a hero for getting rid of lifetime employment with guarantees. Now you have to work to get paid. No more with Wen Jiabao, who OKed the Labour Contract Law — a legal invention that grants you your job for life after you finish the first year without a hitch. This bill has shifted this nation into reverse gear, like it or not. Actually, there’s one thing I’m hoping for that would land you “eternality” once you’re here for a year: my Chinese visa. (It’s easier on me, a Swiss citizen with a PRC wife…)
  • Regional discrimination. The He’nanese are the crooks; all Shanghainese are racist; and the northeast houses the nation’s collection of thugs. Or supposedly, that’s the case. Regional racism is alive and well. If you’re a non-Shanghainese, “shopping territory” for you is by default Nanjing East Road; the “real” Shanghainese (who according to folks in Shanghai are the “only people who aren’t poor) go to Huaihai Middle Road instead. The He’nanese take the blame for every last criminal act, it seems (like the Italians and the Balkans to the Swiss); and the northeasterners are infamous for being people that will ring up a gang to exterminate you upon the slightest offence. If you wanted 31 countries instead of 31 provinces in a country, then keep up this kind of regional racism. Otherwise, dump it.
  • More high speed trains than professional educators. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with Chinese HSR (copied from the West, except for the homegrown CRH380A and CRH380AL trainsets), but the PRC just isn’t spending much cash on making the population more educated. The result is a population of academic robots — folks who swot stuff for tests and then forget them the moment they graduate. As a Swiss, I have outdone my PRC equivalents when it comes to Q&A sessions in class. The Swiss questions what the lecturer has said; not a sound comes from the PRC student population. And I thought the Japanese were robotic already.
  • A moral blank. No longer striving for revolutionary communism, yet always a little suspicious about Confucius and even more so about the West, China’s a moral blank these days. It seems like having a first mistress isn’t enough: successful people are supposed to have second or more mistresses. A man “does his thing” to his (former) lover, then divorces her or fails to marry her, and lets the woman suffer. Kids born in the 1990s openly damn their parents on the Web, and those born in the 2000s read cartoons which would have been banned only a decade ago. Progress? Not really. Most of these cartoons are all about people-turned-poo-machines. Progress?
  • An increasingly nervous Peking. Add the income gap, regional discrimination, poor education, moral blanks, and all that together, and couple it with an “unharmonious” world (the “US imperialists” so-called have already nixed Saddam Hussein, Bin Laden and most recently Gaddhafi), and you can see why the folks in the capital are more than a tad shaking in their boots. With a major change of guards at the topmost echelons in a year’s time, if “stuff happens” in this final year, it’ll just completely wipe China off the map. China has a fifth of the world’s population. How do you like 1.3 billion homeless beggars?

So yeah, we do have a fair bit of issues, but this is probably not the time to rock the boat like that. So here’s the upshot: “Occupy China”? No, thank you. We can’t be confident that we’ll deal with all the issues this very second, and solving them inside our own cocoon will probably take a little time, but the last thing we need is foreign “occupation”.

The PRC and its people run on a very different chipset from the US variant. We don’t have a Second Amendment because we’ve been all about peace and harmony — Confucius said it millennia before there was even the idea of communism. The Chinese aren’t folks who are in favour of creating a tempest in a teapot when there could be a more peaceful, stress-free alternative.

Oh, and if you want the Chinese to continue shopping overseas, pouring millions and millions of dollars (or yuan) upon those of you based outside the PRC — don’t toy with those who give you the money. It’s not nice, and it probably won’t work out great, either. And for those of you more money-oriented: having the PRC as the 51st State of the US probably won’t work great, either. (Just do the maths…)

Rail, Travel

What Is Wrong With Chinese Railways These Days?

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The Chinese railways seem to have had an awful time as of late. The crash in Wenzhou was a man-made disaster that was as big a deal as Chernobyl. (Here’s more: there was a recent case where Train 1164 fell off the tracks. Now HSR and regular rail are all fragile.) The culprit: a serious of bad moves by current head of the railways authorities, Sheng Guangzu (盛光祖).

Let me just say that this guy is the wrong man for the wrong post, coming at the wrong time. A little list tells the tale…

  • Sheng Guangzu came into office pledging to “avoid high speed trains going on to the rails while they had problems”. He completely negated that with the Wenzhou crash.
  • Sheng Guangzu decided to get rid of Business Class seats on a number of new high speed trains (or to at least massively reduce them). You don’t do this in a country that has an overwhelming number of LVMH stores or is opening twenty more Apple Stores in the upcoming months. You don’t. HSR is for folks with the money. We have a great number of these people. Riders choose high-end seats for long-haul journey because they can relax. Our recent Business Class seats for the trip from Nanjing to Beijing were basically packed.
  • Sheng Guangzu decided to implement a “real ID” personal ticketing system, where identification was required for all HSR trips. He rubbed riders the wrong way by extending queues, and causing pain for foreigners with passports that had a letter in them (which was a big problem especially at the very beginning).
  • Sheng Guangzu decided to lower the speed for HSR lines, which basically rid China of its HSR forays. In doing so, he dragged the efficiency of the whole system — and of the whole country — down.
  • Sheng Guangzu decided to mix 300 km/h G trains with 250 km/h D trains on high speed railway routes. The result was the Wenzhou crash, which involved a train on a “mixed rail” HSR route.
  • Sheng Guangzu decided to enable Internet ticket sales — with a terrible interface and a hard-to-install certificate system for even Windows users. Want to pay via credit card? Good luck. Enjoy the hurdles…
  • Sheng Guangzu decided to lower the handling fee for ticket returns. This obviously kind of made the touts pretty happy…
  • Sheng Guangzu is thinking of adding the option of enabling PRC travellers to use their national ID card as a kind of “e-ticket”. Ergh… you do know the cops are watching where you’re going to or from, right? Police state 2.0 this is…

That’s not to say Sheng is all “boo, evil and devils” and stuff like that: he opened the Beijing-Shanghai HSR, gave us select lie-flat Business Class seats, and opened up the VIP lounges. You’ve got to give him credit for that. But apart from that, this is the Gil Amelio a la Apple for the Chinese railways world, and he’s got to know that there are only two ways out:

  1. Improve; or
  2. Disembark.

Boom. It’s a binary thing. Zero — or one. Off — or on. Get better — or go. Easy as that.

Steve Jobs nixed Gil Amelio. Someone down the line is going to do the same to the lost and confused Sheng, especially if he doesn’t get his act together.

Culture, Education, English, Languages

David’s English Lessons: DON’T CALL ME “TEACHER”!

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Worse: DON’T CALL ME “DOCTOR FENG!”… I have not yet been “christened” a “Doctor” since I have still got to get my final dissertation done right… a la KFC (“We do chicken right!” and stuff like that)…

DON’T CALL ME “TEACHER”, EITHER! In China, every last soul calls a teacher — well, “teacher” (老師). That don’t work out fine for your David here. He prefers folks to straight-out address him as David. Buck naked, we are all the same: we can all eat, drink, go to the toilet and take time off in bed. We’re the same be our skins black, white or yellow. So I don’t for a split second buy the fact that “a teacher is ‘superior’ to a student”. I don’t buy it.

I look up very well to the Western world, where you call a teacher by his family name, plus “Mr” or “Ms”. I look up even better to the world of “personal communications” (so to speak in jargon-ese), where David Feng is just simply “David”. Hence my preference for my students to outright call me David. I don’t want for a second to be referred to as Doctor Feng. It just confines me to that Ivory Tower I never wanted to be in at all. It’s un-Mensch, as Guy Kawasaki might say. A Mensch of a teacher realizes he’s an equal amongst all the other students.

I sure hope my fellow students can nick away some knowledge he or she will put to use one of these days, but I hope even more that chez my lessons, students and teachers can act as equals. In this long stroll in the Edu Trail, it’s much better if the head of the team doesn’t put off airs and acts more like a guy in the midst of a group than an absolute dictator leading it. That’s just my way of doing lessons: I don’t do titles, I do outright human language…

Culture

China, Please Don’t Fart In First Class…

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…and I seriously mean that. I’ve had a few nasty trips on the CRH3C trains from Beijing to Tianjin and back. 30 minutes between the two metropolises sure was sweet, but I once shared a 2-abreast seat with a drunk, farting chimney. The dude next to me smelt like a Mao-era chimney, and when he talked, out came the strongest stench of tobacco. I think what would have made it even less harmonious would have been a bit of flatulence. Gaddhafi did not have it any easier… he farted on TV (no, seriously)…

It’s on that very same issue of uncontrolled farting — or, to be more precise — on the topic of bad manners, that I’m about to let myself loose here on my territory. When I came back at the age of 10 in 1992 during a brief summer holiday visit to Beijing, I was shocked when this local came onto the streets of Wangfujing and let phlegm fly right in front of me onto the street.

I saw this article that Elliott Ng shared on Facebook that the Gap is about to close a fair number of stores in the US while opening a good number more here in China. That’s got me a little worked up. The Chinese spend a great deal of money — both at home and especially abroad — but they’ve poor manners (sad to say) and that makes them lose a great deal of face. I have a pretty dim view of the coal mine CEO who got his “farmer wife” an LVHM bag while farting in first class on a plane (with a load of mistresses no less). China and its people have the money but not the morality. I think no nation is “sane” (so to say) or at least “OK” or “in good standing” without both balanced — or both present and correct. I find it offensive that “my people” (the Chinese) go outside of the Chinese mainland and start spitting, smack in the midst of the Champs-Elysees. You are, of course, entitled to your legal income, but shouldn’t you entitle yourself to some modestly good manners as well?

Politics

Swiss Democracy: No Donald Duck, But Yes, Pirate Party…

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I have to say I’m a little shocked seeing that the Chinese are pirating the idea of a pirate party: the Wikipedia link says a Chinese Pirate Party is “in discussion” and is on the drawing board. I think that party’s pointless: nearly all of China is pirated. Don’t get me started on the trains: the CRH3C is a pirated version of the ICE 3 (albeit a legal pirate); no soul, obviously, would believe the propaganda that it is “Chinese because of technology transfer”. Even the doors still carry that invasive sticker: Made in Ybbs*/Austria. Unless the PRC colonised Ybbs (for the train doors, maybe), that’s still non-Chinese…

* How the hell do you pronounce “Ybbs”, by the way?

Ookie. So what’s all this talk about the Pirate Party all about? I was given a shock larger than electrocution (I think: I’ve never been electrocuted, and I think if I was, I probably wouldn’t be blogging here) when I found out that there was a REAL Pirate Party. Bang on the ballots for the Swiss National Council elections (to come 23 October 2011; I’ve, by the way, already sent my ballot back; I didn’t vote for them, for what it’s worth) — the one for the Canton of Zurich had it on page 10. I swear. Take a look at it. Right there — 18 potential “legitimate political pirates”. There are folks younger than I am on the list, and there are even a few sociologists amongst them. It’s crazy.

In China, people are flattened because they happen to stand in the way of a high-speed railway viaduct — and they failed to get the hell out of there in good time. This kind of polit BS would have been sent to Switzerland for a nationwide vote. We are finishing the Gotthard Base Tunnel in the mid-2010s because our people said so. Switzerland is part of the United Nations because I voted yes because I thought this nation had no more sane reasons to stay out of the freaking thing. Bank accounts in some deep, hidden-under-the-square safe just don’t get emptied out of the blue just because you’ve joined the UN. It just doesn’t happen like that.

The fact is, Swiss democracy works just like that. We are pestered up to 4 times every year just because some idiot couldn’t figure if it was OK building this stretch of freeway this way across this yard or that way. But that’s how we’d like it. We don’t advertise to the rest of the world that we are “most democratic” so-called, and we don’t bomb Afghanistan or Libya because they’re “unfree”. In fact, Moammar Gaddhafi wanted to declare “jihad” on the Swiss. Not a single bomb was dropped on Tripoli from the authorities in Berne — and this from a nation that was the target of a Gaddhafi-dictated “jihad”. We’re comparatively cool people!

About the worst thing that happens on Swiss ballots is the requirement that you choose someone who is alive, breathing, and Swiss. No foreign cultural imperialist icons — and by no means Donald Duck. That’s a sucker, given. And we don’t get to choose our Federal President. Rats. But that’s about all there is to it that sucks about Swiss democracy. The rest — is just neat.

Oh, and did I mention that you need “just” 100,000 valid citizens to amend the Swiss Constitution in full?

Helvetia, Politics

I’m proud…

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…that we can change our government without dumping the constitution whole.

Thanks to this civilized invention called an election.

The one thing that makes me super-happy to be Swiss: the government has given us this thing called “a ballot” that gets sent out to registered expat Swiss voters every so often (basically once per quarter). And unlike Aussies who are required to vote, we can legally toss the ballot into the shredder (as in not vote at all) without this hidden fear that government might be breathing down our neck, wondering why we were so civilly disobedient. (Sole Swiss exception: the Canton of Schaffhausen, up north, requires people to vote.)

The upcoming Swiss elections take place on 23 October 2011. I’m sending my ballot back the next few days to be doubly sure that my votes count. I’ve decided to give the SVP (the Swiss People’s Party) Dumpster treatment after its discriminatory “minaret ban” got Switzerland some seriously bad publicity. Worse still, it allowed the Swiss to do something un-Swiss: to eat upon the freedoms the Constitution gave this land. You thought China had “human rights issues”? Have a gander at just how bad the situation is in Switzerland, especially post-ban. Communist China has a minaret right by the new Tianjin West Railway Station (and it looks pretty new — both structures, that is). That kind of architecture (the minaret, not railway stations) are now hors la loi in this supposedly “neutral” country.

I don’t want to get into politics — especially not as a politician. But now, post-ban, whenever there’s a vote about stuff that’s Swiss, that’s like — it sets off an auto reaction my end. I posted a whole slew of commentary regarding the whole election on Facebook. I’ve reposted this on my blog so that most of you get to know my political views on this matter:

  • The best thing about a democracy is you can expel those idiot politicians and unsightly parties screwing the whole country up. Thank you God!!
    Now voting as an expat Swiss as the Swiss national elections loom large and clear. For one thing, the SVP is finished. You gave us the crap minarets ban, ookie… we are voting you suckers out of office!!
  • Of course, all politicians ultimately (will) stink. There is nothing you can do once you get your nose shoved into this trade…
    But the good thing is this: I have not chosen a soul who wants to let the Swiss keep doing nuclear power plans, especially after Fukushima. Nuclear power has always been this kind of hidden bomb that could feed on humanity — and it has, as Chernobyl and Fukushima have shown us…
  • The one “mediated event” of Swiss politics that has completely blown me off is the crazy minarets ban 2 years back. I basically made a huge anti-ban campaign over social media. I told every last living human, algae, cockroach and Swiss-citizen-to-be NOT to vote for that short-sighted bill.
    Which was passed “anyway”.
    And which got me bat-fr*ck-insane when that DID happen.
  • Once upon a time an election was a mere election. Now, it is no more. And while it’s not some kind of crusade or “to save the minarets” (if you can call it that at all), I did find the so-called “minaret ban” most absurd, most unsightly and most anti-humanity.
    I don’t know much about the Muslim world. It kind of fascinates me, though, in all ways. I wouldn’t convert religiously, of course, but having said that, I don’t think a minaret should be something that you should have a cow over or stuff like that.
    Yes, women are not allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia. But instead of making a huge propaganda campaign against that and by calling that “backward and undemocratic”, the best we can do as outsiders is to merely foster a “live and let live” attitude. I don’t think the entirety of any accepted, established religion is problematic, perverted or anything like that.
    The thing that totally pisses me off about the minaret ban is, of course, discrimination, but also this latent and real fear that the Swiss constitution is being eaten alive, bit by bit, by its citizenry. When you start modding the constitution to feed upon itself, when that thing starts taking away the very principles on which it was established, that sure is one hell of a scary development. You think China’s human rights issue is scary? Just you wait until Switzerland comes out with stupider still mods to its constitution. A bigger human rights issue in the making…

And while I think the odds that the Swiss People’s Party will be politically nixed or humiliated are by no means guaranteed, what I can do with my ballot is to show my disapproval. Of course, the vote will be a secret vote, but Bern will have one less ballot in favour of the Swiss People’s Party this time. They’ve sinned and stuff’s got to happen to right that one very big wrong.

David Feng Views

Autumn 2011 + David Feng = …

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It’s autumnal equinox — autumn is now with us.

There are many reasons to hate autumn (or “fall”, if you must, if you hail from destinations State-side). To photographers, this is the season to hate: the days are getting shorter and shorter and 50+% of the day is spent in darkness. To those who are without a partner, the days of the howling winds and falling trees are dreadful to even think of, while those with someone by their side gets treated to a mid-autumn mountain hike.

But to yours truly, to David Feng, autumns are the season where much action has taken place. Except for the worst autumn ever — that of 2004 — the past ten years have seen a lot of good things happen over autumn. Good stuff, even a few good schticks. Like…

  • Autumn 2001: I started doing the old Mac site right and started conceiving what would later be the Beijing Mac user group
  • Autumn 2002: I return in front of the microphone by doing a whole load of presentations, especially in classes in university
  • Autumn 2003: I pulled off a class act by co-hosting the Dyned English Cup Finals. Not a big-namer, but to me, keeping 600 seated was no easy task. It also meant I had to voluntarily starve (before this, I was 88.5 kgs — and this was before Fatburger came to Beijing)
  • Autumn 2005: Former BeiMac group members, including an able secretary and active members working for a good cause, push the Mac community for Beijing into the stratosphere; media events, hosting visitors from outside the mainland, everything
  • Autumn 2006: I’ve basic plans figured out to keep me busy; I was especially proud of the summer that immediately preceded it, where I figured out my career path for the next few years
  • Autumn 2007: I land a lot of commitments, including a three-year schtick with City Weekend Beijing, blogging about the Beijing Subway
  • Autumn 2008: My efforts at hosting overseas groups at the Beijing City Planning Exhibition Museum is recognized by an Olympics-related public/government organization; also, I joined tech geeks on a tour around China
  • Autumn 2009: I spoke at TEDxGuangzhou (which then became with Lonnie Hodge the greater magic that was TEDxCanton) about Twitter; I was all about Twitter then (as I still am now)
  • Autumn 2010: I launched the Dear Passengers blog and seal a book contract, which would give birth to my Chinglish book (in Chinese) in spring 2011

So it’s little wonder why I’m pretty happy autumn is with us again. Let me let you in on a few personal goals I’ve set myself this autumn. Ain’t a freightload, but then again, there’s no big fat incentive out there awarding those who bite off more than they just might want to chew…

  • More time online: I am working out a brand new approach to the online world. The idea is to be online more while not working myself out with the thing too much. I used to be stuck aimlessly online, but that’s no longer my goal. The idea is more like getting more done online in a mobile environment. More tweets with information and commentary. Quality over quantity. Less of those crazy Subway tweets and more meaningful convos. Also, a much more active blog and website my end.
  • More rail and Chinglish content: I am working to get Dear Passengers to be, in English, an accessible-for-all, informative website for all those in and outside China. It’d be a rail (especially HSR) info hub in English about A-to-B-ing in China, whereas the Chinese version would get riders more informed in Chinese about Swiss travel. The Chinglish site, Jionglish would have more frequent updates as well as a little more info about why Chinglish is here at all.
  • More time in front of the mic: You need that for a class of 50, but also for media programmes. I’m hoping for a few new media commitments, but more importantly, I might be heading outside Beijing to build upon my Chinglish book. Details are sketchy but apparently a few in the edu world are happy with my Chinglish book and they’re thinking of doing good stuff with it. Like — the idea of a few lectures and classes, and so on and so forth…
  • More rail mileage: Despite Wenzhou, me being Swiss means I’ll stay on the rails. I’ll be travelling a heck of a lot more in the last few months of this year. If you tweet, I’d love to see you…
  • More communities: I am thinking of getting the beimac circle group run much better and have not excluded a few more community commitments.
  • Even more time with Tracy and family: You just don’t do it any other way: you have a family to belong to and I’m very happy with Tracy. So we’re looking ahead to a sunny and happy autumn…

Meanwhile, here’s Happy Autumnal Equinox to you. Autumn is all about harvesting good stuff. I’m sure there’s good stuff waiting for you all!

Technology

Cloud Computing in Baby Language

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Ordinary hard drive: My files are on my hard drive.
Cloud drive: My files will ultimately be on someone else’s drive.

That’s how I differentiate between the two. The files on my local Mac will forever belong to me — and the same will apply to all other Mac users as well. Lest someone breaks in your system, your files are safe with you for life. (Or until the HD clicks into death. Yikes.)

But were you thinking of unloading your secret passwords onto, say, Dropbox? Not that I detest Dropbox — in fact, quite the opposite is true chez moi. But I don’t think a cloud drive’s a safe bet (yet) for your 50-character long banking passcode for the simple (conservative) reason that you don’t (physically) own your drive. Worst case scenario: your enemy owns the drive. (Very rare indeed — but who knows?) Now that’s going to kind of hurt…

Let’s say you’re storing files you shouldn’t. The worst thing you can do to dump it is to incinerate your Mac if it’s on your local drive. But on a cloud drive? Short of knowing which exact drive(s) your file’s on, you’d have to bring a whole data centre to their makers, and that’d be one heck of an offence.

Of course, there’s something else about cloud drives: the fact that you’d be able to travel without, say, the need for a clunky laptop (which with the iPad and the MacBook Air are no longer clunky thingies — and the 16-pound large Mac Portable was a late 1980s device just about every last soul on the planet has already forgotten about). I personally find that more comforting. The faregates chez the Beijing Subway were obviously not designed for regular Fatburger patrons, and more than once did I take a fair bit of time to clear these. Without a laptop (and with your file saved on to a cloud drive), you’d be easily be able to make it through the gates and onto a crowded subway train.

And if you were tuning into Sliding Doors, two different worlds might await you — depending on if you caught your train — or not…