About Notes From Xi'an.
A Useful Pictorial Archive.
A Page of Specifically Xi'an Related Notes.
Voices on China Worth Checking Into From Time to Time.
A Few Places to Hang Out in Xi'an。
Bill Bishop
The Useless Tree
Pop Up Chinese
Shanghai Street Stories
China Dialogue
They all just keep producing the goods.
Tags: Bill Bishop, China Dialogue, Pop Up Chinese, Sam Crane, Sinocism, The Useless Tree
A picture by and of 艾未未。I like the picture。
A page of the more Xi'an Centred Notes
- helping to give a sense of this city and why many like living here.
What Is It About Xi’an That Makes It Xi’an And Makes It The Place People Like To Live?
- add your own thoughts on Xi’an in the comments section of this Note, help give people an impression of this city.
西安
A good selection of Xi'an's Coffee shops and a few other places for taking it easy
- profiles, pictures and addresses. A Selection of the Better China Related Sites
- News, Comment, Culture, Life & Language
Donates Libraries To Under Financed Schools And Orphanages In The Developing World。
Xi'an 西安 Not For Profit NGO- Soup Kitchen- Aid To Earthquake Regions- Medical Aid- Clothes Donation。'Reform is seen less through the prism of human rights and freedom, than the question of how to increase the legitimacy of the ruling Communist Party. Instead of trying to develop a Chinese variant of liberal democracy, many are looking for a different model altogether.'
Mark Leonard in What Does China Think?, Fourth Estate, 2008, p60
'We felt the chill of the mountain air. On the brilliant yellow tiles, the fresh grass that had sprouted in the spring was as tall as the old withered stalks, and both swayed in the breeze. In the blue sky, a floating cloud that seemed to hang on the corner of a flying eave created the impression that the temple itself was tilting. A broken tile at the edge of the eave looked as if it were about to fall. Probably it had sat that way for years without falling.'
Gao Xing Jian, the first Chinese Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, from Buying a Fishing Rod for my Grandfather, Harper Perennial, 2004, p19. Translated by Mabel Lee
'Pan Wei [an academic at Beijing University] has a vision of a high-tech consultative dictatorship, where there are no elections but decisions made by a responsive government, bound by law, and in touch with its citizens' aspirations... a new model of politics that is the 'mirror image of the West', based on the rule of law and citizens participation rather than elections...In the future 'deliberative democracy' will be the central part of Chinese politics, with grassroots elections playing a supplementary rather than central role.'
Mark Leornard: What Does China Think? as above, p66-7
"From my experience in writing, I can say that literature is inherently man's affirmation of the value of his own self and that this is validated during the writing, literature is born primarily of the writer's need for self-fulfilment. Whether it has any impact on society comes after the completion of a work and that impact certainly is not determined by the wishes of the writer."
Gao Xing Jian, from his Nobel Lecture, 2000
Leisure At Wangchuan
Since my retirement to this place I love,
I've never made again to town a move:
For the times to stare, when on a tree I lean
Before my house, at the field-and-village scene;
For the crops by water their double forms that show;
For silvery birds o'er the mountains soar...
But what if sometime I may lonely grow?
Well, for my greens, with a winch, I 'll water draw.
Wang Wei: 100 Poems in English Verse, translated by Wang Bao Tong
'From the beginning [here referring to around 400BC] the westerners- traders and others- were highly interested in China and its ways. The Chinese, by contrast, showed no interest in exploration or travel to the far West, as distinct from some trade... That contrast between the Europeans' desire for distant exploration and adventure, and the altogether more narrow and domestic focus of China, would continue.' (p36)
'Like other observers, he [Matteo Ricci circa late 16C] greatly admired much that he saw in China. Here was a very large and unified realm, well ordered and with a central orthodoxy, namely Confucianism. Social life was regulated by rituals and manners that produced a harmony only too likely to be disturbed by foreigners.' (p102)
'But there is no evidence that European thought or practice had any influence on the beliefs of the Chinese governing and literary classes. As for the European traders [17C] to the China coast, they were apt to be adventurous, raucous and uncouth, and many of them, the Dutch especially, were a violent lot. Anyway, the Chinese found it hard to distinguish among them, for they were all "red haired barbarians". The empire therefore tried to maintain the general policy of imperial kindness to strangers, and to tolerate their trading efforts.' (p124)
From Harry G. Gelber's The Dragon and the Foreign Devils: Bloomsbury: 2008
'Think about all the hype, all the words, that have been written about China’s economic development since 1979. It’s a lot, right? What if I told you this: “It may be that we haven’t seen anything yet.”'
Thomas L. Friedman, taken from his article 'Is China the Next Enron?' which was published in The New York Times on January 12th 2010
