Americans do not get China, as we head to oblivion

I remember hearing recently - I might have been in China when I heard this - that China recommended that the United States engage in more social spending and less defense spending in order to more reliably pay its debts.  Say what you want about the flaws of the Chinese system, they're right on the money here.

In Kaifeng, Henan province, they've opened a "historical theme park" based on a scroll created in the Song dynasty (roughly our Middle Ages - a high point of Chinese civilization).  This is clearly a country that wishes to tie its past to its present (wait til I show you what the Confucius temple/home looks like).  It is clearly a country identifying itself as the leading force in the world.  While I was in China, there was wall-to-wall "coverage" of  the 90th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party.  The Chinese governmental system is best described as hopelessly complex, and not without its own problems.  I read the Wikipedia entry on it, and still don't understand all the details of it.  But one thing is for certain: it seems to have been attempted to create a structure that doesn't simply put an oligarchy based on wealth in a privileged position in the country.

And the USA?  Well, our system is more or less deliberately designed to favor the wealthy and powerful.

And we are currently debating whether we shall be impoverished by benign warlords or by vicious, psychopathic warlords.

I'm not saying this because there's these pictures I took either - this "theme" seemed to be apparent everywhere I went in China.  I'll probably be repeating it a lot.

The Wenzhou region is replete with Chan Temples

As I had previously mentioned, this year I'm going to spend a near two weeks in China, visiting my wife's family, among other things, in China. My wife comes from Wenzhou, which, as Wikipedia describes it:

Wenzhou, also known as Yongjia (or Yung-chia，永嘉) has a history which goes back to about 2000 BC, when it became known for its pottery production. In the 2nd century BC it was called the Kingdom of Dong'ou. Under the Tang Dynasty, it was promoted to prefecture status and given its current name in 675 AD.

Throughout its history, Wenzhou's traditional economic role has been as a port giving access to the mountainous interior of southern Zhejiang Province. In 1876 Wenzhou was opened to the foreign tea trade, but no foreign settlement was ever established there. Between 1937 and 1942, during the Second Sino-Japanese War, Wenzhou achieved importance as one of the few ports still under Chinese control. It declined in the later years of the war, but began to recover after coastal trade along the Zhejiang coast was re-established in 1955...

Wenzhou is also the birthplace of China’s Mercantilism. From the Southern Song Dynasty, in contrasted to the Confucianism represented by Zhu Xi and Lu Jiuyuan in China urging people to study to be officials in the future, the theory of Wenzhou’s Yongjia School represented by Ye Shi, emphasized the importance of business. The theory has an enduring impact on the mindset of Wenzhou natives and has become the “cultural gene” in the economic development of Wenzhou ever since.

Renowned as the cradle of mathematicians in China, the city has teemed with over 200 mathematic professors in the recent 100 years, among whom Su Buqing, Gu Chaohao, Jiang Lifu and other mathematicians have enjoyed great fame both at home and abroad. Furthermore, Wenzhou is also reputed as the “Home of Swimming in China”, “City of Chess” and “City of Poetry in China”.

They speak a rather unusual dialect/language. 

Anyway, I've been there a few times before, and whether it's an improvement in Google maps, an improvement in the opening up of China or what-not, it seems now that there are many more Chan temples in Wenzhou than I'd been able to find before. I do hope to visit at least one of them, as I have when I went to Tianjin and Xi'an, to talk to the monks, and perhaps find an afternoon for practice at a temple.

That last part might be difficult, since it is difficult for a layman to actually spend time practicing at a Chinese Chan temple, for the moment at least. But then again, my darling wife is one heck of a negotiator...but then again, we're talking theA-list of top seeded world class negotiators when we're talking about Wenzhou, as the rest of the Wikipedia entry would imply.  These are the folks who basically started China's upward climb to economic dominance.

(Click on the link below and it has 3 links at the lower left, with increasing radius.)


View Larger Map

And oh...they have a Shangri-La Hotel there now! Considering that it's only slightly more expensive than the Shiloh Inn in Long Beach Washington  (and substantially cheaper than anything 3 steps down in comfort and quality from its price equivalent in any major American city)...and this is the finest hotel chain I've stayed at in Asia...well...I gotta do some negotiating on my own...maybe I'll bring them for the breakfast at least. You can't beat a Shangri-La breakfast...

I'll be off on travel the next few days...

Business in Japan.   You can't believe all the sightseeing I won't be able to do. I'll be mostly in the Kansai area, which, is somewhat different from the Kanto area as Wikipedia notes. Especially there's a difference in personalities between the two; it's as though one region was like Brooklyn (Kansai area) and the other was more like ...well...whatever place in NYC accountants work (maybe Hartford CT)...the Tokyo region is somewhat like a whole NY full of accountants and insurance salesman..  That's a horrendous and crude over-generalization, but there clearly is a difference in personalities in the two regions, and even an inexperienced foreigner can see the difference first-hand.  Perhaps more to the point: Osaka is like a whole more like  NYC's Times Square, and Tokyo is much less so, save for Shinjuku, Roppongi, Shibuya, Asakusa and places like that.

If I get a chance maybe I'll blog a few pictures but chances are verbal content might be a tad sparse over the coming week.

I'm back...

But at the moment, I've nothing I feel is worth a blog post about.

I could go on about politics, or some such thing. But I have other things to do still.

Hope everyone out there is safe and facing life with a decent measure of equanimity.

Travel Practice

I'm on my way home. It's time to practice, uh, loving kindness amidist the jostle and rushing. Kyle wrote:

What is important is that a genuine effort is put forth to see why virtue is crucial, and to truly understand firsthand what wisdom the Buddha was trying to transmit. Overcoming dukkha and understanding the true nature of reality, the reason for this ancient tradition, many times goes forgotten in pursuit of other individual desires in the name of being a Buddhist, including judging and labeling others.

I think that in usages like the above, "sincere" and "genuine" efforts are not something one should question very much. I can only try to be mindful of what I'm doing, and to put in an effort at doing it.

It is a "challenge that is hopelessly hard," to put forth the practice, but frankly, I don't see any alternative.

How is "genuine" practice related to travel practice? Travel, especially as folks like me do nowadays, is rather difficult. It's important to continue to practice amidst this difficulty.

Guess where I'm going? Plus: re: Brad Warner, like everyone else, like me, caveat emptor

It's not to Nevada, but rather the other country to which Paul Krugman makes an economic comparison here.  So I'm not likely to get much into this blog until Saturday.

There are many things I'd like to do in the week ahead, but there are many things I have to do. Hopefully those things that have to be done I will do, and those that I want to do, for which I have time, will be helpful.

For whatever reason - maybe because it's in response to an equally jumbled post from Brad Warner I'm adding the following to this post:

I wish I could have an in-depth response to Brad Warner's post here, as well as his post on depression here. However, to summarize, I was taken aback by both of them. In the first blog post about AA, if you've read the Stinkin' Thinkin blog, well, enough said, I hope. But in case it isn't enough, let me point out that Zen practice requires about as much faith, I'd say, as getting in the pool to swim when one is completely out of practice, or for that matter, taking up 書道 when one's writing has been decried as chicken scratch^*. Twelve step groups do not function that way.  Zen wasn't predicated or founded on quack science.  Zen Buddhist tradition and practice does not have what can in any way be called an undercurrent of narcissism. And the founder of AA's "root heritage" predecessor teacher wasn't any better. 

In the second case, I'm taken aback because Warner can't bring himself to say simple words here: if you are deeply troubled by depression, get help.  In fact, if you have a substance abuse issue get help.  Just like with anything else caveat emptor.

___________
* Note that one might be out of practice to the point where one has forgotten they can do basic swimming activity, as was my case.  Furthermore, those with bad writing have been said - I forgot where - to have more talent at  書道  than those who have very very neat penmanship.  That says something.    I think what it says is that one should not be nailed to the mast of one's preconceptions.  So do your own homework about everything, including what's written in this post.

Yet more of NY...

I don't know why. Just thought they were worth posting. Click on 'em as well as all the other recent photos for larger sizes/more detail..

More of NY

In many ways the recent trip to New York was a return to my historical roots, or, uh, ancestral homeland.  My parents had taken our family to Niagara Falls when I was very young, and now my son has seen them.  They're impressive, but as I blogged from my phone, way too commercialized.

On the road, in Buffalo

Saw Niagara Falls. It became very Corporate here since I was last here at the age of five or so. But evidently it's been corporate here for a while.

May the Grand Canyon avoidcthis fate.

Dresden

I'm now back home.  I realize I often get to visit civilized cool places that many people never see.  I generally never actually experience them either, as I am generally busy in meetings most of the time I am in these places.  Or perhaps it's better to say that I do experience the places, as I am working there as so many others do.

I did however, get a little bit of time to reconnoiter Dreseden...

It's an odd place, at least in the "Old Town" (Altstadt)  I was in.  The Altstadt of course isn't old at all; there is  no old part of Dresden..  This is because in the Second World War, planners in Defense Departments commissioned engineers to draw up plans and calculations about how to create a firestorm.  The calculations were evidently correct...

In case you didn't know what a firestorm is, here's Wikipedia's entry on the subject:

A firestorm is a conflagration which attains such intensity that it creates and sustains its own wind system. It is most commonly a natural phenomenon, created during some of the largest bushfires, forest fires, and wildfires. The Black Saturday bushfires, the Great Peshtigo Fire and the Ash Wednesday fires are examples of firestorms. Firestorms can also be deliberate effects of targeted explosives such as occurred as a result of the aerial bombings of Dresden, Hamburg, Stalingrad, Tokyo, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and The Blitz during World War II....


A firestorm is created as a result of the stack effect as the heat of the original fire draws in more and more of the surrounding air. This draft can be quickly increased if a low level jet stream exists over or near the fire. As the updraft mushrooms, strong gusty winds develop around the fire, directed inward. This would seem to prevent the firestorm from spreading on the wind, but the tremendous turbulence also created causes the strong surface inflow winds to change direction erratically. This wind shear is capable of producing small tornado- or dust devil-like circulations called fire whirls which can also dart around erratically, damage or destroy houses and buildings, and quickly spread the fire to areas outside the central area of the fire. A firestorm may also develop into a mesocyclone and induce true tornadoes ^[1]. Probably, this is true for the Peshtigo Fire.^[2]

The greater draft of a firestorm draws in greater quantities of oxygen which significantly increases combustion, thereby also substantially increasing the production of heat. The intense heat of a firestorm manifests largely as radiated heat (infrared radiation) which ignites flammable material at a distance ahead of the fire itself.

As in Munich, but much more recently (after reunification) the Germans rebuilt part of the town along the lines of the way the original city stood.  Because of the recentness of the restoration, as well as the fact that Dresden, unlike Munich experienced a firestorm,  the overall feeling I felt here is one of strangeness and disorientation.  Dresden's "old" buildings are signifiers of buildings that no longer exist - because of this the whole city shouts out that it was the object of a firestorm more directly than Tokyo, which was largely rebuilt from the ground up after the war.  In Tokyo, with some small exceptions (such as Asakusa and the Diet) there is no "old" city visible; the aftermath of Tokyo's firestorm and surrender has rendered it relatively new, if somewhat staid relative to Osaka (or perhaps it was always that way).

But Dresden is different.

In Dresden one cannot help but feel unsettled.   The very existence of the rebuilt buildings points to the horible karma that this city experienced; you cannot look at Altstadt without thinking of the firestorm.  Even in the rebuilt part of Altstadt "history" ends with the Kaiser.  The nature of the look of the town does not do anything but point to its horrors.

Or perhaps  that was simply me.  Dresden sits in the former East Germany; it is near the Czech Republic and Poland.   I am of mixed Polish, German and Slovak descent; significantly more than Munich or for some reason Berlin, it seems like the people around here resemble distant relatives of me.

Here is part of where Slavs and Germans mixed.  This area was evidently at one time settled by Slavs, and then by Germans.  Today there is a Sorbian Slavic minority in this general region; in the church in Dresden there is a poster commemorating one Alois Andritzki, who was apparently murdered by the Nazis for suggesting that perhaps it wasn't a great idea to be subjugating non-Germans.  Sorbs, according to Hitler  were just Germans who just happened to speak a Slavic language, and had Slavic customs.  After the war the Sorbian people haven't had much prominence on the world stage; whatever national aspirations these people have haven't had the press that other national movements have.

As for today,  Wikipedia notes:

After the unification of Germany on 3 October 1990, Lusatians made efforts to create an autonomous administrative unit; however Helmut Kohl’s government did not agree to it. After 1989 the Sorbian movement revived, however it still encounters many obstacles. Although Germany supports national minorities, Sorbs claim that their aspirations are not sufficiently fulfilled. The desire to unite Lusatia into one country has not been taken into consideration. Upper Lusatia still belongs to Saxony and Lower Lusatia to Brandenburg. Liquidations of Sorbian schools, even in areas mostly populated by Sorbs, still happen, under the pretext of financial difficulties or demolition of whole villages to create lignite quarries.

Today (2008) Sorbian institutions serving 60,000 Sorb people supposedly receive less money for preservation of their culture than one German theater's yearly budget in Berlin^[3], an annual state grant of 15.6 million Euro by the Federal and the Saxon governments^[4]. Faced with growing threat of cultural extincton the Domowina issued a memorandum in March 2008 ^[5] and called for "help and protection against the growing threat of their cultural extinction, since an ongoing conflict between the German government, Saxony and Brandenburg about the financial distribution of help blocks the financing of almost all Sorbian institutions". The memorandum also demands a reorganisation of competence by ceding responsibility from the Länder to the federal government and an expanded legal status. The call has been issued to all governments and heads of state of the European Union^[6].

May peace prevail on earth.

Seoul...

Made it to Seoul, and in a couple of days hopefully will post some nice pictures and all that. Made it to Jogyesa. Korea's not bad, actually, but there's certainly more corporate heaviness here (or if you like, vertical integration from the chaebol taken to absurdity) than probably anywhere else in the world. I mean, they have Samsuing Life Insurance and Hyundai Department Stores. But it's not all that bad. Or, as a Korean colleague working for me used to say, "It's stupid, but it's OK."

The other thing I hope to get though is a post, of all things, on the death of the mall, and implications of malls you probably haven't considered.

On edit: Actually, no I'm not going to post on this, because to do so would be kind of an anti-mitzvah, if there were such a word.