Today in soft power wins: it’s just been confirmed that Sky Ladder, a stunning documentary about Chinese contemporary artist Cai Guo-Qiang that was released internationally by Netflix last October, will get a theatrical release in the artist’s home country later this month.
Directed by Kevin Macdonald (Last King of Scotland), Sky Ladder traces Cai’s life from his upbringing in the southern port city of Quanzhou, to his education in Shanghai, to his meteoric rise to the status of global art star and his decades-long quest to complete the titular work, “Sky Ladder,” his magnum opus. It features deep interviews with Cai along with prestigious talking heads such as American writer and professional China hand Orville Schell, who introduces the viewer to the Cultural Revolution and praises Cai’s art for its “integrity” and “deep social conscience.”
Though commentary of friends and onlookers like Schell positions the film towards a Western audience, there’s not much in it — nor in Cai’s ouevre itself, which consists mainly of elaborate fireworks displays that he calls “explosion events” — to displease censors in China. Cai himself remains mostly apolitical in his own on-screen reminiscences, even when talking about points in his past at which his work was directly affected by government intervention.
In a review I wrote when Sky Ladder came out, I summarized Cai’s political stance:
In 2014, he coordinated a fireworks display for the Beijing meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), causing some to question his relationship with the Chinese government. Despite setbacks and creative clashes, Cai completed his work for the event according to its overseers’ specifications. The documentary is hesitant to wade too deep into politically heated waters. Cai does, however, speak candidly about his role both in the APEC meeting and the 2008 Olympics, arguing that his participation in such globally important events is no different from that of UK art star Damien Hirst, who created a specially commissioned work for the closing ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics. He talks about the tension between challenging authority and entertaining the masses in his work, saying that he wanted to make people feel “open” with his Olympics display. “As artists, can’t we help change the system by working within it?” he asks.
That question is left to hang rather open-endedly in the documentary, and it took a while for the film to work its way through the relevant departments at home, but it was reported yesterday (link in Chinese) that Sky Ladder will open in China one week from today, on Friday, September 22, with a 100-city premiere.
Doesn’t seem like it lost too much on the censorship chopping block, either: Chinese film site Douban lists a running time of 73 minutes, only 3 minutes shorter than what Sky Ladder clocks on iMDB. I’d bet the rest of my bitcoin that those three minutes are pretty heavy on Orville Schell, a vocal critic of the Chinese regime.
In any case, it’s a rare, heartening soft power boon for China to throw the weight of its burgeoning film industry towards one of its true originals, so we’ll take it, edits and all.
Continuing this week’s photo theme — Things in Yiwu.
Though the Zhejiang city is small by China-city standards, its commercial clout is such that it autonomously strikes bilateral trade deals in Eastern Europe:
A Chinese international trade city may be set up in the village of Bolbasovo, Orsha District. The project was discussed during a meeting between Deputy Head of the Belarus President Administration Nikolai Snopkov and a Chinese delegation led by First Deputy Chairman of the People’s Government of Yiwu, Zhejiang Province Chen Xiaozhong on 17 August [2017]… “As the sales grow, the production of popular goods might be relocated from China to Belarus,” the head of the Belarusian company said. “Belarus will become the second European country where Zhejiang will undertake a similar project. The first one was implemented near Warsaw in 2016,” he added.
Radii’s founder Brian Wong recently led a student group around Yiwu’s massive wholesale market and discovered that one product class that might be absorbed in this shifting production ecosystem is: funky head accessories.
This is kind of a big thing in China, subject to the whims and vagaries of fashion. A few years ago bean sprouts clipped to your dome were in. The classic rabbit ear headband has never quite gone out of style among the kids cruising up and down Beijing’s tourist alleys such as Nanluoguxiang.
For businesses looking to fill their company gas tanks in China, they may not need to look any further than the back alley of a restaurant. Gutter oil — waste oil from restaurants that is crudely refined and sold back to restaurants for reuse — has plagued China for years. The toxic oil can lead to severe illnesses in those that consume it, and has been linked to higher rates of certain cancers. Thus, from the smog-filled air to the polluted oil in an entrée, people in China are at risk of literally breathing and eating pollution.
MotionEco, a Chinese startup, aims to recycle gutter oil to produce biofuels in order to decrease both the prevalence of gutter oil in China and the environmental impact of the country’s transportation sector.
The kitchen is the place for fuel
MotionEco, founded by Liu Shutong in 2015, is working to create a distribution channel for the steady production and consumption of gutter-oil-sourced biofuels by groups throughout China. The startup’s distribution model is called the “Sustainable Oil Alliance.”
“The Safe Oil Alliance includes restaurants, collectors, biofuel manufacturers, and biofuel users,” Liu explained while waiting for a flight back to Beijing after a meeting with American partners in San Francisco. “We collectivize this entire biofuel supply chain.” MotionEco uses its alliance to find gutter oil sources to provide oil to biofuel manufacturers, who then convert the waste oil into biofuel to be used by one of MotionEco’s partner organizations. The biofuel that MotionEco helps distribute can be used “anywhere that conventional diesel is used” according to the company’s website.
Currently, the core MotionEco team consists of two people: Liu, who focuses on business partnerships, and COO Robert Earley, who focuses on the policy involved in developing the waste oil biofuel supply chain in China. While the company has staff in Beijing, MotionEco’s pilot projects and partner organizations are located mostly in Shanghai and Nanjing.
MotionEco’s Robert Earley (center left) and Liu Shutong (center right)
What is Biofuel, and what are its benefits?
Biofuels are categorized based on the ingredients used to make them. There are first, second, and third generation biofuels. First generation biofuels can be made from sugar crops (sugarcane, sugarbeet), starch crops (corn, sorghum), oilseed crops (soybean, canola), and animal fats. Second generation biofuels are made from cellulose, which is available from non-food crops and waste biomass such as corn stover, corncobs, straw, wood, and wood byproducts. Third generation biofuels are made using algae as a feedstock.
Biofuels made from waste cooking oil are categorized under second-generation biofuels, since this category also includes food crops that have already fulfilled their purpose as a food source, such as waste vegetable oil.
Used cooking oil and MotionEco’s biofuel
The use of biofuels created from waste cooking oil is said to have a net positive environmental impact. The total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the transportation sector, globally, was estimated to be roughly 22% in 2013. According to MotionEco and the European Union’s International Sustainability Carbon Certification (ISCC), using biofuels in the transportation sector can cut GHG emissions by up to 90%. As such, MotionEco’s work can result in an increase in food safety as well as a decrease in greenhouse gas emissions.
In addition to decreasing GHG emissions, some of the other benefits associated with using biofuels include waste minimization, improved water quality, and decreased environmental risk. The use of biofuels leads to less municipal solid waste and sewage buildup from congealed grease that might otherwise lead to spills that contaminate bodies of water.
A study by the Department of Energy on the entire life-cycle of biofuels found that for every unit of fossil fuels used to produce biofuels, 3.2 units of energy were gained. More conveniently for consumers hoping to make the switch to biofuel usage, vehicles using traditional diesel engines do not need to undergo expensive conversion technologies to switch from petroleum diesel to biofuel.
Global use of biofuel
In addition to the environmental and health concerns regarding waste oil, issues arising from untreated, excess grease plague cities around the world.
Globally, grease in drains and gutters has been known to result in mind-boggling buildups in sewers, leading to drainage backups.
In 2013, a 15-ton “fatberg” — a collection of congealed grease — was removed from one London sewer. In New York City, grease causes 71% of sewer backups, according to the city’s 2016 State of the Sewers report. Thankfully, countries and airlines around the world have been working to use biofuels.
In March 2015, Hainan Airlines completed China’s first flight using biofuel in a Boeing 737. The biofuel, created by China’s state-owned oil and gas company Sinopec, was made from a 50-50 mix of gutter oil and conventional jet fuel and flew from Shanghai to Beijing. A total of 156 passengers were on board, including Hainan Airlines’ own Vice President.
On October 29, 2012, the National Research Council of Canada achieved the first ever civil jet to be completely fueled by unblended biofuel made from oilseed crops.The NRC made the fuel from oilseed crops. In 2016, United Airlines announced plans to use a blend of 30% biofuels and 70% conventional fuels to power flights between Las Angeles and San Francisco, marking the first time a US airline would use renewable fuel for commercial operations. United also has plans to expand this program to all LAX flights in the future.
MotionEco’s “Why”
So why China, and why now for MotionEco? After Liu graduated from VU University Amsterdam with a master’s degree in Environment & Energy Management Studies with a research focus on aviation biofuels, he worked at SkyNRG, which shipped used cooking oil from Asia to the EU to produce biofuels. While living in the Netherlands, Liu learned about his home country’s struggle with gutter oil.
“In my prior job, I used to help ship gutter oil from Asia to Europe to be made into biofuel. But I didn’t think this was necessary,” Liu tells Radii. “Now, I hope that to be able to make [China’s] gutter oil into renewable fuels that can be directly used in China.”
Liu’s experience with biofuels in Europe, coupled with projects that his team has been able to accomplish over the past two years, point to the potential of MotionEco and biofuel usage in China.
In their two years of existence, MotionEco has partnered with internationally recognized companies including IKEA and Shell. In 2015, MotionEco partnered with the Shanghai government, Shanghai’s Food and Drug Administration, and Tongji University to create a the “Let the Cooking Oil Fly” program, which powered one hundred Shanghai buses with biofuel.
In late 2016, MotionEco worked with IKEA to implement the use of biofuel in the company’s shipping operations in China. Last year, they also partnered with Shell for the oil conglomerate’s new Make the Future campaign to develop a pilot project for biofuels in Nanjing.
Shell’s Make the Future campaign aims to highlight “the need for greater global collaboration to create more and cleaner energy solutions, by helping to bring to life innovations from six smart energy start-ups.” While Liu says he doesn’t know the exact timeline for this partnership, he tells Radii that MotionEco will at least complete the Nanjing pilot project.
“Shell [is providing] some funding for program costs and we will execute the project in Nanjing. We manage all the specifics of the Shell partnered project,” Liu said. “But Shell also has its own biofuel, or renewable fuel strategy, so we count as one of their pilots.” The group also participated in a funding competition, and won $19,286 from Chivas Venture as one of 30 companies vying for portions of a $1 million prize.
Looking to the future
When asked about the biggest hurdle to his work, Liu spoke of introducing biofuel usage to the public, and about international barriers to creating an expansive biofuel supply chain in China using gutter oil.
“People are not familiar with this topic,” Liu said. “Also, from the point of view of China’s distribution channel, the supply of this oil has been dictated by international and Western parties, so our production chain has been narrowed.” In the future, Liu says that developing their work will require more pilot programs, consumer branding similar to their work with IKEA, and other related programs.
Right now, the company is working with the China Quality Certification Center and other groups to create Chinese standards for biofuel, similar to the EU ISCC standards. The group is basing their work off of internationally recognized biofuel standards.
While China continues to struggle with gutter oil, MotionEco hopes to lift the mental fog from health safety concerns while also lifting the smog from China’s skies.
There are a lot of dynasties in China and it can be hard to remember them all. I have used different mnemonic devices over the years, but since I’m a one-time garage rock champion (although we never played anywhere but my garage), music seemed a good choice to keep track of the different eras in Chinese history.
Xia (approximately 2070-1600 BCE)
Robert Johnson
Shrouded in myth, not much on record, but set the basic template for everything that was to come later — even if those original influences aren’t always apparent at first flush. The end is also something of a mystery.
RoJo signed a deal with the devil and died from drinking whiskey poisoned by a jealous husband. According to legend, the last ruler of the Xia, King Jie, also had a notorious love life, becoming overly infatuated with one of his concubines, the notorious Mo Xi.
Jie and his paramour liked their tipple so much, in fact, they built a lake of alcohol and when they got bored of swimming around naked and drunk, Jie ordered 3,000 of his soldiers to drink the lake dry. Spoiler alert: The soldiers drank as much as they could and then all 3,000 of them fell into the lake dead drunk and drowned. As Robert sang, “I’m a poor drunken-hearted man, my life seems so misery.” Jie’s troops would no doubt relate.
Shang (approximately 1600 to 1046 BCE)
Rush
Faith is cold as ice
Why are little ones born only to suffer
For the want of immunity
Or a bowl of rice?
Well, who would hold a price
On the heads of the innocent children
If there’s some immortal power
To control the dice?
We go out in the world and take our chances
Fate is just the weight of circumstances
That’s the way that Lady Luck dances
Roll the (Oracle) bones
Seriously, if we were to play the drinking game: “Oracle bones inscription or Neil Peart lyric,” would Victor Mair and Kaiser Kuo be the only people alive able to tell the difference? Could Neil Peart even?
Zhou (1046-256 BCE)
The Beatles
Everybody claims them as their big influence, nobody sounds like them. Generations of Confucians and Confucian wannabes from the Grand Master Kong himself down to Daniel Bell have talked about getting back to the golden age of the Zhou. Nobody ever does it, or at least nobody ever does it well. But in that failure, they often end up innovating accidentally. Failing to sound like the Beatles is what gave us Elton John, Elvis Costello, ABBA, and, of course, the immortal Bad Finger.
Qin (221-206 BCE)
Sex Pistols
Shocked the world, didn’t stick around to finish what they started. As you know, one was fronted by a megalomaniacal, self-absorbed, psychotic narcissist obsessed with his place in history whose blatant disregard for others doomed the whole enterprise to failure. The other, of course, was led by Qin Shihuang.
Han (206 BCE-220 CE)
The Clash
Johnny Rotten, Steve Jones, and their band paved the way, but the Clash cashed in. Nobody really listens to the Sex Pistols anymore, but London Calling, even 38 years later, still sounds oddly relevant.
It seems strange: the Han Empire was so long ago that looking closely at it ought to reveal a civilization far removed from our own age, altogether alien and irrelevant to present-day concerns. And yet… a soon-to-be overextended empire, freakishly paranoid about foreign influences, unsure about its ruling ideology, beset by palace intrigue, and forever arguing about the role of the state in controlling the economy seems awkwardly du jour.
Sui (581-618)
Guns n’ Roses
I think because their peak was so short and they so quickly imploded, it’s easy to dismiss how shockingly important they were at the time. The demise of the Han Empire in 220 CE led to nearly 300 years of divided kingdoms and conquest dynasties with no real end in sight. The 1980s pop-metal scene didn’t last 300 years, but after watching Poison and Diamond David Lee Roth on endless loop on MTV during my formative years it might as well have. In the end, both GnR and the Sui cleared the playing field for better things to come but they were just a little too volatile, too given to excess, and too violent to be a part of what came next.
Tang (618-907)
Rolling Stones
Does anyone even care that Keith Richards is approximately 149 years old and cannot be killed with conventional weapons? It’s entirely possible that when aliens descend and exterminate humanity with their hyper-advanced death rays they will still find it necessary to take the mother ship back into orbit to nuke Keith from space just to make sure he’s really dead. The Rolling Stones released their first single in 1962, and they’re apparently recording an album right now. That’s 55 years and they are still sorta/kinda relevant thanks to their overexposure on every heist film/gangster movie trailer ever made.
This would be like the kids in 1965 smoking weed and getting seriously down with Scott Joplin, or one of the ’80s/’90s-era Scorsese films (back when Marty still had his crossover and an extra gear) getting scored by Stephen Foster. What does this have to do with the Tang Dynasty? Nothing really, but it’s worth mentioning. Besides, there already was a band called Tang Dynasty. That would have been too easy.
Song (960-1279)
Allman Brothers Band
Okay, I’m being lazy. Both were founded by a pair of brothers. (I guess I could have also gone with Oasis or the Black Crowes, but Oasis always had more of a “Warring States” vibe about them, and nobody really likes the Black Crowes.)
Like the ABB, the Song Dynasty had a harder edge and more substance than people give them credit for, although the Song rulers could go off into flights of poetic and philosophical fancy while losing half their kingdom, just as the Allmans would occasionally — and for reasons passing all understanding — launch mid-song into a 23-minute freeform jazz improvisation, thus losing half their audience.
Look and listen closely, and they were both clearly doing something new and funky which appealed to a wide variety of intellectual and artistic traditions. Also, some of their spin-offs (See: “Allman and Woman”) had a nasty misogynist streak that would no doubt have appealed to the Song-era Neo-Confucians (“Better for a widow to starve than to remarry”).
Yuan/Mongolian Empire (1271-1368)
Public Enemy
It turns out a nation of millions could not, in fact, hold them back.
Ming (1368-1644)
Van Halen
Lasted a long time despite never really being as good as everybody thought they were. Certainly had some peaks (“Van Halen I”/Zhu Yuanzhang terrorizing the bureaucracy; “1984”/Yongle re-building Beijing and sending Zheng He out to terrorize the Indian Ocean coastal states), but it all soon devolved into a long goodbye of disposable frontmen, self-medication, and nepotism. I could also make a Michael Anthony/eunuch joke here but I’m sure you can make your own, and I wouldn’t want to deprive you of that right.
But drugs, man… it’s always the drugs that bring you down. And women problems. (It would be easier perhaps to list the band members Joni Mitchell didn’t sleep with. Also, I occasionally have dreams where I’m at a concert and it’s the Empress Dowager Cixi, in full regalia, singing the Court and Spark album in its entirety while Li Lianying plays fretless bass. Do. Not. Let. This. Happen. To. You.)
Or maybe it’s that when it does work, they’re so good that you wind up forgetting 3/4 of them grew up in a foreign land…
Republic of China (1912-Present)
Fleetwood Mac
It took a few more years and more than a few lineup shuffles before they got it right, the peak didn’t last as long as it seemed like it should have, and they are better regarded now than contemporary evaluations would suggest. You also have parallel power couples consisting of a truculent perfectionist with delusions of grandeur and a witchy enchantress who, in both cases, turned out to be the smarter of the two, and who may or may not have been sleeping with one of the roadies the whole time.
PRC (1949-Present)
Pink Floyd
Started out as a vehicle for an increasingly unstable leader, only to be written off prematurely when said leader imploded into a drug-addled haze of paranoid narcissism. Mao, like Syd Barrett, may have been a mad genius, but sometimes it takes a mercurial persnickety pragmatist to really make the diamond shine.
The problem is: how many times can a band/party reinvent itself before they run out of talent in the back? Like post-Roger Waters Pink Floyd, the CCP in recent decades has bloated into corporate rock. Looks good, sounds good, but never confident enough in the new material that they could fully jettison the past, and thus wind up playing souped-up versions of their greatest hits to stadium crowds hoping that a light show will distract the punters into thinking they are watching something big and bold.
Besides, every time my VPN dies, I have a mental image of Xi Jinping standing on top of a towering digital wall, lavishly masturbating a Fender Stratocaster through the solo to “Comfortably Numb.”
***
On a somewhat related note, should we keep using the word “dynasty” at all? Dynasty would seem to imply one family taking over the top of a relatively stable system. I wonder if this suggests a continuity that is a bit at odds with the historical reality of Chinese history. While the different states/dynasties/empires certainly shared many institutional and ideological structures, they were also quite different from each other. One wonders if there is another term which best reflects this glorious complexity and diversity…
A train loaded with 88 containers of cloth, clothing, shoes, hats and Christmas items left east China’s Yiwu City Sunday morning for Prague, the Czech Republic. It will pass through Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus, and Poland and travel about 16 days before arriving in Prague. The journey is about half the time for traditional sea voyage. On August 4, the first train from Prague arrived at Yiwu, east China’s Zhejiang province. Before the launch of the Prague route, Yiwu, often called the “world supermarket,” already boasted eight freight train routes.
Radii’s founder Brian Wong went to Yiwu recently and found that among the things wholesaled in this “world supermarket” are: squishy toys.
Maybe these aren’t as big overseas. In most major Chinese cities you can find street hawkers perched over pretty much any bridge moving these things. You smash them on the ground and they make a satisfying splat, then slowly reconstitute their original shape, insofar as they have “shape.”
Kind of a niche thing but Yiwu sells them in bulk.
This recent news item touches on a few of Radii’s core content areas (things Chinese millennials do, weird theme parks, problems of scale):
China is home to about 100 known firefly species in 21 genera, with perhaps 100 others yet to be discovered. Spread across the country like a vast and sparkling tapestry, China’s lightning bugs could surely be considered a national treasure. Yet skyrocketing demand for live specimens is driving a lucrative trade that now threatens their survival. In recent years Chinese urbanites have flocked to theme parks for massive firefly shows, and alarming numbers of the insects have become romantic gifts. According to the Firefly Ecological Alliance (FEA), a Chengdu-based conservation organization, over 17 million live fireflies were purchased in 2016. Most were sold through Taobao, the popular online shopping platform, where one vendor reportedly sold as many as 200,000 per day.
That’s a report by Scientific American from Wuhan’s East Lake Peony Garden, China’s first firefly-themed amusement park. The park has as many as 10,000 fireflies at any given moment, corralled into the park for the delight of children and pairs of amorous Chinese 20-somethings, whose “lust for romance is a death trap for fireflies” (Sixth Tone’s killer headline).
To curb China’s newfound insatiable lightning bug lust, the East Lake Peony Garden recently switched to lasers to mimic the effect of having thousands upon thousands of flickering flies light up on demand. But Scientific American reports that the network effect of this newly created market for indigenous Chinese firefly species like Abscondita terminalis, A. chinensis, and Aquatica ficta may spell ecological disaster:
Although buyers bask in their luminous glow, such prolific commerce spells doom for China’s fireflies. Although these insects spend up to two years as larvae, flying adults last for just two weeks. Of those sold online, an estimated one quarter to one half will die in transit. And those that do reach their destination alive are unlikely to reproduce, due to unsuitable conditions for mating and egg-laying.
They conclude: “Do we really want our children and grandchildren to live in a world devoid of fireflies?” No. We don’t.
