4 Takeaways from the Recent Talks Between Tesla and the Chinese Government

Talks between Tesla and the Chinese government took over tech headlines last week. Why were these so important?

1. Tesla wants to build a factory in Shanghai

Tesla is trying to reach an agreement with the Shanghai Municipal government that would allow it to set up an electric car factory in Lingang development zone. If talks are successful, Tesla would be the first foreign automaker given permission to produce electronic cars on Chinese soil. If the assembling process is done in China, models like the Model S sedan and Model X sport utility vehicle can avoid a 25 percent tax, thereby allowing Tesla to lower its sales price and become more competitive in the Chinese market.

2. The China market is essential to Tesla’s global ambition

According to the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers, 507,000 new-energy vehicles, including electronic cars, were sold in China in 2016, and the country hopes to boost that number tenfold in the coming decade. According to Bloomberg, research shows China contributed to about 15 percent of Tesla’s $7 billion in revenue in 2016, almost double what it was in 2015.

3. Tesla needs to find a local partner

Tesla cannot enjoy this ride solo. In order to build its own factory in China, Tesla needs to comply with the law that requires it to find a local joint-venture partner. Tesla might be able to play around with it and have its fully-owned factory built in a foreign trade zone. However, the Chinese government recently announced a halt in issuing business licenses to auto manufacturers. Tesla does not have a license. Moreover, building a factory in a foreign trade zone means that Tesla will have to continue to pay the 25 percent import tax, which would defeat the entire purpose of manufacturing in China to begin with. Getting a local partner is the company’s only option. It is still unclear who Tesla will pick, though the best possibility is SAIC Motor, a state-owned auto manufacturer in Shanghai.

4. Everything about this is totally up in the air

On June 22, the photo below was widely spread online to prove that the talks were happening and an agreement is to be made. However, some Chinese reporters later raised suspicions about the reliability of the photo, pointing out that it shows neither signed documents nor credible people. The name tags say Shanghai Municipal Government and Tesla, but beyond that — nothing. The photo is far from persuasive.

Meanwhile, though their stocks have enjoyed a substantial bump due to the recent news, multiple Chinese auto companies, such as Lingang and Tianqimo, have publicly distanced themselves, saying that they have not yet been in touch with Tesla. In response, Tesla said in a recent statement that more details will be released toward the end of this year.

In Hangzhou, This Field is Where 20,000 Confiscated Bikes Have Gone to Die [UPDATE: Now with Video]

The proliferation of dockless shared bikes in China has been nice in many ways, easing everyday commutes and weaning countless drivers off their dependence on four-wheeled vehicles, but competition between various bike sharing companies has been so intense that it can sometimes seem like they’ve lost their sense of moderation. It creates scenes like this one in Hangzhou, a city where authorities have reportedly confiscated 23,000 shared bikes to date, most of them since March.

And where do those bikes go? According to reports, to 16 different places around the city. The one featured here is a field near a gas station on Qiutao Road in the south of the city.

A Hangzhou Daily reporter interviewed an urban management official to get some details, and was told, “Individual randomly parked shared bikes, (we’ll ask) volunteers, officers, sanitation workers, etc. to move them to a place that doesn’t affect traffic; but for large-scale violations that seriously affect city residents’ commute, we’ll take confiscation measures.”

And how!

The pictures here only show part of the fields where these bikes get taken. Seen from some angles, it’s almost artistic, post-impressionist. This one’s a god-dang Van Gogh:

And here’s two-wheeled pointillism, on grass:

What will happen to them next? Wukong Bike recently went bust after 90 percent of its bikes went missing. They can restart their business from all the recyclable parts found here:

By the way, here’s what the field looked like earlier this month:

UPDATE:

We Need to Change the Way We Talk About Traditional Chinese Medicine

Here are three recent headlines on Chinese medicine:

I think these titles represent some common Western attitudes toward traditional Chinese medicine (TCM).

In headlines 1 and 2, TCM is painted as an ancient healing tradition turned modern panacea, promising miraculous cures for troublesome biomedical ailments: heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure.

In headline 3, TCM is a folk remedy of dubious efficacy, with the added effect of driving endangered animals closer to extinction.

But in all these, TCM is framed as the consummate alternative to Western biomedicine.

Sometimes it represents what biomedicine is not but wishes it could be: where biomedicine is artificial, prescribing pills with complex chemical ingredients, TCM is natural, its practitioners mixing herbs into poultices and potions. Biomedicine subdivides the body into organs, tissues, cells, and molecules, sometimes threatening to erase the person that unites them, but TCM adopts a holistic approach to the human body, preserving the patient’s individuality.

Other times, TCM pales under biomedicine’s shadow. TCM is dismissed as primitive superstition. Reporters condemn the black markets for “medicinal animals” that flourish due to East Aisan demand, while conveniently ignoring the Western pharmaceutical industry’s destructive effects on the environment (tripping fish, anyone?). In the New York Times article that suggested Michael Phelps’s evident enthusiasm for cupping at the Rio Olympics could be attributed to the placebo effect, TCM isn’t treated as knowledge. Instead, it’s regarded as belief.

This is all to say that I have some pretty huge problems with the usual media treatment of traditional Chinese medicine. TCM is exotified and de-historicized. It is compared to Western medicine (and always according to biomedical standards) at every turn, and invariably found lacking – at best, an alluring alternative to be selectively incorporated into biomedicine, and at worst, dangerous superstition.

But Chinese medicine has an incredibly long and complex history, which became even more complicated after TCM’s encounter with modern biomedicine. To dismiss it as myth or exotic curiosity or placebo is to do an incredible disservice to a system of knowledge that is undeniably different from biomedicine, but perhaps not so easily disregarded as lesser.

This summer, I’m studying at the Beijing University of Chinese Medicine, shadowing doctors in clinics and reading classical texts under the guidance of BUCM professors and students. As a researcher and student, I will learn more about TCM and its complicated relationships with biomedicine and with its own history. I’m planning to post weekly pieces about things that fascinate or surprise me, things that I remain curious about, and questions that keep me up at night. I’m excited to share them with you.

Illustration by Marjorie Wang | Column Archives |

SK-II’s Latest Ad Continues to Challenge Notion of “Leftover Women”

Japanese anti-aging skincare brand SK-II has once again impressed and inspired Chinese audiences with its new ad, “The Expiry Date.” In it, different women confront the societal pressures of marrying before they hit a certain age — usually the nice round number of 30 — and in the end achieve a sort of liberation.

Jing Daily reports:

The empowering message clearly struck a chord with SK-II’s intended audience as just days after the ad’s release, it racked up more than 20,000 views on its official Sina Weibo account and more than 100,000 views on WeChat, prompting conversation around the world. As of February this year, the video gained more than 46 million views on Youtube and across platforms.

SK-II’s global president Markus Strobel told Bloomberg Businessweek in February that the campaign helped the skincare brand increase sales in China by more than 50 percent in nine months. “This campaign has put us on the map in China and generated extremely positive sentiment among consumers and retailers,” he said. “It’s helping us win with young professional and executive women.”

The Expiry Date is a follow-up to “Marriage Market Takeover,” an SK-II ad released in April that takes a deep dive into the meaning of “leftover woman.” You can watch it below. (Fair warning: maybe with some tissues at hand.)

Jack Ma’s Selfie with Steven Spielberg Has Chinese Netizens Asking a Different Question

Jack Ma met with Steven Spielberg in New York last week, as Jing Daily notes, reportedly to discuss collaborations on a future movie. After all, the two entered into an agreement last October to co-produce and co-finance films, involving Ma’s Alibaba Pictures and Spielberg’s Amblin Partners.

But Chinese Internet users aren’t talking about that, or the selfie these two took. They’re buzzing about this:

What sort of monstrosity is that? It’s orange.

It’s the size of an iPhone 6 Plus or 6s Plus, but upon close examination, netizens have pointed out that the camera hole isn’t exactly the right size. Something is off.

They’ve further asked: is it a fake iPhone 7? Is it an as-yet unreleased iPhone 8? Or maybe a Huawei phone, dressed up like an Apple product? Most seem convinced it’s custom-made and specially tailored. Is Jack Ma using a custom-made and specially tailored iPhone???

I dunno, guys. Here he is with a fairly normal-looking iPhone earlier this year:

The mystery continues.

The Forgotten (and Fiery) History of Mulan

Mulan is known to Western audiences mostly as the hero of Disney’s 1998 animated feature, Mulan, which netted nominations for an Academy award, Golden Globe and Grammy, grossed $304 million, and treated audiences to deeply ironic sing-a-longs. It was a thoroughly bleached, Disney-ified rendition of the Chinese source material.

As it turns out, Chinese directors have been making and re-making Mulan since as early as 1939, when Xinhua Film Company (新华影业公司) released Bu Wancang’s Mulan Joins the Army (木兰从军, Mulan Congjun) in Shanghai. Similarities in the two versions are apparent. Bu’s Mulan, like Disney’s, outwits her entirely male and typically less-intelligent fellow soldiers, ultimately falling for the captain who follows her into marriage as she returns to domesticity at the close of the film. Both feature a tongue-in-cheek bathing scene with Mulan’s fellow soldiers, who in both versions are depicted as monstrously fat or tiny. Although Bu restrained himself to foot washing, while Disney indulged in full nudity, the correspondence is basically undeniable.

But according to Weihong Bao’s truly exhaustive analysis of Chinese film, Fiery Cinema, Bu’s film received special attention: in 1939, audience members were roused into a “riotous mass” during a screening of Mulan Joins the Army in Chongqing, setting fire to the theater’s stock of film reels in the street outside the establishment. The riot proceeded punctually from the first theater, the Weiyi Theater, to the second, the Cathay Theater, where the aroused audience promptly burned the remaining film reels stored there.

This wasn’t because Mulan Joins the Army was a bad film. It was actually met with critical success, adhering as it did to the generic conventions of the “costume drama,” with lavish costumes and sets and regiments of meticulously garmented soldiers and generals, much like Bu’s previous effort in the genre, Diao Chan, in 1938 (a portrayal of one of China’s “Four Beauties”). Mulan Joins the Army also featured Hong Kong starlet Chen Yushang in the titular role.

So what’s with the fires?

In 1939, Shanghai lay under Japanese occupation – and so too did its film industry. During the middle of the film’s screening, a man stood up on stage and accused Bu Wancang of collaborating with Japanese occupiers. This happened despite the fact that Mulan Joins the Army itself is a not-so-subtle nationalist film in which Hua Mulan takes charge of China’s defense against invading forces. (In Disney’s rendition, Mulan defends against the “Huns,” the epithet commonly applied to Germans during World War Two.)

The allegations against Bu weren’t unfounded: he directed two propaganda films for the Japanese government while they occupied Shanghai: Universal Love in 1942 and The Opium War in 1943. These blemishes in his filmography are emblematic of the complicated politics of Chinese film at that time, when the industry was heavily influenced by leftist directors and critics but operated under a nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) government characterized by a fundamental ambivalence toward socially conscious films. Indeed, Nationalist films were sometimes leftist – they featured poor characters who struggled against the rich and/or powerful, like Hua Mulan. KMT censors struggled to navigate between an imperative that films be socially progressive and a fear of leftist uprisings against nationalist rule.

The riot, according to Weihong Bao, illustrates much about this political moment. Film found its way to the center of a political and violent confrontation between Chinese nationalists and Japanese occupiers. What’s more, the riot was itself a type of orchestrated performance planned by opponents of the film: two dramatists and a filmmaker, who had tried and failed to convince Chongqing newspapers to publish petitions against the movie. Despite all that, Mulan Joins the Army was still better received than Disney’s Mulan II.

And wouldn’t you know it, Disney has a new Mulan in the works, a live-action movie – not a musical! – with a November 2018 slated release. Here’s to hoping it sees a calm, fire-free premiere.

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