Over the last few months, many sexual harassment cases in the US have come out one by one. Many women have stepped out from the dark to speak about what has happened to them, bravely challenging the powerful figures that they used to be afraid of. It is time to say “NO.”
On the other side of the world, some Chinese women who have more exposure to international affairs have started to raise awareness of this issue, and look at what’s happening to themselves. China’s society as a whole, however, remains quiet. In fact, there is rarely any public discussion about sexual harassment here. An op-ed published shortly after the Weinstein scandal broke by China Daily, the government’s mouthpiece, argued that sexual harassment is a Western issue, one that doesn’t exist in China due to “Chinese traditional values and conservative attitudes.” (That op-ed has since been removed from China Daily‘s website.)
We disagree! There IS sexual harassment in China, and it is quite common.
We talked with our friends, and share some of their personal stories on today’s podcast. We also argue that there are several reasons why, when compared with the US on the issue of sexual harassment, Chinese society still has a long way to go:
• Severe lack of sex and gender education
• No legal and regulatory execution or environment to protect women who speak out
• Government control of the media limiting open discussion of the issue
So, as girls in the US enjoy newfound support, here in China we need to stand by each other, share our stories, raise awareness, and, most importantly, bravely say “No.”
Previous episodes of the Wǒ Men podcast can be found here, and you can find Wǒ Men on iTunes here.
We launched a new initiative of monthly themes in November, with a series of posts on the topic of Single Life in China. Here’s the theme for December 2017:
Imported Holidays
How are different national, religious or cultural celebrations imported, adapted, appropriated, reformatted, Capitalized, or otherwise done in China? We have Christmas and Diwali covered, but we also want to hear from you.
Hit us up at [email protected] with stories about how your own cultural festivities get Chinafied.
This week’s photo essay is by Kristen Ng, a Chengdu-based promoter and musician who runs the offbeat touring label Kiwese, facilitates live music programming at NU SPACE Chengdu and performs electronic music as Kaishandao. She’s selected seven snaps from her recent nationwide tour with New Zealand’s The All Seeing Hand: hardcore slow train tour life.
“Stop the music!”
Panic reared its head. The warmup band fled the stage. Bar staff scampered into action like clockwork — house lights and quiet pop music came on, tables moved into place, merch stashed away, gig posters covered — it was all very Matilda. I was half expecting Ms. Trunchbull to walk in.
“They’re checking downstairs now,” said Midie Livehouse’s bar manager, putting a tray of IPA on the table. “If anyone asks, you’re just customers.”
In the lead up to 十九大, the National Congress, authorities were checking bars and clubs around Xi’an for any sign of… well, anything, really. An hour passed. It wasn’t looking good. If the cops came and saw The All Seeing Hand on stage they’d probably think it was some kind of black magic cult gathering. The manager politely suggested we call it a night. Stubborn Sagittarius, I refused to give in — we came to Xi’an to play, and that’s what we were gonna do.
Close to midnight, The All Seeing Hand played four of their heaviest tunes. I closed the night as Kaishandao. The handful of people that remained were ecstatic. We’d stuck it to the man.
***
6am. Two hours sleep, straight to the station. Short one ticket for the sleeper train to Chengdu, I martyred myself to the hard seat. Excruciating. I lasted two hours before finding an upgrade to soft sleeper.
“Oh my god, so comfy!” I announced, collapsing on the bed after dragging a case of gear through a packed train of National Holiday passengers.
Here’s a photo of my fellow passenger’s phone screensaver:
“现在年轻人不能吃苦!” (young people these days can’t take hardship!), he said.
Damn straight.
TOUR TIP #3: Avoid touring in China around the National Congress meeting and/or National Holiday Week. Avoid like the plague.
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Zhibo is a weekly column in which Beijing-based American Taylor Hartwell documents his journey down the rabbit hole of Chinese livestreaming app YingKe. If you know nothing about the livestreaming (直播; “zhibo”) phenomenon in China, start here.
In these increasingly divided times, I think one thing we can all agree on is the importance of good lighting. It doesn’t matter if you’re Instagramming that healthy food you’ll never eat, taking gym selfies, or trying to get that perfect profile picture; everyone wants their face/abs/kale chips to be illuminated just so.
And luckily for us modern-day pond-gazers, we have more lighting choices for our photos and videos than ever before. Whether it’s the ever-growing collection of photo filters, the touch-up options you can play with from the lazy security of your camera app, or the funhouse mirror world that used to be called Snapchat, we live in an unprecedented time when it comes to quickly and easily messing with the light situation of our photos and videos.
Chinese livestreaming is obviously no exception, and proper-ish lighting was something I started thinking about once it became clear that a not-insubstantial number of people were showing up to my stream for foreigner-gawking purposes. But before you start repositioning all the lamps in your house or go hunting for filters, you should know that Yingke does a lot of the work for you. Or, at least, it does… something:
Can’t quite put my finger on it…
From the moment you launch the app, it’s clear that something is different. At first glance, you might assume they’ve just got a less-than-optimal light balance situation going on, but no — this vampire effect is pretty universal.
It’s like a PSA for the dangers of never leaving the house
And to be clear, this is the baseline. Once you get into the actual *beautification* effects, the freak show really gets rolling. There are four main effects — first and foremost among them, the skin-whitener:
To be fair, this is probably what I’ll look like once the winter is over anyway
Then there’s the skin-softener:
And this is what I imagine my wax statue would look like
If you want to really start moving into alien territory, there’s a slider to make your eyes bigger:
Oh boy
And finally, what is essentially a plastic surgery slider for that gaunt, malnourished look you’ve always craved:
OH GOD KILL IT WITH FIRE
Now, I look at this result and see some kind of hilarious cartoon monster. And to be fair, plenty of Chinese friends have laughed along with me at the obvious excess of these features. And yet…
I mean, they can’t ALL be doing it ironically, right?
This obsession with pale, thin, big-eyed faces is neither new nor unique to China’s livestreaming industry. Cosmetic ads targeted at Chinese consumers have made it clear for years what kind of pigmentation is deemed ideal:
Very little, apparently
So… why the obsession with whiteness?
It’s easy to jump to the conclusion that this is a relatively modern problem, that because the average Chinese consumer is saturated with Western media but rarely sees foreigners in real life, they’re easily persuaded that whiter = more beautiful. But this doesn’t really make sense when you consider that Western beauty standards — unreasonable though they are — have been pushing well-tanned skin for decades, and what Yingke and Chinese commercials show is more like a literal whitewashing.In fact, it’s worth pointing out that Chinese preference for pale skin isn’t really about race, and it’s certainly not about looking like Westerners — it’s about being the palest possible Chinese person you can be.
(see above)
As far as I understand it, this is a class issue that long predates the first Caucasian setting foot in the Middle Kingdom — more pale skin means you aren’t laboring in the fields, which indicates more wealth and prestige. To some degree, that’s not unique to China; medieval European artwork shows us that their nobles also preferred pale women on the basis that they weren’t spending time in the fields. Of course, they also had a preference for curvier bodies that indicated someone was well-fed, whereas the Chinese beauty ideal has insisted on women with tiny waists (and feet) for many, many centuries.
Pretty sure this came before they cast a bunch of white kids in The Last Airbender
And yes, there is a focus on women in this equation — no shocker there. Just Google “Chinese empress artwork” and “Chinese emperor artwork” and you’ll have no trouble spotting where the bars are set. But when it comes to regular people — not stars, royalty, ancient concubines, etc. — there’s no question that dark skin is frowned upon no matter the gender. Women are treated more unfairly, to be sure (again, no shocker), but while they have to deal with a lifetime of having nasty and often dangerous beauty products literally shoved in their face, darker-skinned men in China are judged by a whole lot of employers and potential mates to simply be inferior from the word go.
Then again, you can probably tell from the pictures above that the “must be paler must have bigger eyes” phenomenon on Yingke disproportionately impacts the female hosts. But then again (again), the 小鲜肉 moniker (literally “small fresh meat,” meaning a somewhat feminine, soft-skinned, well-groomed guy) is a super popular idea in China right now, so perhaps men’s time in the harsh beauty-standard spotlight is finally coming.
Just so long as there’s no UV rays in that spotlight (source)
And despite living in the 21st century, it makes sense that a lot of people in China would still be holding on to the idea that pale skin means beauty and status. If you’re a young adult here, there’s a statistically relevant chance that either your parents or grandparents were farmers — remember, this is a country that was still an almost entirely rural, agrarian economy less than half a century ago. As someone who’s never seen a pre-Beijing-Olympics-China, it can be easy for me to forget that this is a country that went through an entire Industrial Revolution’s worth of progress in just a bit more than my short lifetime.
So when I roll my eyes at a subway ad asking women if they’re “white enough,” I’m not really actively considering that a large portion of this country’s population grew up in a world not just without subway ads, but without subways.
Of course, times change, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect people to adapt their thinking when they get new information and are confronted with new realities.
But, you know, maybe I’ll see if we can cast a Chinese woman to play Mulan and/or make it another month without a neo-Nazi rally before I start chucking *behind the times* stones in this glass house.
2017 has been a year of many apocalypses. Some have been long and slow, and totally dependent on your set of alternate facts. Others, like the “Retail Apocalypse,” are more concrete. Sears is collapsing. Macy’s is closing stores. Radio Shack is just a sadly vanishing ghost composed of budget phones and doo-dads. A generation of mall brands are teetering on the brink of nothingness while their VC owners-cum-overlords gorge themselves on debt and bank fees.
Take heart — there is hope on the other side.
In China, the “Retail Apocalypse” already happened. The four horsemen of e-commerce, rising real estate prices, increased travel abroad and rising consumer expectations combined to decimate China’s former retail giants: Department Stores.
China’s department stores were a vast empire of State-owned, six-story monoliths staffed by the unwitting heirs of Kafka — uncaring and deeply bored clerks more dead-eyed than a partially frozen sock-eye salmon. They featured a bizarre assortment of products: international brands from the ’80s like Pierre Cardin, State-owned Chinese brands with unpronounceable names, and hallucinatory “fake” foreign brands named after everything from American universities (UCLA) to French philosophers (Roland Barthes).
The four horsemen of e-commerce, rising real estate prices, increased travel abroad and rising consumer expectations combined to decimate China’s former retail giants: Department Stores
The “fakes” and leftovers and unpronounceables were laid out in a retail environment that resembled a Mad Men-era department store — kiosks and nooks with products and visual merchandising sort of haphazardly poured in little liquid piles rather than displayed with any kind of discernible intention to sell product.
Every department store was designed with the same rigorous and lugubrious blueprint. First floor: cosmetics. Second floor: women’s stuff. Third floor: more women’s stuff. Fourth floor: men’s stuff. Fifth floor: sporting goods. Sixth floor: a dining area composed entirely of snacks, always including lukewarm dumplings, terrible noodles, and surprisingly good Korean food.
The strangest thing about China’s empire of department stores was that it was very difficult to pay. Like, basically impossible. After you decided that the shirt at Roland Barthes was in fact a shirt — and you brazenly decided you wanted it — the clerk would produce around 17 pieces of pink and green carbon paper and direct you to a register located… somewhere very far away and foreboding.
But the human desire to buy is like a cockroach, so when you finally made it to the register, a byzantine process of stamping and muttering would eventually lead to you paying in cash (you could only pay in cash). And the price tag was about 150% more expensive than any shirt sold in Hong Kong or Houston or wherever.
After you paid, you trudged back to the Roland Barthes kiosk, handed over the 17 pieces of stamped carbon paper and collected your shirt, usually already safely nestled in a bag advertising another brand or featuring the Latin name of a local tea varietal.
So obviously — spoiler alert — the internet killed these places.
Maybe our phenomenological romp through the dead Chinese department store helps you understand why e-commerce is big in China. It’s not hard to disrupt something that sucks.
Back in the physical world, strange temporal palaces that subtly shifted the meaning and goals of retail emerged fully formed. Instead of merely being places of “commerce,” China’s new shopping malls are consumption-as-experience, where sensory inputs only exist as a way to sell goods and services.
For me, the starkest example of the new Chinese shopping mall, the apotheosis of consumption qua experience, is called the Aegean Sea. It’s evidently a national chain, but I’ve only had the pleasure of patronizing the Aegean Sea in Xibahe, which is a sort of déclassé suburb-like space vivisected by the northeast vector of Beijing’s 3rd Ring Road. I live within walking distance.
The Aegean Sea is (as you would expect) vaguely Greek and vaguely nautical in décor. There aren’t naked cherubs or tridents or a goat-legged Pan, but you get the sense that they were trying. There’s blue tile and some half-assed fish-ponds.
The design of the Aegean Sea follows a meticulously crafted, architectural logic of consumption:
The wide, slack-jawed space in front of the Agean Sea is a place for experiential event marketing, where corporations set up booths and do things like have kids rollerblade in figure-eight patterns around Monster energy drink cans.
The first floor is home to global fast fashion brands and their cousins with a slightly premium patina: Muji, Uniqlo, etc. There’s also an Adidas store with no Yeezy’s.
The second floor houses the weird Chinese brands and fake foreign brands we first learned about in dead Chinese department stores. Sadly, no Roland Barthes though.
The 3rd floor is all kid’s stuff. Both children’s clothes and knick-knacks and, more importantly, experiences designed for children. There are English classes and art schools and a place called Doctor Ma’s Baby Swimming where infants are deposited naked into a tub of water to flail and cry while their parents or grandparents take photographs. Or shop. Or eat.
Floors 4 through 6 are dedicated to restaurants and a movie theatre. The restaurants are a hyper-real ramble through every Chinese province, seemingly mediated by an American inspired chain restaurant… Sichuan a la Chili’s, Ningxia a la Cracker Barrel, Zhejiang also a la Cracker Barrel. There’s also a Sizzler and a perfectly credible bowl of Pho. It’s not all bad…
The underground levels of the Aegean Sea are dedicated to a vast supermarket. I don’t go there.
The effect of this ruthless architecture of consumption is to construct a space where experience is a safe, warm mush flavored by the spices of sales and marketing.
Instead of merely being places of “commerce,” China’s new shopping malls are consumption-as-experience, where sensory inputs only exist as a way to sell goods and services
Hungry? Go to the fifth floor. Need a t-shirt? There’s Uniqlo. Want to relieve yourself of the burden of parenting? Doctor Ma and/or English Best! are here for you!
From a business perspective, the focus on restaurants and children’s experiences is both critical and genius. People need to eat, and they will go where there are choices, even if they are vapid and sterile. People’s kids need “enrichment,” and all the better if said “enrichment” is in the same place as lunch. And, if you’re spending hours and hours in a mall eating and enriching, you’re pretty likely to buy a cardigan, or a microwave, or a Muji back-scrubbing brush woven from the fibers of your own sense of Veblen-esque self-superiority.
Not surprisingly, I spend much of my time at the Aegean Sea checking my phone, which sizzles and hisses with WeChat messages bombinated by the marketing technology apparatus employed by Muji and Uniqlo and Sichuan a la Chili’s.
“25% off,” my phone shrieks and whistles, getting slightly warmer.
In other words, what the Aegean Sea seems to be asking me is, “What’s the difference between me and your phone anyway?”
Our photo theme this week is Fashion Frontiers: fabulous looks at the far edges of contemporary Chinese culture.
To round off our theme this week, we have a photo from the recent inaugural Black Fashion Week in Shanghai (we’ll have a more in depth look later with photos and words from inside).
For now, feast your eyes on this model, sizzling in an all-red ensemble with matching lipstick. We love the patterned motif throughout. It’s a look.
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