Since yesterday, Lady of tdaxp has criticized my exorbitantly priced, wasteful, and just plain un-Chinese $80 tooth filling. So for her work, we left early for Peking University Dental Hospital to go the non-English-speaking-route and get her a better deal. Arriving at 10, we set up an appointment for 4:30. Thus we had a day to kill.

It was another day of firsts, including my first straight caffee mocha, my first sweet bun (or manto, steamed buns), and a visit to the first KFC in China.

It was also a day of true smog, thick fog plus the smoky grayness that had been growing since the last rain. A true rain clears the sky. The moist air we got from last night to this noon just made things miserable.

For instance, in this photo of Tianamen Square taken lengthwise:

Central Beijing, 2007

The far end is almost completely obscured. Compare that to the embarrasingly idyllic shots from last year:

Central Beijing, 2006

The air today was worse than anything I experienced last year, whether in Beijing or Tianjin. I’m exhausted from the lack of oxygen. My boycott of National Review and further photos will have to wait for a bit, I fear.

Sean Meade, a good friend of mine, blogs at Interact and Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog. He’s been expanding his efforts recently, and is now the principle editor at Ares: A Defense Technology Blog. Just as cool, he has his first in-print piece appearing in the May 2007 issue of Defense Technology International. Congrats Sean!

The good: The Great Firewall of China is blogging blogspot and livejournal currently — thanks Cisco and Nortel! Fortunately, google reader is still up and running, so I can still follow all of my favorite blogs.

The bad: Unfortunately, google’s attempt to track its users is reducing its functionality as a quick search engine. For instance, if I google “great firewall of china tdaxp,” the first result appears to be to http://www.tdaxp.com/tag/great+firewall+of+china but is actually to http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=1&url=http%3A%2F…. So to copy a url, right-clicking on the result is not good enough — I need to follow it to its source.

The day of my medical tourism, Lady of tdaxp and I visited the Dashanzi 798 Arts District, the “it” place for the “it” crowd in Beijing. 大山子 is a curiosity, because the openness it reveals is a product of the new China, but it may soon be turned down to make way for that other aspect of connectivity, openness, and economic freedom: a real estate boom.

So join us, and take a quick tour of the interesting, political, provocative, and downright strange modern art that has finally landed in China. While I prefer more traditional fair, you won’t be disappointed…

Democracy Club Series, by Wang Zhong

Especially if you enjoy DPRK Studies or One Free Korea.

Political symbols were common fair in 798, such as this juxtaposition of American and Soviet iconography

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In several places North Korean Communist Party symbols were used, and in the “Long March” exhibit as part of a common on the events of 1989…

… no, not the Tiananmen Square Massacre, but the No U-Turns Protest of a few months beforehand. No U-Turns was a struggle fro art-for-the-sake-of-art, and lacked the larger political resonance of freedom, democracy, and the like. Nonetheless, it is interesting to see a large-scale exhibit on the success of people power in the country.

Of course, not everything was so weighty. Faux-propaganda-posters urge the view to “Read Chairman Mao’s book” at McDolands…

I’m Loving It

while other posters, not pictured here, included the face of Denx Xiaopeng with his exortation to “let somebody get rich first.”

Other exhibits likewise were on both sides of the “actually meaningful” divide. A moving reproduction of an audiotape from 1982 retells the heroic death of a girl’s uncle in China’s (now never mentioned) invasion of Vietnam.

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While outside meaningless anarchy symbols are exactly as empty in the East as they are in the West

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And Red-Star-Over-Monkey comments (I assume) on Red Star Over China.

Or maybe it just looked cool.

Of course, not everything was political. Reactions to popular fashion were here and there

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And some pretty-if-strange paintings held my attention

Scuba-diver-and-pond

Two chicks, either part of an experimental avant-guard piece or just someone’s pets (we think not food) had adventures among themselves.

Lastly, as we walked out (foolishly, foolishly, foolishly into the 5:00 PM rush-hour) we saw what ever hipster district needs: fashionable hipster hooligans. Sigh.

Box-meets-plants

That was our visit to Dashanzi 798. While Prince Gong’s Mansion was a work of art turned into a factory, all of 798 was factories turned into houses of art. Neet, no? I hope you enjoyed the visit!