Beijing State of Mind

A rap about life in Beijing

Mad Engineering: Build your own Egg Apartment

Twenty-four year old architect Dai Haifei of Hunan province had just landed a new job in Beijing. However, he could not afford to live in what is one of China’s most expensive cities. Unable to afford the rent, he took matters into his own hands and decided to build his own house in the courtyard of his office (he should have called Jimmy McMillan). After 2 months of construction, the result was a one room dwelling shaped like an egg and covered with grass. He built this house on the cheap. By using his friends as labor, he only had to pay for the materials. Which Included:

Wheels 元160
Zip ties 元125
Grinder 元31
Water tank, pump 元95
Steel rods 元573
Drill 元18
Bamboo 元375
Other Tools 元210
Glue 元200
Waterproof fabrics 元508
Solar Panels 元970
Square rods 元30
Screws 元115
Paint 元284
Welders 元260
Spray gun 元450
Gauze 元600
Insulation 元100
Grass seeds 元110
Lightbulbs 元36
Vent Fan 元50
Plexiglass 元160
Sink 元60
Steel mesh 元240

______________________________

Total 元6427

Meaning he built the whole thing for $965 dollars. Less than a grand for a mobile home.

The shell is made of a steel wire and bamboo wood frame. The exterior is made of hundreds of mesh packets filled with soil and grass seed zip tied together to form insulation (it would be interesting to see if he can stand the Beijing winter).

Inside is a single bed and little floor space. It contains a floor vent, solar panels for power, a light, a skylight/window, a pop-out side, even a water tank and sink. 

The entire thing is portable to. It stands on four wheels and can easily be lifted with a forklift onto a truck.

Dai eats out every night, uses public restrooms, his company’s gym and their showers, has no commute, and never pays any rent. Needless to say he’s living the good life. 

Seeing this makes me want to build my own. I don’t care if its three times smaller than my room, it would just be so cool.

You can view the entire construction process in his flickr album.

It takes balls to guard a Princess, oh wait...

Nestled in a hidden part of Beijing, there is a museum dedicated to those who suffered a punishment worse than death. It is the Beijing Eunuch museum. Eunuchs were male servants and protectors of female members of the royal family. At a young age, these servants were castrated. This was done to ensure that they would not sleep with members or concubines of the royal family (though I don’t see why they couldn’t just use female servants). This practice of castration dates back into ancient China. It peaked during the Ming Dynasty before finally ending with the fall of the Qing in 1911. The museum is located at the tomb of Tian Yi, a eunuch from the Ming Dynasty, it is one of the most well preserved eunuch tombs in China. 

The museum features many artifacts excavated from the tomb as well as a realistic diorama of the castration process. The victim would be held down by several men while another did the procedure. This was all done with no anesthesia, and it would take months to heal before one could even walk again. However most of the time they just died of blood loss, infection or the extreme pain. The boys “package” was then wrapped up and placed in a case which was then placed on a roof beam in the boy’s house. When he died, his goods were then buried with him. One of the most famous Eunuch’s was Zheng He, the famous Chinese explorer. 

Another section of the museum is dedicated to Sun Yaoting, the last surviving Eunuch from the Qing Dynasty who died in 1996. 

So next time you’re looking for an interesting place to go in Beijing, check out the Eunuch museum! Unfortunately, I was unable to find the exact address. If your into this sort of thing, you might want to check out the Icelandic Phallological Museum as well.

China is becoming more like Hong Kong everyday!

This is for some of the HPC homies, you know who you are...

I've spoken about cage homes in Hong Kong a few times where people rent 16sq foot beds as flats for about $1000HK a month. It appears yet again as if China is taking up this too (there is an article somewhere where I can't remember where I stored it on one of my drives which has even smaller. You can read about HK cage homes here. Anyway Beijing has caught up with the modern shithole metropolis of HK! Read all about it here

IIRC these um apartments cost about 1/24th -1/12th of a typical person's income. Heh if this was in the UK or Europe or maybe New York/LA they'd want an arm and a leg for it!


Source

Say No to Mandarin!

There is a war of words occurring in China. Literally. Since the PRC’s founding, the communist party has been pushing the country to adopt Putonghua (common speech) as a way to promote national unity. Putonghua is the establishment of adopting Beijing Mandarin as a lingua franca for all Chinese. While over 53% of Chinese already speak Mandarin natively, half of 1.3 billion people is still a lot. As a way to push Putonghua, the PRC government has banned using any dialect other than Mandarin in all television broadcasts, with the exception of Cantonese and Wu (Shanghainese) as they are the largest of the minority dialects. Non-Mandarin dialects are also discouraged in the public education system. Students can have their grades penalized for using Cantonese or other dialects.

Recently, the people of Guangzhou took to the streets under rumors that their TV broadcasts would mandate Mandarin. Many feel that the government is trying to replace all other dialects with Mandarin and that it will lead to a loss of identity.

While I agree that a national language is crucial for a strong unified nation, a national dialect is a little more of a hairy issue. In a country as vast and diverse as China, it becomes even more complex. In Imperial China, people rarely ventured far from their home villages (except for the Beijing bureaucrats). This resulted in thousands of dialects in different pockets all over China. It wasn’t unusual for the town over the mountain to speak another dialect. Ever since the Ming Dynasty, the government has tried to implement Beijing Mandarin as a national dialect. From then to the present day, it has been mostly successful. 53% of China speaks some accent of Mandarin but it took over 700 years. In the southeast of China, the mountainous terrain had isolated most communities from these national language efforts until modern times. As a result, lands from Shanghai to Guangxi still hold on to these pocket dialects, and they have firmly resisted Putonghua.

Shanghai expo 2

Hey The Chinese guy,

I have a question for you!

I visited the Shanghai expo last month! It was impressive in its size and displays. But I got a sense that this was mainly for the Chinese public NOT for foreign tourist because I only saw few of them including myself. If this is the case, why the HUGE Chinese pavilion, I mean that thing covered several blocks. Don't the Chinese public know this already!

Is my view right in that the expo is primarily to impress the Chinese people or maybe the gov. are trying to say something here?

Thanks
Marcus from USA


Dear Marcus

Excuse the lack of lucidity, last night was a night on the town and my hangover is killing me.

You got it in one there, the Chinese expo in Shanghai is merely a dick waving opportunity for the Chinese communist party (CCP). They have not missed a chance at dick waving for a very long time. Though sometimes they go a bit far, like the Song Class Sub appearing in a USN exercise.

Quite frankly it is for the CCP to say how great they are and how wonderful they are. the British government near election time does this all the time. The thing is there are no elections in China . Well strictly this is not true as there are sort of elections right down at the street level who then elect others etc. But the old men who embezzle and drink the blood of the citizens cannot be touched.

But there is a big fear of the old men that there will be a big insurrection, 1989 proved people would pay in blood for chance, change happened (to be rich is Glorious) but not in the way the demonstrators quite wanted. They changed from an nasty state where the old men of the government lived lives of champagne socialism, to a capitalist state where the old men of the government lived lives of champagne socialism....

Oh wait a minute did I just describe the U K?

Thus everyday is potentially (correct me if I'm wrong) 2nd Amendment type election day meaning they have spread propaganda daily as if it is a normal election day about how good their lives have been. Granted the CCP HAS improved the lives of SOME, however the income gap is HUGE. This is just one of the parts of the jigsaw of the state control machine of course.

Recent other propaganda things have been the China space programme and also the Olympics, though admittedly the Olympics were mildly impressive. Wandering around through China even HK they regularly show propaganda alluding to the above. However when you have an endless pool of cheap expendable labour anything is possible. (regarding the Olympics). The CCP needs this propaganda because quite simply support for the CCP is waning.... especially in their core, i.e. the rural communities.

I've mentioned it before but the community bonds which tied the Chinese together are being destroyed and exploited. The young don't really give a damn about Mao's personality cult and are not exactly nationalistic. Kaiwen has an excellent article about China's rising ant colonies I archived somewhere. That the Chinese children are being screwed over too, they too were tricked into the MYTH education = good career. This hasn't been true in the Westernised nations for a good 10 maybe 15 years.

It's a bit like the book 1984, but just not so sinister... if anybody has read it Winston Smith works for the ministry of truth, he edits old newspaper articles to make it seem as if Big brother was right all along and for revisionista history purposes. Or he will edit it such that Big Brother underestimates the industriousness of the people in Oceania.

Some might say it mirrors the book closely what happens in China with the simplification of the language, though personally I don't think it is as sinister as normal people find Chinese bloody difficult to read and write therefore a simplification which is run in parallel with the old style language as well as wide spread English teaching isn't to oppress ideas. Guns are more useful for these purposes.

Anyway back on topic, it's more of a buy British Campaign or Buy American Campaign. If you're old enough you'll probably remember such things, when the Japanese products were arriving on our shores our own companies were caught with their pants down. China gives limited space to others to make itself look bigger... AND so less people can see other countries technical wizardry.

The Toyota violin playing robots for instance are great. And thus there are stunningly big queues to see things which we consider to me mundane and completely ordinary in our home countries. But really this I suppose is because there are plenty of poor people who haven't travelled and thus haven't seen tech of the rest of the world and want to have a glance. Which is funny in a way because it actually lessens the propaganda value of the Chinese pavillion* as it shows others are better in some ways than the CCP.

Though I suppose this demonstrates less of a strangle hold unlike the NK propaganda.

*A funny story was done by Kawasaki once in the 1980s, they released the new an improved GPZ1100 or something. They also bought along their older GPZ900 so journalists could try back to back how improved the bike was compared to the old model... Journalists had rides and most of them prefered the older bike to the new one and thus the new bike was canned and the older bike improved and continued for several years instead.

Optimus Prime in Beijing

Beats the usual Mao statute doesn't it?