Salon.com > Lisa Movius

Roll over, Confucius

Tue, 02 Dec 2003 20:41:00 +0000

Even in China, sex sells.

Li Li, a 25-year-old aspiring writer from Guangzhou, probably realized as much in June when launching her weblog, "Love Letters Before Dying." Under the pen name Muzimei ("Wooden Beauty"), Li Li provided lurid details of her unusually hyperactive sex life, naming names -- some of them famous. China's titillated netizens lapped it up, and by November the blog was receiving more than 100,000 visitors a day. It was also attracting less enthusiastic attention. The state-owned press excoriated the blog as pornographic and corrupting, denouncing the author's disillusionment with love and marriage. The growing furor got Li Li fired from her magazine job, and in late November she shut down the blog.

Since Muzimei was removed from the site, scores of imitators have taken her place. The most popular of these, a blogger calling herself Lady Cat, tells of her emotional and sexual voyage through an early marriage, hasty divorce and subsequent casual dalliances -- with a sprinkling of racy Calvin Klein ads and essays like "An orgasm a day," which discusses her discovery of masturbation and pornography. Meanwhile, "Love Letters Before Dying" came out in book form only to be banned after a few days, but it will probably enjoy the same fate as China's previously banned risqué books: translation and brisk international sales.

Mrs. Li is watching me

Thu, 19 Jun 2003 22:44:00 +0000

Mrs. Li is a plump woman whose quick, crinkly smile is framed by a utilitarian haircut. Always polite, she never fails to ask whether I've eaten -- the standard Chinese greeting -- or about the health of my family. She differs little from most middle-aged Chinese women, or from the other women in my Shanghai neighborhood, but with one exception.

Mrs. Li is watching me. It's her job.

As a neighborhood committee member, Mrs. Li helps oversee an army of gossipy old ladies who watch and report on their neighbors. Until two months ago, Mrs. Li and her comrades seemed anachronisms, but China's SARS outbreak, coverup and ensuing public panic have revealed deep fissures in the Communist infrastructure, and have prompted the government to revitalize some of the repressive elements of the Cultural Revolution. Suddenly Mrs. Li is very important. Although they're now policing temperatures and travel rather than ideology and dissent, the newly activated neighborhood committees underscore the fragility of the new freedoms that the Chinese were beginning to take for granted.

Imitation nation

Mon, 08 Jul 2002 19:30:00 +0000

In the shadow of century-old plane trees, art deco apartment buildings, gleaming A-grade office buildings and bustling department stores, they ply their trade. Seconds after you step off a bus, out of the subway or onto the curb a young man or woman sidles up to whisper, "Hello! CD? DVD?"

The stretch is found along Huaihai Road, as Shanghai's old Avenue Joffre has been called since 1949. Should you pay no heed to the whispers and continue on, they intensify into to a cacophony, as yet another salesman calls out the same refrain every few meters. Slip into the adjacent Xiangyang Market and the noise continues, only the mantra has diversified: "Hello! Prada?" "Hello! Rolex?" "Hello! Calvin Klein?" A dizzying array of products with Western brand names meets the eye, all available at impossibly low prices.

Places like Xiangyang Market, its Beijing equivalent Silk Alley, and similar retail centers in all of China's urban centers are hotbeds of pirated goods, but the trade is not confined to their boundaries. On every pedestrian overpass, subway stairwell or crowded street, there is at least one man, invariably middle-aged with greasy hair, opening a briefcase to reveal a selection of imitation name-brand perfumes. Next to him, resting on a folding chair, is the inevitable cardboard box crammed with pirated discs.

To be young, Chinese and Weiku

Wed, 30 May 2001 19:30:00 +0000

It's a springtime Saturday afternoon, but the sunshine doesn't intrude on the scene in the New Brightness Performance Hall. Originally a huge storage space in a mall built in the early 1990s on the outskirts of town, the hall is now filled with some 300 young music fans, listening intently with cheap cigarettes clenched in their jaws.

The singer onstage is tall and emaciated, with dyed-red hair curling around his protruding cheekbones and slinky shirt unbuttoned to reveal a bony chest; he may look the picture of heroin chic, but his real drug is a reputed 10 hours a day spent in the pale green glow of a computer screen.

When he starts to growl into the mike, the crowd goes wild. Young men, just out of college and fleeing the conformity of their weekday white-collar grind, headbang in their Kurt Cobain T-shirts while rival rockers sporting the image of Che Guevara across their chests coolly nod in approval. A gaggle of female art students jingles gaudy imitation Tibetan jewelry, trademark du jour of China's budding bohemians, in rhythm to the music. A few of their less reserved sisters periodically toss undergarments at the stage.