Here’s the FT article.

As you can imagine she was working in pretty abysmal conditions in the beginning:

Back in 1980, I thought I’d plunged headlong into the journalistic Dark Ages. My office was a bat-infested eighth-floor room at the Qianmen Hotel. Whenever I finished composing a new story on the typewriter, I hopped on a bicycle and pedaled like mad to the city’s public Telegraph Building several miles away. There I retyped the copy on an antiquated telex machine before carrying the perforated paper tape across the cavernous room to a distant counter and pleading with the clerk (a state employee, of course) to do his job and send it out. To make sure it got done, I usually waited until the transmission ended. Sometimes I nodded off on a bench, listening to the chugging of the machine as it echoed through the freezing, lugubrious hall. The process took hours—and that doesn’t count reporting time.

But in the end she got the last laugh. What more amazing place is there to have covered over the last three decades than China? Even when (particularly when?) the world’s focus was on Japan and the Soviet Union, stunning changes were taking place under Liu’s watchful gaze. She chronicles reforms, 1989, the Hong Kong turnover, and the Olympics.

On of the refreshing aspects of the article is its length. The magazine has long suffered from trying to appeal to short attention-spanners, and thus has frequently published articles with great ideas, and not bothered to expand on them. Take for example another piece from the same issue about Hu Jintao’s heir apparent Xi Jinping. What could be more interesting than understanding about the man who will likely lead China for ten years? Even more so given the secrecy around China’s selection process. However, Newsweek only thought it appropriate to devote eight paragraphs to the man. Or the article on GM reviving the electric car. The devote two full pages in the hard copy, but 75% of it is a giant picture.

This makes Liu’s writing all the more remarkable. She has been a witness to some of the most amazing events since Deng took over, and is a tremendous expert on China, while many reporters proclaim to be while having only the most basic grasp of the country. Her experience in 1989, and analysis, are both amazing, and amazingly prescient:

A lot of people think Tiananmen was all about democracy. They’re wrong. Economics also had a big role. After a decade of impressive but halting economic reforms, inflation was running wild, and although farmers were making money for once, city dwellers were lagging—especially on university campuses, where labs and classrooms were as decrepit as the housing. Still, idealism was a driving force…

I saw things I could scarcely have imagined possible. Fifty soldiers holding Kalashnikovs sat on the ground, listening intently as students with megaphones lectured them about democracy and fed them Popsicles. In another neighborhood a soldier emerged from his blocked convoy to shout: “We’re soldiers of the people! We would never suppress you!” as the crowd roared its appreciation.

Her analysis about the motivation behind the demonstrations make me wonder if one couldn’t argue that the main objectives of the students have not in fact been met. If democracy was primarily a tool for economic reform and upward mobility, has that dream not been at least partially realized? Sure true freedom of the press and human rights were also supposed to be a consideration, but crushing the uprising surely led to the remarkable reforms–economic at least- of the last 20 years. Just a little food for thought.

Other interesting articles from the issue are:

• Fareed Zakaria’s The Rise of a Fierce Yet Fragile Superpower
• Mike Bloomberg’s A Race We Can All Win
• the afforementioned Xi Jinping article

Overall a very interesting issue. Now if only Newsweek would let its talented reporters write longer articles, maybe it would be able to become a serious magazine once again.

Enjoy the holidays. And all your Iowans out there: vote early, vote often.

But I put the vote to the people:

[quote added] Here is one of his most recent posts:

Get used to the new reality, people have started rubbing China’s and the CCP’s polish to see how deep it goes and underneath they found pollution and pissed stained commie cinder block.

China deserves to be bashed, it hides behind its developing world status and yet with such a long cultural and academic history (that people like you love to point out)ought to know better than to keep doing the things it is doing and believing that it is ok because 1. China is developing 2. some other country did it or might have done it in the past 3. China is China and that is reason enough.

I’m personally glad to see the population of panda-licking soul sellers like you decline and be humiliated.

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When I wondered aloud once what was out there, someone told me that it was actually quite beautiful, although never really explained more than that. It is seventeen stops west of Jianguomen, the station where I transferred lines. About halfway there the bustling and crowded subway car filtered out enough that I was able to sit down. No longer were people anxiously standing by the door, hoping they could push their way off before the conductor impatiently sealed their passages back home. Instead, riders were mostly sitting quietly, waiting for the long ride to end, where the train would drop them near their homes, or more likely, near a bus that would scatter them even farther from the city’s business center.

Going west in Beijing is an odd experience. When I came back to China about a year ago, a former colleague, then studying in England, was nice enough to put me up in her empty apartment. It sits about 2 kilometers south of the Muxidi subway stop. Usually when foreigners would ask for a more useful description I would say, “You know the west train station? Near there”, although in reality that is about a 45 minute walk away. In a city with a huge foreign population, much of the west, particularly the southwest, remains No Man’s Land.

I’m not exactly sure what I expected the end of the line to look like, but it did feel eerily like I was at the edge of the city. Las Vegas always seemed like a place that thinned out until it was just sand, and that is kind of what happens in Chinese urban areas. Going northeast, or due west, in Chengdu, the buildings and businesses suddenly give way to rice paddies. You might think that the agriculture was seeping into the city to swallow modern life, if only you didn’t not know that quite the opposite is taking place.

At the end of the old line one it looks like any industrial rust belt in China. It more resembles Beijing from when Seoul hosted the Olympics, than a year before the Chinese capital will. In the near distance, only a few hundred meters away, I could see a few hills. This was probably as far away as you could be and still have them in view on a day when the fog, smog, and smoke conspired to turn the sun a dim orange. Make-shift homes dotted the rising earth, like they might in South American slum. Except in China these types of houses never have the desperate feel of Africa or Brazil, but instead, they just are, meager existences, but without the enveloping influences of gangs and drugs.

I walked down the street, relatively empty, with cars and bicycles going by every few seconds. Billboards lined the sidewalk advertising a clinic for the child-planning center. They way they phrased it I wanted to believe it was for advice on young parents, maybe with some contraceptives. But inside I knew that the goal of fewer kids was the most critical goal. If you did not show up before to get your birth control, well then, that smiling young woman would just have to come up with an alternative. After all, this isn’t rich Beijing where people can simply pay the tax for a second or third child.

Across from me I could see a building with the scarlet letter 拆, indicating that even out here, on the edges of Beijing society, someone had bigger plans for the lot where a one-story grocery sat. But the characters were old and peeling. Perhaps it once seemed like a good idea to build something here, but so much time seemed to have passed I wondered if developers had given up, or even forgotten. Outside the store were stacks of cabbage–or is it bok choy? I can never get that right–sitting on the dirty ground, lined up for sale.

As I reached the corner I noticed on a sign that I had been heading west, not south as I had suspected. Most subway maps do not bother to show that the tracks veer north just before the last stop. Why would they? If you needed to know, you already would.

To my right was an open air market where people from the countryside came to sell their vases and knick-knacks. A hidden treasure I thought to myself. But the skeptical looks on the shoppers’ faces told the real story. This was not a great find, just a few country folks hoping someone would buy their shoddy copies of Chinese eras gone, and nostalgic memorabilia from decades for which few feel actual nostalgia.

I passed construction sites that seemed to be making little progress, and old Communist-era apartments that had not yet been designated for demolition, but surely would once the boom finally cast its eyes west. A huge factory, or possibly power plant, billowed smoke into the sky just past a highway pulling people toward the city. Such open displays of pollution can only take place outside the great cities, like stretches of New Jersey, and Pingguo yuan.

By the time I finally found a place to eat it was nearly 3 O’clock. The waiter informed me that they were out of bottled water, Sprite, and bottles of coke smaller than 2 liters, feeding into my already-budding suspicion that this neighborhood only received food deliveries after distributors were sure they had satiated the needs of the rest of the city. Finally I decided on Coconut Palm Drink, the official drink of state banquets.

As I got up to leave a waitress came over and blurted out, 我羡慕你们外国人, I envy/admire you foreigners. Why, I asked her. 你们会说外语, you can speaker foreign (non-Chinese) language. I wanted to ask her why it was so great to be able to speak ‘non-Chinese,’ given that English was my first language. But I did not. I just gave her a slightly blank look, and said nothing. Then I took my leftovers and headed toward the subway station for my 19-stops-and-a-transfer ride back to the other end of Beijing.

This also wins the “Too Much Information Award”. I went to college with this guy, which makes strongly question my choice of higher learning institute.

A little background for those of you who don’t know me: I started out as the Managing Editor of China Expat in February and overhauled their website, redesigned the magazine, and had a lot of fun there. Sadly I will move on to my next challenge in a couple of weeks, but wanted to continue writing my blog, which is currently Daily Tea Leaves, and lives on over at the old site. Since I’m incredibly unoriginal, and for some reason wanted to stick with the ‘tea’ theme, I went for Cup of Cha, with ‘cha’ (茶）meaning ‘tea.’

This blog title was roundly criticized by virtually everyone I know. People liked ‘Cup of Chai’ better, even though that would be Thai. They thought ‘Cup of Tea’ would be better, but that URL was taken, and it didn’t seem very Chinese. Dan Harris over at China Law Blog told me I was doomed to failure since I didn’t have ‘China’ in the blog title (actually he was much nicer and more supportive than that sounds). However, he told me that after I bought this domain, and since this is not going to be a profitable site, and I’m not a hotshot lawyer like he is, I decided to stick with ‘Cup of Cha’. The last suggestion, which I actually liked a lot, was “Cup of Noodle,” from Sam of pink bicycle fame. As you might imagine, that name was taken a while ago.

So here I am, a man with a blog and opinion, but not much to say (or possible too much).

Cup of Cha will mostly be in the same style as the old site, with a few differences. One, this is my blog, entirely owned by me. It will be mostly about China, but since I have other interests (the 2008 election for example), I will voice an opinion. Even though I’m normally terribly shy. You have no say in this, although I’ll be sad if you stop reading.

The second thing, is that there will be regular videos here. Not that kind of video. A friend of mine who has worked for a number of news organizations is currently putting together a documentary. Editing leaves you inside the studio a lot, and she wants to get out and do what she really loves, namely shooting video. She is hoping to go out around Beijing every week or so and put together an interesting segment about what’s going on. We’ll see how it goes, but it’s something to keep your eye out for.

So that’s it for now. These are the things to look out for. If something doesn’t work on the site please tell me, as I’m still doing some house keeping and sorting out the details. Feel free to read and promote me!

If you want to get in contact, you can reach me at: Josh ( at ) cupofcha (dot) com