Archive for the ‘China’ Category
Poachers Should Be Shot
Posted by MyLaowai on Thursday, May 10, 2012
Posted in China, Lies & Damned Lies | 17 Comments »
First.
Posted by MyLaowai on Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Here’s a little experiment you can try at home. That is to say, you can try it at home if you live in the Sahara or the Gobi or the Kalahari. Or pretty much anywhere in Australia. Death Valley even. If you’re in South America and have a holiday home in the depths of the Patagonian Desert, then this is definitely for you:
Walk out into the middle of nowhere, look around to ensure that you are absolutely alone, and proceed to build a bus stop. Actually, just push a stick into the sand and tape a piece of cardboard to it that has the words “Bus Stop” written on it in crayon. It’s the general effect you’re looking for here, not a recreation of the Realism Art Movement. Then, imagining that you are at a bus stop in the middle of nowhere, all alone with not another living thing in sight, stand at the bus stop.
I give it all of two seconds before a Chinese pushes past and stands right in front of you.
Actually, there’s probably not a lot of point in moving your caravan or RV to the depths of the Great Western Desert and constructing a bus stop, because now you already know what is likely to occur. That, and your wife will probably have you declared insane or legally dead or something. So yeah, maybe we should call it a thought experiment. Philosophers do those all the time so it must be fine, right?
Anyway, the point is, Chinese simply must push past you and stand right in front, no matter what you are doing, why you are doing it, or where it might be being done. Some of the rungs in their twisted little double-helical ladders are missing I reckon, although of course that is the technical explanation that geneticists give. Most people just call it being fucktarded. And fucktarded they are – if you want an insta-crowd in China, all you need is two Chinese and an object for their myopic attention to focus on. Bingo! They’ll start pushing past each other to be at the front, others will notice and push past them, and in the blink of an eye you have a mob of pungent, feckless savages jostling and straining to be at the front of the herd.
I kid you not, I watched the other day as a Chinese was reading a newspaper in the street, while a random passer-by tried to push in front to see what he was looking at. Another saw the action and joined in. Within minutes there were no less than forty of the muppets, all of them trying to be in front. Lord knows what happened to the newspaper – someone probably ate it for all I know.
It’s this bloody obsession they have with being first. First, best, biggest, loudest, most, before anyone else, ahead of the rest, you get the point. It doesn’t matter how insignificant the deed is, they have to be Numero Uno. And if they can’t, they lie and say they are. And if they can’t do that, then it simply didn’t happen. And it doesn’t matter what corners they cut to get there, who they step on, who they cheat along the way, how pointless it is… They will be First, legends in their own minds. If Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh actually went back to the Challenger Deep today, they’d probably find a Chinese flag there that had been dropped by a surface ship, and weighted with a plaque stating that China had got there first. Neil Armstrong, were he to return to Tranquillity Base today, would no doubt find a gilded bust of Chairman Mao and a sign saying that the moon was discovered in China five thousand years ago. Walmart, despite revenues of nearly 422 billion U.S. dollars in FY2011, is still not as big or as important as the bloke in the wetmarket down the street from where I live.
China has the best Olympics, the biggest Expo, the most developed industries, the best roads, the longest penises, the fastest cars, the tallest buildings, and the most powerful neon signs. The people are the most diligent, hardest working, longest lived, happiest, most affluent, healthiest and politest ever to walk the face of this green Earth. They were here before the dinosaurs and invented civilisation and cities and agriculture. In fact, they invented everything, even things that haven’t been invented yet.
And I pity the fool who tries to claim otherwise. He’ll be torn limb from limb by an uber-nationalistic mob of shrieking imbeciles who will not ever accept that they are not First.
The thing is, you see, that the Chinese psyche is a brittle one. One and a half billion tantrum-throwing children who lob their toys out of the pram the very instant things look like they aren’t going their way. The only thing that holds them together emotionally is Being First. If you are First, then you don’t even need to acknowledge the existence of anyone else. If you are First, there are no problems worth mentioning. If you are First, nothing else matters. Delusion it may be, but when Chinese meet actual emotional adversity, or what we refer to as ‘reality’, they shatter. Their whole world comes crashing down. You and me, we dust ourselves off and think “must try harder next time”, or “well done, that other chap”, or “so what?”. A Chinese is more likely to to take the long jump off a tall building.
This is why China is and must always be Number One. Why the Chinese are always Number One. Why Chinese culture is always Number One.
Ironic, isn’t it, when one considers that this is a nation of Number Two’s.
Posted in China | 1 Comment »
Normal Service…
Posted by MyLaowai on Thursday, February 16, 2012
… will resume in the near future. Stay tuned to this frequency.
Posted in China | 2 Comments »
Fire
Posted by MyLaowai on Wednesday, November 17, 2010
There has been a bit of a fire in Shanghai. Actually, it was rather a large blaze by all accounts, seeing as how a large apartment building caught fire, killing dozens and injuring many more.
Now, you all know me and you know I’m not one for shedding crocodile tears. If there’s one thing I hate about Chinese society above all else, it’s the sheer hypocrisy that permeates every aspect of life here. So, you won’t find me bleating on about some dead people I don’t know, didn’t want to know, and am not going to miss. Sorry if you think that’s a bit harsh, but quite frankly I couldn’t care less. Whether they die today in an apartment fire, or die in a few years time in a nuclear fire when they piss off a few more of their country’s neighbours; it’s all the same to me.
But there are a few points worth mentioning, because they tell you plenty about the Chinese way:
1. A fire in Shanghai gets a lot of press coverage. A fire in the countryside, or in a provincial city, wouldn’t rate a text message, and if you did make a story out of it, you and your family would be taken away, declared insane, and tortured to death. Shanghai matters because it’s highly visible, and that’s that. Face matters. That’s the Chinese way.
2. Within hours the head of the Public Security Bureau (China’s version of the KGB) was on a plane to Shanghai, to say how much he sympathised with the families blah blah blah. This is a guy who is responsible for thousands of murders every year. But hey, none of those are in the public eye, right? That’s the Chinese way.
3. Before the fire was even properly out, before the Origin & Cause investigation had even had a chance to begin, eight people were arrested. All of them from the countryside, so they won’t be missed (and if they are missed then their families can be forced to keep quiet, far from the eye of the foreign press). Why? Because someone must be blamed. It doesn’t matter what happens, it doesn’t matter who is responsible, and it especially doesn’t matter what the truth is, someone will inevitably be blamed, and that person will be the person who has the least power to defend himself. That’s the Chinese way.
4. New and ‘more stringent fire regulations’ have been ordered. Of course they have been. Nothing will change, and buildings all over China will continue to do good impressions of Roman Candles every few days, but the main thing is that the mandarins in Peking have made a proclamation, and the good folks of China believe them. The Party Bosses could order the moon to fly backwards, and The People would actually believe it happens. That’s the Chinese way.
5. For the next week, sales (and prices) of smoke hoods and fire extinguishers will increase, and so will sales (and prices) of various magical remedies for being burned to death. Little bags of magical twigs and various bits of lawn clippings will outsell smoke hoods and assorted magical incantations will take place in many homes. No one will actually consider how to get out of a building that is on fire; no one will walk the stairs down to the ground as a test-run; no one will invest in equipment to rescue people above the fourth floor; no one will unlock any of the fire exits; and no one will stop shooting fireworks at other apartments. This is the Chinese way.
I hate the Chinese way. I really do.
Posted in Ask MyLaowai, China, Newsflash | 13 Comments »
An Open Letter to All English Students in China
Posted by MyLaowai on Tuesday, November 9, 2010
Dear Student,
So you want a Laowai to be at your beck and call to help you improve your English? Yes, I came to China just so I could devote my life to licking your butt and helping you every way I can. What will you do to help this friend in return? Oh, teach us Chinese? Come on, WAKE UP.
#1: You want a private Laowai tutor? It’s 150+/hr. A Chinese tutor for us, at most, is 50/hr. What qualifications do you have to teach us Chinese? Oh – NONE. Is your English even good enough to DREAM of being a tutor for us? No.
#2: How many THOUSANDS of Chinese people give us the same ridiculous offer every day?
#3: You want a penpal? Look outside China. Oh yes, a few problems with that:
a) Your government blocks many of those websites in case some foreign scum dares to talk about the (non-existent, of course) problems your country has.
b) Much to your amazement, very few Laowai have got ANY time to talk with a person from your xenophobic backward country. Oh yes kiddies, scream blue murder all you like, but for god’s sake, me and my buddies here (in China) have to do without electricity or water for sometimes days on end. My workmate here lives in the “second best community in this city”. His home here is worse than a slum in America. At least said slums have the water, telecommunications, and electricity INSTALLED in the fricking walls and not draped around the outside. The list grows on. You have LITTLE to offer us, and we, even if it’s just our native language, have much to offer you.
#4: You wanna improve your English? Pay for a tutor. Oh, sorry – you want it for free? Visit my blog and knock yourself out. And when you do, be very thankful I bother to spend any time giving away my vast experience for FREE! What do you give away for free of any value? Huh? Oh yeah… NOTHING.
#5. Don’t go trying to chat with me every time you have 5 free minutes. I don’t have free time, I am a dedicated teacher and spend my time developing materials that I place on my blog (or in my school’s text books) that MANY people can benefit from. I will happily block you if you try. Why spend my precious time on just one person? I’d rather spend it helping thousands.
You claim the people around you only speak Chinese. Bloody hell, what about your classmates in your English class? Hell, what about you!!! You ALSO speak Chinese every day! Why don’t you try speaking English to your classmates and encourage them to do the same? Sure, it might be BAD English, but any practice is better than NO practice!
I hope to see you actively participating in a chat group. I really do. Because most of you ignorant bastards want to learn English but don’t want to participate. As I don’t know you at all, this means you haven’t said ANYTHING in our group of any note whatsoever. I also reckon that this entire conversation is above your head. For the next few weeks, work with your Chinese friends to comprehend this letter. That will help your English no end, and I haven’t had to waste a single minute on you, other than this message which I will share with the ‘world’ (= China, you folks really have trouble believing there is more to the world than your precious homeland) to help offset the waste of time that I know it to be.
Oh yes, I can hear more screams of protest at this latest statement. “We are almost the biggest economy in the world.” Lets examine this in detail:
#1: Your GDP PER CAPITA is woeful. It’s only big because you have 1.6 billion peasants running around trying to buy clean water, untainted food and a dogbox to live in. And failing.
#2: Your innovation capabilities are almost non-existent. You specialize in R&D: Ripoff and Duplicate.
#3: If you were to actually be able to account for REAL expenditure, you would be (by far) the largest economy in the world. Unfortunately, graft, bribe, deceit and fraud aren’t actually counted in the GDP, let alone whores, KTVs, street vendors and the like. You don’t just cook the books, you eat them as well! [note from ML: in fact, prostitution does account for some 15% of GDP, and is the only state-owned business making a profit]
You call me “good friend” and you haven’t even read this article. You know NOTHING about me. You aren’t my friend, and most likely never will be. Acquaintance? Maybe. Friend? You Chinese love to call anybody your friend, your brother etc, but am I really? Did you help me this week? Last week? In the last year? Christ. My friends look after me, worry about my problems and try to help me. An unknown student begging for free English practice is NOT my friend at all. To make it even more insulting to us, I know that many ethnic Chinese English teachers suggest (demand) their students make foreign friends so you can send us class surveys, correct your homework and so. Sorry, no go mate.
I love this country of yours, but I am so fed up with people expecting me to do something for nothing when I have to pay inflated prices for everything. Who will pay my rent if I spend all day being your private English tutor gratis? We can go back to an old quote and paraphrase it a little. “Ask not what a foreigner can do for you, but rather, what can you do for a foreigner?” Peace out little sibling.
Da Bizarre
Experienced, QUALIFIED Foreign Teacher
Posted in China | 72 Comments »
Happy National Defense Education Day
Posted by MyLaowai on Saturday, September 18, 2010
Today (in China, obviously) is National Defense [sic] Education Day. That’s a cutesy name for what is really Stoke Up Nationalist Hatred Of Japan Day. It’s an ancient day of remembrance since 2007, and is celebrated by air-raid drills and a nationwide ringing of alarms.
It’s a good time then to take a quick look at the Senkaku Islands. China claims them to be an indisputable part of Chinese territory since ancient times (of course), but then China also says the same thing about Taiwan, Tibet, Korea, East Turkestan, Hawaii, Australia, the Arctic Ocean, and the entire South China Sea. I think it’s probably safe to say that their claim to the Senkaku Islands is based on equally substantial evidence, but for the record, let’s just take a quick look at what everyone else in the world considers to be ‘historical fact’:
The Senkaku Islands comprise five small volcanic islands and three rocky outcroppings with a total land area of just seven square kilometres. They were first discovered and mapped by Japanese explorers and finally were formally incorporated into Japanese territory in 1895. A number of surveys have been conducted on the islands, and no trace of any previous habitation or prior ownership has ever been found. Since 1895, the islands have continuously remained as an integral part of Japan’s territory.
In 1895, China and Japan also jointly signed the Treaty of Shimonoseki, in which the Emperor of China stated that: “China cedes to Japan in perpetuity and full sovereignty of the Penghu group, Taiwan and the eastern portion of the bay of Liaodong Peninsula together with all fortifications, arsenals and public property.” The Chinese now claim that the Treaty of Shimonoseki wasn’t fair, and refuse to recognise it today. They now claim that all the bits they ceded away are still theirs, regardless of the fact that they ceded them away in an internationally-recognised document. By their reckoning, therefore, the Senkaku islands are still part of China. Except, and here’s the kicker, that the Senkaku Islands were never part of the Pescadores group of islands that were ceded to Japan in the first place. As a result of this small and inconvenient truth, the Senkaku Islands were not included in the territory which Japan renounced under Article II of the 1952 Francisco Peace Treaty. They were instead placed under the administration of the United States as part of the Nansei Shoto Islands, in accordance with Article III of that treaty, with the United States later handing administrative rights back to Japan.
All this time, China made not the slightest objection to any of this. In fact, China had nothing at all to say on the entire subject until oil was discovered there at the end of 1970, when they suddenly and very conveniently produced ‘historical records’ proving that the Senkaku Islands had been used exclusively by China since 1403. Hmmm. Gavin Menzies would be impressed.
Anyway, moving on… Even China does not dispute the fact that Japan exercised control of the Senkaku Islands from 1895 until the Second World War, and in fact officially recognised the fact that the islands were part of Japan’s Okinawa Prefecture. So what’s the problem? I mean, apart from extreme nationalism, oil, and pig-ignorance, of course? Oh yes, a claim that a few Chinese fisherman caught some fish in the area back in 1403.
So, here’s my question:
Can sovereignty claims based on a complete lack of any legal, historical or physical evidence, and backdated to fourteenth century Asia, be considered as a basis of ownership in a modern international legal system?
I think not. And hey, for once the International Legal System is on my side.
Happy National Defense Education Day. Idiots.
Posted in Annexed Territories, China, Festivals et al, Lies & Damned Lies | 12 Comments »
Banjo’s
Posted by MyLaowai on Monday, September 13, 2010
Banjo’s are very cool, just ask these ol’ boys. And boy howdy do we have some banjo’s coming up for you good folks out there in Intertube Land! That’s right, stay tuned for more banjo’s than you can shake a stick at. And even better, it’s all for a Good Cause.
Banjo’s For Beijing
Posted in China | 2 Comments »
The Price Of Poontang
Posted by MyLaowai on Thursday, July 29, 2010
I received an email from a reader recently, pointing me in the direction of a website that concerns itself with statistics of various sorts. Now, I don’t know if this is your sort of thing, but I simply love statistics, so MLHQ has been knee deep in numbers for the last few days.
Did you know, for instance, that the value of the prostitution industry in Australia is twenty seven million U.S. dollars? I’m frankly staggered, and have to assume they aren’t including all the keen amateurs who marry for money or expect blokes to buy them drinks and steak dinners. The figure for the U.K. is more realistic, around a billion dollars, which is just a little over half of what gets done in much smaller Taiwan ($1.84B). I was not surprised to see that Thailand, long regarded as the sex capital of the world, has a annual turnover of 4.3 billion dollars, but I was a bit surprised to see the Philippines at six billion green-backs. American men are obviously not getting any from their wives, because they are spending 14.6 billion dollars annually on prostitutes, but in Germany, where the industry is legal and regulated, the figure is eighteen billion!
In China, it’s seventy three billion dollars a year! That’s USD$73,000,000,000 per year!
So, you might be thinking, “Wow, that’s a lot of poon getting tanged, but after all there must be a reason Shanghai is called ‘the Whore of the Orient’, right?” And you would be correct, because most economists I’ve talked to, quietly reckon that prostitution is not only the only State-owned business that turns a profit, it also accounts for between ten and twenty percent of true GDP. Add in the fact that Chinese women really are the most unfaithful in the world, and you can understand why China has the worlds highest rate of syphilis – and it’s growing by 30% every year (that’s a faster rate than any other country).
But it isn’t the only big number you see when you start getting into the statistics. Take illegal logging, for instance. That’s 3.8 billion dollars right there, and that’s only what the Party admits to. Music, film, DVD and software piracy add up to more than 20 billion, while the counterfeit goods market is worth 60 billion. China’s contribution to the global drug trade is 17 billion dollars annually, and human trafficking brings in another 2 billion every year, almost as much as the cigarette smuggling industry. To get an idea of volume, a Burmese girl between the age of 16 and 18 who has been snatched from her home and sent to China (and several thousand are every year), is worth approximately $700 when sold as a bride in the countryside. A Chinese girl would be worth far less. The black market is worth nearly a hundred and sixty billion dollars a year!
The reports say that one third of homosexual men in China are married, but I might have read it wrong – it could have been one third of married men are raving queers, which seems rather more likely. Thirty-five percent of organ transplants take place via the application of forged documents, with almost all the rest being harvested from prisoners killed to order. Ninety percent of female North Korean refugees in China end up sold either as wives or prostitutes and sixty thousand Chinese children are abducted and sold annually. Non-performing loans are estimated to be worth nine hundred billion dollars! Seventy three million sharks are killed every year for their fins, 100,000 pangolin’s find their way to the dinner table, and 3,000 tons of protected and endangered animals are annually smuggled in from Vietnam alone for the restaurant trade (that’s why I only eat Panda).
These are big numbers, almost too big to comprehend. Let’s look at numbers you can get your head around, shall we? Like the price to be smuggled out of China and into another country – average price to go to Italy is $15,000 but that probably includes buying off every Italian official in the whole country. But if you’re Chinese and don’t have that kind of money, then why not just stay home and dull the pain of your worthless life with drugs? Pure heroine is cheap at $36.20 a gram, Meth is $6 a gram, Ecstasy is $4.50 per tablet, and Marijuana is a great deal at eighty cents a gram. And if it’s really bad and you decide to end your life, you always have the option of breathing the worlds most polluted air or eating the local food, though I wouldn’t recommend it due to the intense suffering you’re likely to experience (world’s highest rate of food poisoning). Hell, buy yourself a bear paw before you check out; a snap at $50.
Well over half of all the world’s seized counterfeit goods come from China, as do 90% of the counterfeit goods in the whole of the United States (64% in Europe). Chinese organised crime (which in China means ‘working with the blessings of the Party’) earned 3.3 billion dollars for the nation in Italy alone last year. Industrial espionage against the United States is worth in excess of fifty billion dollars a year!
Not one single Chinese policeman has ever arrested the top leaders for crimes against humanity, however.
Folks, I’m not making this stuff up – these numbers are based on official sources.
I love statistics, so if there’s any readers here who consider themselves a ‘numbers’ kind of person, and would like to discuss these shameful and disgusting statistics, feel free to be ignored in the comments section below.
I’m off to see if it still costs $10 to get my knob polished outside the nearby school.
Posted in Ask MyLaowai, China, Corruption, Fact Friday, Pornography | 8 Comments »
If MyLaowai Was In Charge…
Posted by MyLaowai on Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Boy howdy, if I was in charge, there’d be a few changes around the parish:
As of today, replying to any question or statement with a noise that sounds like a barking troglodyte is illegal. And so is grunting “Shenma?”.
Believing that the Titanic was a romantic film and nothing more is illegal. It is also proof positive that there is a difference between one’s education being ‘for free’, and being ‘for nothing’.
The word “Hello” or any synonyms thereof must be used only as a friendly greeting, or you will be acting illegally, and are liable to experience summary execution.
If you are a woman who has been waiting in the checkout line at a supermarket and now it is time to pay for your three items, then spending the next eight and a half minutes trying (and failing) to find the exact change, organising your receipts, composing text messages and checking your make-up is illegal.
If you have just spent the last fifteen minutes elbowing your way to the counter at the bar / KFC / McDonalds, finally attracted the attention of the nearest staff member by waving a 100 kuai note at them, and then say “Hmmm… What do you sell? What is on special? Can I have a discount?”, then that is very illegal.
If you leave every open door closed and every closed door open, then that is illegal. I don’t care if you were conceived in a wind tunnel. The same general principle may reasonably be extended to cover lights and air-conditioning units.
Attending important international summits with the sole intention of ruining it for everyone else will be extremely illegal.
If you are a plumber you must not pass yourself off as an electrician, and vice versa. If you are repairing something, then that must be the thing you actually repair. Failure to actually repair it, despite replacing everything else in the room at vastly inflated rates, is illegal.
If you are unable to reverse (or ‘parallel’) park a car without the help of four assistants, three empty parking bays, and twenty minutes worth of time, then you are not permitted under any circumstances to make the attempt. In fact, you are not permitted to operate the vehicle at all. Note that ‘park’ means that your car is not obstructing passing traffic or pedestrians, and therefore leaving it on the footpath or in one of the road lanes does not count.
If you are an oncologist, and you consider that giving patients a henna tattoo and a bag of dried twigs is an acceptable form of treatment, then that is illegal.
With immediate effect all of the following are illegal: Food that was dredged from the moat around the local Town Hall; anything described as ‘traditional’; pickled cabbage; any part of an animal that is known in civilised places as ‘offal’; the parts of a chicken that are made of cartilage and sinew; grass and/or leaf mulch.
Opening your mouth to speak or exhale in public without first removing the mushroom farm and brushing with toothpaste is very illegal. Offenders will be fumigated on the spot with petrol and a match.
Failure to honour contractual agreements is not only illegal, it’s also uncivilised. First offence will be rewarded with a warning shot between the eyes. 100 grains of soft lead will generally cure you of your dishonesty.
This list is non-exhaustive and subject to change by MyLaowai at any time.
Posted in Ask MyLaowai, China | 8 Comments »
Great Scott!
Posted by MyLaowai on Wednesday, July 7, 2010
A reader with a sense of occasion has just notified me of this:
The way I see it, if you’re gonna build a time machine into a car, why not do it with some style?
Posted in China | 1 Comment »
