Our photo theme this week is Fashion Frontiers: fabulous looks at the far edges of contemporary Chinese culture.
If you’re looking up to light up the night in a near-future cyberpunk dystopia, consider this prototype from prominent Shenzhen maker Naomi Wu. She describes it:
One of my favorite wearables is the Hikaru Skirt: http://hikaruskirt.tumblr.com
My problem with the existing design is- Limited external control (just responds to movement) and the frilly skirt/tutu style is not really to my taste.
Solution: Denim mini/micro skirt with control pack hidden in belt buckle. Skirt length is a matter of personal taste but with the LEDs off it passed for normal.
Read more about this project here, and if you’re into it, support Naomi’s work via her newly launched Patreon. Naomi recently waged a brutal internet battle with Maker Faire founder Dale Dougherty, which ultimately resulted in her receiving a sincere apology from Dougherty for his inherent bias against her, a Chinese woman maker, and an invitation for her to attend a major industry event in the US next year.
It’s been a bad week in Beijing. Last weekend, a fire in a two-story building housing mostly migrant workers killed 19 people and injured eight others. In response, the municipal government announced citywide inspections targeting “illegal and unsafe structures,” a move which is as much about clearing out economic migrants as it is about safety.
A few days later, a child abuse scandal at a kindergarten in an upscale neighborhood of Beijing blew up what’s left of the internet in China. Censors rushed to contain angry Weibo and WeChat posts from concerned parents, leading many to wonder if this is just the tip of a particularly terrible iceberg of abusive practices at childcare facilities here.
Two unspeakable tragedies in the same city and yet happening worlds apart.
Last weekend’s deadly blaze broke out in Xinjian Township, a part of Beijing far removed from the high rises and malls of Beijing’s Chaoyang district where the RYB kindergarten is located. It’s a part of the city where shantytowns and dilapidated buildings are divided and then divided again to create residential and workspaces for some of the city’s millions of economic migrants.
“There were 82 garment manufacturers crammed into Xinjian Village,” according to the China Labour Bulletin:
The building where the fire occurred, “Gathering Good Fortune Apartments,” and its neighbouring structures were draped in tangled power lines, and their exteriors darkened by age. The second floor contained more than one hundred cramped ten-square-metre rooms, some housing three to four people, and the whole floor was serviced by just two staircases.
In many cases, migrant workers are forced by the economic realities of Beijing into improvised — and frequently dangerous — accommodations. The median monthly rent in Beijing is 2,748 RMB (about $415), according to a study cited in an earlier post by China Labour Bulletin. This amount is equal to 100% of the average salary of a migrant worker. This unsustainable situation has resulted in a proliferation of “Migrant Villages” of ramshackle housing with limited social services.
The response to the fire by authorities was swift and predictable: a combination of media suppression and an aggressive campaign against illegal and unsafe structures, which a cynical observer might suggest fits a little too neatly with a larger plan to transform the city into a show capital of high-end businesses and “high quality” people.
To be clear, I’m not arguing against safety inspections. Many of the city’s low-cost dwellings (and a frightening number of high-cost dwellings as well) have been constructed haphazardly using substandard materials, according to safety standards undermined by official corruption and the cult of chabuduo. But the official response to the disaster is to demolish unsafe structures without consideration for providing low-cost alternatives for economic migrants who, let’s face it, do most of heavy lifting for the city’s better-heeled residents.
And it is this group — Beijing’s urban elite — who also had their world rocked this week by the sickening allegations of children being forcibly injected, drugged, assaulted and threatened by staff at the RYB Kindergarten, located in Xintiandi, an apartment complex popular with Beijing’s upwardly mobile.
This latest scandal comes only a fortnight after videos of child abuse at a company daycare in Shanghai. Outraged parents there went Red Guard Redux on a janitor at the school during what was supposed to be a press conference.
This week’s accusations in Beijing against the RYB Kindergarten have resulted in similar fury that, so far at least, seems to be contained online. But what a fury it is. As Fan Shuhong wrote on RADII yesterday:
Over the last two days, the Chinese internet has gone wild with thousands of burning reposts and comments of news relating to the latest such scandal, in which several parents have accused the staff of a Beijing branch of private kindergarten RYB Education of drugging and sexually abusing children as young as three and a half years old.
“I want to burn it down,” said one victim’s father while staring at the school, part of an education company that was listed on the New York Stock Exchange in September. In another video, which has more than 76,000 reposts and 56,000 comments on Weibo as of this writing, another parent says that children from the school were given white pills, and that dozens of students were found with needle marks on their bodies.”
We all know that society is not so light, but who knew it was so dark,” some people on an online forum say: “Besides what is out there in the media, there are so many things that remain under the radar. What can we do but just hope that these kids will grow up healthy and strong?
Authorities have detained staff members from the kindergarten while attempting to portray this case — and the one in Shanghai — as isolated incidents. Online censors initially kept busy deleting posts which “sensationalize the incident” but later backed off slightly when the censorship of the story threatened to create its own backlash.
It’s a dangerous game. There have long been grumbles by the moneyed class that many of the city’s problems are rooted in an overly permissive attitude to migrants from other provinces, foreigners, and the seemingly unregulated and chaotic neighborhoods popular with businesses run by members of these two groups. But Mao protect the government official who messes with the children, or, in what is still the case in many families, child, of the Beijing middle- and upper-class. It’s one reason air pollution is such a sensitive topic. It doesn’t matter if some people can’t send their kids to school in Beijing so long as my kid can go. But every person’s child, rich or poor, has to breathe the air.
The child abuse scandal at RYB cuts to the heart of a sacrosanct — although mostly fictional — belief that economic success and relative wealth can protect the urban elite from the harsh realities faced by most other Chinese citizens. The urban elite believes they can spend their way out of life in substandard housing and provide their children the best education and healthcare money can buy. When policies affect their well-being or status, this group has also for many years consistently punched above its weight. But there are limits.
Chinese leaders, especially over the past 28 years, have perceived linkages — whether horizontal across geographical boundaries or vertically connecting grievances among social classes — as dangerous and destabilizing. The events of this week in Beijing, twin tragedies affecting different worlds in the same city, are sad reminders of realities often forced out of view by anxious authorities and the self-preserving elite.
Our photo theme this week is Fashion Frontiers: fabulous looks at the far edges of contemporary Chinese culture.
“Chinese Playboy” — the phrase alone conjures up misguided orientalist visions of models in see-through dragon kimonos. But actually, it’s just a bunch of nonsense like this:
China has a pretty strict “no” policy when it comes to pornography, no matter how softcore it may be. But that didn’t stop Hugh Hefner from trying to break into the untapped market. While Hong Kong did have its own Playboy magazine for a while, it soon pittered to a close, and by the time the brand entered China, it was pretty much just a logo.
Now, the infamous Playboy bunny logo marks everything here, completely drained of its edgy and taboo coolness. Free gift keychains from Taobao promotions, toddlers’ t-shirts, huge stores of belt buckles — no trinket is safe from the easily-replicable might of an iconic brand logo.
But, we bet that somewhere, Hefner’s family is comfortably banking off some of it. So rest in peace Hugh: the baseball hat-wearing grandpas of China have you to thank for their steez.
Our photo theme this week is Fashion Frontiers: fabulous looks at the far edges of contemporary Chinese culture.
We checked out a drag show in Shanghai this weekend (full write-up on that below). The whole event was stupendous, and so were all the performers, but we wanted to spotlight this majestic, unique, badass soul right here.
Concept, badass. Ink, badass. Shredded BMI, badass. Performance, badass. There was literally a whole choreographed Muay Thai fight that required a big, intimidating stunt man.
So today, we offer this brave warrior a salute. Knock ’em dead.
Read more about Shanghai’s growing drag scene here:
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.
Welcome back!
Last week, I told you about how I almost got myself thrown off of Yingke by violating the sacred “thou shalt not hop onto a bicycle” commandment — and started to talk about all the other commandments regarding treason, self-endangerment, and solider-streaming I subsequently learned about. If you missed part one, here it is again:
Without any further preamble, let’s jump right back in where we left off:
4. Don’t drink or show people drinking…maybe…?
As someone who enjoys aglass of whiskey now and then, I’ve been pretty worried about Yingke’s official on-camera imbibing policy. Unfortunately, the rules are of minimal help — there are only two rules that directly reference alcohol:
Don’t stream anything that involves self-harm, such as (but not limited to) heavy drinking/alcoholism
Define “heavy.”
Don’t show other people in the stream who are violating rules, such as — and I’m translate-quoting here — drinking, smoking, or topless men
Wait, what? Forget the drinking, when did topless men become a part of this? I don’t have a clue in this world why it specifically says men (the exact language is男性赤裸上身) or how that fits in with drinking and smoking, but there you have it (perhaps it’s some sort of idiomatic language and I don’t get what it really means).
Either way, I’m not really sure what the rules are. I’ve had a few drinks while streaming before — I’ve even joked with some of the moderators about how my fans always ask me to drink more (though as I mentioned last week, that can quickly go down a dark path). The Yingke rules seem to go on and on about anything that really matters, and there’s no question people drink all the time while streaming, so my guess is it’s one of those rules that might be enforced with just a touch of subjective selectivity.
That being said, I’d like to avoid as much liability as possible, so let’s just say I’ve been spending more time drinking *coffee* from a big mug while streaming at night.
5. Don’t hawk stuff
This one might actually be the most interesting. When I first started down the Chinese live streaming rabbit hole, my expectation was that every major star would be promoting products left and right. But to Yingke’s immense credit, I’ve hardly ever seen any kind of branded product in a stream, let alone obvious product placement.
Perhaps the native advertising is so subtle (or my Chinese is so bad) that I don’t notice it, but I haven’t seen any streamers obviously attempting to promote anything. Specifically, the rules are:
No publication of advertisement information, such as but not limited to:
gambling
Yingke tickets or selling fans
health products
drugs (duh)
swords (is this a problem?)
bows/crossbows (is THIS a problem?)
adult products
STD medicine (erm…)
…or absolutely anything else that is deemed inappropriate
What interests me about the no advertising rules is I know for a fact that the app is pretty strict about using their platform to promote just about anything, not just dangerous/illegal/sensitive items. So either I’ve missed the part in the rules where they say “look, just don’t use your streaming room to run commercials, people,” or it’s just understood.
6. Don’t do sex things
We all knew — I hope you all knew — this would be the big one. Of the ten or so long paragraphs that make up the bulk of the user agreement, at least six of them either mention or are specifically devoted to the rules against adult behavior. To be honest, I’m not sure if this is because they want as many specific things outlawed as possible, or they just want to oversaturate the message for the benefit of whoever decides which apps aren’t in accordance with Chinese laws.
Either way, here is a SAMPLING of the things specifically mentioned:
No spreading of pornographic content, including but not limited to pictures, speech, songs, audio, video, or text (how does one spread pornographic text on a live stream?)
It’s worth pointing out that in Chinese, the word for pornographic is often 黄色, or yellow. There are a few schools of thought on how this came to be, but let me warn you right now that Googling “Chinese yellow porn” is NOT the ideal way to get answers.
No advertising for prostitution or one-night stands
No bare-backed females or shirtless males
No idea. Not consistent with either the rest of the rules or reality.
No indecent makeup
Explain yourselves.
No skin-colored tights
The Chinese — 肉色紧身衣, “meat-colored clothing” — is far better.
No fishnets or garters
No *sexual uniforms*
NO TRIANGLE-SHAPED SHORTS
HOW DARE.
No focus on the chest
No focus on the buttocks
No focus on the legs
No focus on the feet
No chest-shaking
What if you shake your chest but don’t focus on it? What about buttock-shaking? I feel like there are a lot of unanswered questions here.
No “guessing the color of underwear”
Whose?
No erotic games
No “rubbing” games
Glad we clarified that.
No “drawing a circle with your buttocks”
No tearing your clothes/torn clothes
Someone call American Apparel and tell them to cancel their sponsorship deals.
No “simulating the movement of a piston”
Ok, no, this one is DEFINITELY my favorite.
No “easy to open” clothing
If you’re gonna be an Yingke stripper, you’re gonna work for it, damnit!
No “imitating the sensations of human sexuality”
etc.
etc. ad infinitum
The thing about all these rules governing “adult” behavior, though, is that they seem to lean pretty heavily towards Pirates of the Caribbean-Rules-Are-Really-Guidelines territory — that is to say, very few of them seem to carry much weight:
I see London, I see France, I see meat-colored clothing and triangle shorts
So…
Definitely some non-facial focus going on there
Um…
Yeah, I’d say the rules aren’t exactly being followed. Hell, I’ve even spotted the occasional violator of the Glorious People’s Banana-Ban!
Scandalous…
So what does this mean?
After talking to some of the moderators and Yingke investors, my impression is that their overall goal is a common-sense PG-13 ranging towards the lighter side of R rating, if that makes sense. It’s certainly not meant to be a family-funtimes-hour kind of app, and there’s obviously a direct link between how close to the boundaries you get and how many users are regularly tuning in. They do clearly enforce a strict no-actual-nudity/no-actual-sex-acts policy and I’ve never seen anything that would get them a hard-R rating in our own (equally dumb and strange) MPAA-based world.
As for the rules in general, it’s clear that Yingke is working hard to maintain that difficult balance between hosting a fun and exciting platform and not getting themselves axed by the powers that be. As one of the few actually profitable live-streaming companies — and one that’s constantly evolving and adding new features — they’ve clearly got a solid model built to last… insofar as anything in the fast-changing Chinese online world can be said to “last.”
Our photo theme this week is Fashion Frontiers: fabulous looks at the far edges of contemporary Chinese culture.
Kicking the week off with a still from the recently concluded iQiyi x Tencent reality show, Road to the Runway. Radii’s own Fan Shuhong watched the whole series and recapped it here earlier today:
In the episodes following the premiere, these judges made harsh comments on photos of the girls taken in the deserts of Gansu province and Xinjiang in China’s northwest, in the ancient Tibetan buildings of Shangri-La, and in a vintage hotel in Shanghai. The models tried their best to strike the most fashionable poses at the most appealing angles as they were adorned with Peking Opera-style makeup and paper-cut outfits, all the while facing the pressure of knowing that one of them would get eliminated from the contest after each round.
The show’s champion, One (王艺), officially launches her career as an international supermodel today, as she walks in what has become a rather controversial Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show in Shanghai.
