The View, from China

**Saint Willy** · 03-12-2021, 04:36 AM

Originally Posted by sabang

around the more remote border regions

Your witterings have scored an own goal: the conversation was about farm land not some remote regions

**sabang** · 03-12-2021, 04:40 AM

Congrats, while I have you on ignore I actually opened that post. The dumbest thing I have read in a long time, apropos of nothing. Back in your box then.

**Saint Willy** · 03-12-2021, 04:45 AM

Originally Posted by sabang

But hey, if you prefer to remain one of 'the Great Unwashed'- as we used to term the general public in all of it's ignorance, that is entirely your choice.

Originally Posted by sabang

You sir, are the ones being shilled. Otoh I have come to realise that many of you prefer it that way. I guess life is simpler in black and white

Congratulations, you’ve turned into Skidmark.

**sabang** · 03-12-2021, 04:53 AM

You, by contrast, have always been an Asswipe.

**Saint Willy** · 03-12-2021, 04:54 AM

Resort to insults when called on your argument.

**Saint Willy** · 03-12-2021, 05:05 AM

Any other fallacies you want to employ?

**sabang** · 03-12-2021, 07:13 AM

Another fine Post that said absolutely nothing. Any comments on Kaiser Kuo's perspective? Y'know, something to do with the actual thread topic.

**sabang** · 03-12-2021, 08:45 AM

A bit of sinocounterculture for those interested

**sabang** · 03-12-2021, 09:04 AM

Wuhan calling: how the city’s punk rock scene changed China’s youth

Punk is still not a common sight in China, but if you do find a scene, chances are you’re in Wuhan
‘An old lady pointed at my head,’ recalls a founding member of the country’s earliest punk band of the first time he shaved his head bald

Zhu Ning, a founding member of China’s earliest punk band, remembers the uncomfortable looks he received the first time he shaved his head bald.

“We were on our way to band practice,” he recalls, “and along the way, a lot of people would get on the bus and then promptly get off. At the back of the bus, an old lady pointed at my head.”

This was the 1990s, when punk rock had just arrived in China. Zhu was young, in his 20s, and rebellious. He knew his sense of style was unorthodox, but he was still surprised by the response he received. “I didn’t think it would be so dramatic,” he says.

Punk is still not a common sight in China, but if you do find a scene, chances are you’re in Wuhan.

Although the city was in the news this year for different reasons, before Covid-19, it was known as the spiritual home of Chinese punk.

The underground scene can be traced back to the formation of the punk band SMZB, short for shengmingzhibing, which means “bread of life”.

Zhu, a drummer, was one of the founding members, along with bassist and vocalist Wu Wei and guitarist Han Lifeng.

The trio are all originally from Wuhan and met while studying as undergrads at the Beijing Midi School of Music.

There, they gained exposure to rock music from overseas. Kurt Cobain was particularly influential.

“I think the first time we heard punk music was probably Nirvana,” Zhu says, referring to the band that Cobain fronted. “Cobain was a very hardworking person. His thoughts about society, family, and people are all in his music. And that motivated us to do things, too.”

After the trio graduated in 1996, they returned home to Wuhan to start a band.

SMZB’s first songs were controversial. They were filled with obscenities and anti-establishment lyrics. They raged against political corruption, social obligations and other disenchantments in a mix of Mandarin Chinese and broken English.

One of their songs, cleverly titled F*U*N*K, is a protest against authority.

Zhu says the first time he heard SMZB’s music played on the local radio station, he could not bear to listen to it.

“It was basically noise,” he says. “We felt the performance was very bad. Because it was the first performance, we were very tense.”

The band was new and inexperienced, but SMZB paved the way for Wuhan’s underground scene. More bands formed, and together, they lived and breathed punk. At one point, Zhu was drumming for at least five bands.

“We did everything together,” Zhu says. “We lived in groups, eating, drinking, and rehearsing together. Everyone was always together, so sometimes it was annoying.”

But how did Wuhan become the birthplace of Chinese punk instead of other big cities like Beijing or Shanghai?

The answer might have to do with the city’s working-class roots and revolutionary history.

As a major port city, Wuhan was home to a large working class. Punk’s anti-elitism, rejection of mainstream culture and do-it-yourself attitude strongly resonated with the city’s youth.

“In the mid-90s, you had a sufficiently large number of people interested in the same music,” says Nathanel Amar, a researcher who studies China’s punk scene and its history.

Wuhan also has a long history of dissent. It was the site of an uprising that led to China’s 1911 revolution, which overthrew China’s last emperor and established a republic.

Then, at the height of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, the people of Wuhan challenged leader Mao Zedong’s policies in an armed conflict later called the “Wuhan incident”.

“The punks themselves use this history in their lyrics,” Amar says.

One of SMZB’s most popular songs, Big Wuhan, starts with a reference to the 1911 uprising.

In 2002, Zhu left the band to start Vox, a live music venue that now acts as the epicentre of Wuhan’s punk scene. On any given night, it is possible to see punks, university students and expats all mixing together in the audience.

“They had nothing to do with punk music, but they discovered SMZB through these concerts at Vox, and it moved them profoundly,” Amar says. “You can see that SMZB is part of the city and part of the city history.”

Wuhan calling: how the city’s punk rock scene changed China’s youth | South China Morning Post

Musta gone viral.

**pickel** · 03-12-2021, 01:08 PM

China is currently banning effeminate pop culture at the moment, they will get to the punks soon enough.

**sabang** · 03-12-2021, 01:32 PM

Uncle Xi has railed against femmales, especially celebrities, but in a country where homosexuality is legal not sure what else he can do but express his paternalistic disapproval. Certainly, 'alternative culture' is alive and well in the larger Chinese cities- checkout "TuTu the Voguer' from earlier in this thread, not to mention the Wuhan & Beijing punk scene. His comments did however result in the annual Shanghai gay pride festival being called off- that doesn't seem to have been from any official edict, rather a decision to avoid further controversy and maintain a lower profile. You do know I think Xi is an asshole right? I've said it enough times anyway.

That said, something should really be done about those K-pop girly boy bands.

But thats to do with taste, not morality.

I think maybe the 'thought crime' of these effeminate boy bands is that it has gone totally mainstream over there- it's huge. But at the end of the day, it's just the latest mutation of that awful, syrupy Cantopop, with a bit of androgyny thrown in.

**pickel** · 03-12-2021, 02:36 PM

Originally Posted by sabang

You do know I think Xi is an asshole right? I've said it enough times anyway.

Perhaps it was hard to understand you, with your tongue so firmly planted up his asshole.

**sabang** · 03-12-2021, 02:37 PM

I like America you know, I like it's people too. Thailand too. So that means I must like (no love, in a manly way) their incumbent political leadership by your primitive reckoning. So how on earth are you gonna remove my tongue from Uncle Xi's tunnel of love when it has must previously have gotten lost up donald trumps hershey highway, Einstein? And the other lost half must be pleasuring a certain Chinese generals dark soi in Thailand, obviously. How many tongues ya think I got? Can I borrow yours?

Stay classy TD. I know you will.

**pickel** · 03-12-2021, 02:49 PM

I absolutely hate effeminate k pop style bands, but I don't think governments should control pop culture. To throw in some whataboutism for you, do you remember the "moral majority" trying to ban punk records in America in the eighties? They lost. Freedom won. Xi will come for the punks. Get your tongue out of his ass.

**sabang** · 03-12-2021, 02:58 PM

Lets see what he does with the femmales first, luvvie.

"Owzya pickle, pickel?"

**pickel** · 03-12-2021, 03:04 PM

^
Perhaps you should ask them for their "view" on Xi's latest policies. But you'll probably just settle for the latest government edicts.

**sabang** · 03-12-2021, 03:11 PM

Maybe go back in this thread and watch dahling TuTu again luvvie. No need to be shy of your feminine side, we are an open minded bunch of hypocrites here.

**OhOh** · 03-12-2021, 05:27 PM

Originally Posted by Switch

You really want to sound off about agricultural achievements in a country where large parts of it are returning to desert, caused by land mismanagement policies?

You may want to look up the NASA site and ask them about who is increasing capture of CO2, by increasing their earths canopy coverage.

Before exposing your lack of .....

The View, from China-nasa_satellite-752x502-jpg

NASA satellite imaging reveals that China and India are leading the global increase in land greening due to tree-planting programs in China and intensive agriculture in both countries. Photo courtesy of NASA Earth Observatory

Humans Are Officially Greening the Earth. Is That a Good Thing?

China, India have added an Amazon rain forest’s worth of plants to the world

February 11, 2019

Chi Chen

Ranga Myneni

"Chi Chen, a Boston University graduate researcher, and Ranga Myneni, a BU professor of earth and environment, are the lead and senior authors of a new paper in Nature Sustainability that reveals how humans are influencing the Earth’s plant and tree cover. On the surface, it may look like a no-brainer that “greening” of the planet would be a good thing for reducing atmospheric carbon. But taking a closer look, the authors help us see that not all leaves grow up to be equals.

Looking at remote sensing data from NASA’s satellites, we’ve discovered that over the last two decades, the Earth has increased its green leaf area by a total of 5 percent, which is roughly five and a half million square kilometers—an increase equivalent to the size of the entire Amazon rain forest. The two countries that have been most responsible for the global greening came as a surprise to us. We found that China and India—the world’s first and second most populous and still-developing countries—are leading the world in greening due to widespread crop farming.

But is all of this extra leaf cover from agriculture helping or hindering our planet’s health?
Each year, about 10 to 11 billion tons of CO2 is emitted into the atmosphere from carbon sources, such as burning fossil fuels and tropical deforestation. About half of those emissions are stored temporarily in equal parts in the oceans, soils, and land plants—our Earth’s so-called carbon sinks.

Green leaves produce sugars using energy from the sunlight to mix CO2 absorbed from the surrounding air with water and nutrients soaked up from the ground. These sugars, whose production helps eliminate CO2 from the atmosphere, are the source of food, fiber, and fuel for life on Earth. Based on this knowledge, more greenery sounds like a good thing.

Here’s the catch. Not all land plants are created equally.

Part of the green effect in China can be attributed to an ambitious tree-planting initiative known as the Green Great Wall. However, the vast majority of greening in China and India stems from the intensive agricultural use of land that helps feed the 1.4 and 1.3 billion people who live in those countries. China and India each have about two million square kilometers of crop lands, which has not changed much since the early 2000s. In contrast, total food production of grains, vegetables, and fruits has increased greatly, about 35-40 percent, in that time. Rama Nemani, a scientist from NASA’s Ames Research Center and one of our paper’s coauthors, says that the increase in food production is due to the planting of multiple crop rotations each year and by heavy fertilizer and irrigation use.

Although China’s Green Great Wall tree-planting efforts—similar to sustainable forestry practices in Western Europe and tree regrowth on abandoned lands in Eastern Europe—enhance our planet’s ability to absorb atmospheric carbon, greening achieved through intensive agriculture does not have the same effect, says Victor Brovkin of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, another coauthor on our paper. Instead, carbon absorbed by crops is quickly released back into the atmosphere.

It was surprising for us to find that intensive agriculture is driving so much greening in China and India because we previously thought that greenhouse gas emissions were the primary drivers of global greening through higher levels of atmospheric carbon (aka more food for plants) produced by the burning of fossil fuels. This is consistent with work from other research groups that have recently provided strong additional evidence for the connection between human land use and the greening phenomenon observed in sub-Saharan Africa and throughout Europe.

Our findings have uncovered an important research gap that has not been considered until now, which is the need for Earth system models to incorporate data and processes about how humans are using land. These factors are essential for us to understand as we continue to look at the Earth’s plant cover and consider how green leaf area can help—or hinder—our efforts to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and combat climate change.

Moving forward, we recommend that Earth system models be refined to include key human land-use practices identified by our work—such as crop rotation, irrigation, and fertilizer use, fallowing and abandonment of land, afforestation, reforestation, and deforestation—all of which influence atmospheric carbon in different ways.

This work was funded by the NASA Earth Science Directorate, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and the NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship Program."

https://www.bu.edu/articles/2019/humans-are-officially-greening-the-earth-is-that-a-good-thing/

Or this:

https://news.cgtn.com/news/3d3d774d3...d54/index.html

**sabang** · 03-12-2021, 05:30 PM

Fek sake, why can't ya plonk this green stuff in my China Starve thread? Can't anyone take a bluddy hint around here?

We're too busy arguing about Chinese subcultures to worry about the bluddy environment here..

**OhOh** · 05-12-2021, 12:11 AM

China + News - to the majority of TD members.

Comparison of election systems between China and the US

By Deng Zijun and Tang Tengfei Published: Dec 04, 2021 07:18 PM

The View, from China-0d6408ed-2723-4d2c-bd33-ff08c500f3ef-jpg

Comparison of election systems between China and the US - Global Times

**sabang** · 05-12-2021, 05:08 AM

Dunderheaded response- "Nah, China ain't a democracy- it's commie". In other words, avoid rational debate by boycott.
My response (adjusted from Deng Xiaoping)- "It doesn't matter what name you call your cat- as long as it catches mice".

**Chico** · 05-12-2021, 07:37 AM

Amusing really all this shit regarding China, considering the Aussies and Americans are selling as much coal,iron ore etc to them as possible.

BHP has a lot to answer for, or I should really say the American Vanguard Company

**sabang** · 05-12-2021, 08:44 AM

It's called trade mate, and puts bread on our plate.

**Chico** · 05-12-2021, 08:55 AM

Originally Posted by sabang

It's called trade mate, and puts bread on our plate.

won't be putting bread on your grand kids plates the rate the Aussies are digging up all the shit

**Switch** · 05-12-2021, 10:52 AM

The view from China is occluded. It’s full of Chinese people and no one is allowed to leave.

Outsiders like OhOh and Sabang must have their views delivered by email.

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