No More Double Tenth?

Dr Sun Yat-sen's portrait in Tiananmen Square

 

If there is one thing Taiwan and China can agree on, it is that Dr Sun Yat-sen is the father of modern China.

They both respect him deeply, and Sun's portrait is placed in Tiananmen Square during national holidays, like the National Day holiday that just ended.

"Red House" in Tuen Mun

However being able to pay respects to him in Hong Kong was made impossible today, October 10, Taiwanese National Day, also known as "Double Tenth".

The Double Tenth anniversary commemorates the start of the Wuchang Uprising in Hubei province on October 10, 1911, which ultimately led to the overthrow of the Qing dynasty and resulted in the establishment of the Republic of China, which was led by Sun.

For Kuomintang compatriots in Hong Kong, today they would hold a raising ceremony and sing nationalistic songs and then pay their respects at Hung Lau, or "Red House" in Sun Yat-sen Garden in Tuen Mun. This was one of Sun's former revolutionary bases, and every year until today, over a hundred people would gather.

But this year was completely different.

Apparently the dilapidated home is owned by a mainlander and today it was guarded by black-suited security guards in bright orange vests. The garden was also crawling with police officers, something Mak Ip-sing had never seen before. He has been a longtime organizer of the events and the vice-chairman of the Yuen Long District Council. He studied at a Taiwanese University and his father was a KMT soldier.

Scuffle between a KMT patriot and security guard

Many KMT fled to Hong Kong after the Communists took over China in 1949, so Double Tenth is very important to them and their children.

One or two people tried to approach the over century-old building in Sun Yat-sen Garden and were roughly handled by the sharply-dressed security guards. 

In the end people gave up approaching the building and instead stood in groups of four nearby to sing nationalistic songs to avoid violating the social-distancing regulations.

Mak called off all events involving Taiwanese flags over fears of violating the new national security law.

"Our legal advice suggested that we should not risk falling afoul of the law, which is extremely vague and broad," he said, adding a lunch and dinner banquet had been organized, but the restaurant cancelled the booking at the last minute citing social-distancing measures. Mak believes the restaurant was pressured to cancel the event because it involved displaying Taiwanese flags.

No one was allowed near Hung Lau today

A man surnamed Chen, who wore a blue T-shirt printed with KMT characters, said he was deeply disappointed over being denied access and the lack of Taiwanese flags. Previously there would be many Taiwanese flags flying in the area for the day.

"Do the authorities fear the display of flags will endanger the security of China?" he said. "We are here to honour Sun Yat-sen for his role in ending 2,000 years of imperial rule in China." 

Indeed. Seems the desire to pay their respects to China's founding father has been kiboshed thanks to the more assertive control of Beijing over Hong Kong. 

Perhaps last year was the last year they could do that freely, and the same goes with the candlelight vigil to mark June 4 in Victoria Park, mass peaceful rallies on July 1 and October 1... the list will continue to grow...

Word of the Day: Tegong

A university canteen with students in the back lining up for food

When I worked at a state media outlet in Beijing, at 12 noon we would get our empty food containers and chopsticks, and gather at the canteen door for some grub. Only when the staff were ready were the doors unlocked and we could see what grub was available.

There were thick noodles with a tomato and scrambled egg sauce, small plates of appetizers like pickled garlic cucumbers, or spicy pickled wood ear fungus, or even steamed or fried small fish.  My favourite on Thursdays was jiaozi, or dumplings. I'd get two catties' worth, or about 20 of them and was very happy eating them with a good dose of vinegar. The food was also very cheap too, only a few yuan.

Tomato and scrambled egg with noodles in soup

After a few days or weeks, I can't remember, a colleague I was eating lunch with said we were lucky to have good food. He explained that because we were working for a company that was state owned, the food was of a good quality. Of course he added, senior officials had access to the best quality food.

I was relieved to hear this, as there were so many stories of fake food in China, but I was also surprised to hear this privilege we had, just from working in state media, my colleagues toiling for 3,000 yuan a month.

Now I know there is a word for it, called 特需供應 te(4) xu (1) gong (1) ying (4) or tegong meaning "special supply", where food comes from organic farms, and quality trusted pork, beef and chicken producers.

This privilege extends to all canteens of local governments, state-owned enterprises, and elite athletes, while everyone else has to guess if the food they are eating is not dodgy.

Dumplings were never served like this in the canteen...

Tegong is an ancient tradition in China, where royal households in past dynasties used to source food from designated suppliers in regions known for their particular produce. One example is that during the Qing dynasty, emperors would only drink spring water from Beijing's western hills, which were carried over daily to the Forbidden City.

The tradition continued after the People's Republic of China was founded in 1949 for Communist Party leaders. The main reason was for food security to ensure central government officials were not poisoned, the second was for food security during famines and food shortages. The third is reputation, where the government designates certain farms and suppliers for overseas consumption, including Hong Kong, so that the quality and safety is ensured.

During the 1980s, one of the grievances that led to the Tiananmen Square protests was anger against officials' privileges that included tegong. After the bloody crackdown, the government promised to do away with the tegong system, but the measure wasn't implemented.

And so this privilege is still here to this day, while people continue to buy milk powder outside of China, and any other food they can get their hands on.

Until government officials eat the regular food that the laobaixing or ordinary people eat, food scandals will continue to fester, while the privileged can enjoy their tegong food.

A Storyteller Remembered

Shan Tianfang became a household name for his storytelling of the classics

Only today we heard about the passing of Shan Tianfang, who was a well-known storyteller in China that many taxi drivers would listen to on the radio.

Shan died on September 11 of organ failure at the age of 83.

People enjoy listening to his renditions of classical Chinese novels over the airwaves -- he recorded over 110 stories for radio and television which means about 12,000 episodes spanning over 60,000 hours.

He told stories in the pingshu tradition, where the performer was dressed in a Chinese scholar gown and sat behind a desk on stage with a folding fan and a wooden block that was used like a gavel.

Shan performed pingshu, starting out in tea houses

In pingshu, the performer tells a legend from memory and uses different voices and exaggerated gestures, as well as a bit of commentary or historical context. That meant a pingshu performer had to do a lot of research to give the stories much more detail to make them more believable.

Usually these storytellers performed in tea houses, though Shan would adapt to gain an even wider audience with the introduction of radio and television.

But when Shan was growing up he didn't want to become a performer -- his mother was an actress, his father a musician who played the sanxian, a three-stringed Chinese lute. He along with his parents and four sisters lived an itinerant lifestyle which Shan was keen to avoid, along with the financial insecurity.

He wanted to study medicine, but in the early 1950s his father was wrongly imprisoned; his mother left the family and so Shan had to work, apprenticing under a pingshu master before he joined a folk arts troupe in 1956 in Anshan, a town in northeastern China known then for its tea houses and pingshu performers.


Shan did well in the tea house circuit until the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, and he was branded a "counterrevolutionary" and sent to northeastern China to do manual labour.

These are copies of his scripts

After the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976, he got back to performing and found audiences were keen on entertainment other than party-approved propaganda. He tried his luck in radio and quickly found it was very different from performing in tea houses.

There was no need to dress up and have props, and that there was no audience to give instant feedback. As a result Shan had to use the three recording technicians in the studio as his audience and adjusted his performance accordingly.

His first recording was debut on Chinese New Year in 1980 and it is believed some 100 million people tuned in to the 56 hours over which it was broadcast.

Over six decades Shan recorded such famous Chinese classics as "White Eyebrow Hero", and "Sanxia Wuyi". He also did dramatizations of historical figures like politician Zhuge Liang from the Three Kingdoms period and Lin Zexu, a scholar-official from the Qing dynasty who was a catalyst for the first Opium War.

Audiences liked to listen to his stories because he made complicated historical stories easier to follow and made the characters more relatable. "You feel you could relate to the characters in his stories, even though they lived a long time ago," said one Beijing taxi driver surnamed Zhao.

After his retirement in 2007, Shan tried to foster another generation of pingshu artists, even mentoring young people. But as more storytellers like Shan passing away, this oral art form may also die with them...

Silk Road: Binglingsi Grottoes

The Maitreya Buddha at 27 metres tall, makes humans feel very small

The highlight of our Silk Road trip would be visiting the Mogao Grottoes in Dunhuang, but before we got there we had a mini preview at the Binglingsi Grottoes.

Cruising along the calm Liujiaxia Reservoir

To get there was quite the ordeal which is only accessible in the summer and fall. We drove several hours to get to Xiahe, and then we reached the Liujiaxia Reservoir where we donned orange life jackets and squeezed into tiny covered speed boats that alternatively went fast and slow through the reservoir for about half an hour to to reach the grottoes.

But even after we arrived we had to walk a good 15-20 minutes down a winding path just to get to the grottoes.

Apparently these ones were a work in progress for over a millennium. The first one was started in 420AD, and work continued all the way up until the Qing Dynasty. But over the centuries, earthquakes, erosion and looters have damaged or destroyed many of the 183 caves that feature 694 stone statues and 82 clay ones.

Buddhist statues from the Northern Wei Dynasty

Only a few of the "doors" were opened for visitors to peer into them. One of them had a pair of disciples dating back from the Northern Wei Dynasty with their long faces, highly-arched eyebrows, slanted eyes, and flowing robes.

Other Buddhist statues looked like Indians from their dark skin, but it's actually skin colour on the pink side that has changed colour thanks to oxidation. We liked how one cave featured a Buddhist statue flanked by two palm trees painted on the cave.

Check out the palm trees behind Buddha!

Anchoring the area is a giant Maitreya Buddha that sits more than 27 metres high. What a sight!

Father of Pinyin Dies

Zhou returned to China in 1949 to help the country -- by creating pinyin

I was kind of dreading this day -- but it has come. The father of pinyin, Zhou Youguang, has died at the age of 111. He died this afternoon (Saturday), a day after his birthday in Beijing.

It's pretty amazing he lived this long, and I suspect it was keeping his mind active that kept him going.

He was born in 1906 during the Qing Dynasty and as a young man he lived and worked in the United States as a Wall Street banker.

When the Communists took over in 1949, Zhou returned and was tasked with creating a new writing system using the Roman alphabet.

"We spent three years developing pinyin. People made fun of us, joking that it had taken us a long time to deal with just 26 letters, he recalled to the BBC in 2012.

He had kept active, writing many articles and books

However, it has helped millions of people, including me, to learn how to pronounce words in Putonghua properly.

It is now widely used on phone apps to help people communicate. They can type in the pinyin and from there choose the Chinese character they need.

Developing the pinyin system helped protect Zhou from Mao's political purges, but eventually Zhou was sent down to the countryside for re-education during the Cultural Revolution.

As he became older he grew more critical and outspoken about the present day Communist Party and wrote several articles and books that were banned.

In an interview with NPR in 2011, Zhou said he hoped to live long enough to see the Chinese authorities admit the bloody crackdown on pro-democracy protesters around Tiananmen Square in June 1989 was a mistake.

Wishful thinking on Zhou's part.

He added that most ordinary people did not believe in the Communist Party, and that the vast majority of Chinese intellectuals favoured democracy.

Beijing can probably breathe a sigh of relief that another one of its critics has passed. They couldn't do much to Zhou considering his immense contribution to the country, but we hope he will see justice in the end.

I wrote a blog post about him when I was in Beijing. One of my colleagues at the time went to visit him and told me later she thought he was a wonderful, sweet man. He wasn't a typical Chinese elder who towed the party line, but instead had a lot of interesting things to say about a wide range of subjects.

Thank you Mr Zhou for creating a writing system that has made Chinese more accessible to so many people and in so many ways.