卦Trigram 2.0

My old G4 12″ iBook recently started making really loud grinding noises, which seemed to come from the bottom left-hand corner. Sometimes, when I started it, it gave an error message saying that it couldn’t find a hard drive.

Oops. Not good.

A trip to the new Apple Store in Sanlitun village led to me “checking in” my ailing laptop for inspection. Yesterday, the diagnosis was made: a new hard drive is needed.

Hmmm. That’ll cost me 3000RMB. While I was in Singapore recently, I spent SGD244 on a new battery, since the old one had lost most of its capacity. How annoying! But it makes me think that’s probably not worth it, to keep throwing money at an old machine…

OK. Well, I liked that iBook because of its small footprint. However, I’d already stopped carrying it around… my Asus EeePC 700 has filled that niche… I mostly used it as a home media centre, and for video editing. That suggests I should replace it with a Mac Mini, which would cost 5,388 RMB. 

I wonder whether Apple offer an educational discount in China? On their web page, I can’t see the icon, which is a little frustrating. In Singapore, I bought a few items from them and took the benefit of the discount, both as a student and, later, a lecturer. If they’re not offering it here, what does that say about their brand positioning in the Chinese market? Are they cutting loose the education sector as too insignificant, and just going for the urban hipster segment?

Well, I need to go to the store this afternoon to retrieve my iBook; I’ll ask them then.

I’ve just moved in to my new apartment, on the inner side of Beijing’s north-western Second Ring Road. This road was built where the city’s ancient defensive walls used to stand, so “inside the second ring road” means “inside the historic part of the city”. One of Beijing’s little mysteries, by the way, is that there is no First Ring Road…

My apartment block’s not historic, except perhaps for the people: when the old alleyways and courtyard dwellings were to build shopping malls etc, the local residents were relocated in these housing areas. They’re rather cheaply built – bare concrete stairways, and no elevators (and didn’t I feel that this morning, when I was carrying my boxes and bags up to my 7th-floor place – I climbed those stairs twelve times, each time with a heavy load!).

Today’s been a lovely late summer day: blues skies, the air getting dry now, compared to the humidity of July and early August. I was coming back from my evening meal at the Guloudajie dumpling joint, looking up at the stars as they came out… and then realised, hey, I can see the stars! At least in these areas, and especially in these apartment complexes, Beijing has definitely joined the Dark Sky movement, with plenty of screened halogen lights, sending all of their light downwards – not up into the sky…

It’s also interesting that the apartment complex has lots of “flower beds” around – which is to say, I don’t think anything much was ever done with them, except perhaps some sickly grass. However, almost every available spot has been colonised somehow, bu residents planting all kinds of flowers and other plants. Sometimes occupants of ground-floor flats have planted vines outside, training them up to almost entirely cover the windows. I can see the advantages – extra privacy and insulation, flowers, and so on, but it must still be a little strange to live there! Anyway, another Western trend that’s got some coverage lately, Guerrilla Gardening, also has its Beijing equivalent!

So, the Olympics have come and gone,the Paralympics will start soon, but the city and it’s local culture – which didn’t get so much attention – continue to grow and thrive in ways that the rest of the world could learn from.

Coming to the end of a couple of weeks’ holiday in Singapore, it strikes me that when I fly back into Beijing on Wednesday morning it will be different…. For the first time since my first stay there in 2004, Beijing won’t be looking forward to the Olympics… I wonder whether it will make a difference?

So… the Spice phone, with no screen or non-voice call functions will cost the equivalent of RMB 141? With basic but full-featured phones available at RMB 199, or even RMB99, new – where’s the market, again?

RMB99: advert next to public newspaper board. These boards are still pretty common around Beijing, with the day’s paper there for passersby to read.

RMB 199, in the window of a phone shop at Wudaokou. With a constant influx of new students – Chinese, Western, and (in large numbers) Korean – the phone market is intensely competitive here. A cluster of shops make it a great place to look for that new phone, regardless of budget.

Over the past four years or so, I’ve written a number of posts on China’s role as a destination and a source of cultural influence. China hasn’t just been drawing the MNCs, the investors, the outsourcers, and the rest of the big battalions of globalization. It’s also been drawing the artists, the freelancers, the global nomads, and the dreamers – all those who recognise that change is brewing and want to be a part of it, no matter how small, or who seek the opportunity to reinvent themselves, or to find a niche for themselves that they couldn’t find wherever they came from. It’s this that separates China from Singapore, for example, where they prefer established artists who are already successful, and where up-and-comers are co-opted early on because there’s no way to get a platform without government or corporate sponsorship.

Amongst the foreigners here in Beijing – I hesitate to say ‘expatriates’, which is too loaded a term – there’s a common meme that Beijing now is like Paris between the wars, a society in flux, open to new ideas, prosperous whilst still cheap to live in; I have to agree, and it means that this city – and Shanghai, and Kunming, and Xi’an, and many others – are drawing in young, creative, adventurous people, who are engaging in a fertile exchange with the local scenes. Many of these people (I suspect) will be culturally influentual in the future, and are being shaped and influenced by China.

So, having felt all that for a while, it’s really interesting to see something on the same lines appear in the IHT today: For a new generation, land of opportunity may lie in China, not the US.

Just a few photos, taken to test my new Nokia N73; I decided that what I wanted was an affordable phone that can take good quality pictures, and the N73 seemed to fit the bill.

The very first, taken at the counter where I bought the N73. Note the prices of the local-brand phones; even cheaper ones were also available.

Brand names are so important.

Construction and (not so) clear air.

Why are some wrapped, and others not?

Beijing and Singapore are both full of construction sites.

This set of signs is pretty typical of those I’ve seen in various parts of Beijing. I like the ‘wear your hard hat’ icon; it seems to seek to inspire, to persuade workers that they do really want to wear a helmet, as opposed to the Singaporean, “obey the rules” style… Not sure if I have a photo of Singapore’s signage; it may have to wait…

The Guardian has an interesting piece on Beijing’s music scene…. no idea if I’ll have time to get to any gigs, but Beijing is a really happening place, with all sorts of underground and overground cultural stuff going on…

At the University where I’m teaching, basketball is the big thing. Just outside my hostel, there are six basketball courts, and they are busy from early morning until late at night. Now that spring is arriving, I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s someone playing there 24/7. By contrast, although there is a football pitch, and sometimes there’s a team playing there, I never see knockabout games of soccer being played informally. I wonder how much of this is due to Yao Ming?

Last Sunday night, I met up with old friends at the Stone Boat cafe in Ritan Park, the old Temple of the Sun, where the Emperors made annual sacrifice. Leaving around 9pm, I heard the sound of Tibetan music. Thinking that perhaps a new restaurant had opened, I wandered over to take a look, to find a large circle of middle-to-old aged Chinese, all warmly wrapped up against the cold night air. In the middle of the circle, all of their bags were piled up, kept in plain view. There were about thirty people there, and they were all dancing along to the music from a CD player somewhere, throwing their hands in the air and stamping along in a ‘traditional’ Tibetan dance, with the occasional shout of “Hey!”. Heh. To the average Chinese, Tibetan culture appears as exotic and romantic as it does to the average Westerner; for these pensioners, Tibetan dance is the equivalent of the ‘cowboy-style’ line-dancing in the UK… All around Beijng, things Tibetan are ‘in’.

I was asking around, seeing what associations people I know have with various colours (following on from my last post). I mentioned to one that in China, red is associated with “Stop”, “Prosperity”, and “Communism”; she replied, “hmmm, maybe not so much the last one these days”.

As it happens, I’m currently re-reading “Escape with Me!”, first published in 1939. It’s by Osbert Sitwell, and deals with an extended holiday he took in China in the mid-30s. He opines in chapter 3:

Even so rigid a faith as Communism, if for for the sake of convenience it had temporarily to be accepted, would find itself powerless to alter the national character; on the contrary, the national character would very soon modify Communism to suit itself, or even assimilate it as it has always assimilated foreign conquerors.

. Much of what he writes, with the benefit of 70 years of hindsight, stands up well.