On August 4, e-commerce platform Taobao announced online that according to official regulations, it would ban sales of all Japanese-language video games. Or at least, that’s what the headline said.
In the fine print, the announcement itself explained that video game software products weren’t allowed to include any information about being the Japanese-language version of the game in its listed title, pictures, or description. The notice requested that sellers make changes accordingly before August 8. After that deadline, the announcement continued, Taobao would take down or delete products violating these guidelines, and sellers in violation may also have points deducted from their credit-like vendor score.
In short, the announcement seems less like an actual ban, and more like a way to cover up sales of Japanese-language games while appearing to enforce national regulations.
The strangest part of this is that the announcement took the form of a post by a user on Taobao’s announcements message board. Other users initially suspected it was fake, but that user had previously made official Taobao posts, and the post was quickly pinned to the top of the board, suggesting official backing. Taobao customer service also confirmed that the announcement was official.
This so-called ban isn’t really new. Back in March, Taobao announced that it would ban sales of foreign publications, including video games. Unlike the August announcement, the March one became an actual Taobao rule, citing a 2007 regulation regarding incoming printed material and audio-visual products. In this case, Taobao seems to have taken the initiative (or at least tried to appear that way) to enforce the regulation with their announcement. But according to reports, Taobao customer service confirmed that they made the recent announcement because of the request of an official department overseeing China’s video game market.
Some Taobao vendors skirt around these regulations through parallel trading (also known as “daigou”): they buy sensitive games outside of China and privately resell them to customers
So why is Taobao (sort of) banning Japanese-language video game sales? It probably has to do with the fact that foreign games need to be approved to be imported, and require a license to sell. Private Taobao vendors skirt around these regulations through parallel trading (also known as daigou, 代购): they can buy, for example, politically sensitive or overtly sexual games outside of China, and bring them back to privately resell to customers. They also skirt official taxes to do so — users on Zhihu, a Chinese Q&A website similar to Quora, suspect that this is why only Taobao, which mostly consists of third-party sellers, announced the ban.
The ban is also part of a trend of crackdowns on foreign pop-cultural content, which a few months back saw the removal of almost all foreign films and TV shows on video streaming site Bilibili.
However, I did my own quick search for “日文游戏” (“Japanese-language game”) on Taobao today, and still saw some for sale:
So, it seems the jury’s out on how thoroughly this “ban” will be enforced, or how the cat-and-mouse between official commercial regulations and the shadow economies of the Chinese internet might unfold.
Next I’ll discuss the other senses: how can we judge dry leaves by smell, feel, and even sound? The tricks I’ll talk about today are more difficult to use than the ones discussed earlier, but if you constantly pay attention to these factors and develop a good baseline for them, you will be able to tell when a tea stands out from the rest, for better or for worse.
1. Feel
Rou Gui
Good tea is full of stuff. That may sound like a stupid statement, but it’s true. There are physical molecules and compounds that give tea its distinctive characteristics, such as flavor and aroma. Another seemingly stupid statement: this stuff has weight. While this may seem like an arbitrary fact, this simple criterion can be an effective way of judging tea. Take two teas of the same type — lets say Rou Gui, but of two vastly different qualities — and put one in each hand. Although the difference will be slight, the higher quality tea will weigh more.
Good tea has more weight to it
An easier way to test this is to use a scale and weigh out the same amount of grams for both teas. What you will see is that the better tea will need fewer leaves to reach that weight. A heavier leaf is a sign that the leaf has more compounds in it, and thus packs more flavor.
2. Smell
All teas smell different. A white tea smells different from a green tea, which smells different from a pu’er. That being said, there is a general characteristic to the smell that holds across the board for all tea categories: tea should smell lively. Even a Tie Luo Han, which has a full, dark-roasted aroma, has a very lively smell. When you open a jar of Tie Luo Han and take a sniff, the aromas seem to flow effortlessly into your nose, like you were taking in steam.
A good tea has a lively smell, a bad tea has a thick, heavy odor — think steam vs smoke
Even the smell of a well-aged pu’er seems to spring forth when you inhale. A bad tea, by contrast smells thick and heavy. You almost have to put extra effort into inhaling; think steam vs smoke. This is a characteristic that is very hard to describe, but one that in my own personal tea judging has rarely failed me. When I smell a tea and the aroma seems thick and heavy, there is a little red flag that goes up saying something is not right.
3. Sound
This is a trick that a farmer of white tea taught me last spring. I asked him how he judges a white tea before tasting it. He picked up a Silver Needle that had just finished drying and said, “Listen.” With that he pressed ever so slightly on the leaf and I heard a *crack* *crack* *snap*.
When a tea leaf is completely dried, he explained, it cracks very easily. This made me think back to my days of camping, when I would test if a branch was good for the fire. I would break it in half, and if it broke easily it was good; if it didn’t quite break, or bent a bit, that meant the branch still had moisture in it and wasn’t good.
He picked up a Silver Needle that had just finished drying and said, “Listen”
I was able to try this trick on my way back to Shanghai in a random tea shop in Fuding. I pressed some tea between my fingers, but had to apply about twice as much pressure before hearing the crack. This test is relatively new to me, and I hesitated putting it in this article because I am still experimenting with it across other categories, but I think it is a good trick for white tea, and an interesting way to think about the dried tea leaves
There are many ways to judge if a tea is good. The skill of objectively judging tea is something that takes times to develop, and it takes the accumulated use of all your senses. When we judge a tea, we are more than just judging good or bad; it is not so black and white. For example, if a Hou Kui has an amazing flavor but the aroma is bad, it is still a very good tea.
The skill of objectively judging tea is something that takes times to develop, and it takes the accumulated use of all your senses
Judging teas is very complex, and we often have to take our own personal preferences out of the equation. You can say the hypothetical Hou Kui above is bad because you don’t like the vegetal flavor, but Hou Kui is suppose to have a slightly vegetal flavor. This is when these various tests become useful. It takes a long time and many teas to develop a baseline of objective understanding, but once you do, tasting teas becomes a whole new adventure.
This is Part 1 of a six-part photo essay by Beijing-based student and artist Liu Qilin, who recently finished his freshman year of undergraduate study at Beijing Normal University. Liu, who goes by the English name Jady, is founder of the Beijing Hutong Team, a loose collective of artists and creatives united in a desire to document Beijing’s inner-city alleys (胡同, hutong), which are currently undergoing a process of “renovation” that many feel is stripping them of their historical and cultural charm.
Liu Qilin says about this photo:
One afternoon, when I was strolling through the hutongs around Yonghegong Lama Temple, I found this tea room. Sometimes you really can’t imagine what you will encounter around the next corner of the hutong, like this shop; it’s entirely a new world.
Follow Beijing Hutong Team on Facebook or WeChat (@BeijingHutongTeam)
One way to beat the summer heat: WAY MORE HEAT. Chinese paper People’s Daily on the scene of a chili-eating contest in Hunan province, famous for its spice:
Competitors squat in vats filled w chili peppers & try eat as many as possible at a chili eating competition in south China’s Hunan on Aug12 pic.twitter.com/d92f0o9gxy
Tiny watermelons are on display at a fruit and vegetable farm in Changzhou, east China’s Jiangsu province on June 6, 2017. With green flesh, the thumb-sized watermelon is only 3-centimeter long. It can be eaten with its peel.
Here’s the heat to kick off your week: Overseas Vol. I, the first mix in a new series by American music industry professional and DJ Allyson Toy, aka DJ TOY:
The mix comes midway through a tour Toy is doing with Bohan Phoenix, a Chinese-born, New York-based rapper who’s spent the last few years building a solid fanbase in both places. She actually tagged along on a China tour Bohan did last year, and caught a hard look at the creative explosion currently underway in various pockets of China’s cultural underground.
In an interview with Hypebae posted over the weekend, Toy says about being switched on to the China scene:
Bohan helped me tap into what feels like a sort of creative renaissance out here in China. Simply put, there are more young creators and innovators than ever, which paired with a real demand for creative output and the sheer numbers and scale of China, is an equation for success that simply doesn’t exist in the U.S. anymore.
Toy, who is second-generation Chinese-American, talks in the interview about the “bamboo ceiling” limiting Asian-Americans in creative fields in the US, and uses her expertise to highlight differences in the commercial landscape of the US vs Chinese music industry. For someone who’s spent time in the industry grind working on projects with such household names as Kanye West and The FADER, Toy’s interest in the China scene — strong enough to cause her to relocate from NYC to Shanghai — should tip you off to the fact that it’s getting very real over here.
Read Allyson’s full Hypebae interview here, and click play above to hear her first mix in a series that aims to create sonic bridges between East and West (it opens on one of our most spun tracks of the year so far, Higher Brothers’ “WeChat”).
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.
Taylor’s follower count to date:
If you’ve ever attempted to either learn or teach a second language, you’re undoubtedly familiar with the importance of repetition. So, budding young students of Chinese everywhere will be delighted to know that Zhibo pushes this principle — and sometimes my sanity — to the very edge of reason. For example, there is no end to YingKe’s geographical fascination with me — whether that means asking where I’m from or where I’m currently located:
Even the American flag didn’t help stem the tide…
Yes, one of the downsides to meeting a few thousand new people a day in a country where you’re a statistical anomalyis that you’re going to end up repeating yourself a few times. I tend to handle this — as is my nature — by constantly giving different snarky answers to the same question; not just because I’m a jackass (key word: “just”), but because it seems to amuse people and keeps regular viewers from getting bored.
For most endlessly repeated questions, this is pretty easy: when asked where I’m from by every new viewer, I cycle through countries, planets, alternate dimensions, and various riffs on “the magic space inside your phone, of course!” When I need to tell people what I like to eat for the fiftieth time that hour, I explain that like most foreigners, I subsist entirely on a diet of Chinese babies, the blood of my enemies, and a proprietary smoothie blend of cauliflower and marshmallow fluff that keeps my skin nice and white.
But there’s one question I get asked all the time yet never know what to do with:
你有女朋友吗? Do you have a girlfriend?
Now first off, I find this question to be hilarious, though not nearly so hilarious as being greeted with 哇你好帅啊 (wow, you’re so handsome!) over and over and over again. I’m painfully aware of how arrogant that sounds, but just give me a second to explain myself here.
Seriously, I try my best to set the record straight!
Actually, this being our 2-month anniversary together (me and my imaginary readership, that is), let me tell you a little bit more about myself. I’m a pale, nerdy white guy who might clock in at a solid 5’9” with a pair of boots and a bit of wishful thinking. I transitioned seamlessly from a skinny un-athletic child to an overweight un-athletic teenager pretty much overnight, and I managed to get halfway through college before realizing that the gross Bieber hair-swoop wasn’t working for me. The point is, I’ve never been particularly popular with the ladies, in part no doubt owing to my usage of phrases like “popular with the ladies.”
But it turns out — who would have thought? — that losing 30-odd pounds and moving to a country where you’re a couple inches above average height rather than below it really raises your stock price. Pair that with YingKe’s utterly ridiculous filters (baby-smooth skin the color of marble, basically), and suddenly a whole lot of people want to know what my dating life is like. So everyone asks me if I have a girlfriend.
Seriously.
Honest answer? No. Naturally, they then they ask “why?” Again, the honest answer isn’t that interesting: because I like being single and I don’t want to be (or think I’d be any good at being) responsible for another human being’s emotional well-being. Besides, I live in a city that functions as more of a revolving door than a long-term home, especially for foreigners.
Not surprisingly, this sort of answer is generally found…lacking by my audience (at least 70% young Chinese women) on YingKe. Of course, when they ask if I have a girlfriend, what they’re really asking is whether my girlfriend — the one they assume exists — is Chinese or foreign. And I can assure you, not even a game of Russian Roulette played with six bullets is as dangerously loaded as that question. Having a conversation with ten thousand Chinese people about my relationship status quickly turns into a multi0pronged Catch-22 of sorts (a Catch-88?). I’ve illustrated the problem in the following helpful flowchart:
Of course, this conversation isn’t limited to a live-streaming audience. Anyone who’s ever lived in China has likely had uncomfortable-yet-amusing conversations about their dating life with friends, coworkers, cab drivers, etc., all of whom want to know why on earth they haven’t found a nice girl/guy and started thinking about buying a house yet. If you don’t want to date a Chinese girl, you just don’t like Chinese people. If you are dating a Chinese girl, you’re one of *those* foreigners. And if you explain that planning your marriage and future child’s school district in your early 20s just isn’t really up your alley, you get the distinct privilege of once again suddenly and selectively representing every non-Chinese person on earth (as in, “ah yes, this is just the way foreigners are”).
But to be honest, this is one area where I don’t really begrudge the Chinese their stereotypes. There are a lot of foreigners in China — particularly guys — who take definitively gross advantage of their artificially inflated status. I’ve heard the term *yellow fever* uttered enough times without irony to know that the porn industry didn’t just make it up. And yes, there are also a lot of Chinese guys who just want to hook up with foreign girls. For every Chinese girl on YingKe asking me if, you know, I happen to have a girlfriend already (hint hint wink nudge omg why would you send me that picture?!?), there’s a guy asking quite seriously if I can somehow introduce them to a foreign girl.
Pictured: what I imagine is on the other end of the phone
[sidebar: I’m kind of doubting Radii has a lot of readers in the, erm, *men’s rights movement* camp or whatever reddit and 4chan calls it these days, but just to be safe – I’m talking mostly about human males because I am one and that’s the perspective I’m more familiar with. I’m sure there’s lots of unsavory foreign women in Beijing as well if that helps forestall any angry comments]
So in the end, I’m not complaining about the constant predictable line of questioning for once. I mean, I know it looks like I’m complaining, but that’s just me being my lovably abrasive and misanthropic self. As with everything on YingKe, I’ve had far more positive interactions than negative; the vast majority of YingKe users are young and I’m finding that simply choosing my words a bit more carefully makes a big difference. If I say that I have no thoughts on the notion of getting married or having kids, everyone starts telling me how very strange and different *your foreign culture* is. But if I say that I prize freedom in my life and my parents think I’m crazy (sorry mom! I exaggerate for the greater good!), suddenly I can’t get a word in edgewise over all the agreement happening in the room.
People are people, after all – young people everywhere don’t like it when their families and society tell them what to do, and young people in China are under particularly massive pressure to partner up and start families (and go impossibly-expensive-house-hunting) as soon as possible. Some people are gonna go make babies in their 20s and some people aren’t, but I’m increasingly happy to find that no matter the topic, as long as I lead with “hey, this is just how I feel, but I’m just one dummy and you don’t have to agree,” I find myself in a (digital) room full of very friendly humans — not really something the internet has trained me to expect.
