Wo Bu Zhidao

Passing Through Shijiazhuang

Waiting For The Police

A DVD store in Shijiazhuang that we visited was busy clearing the shelves of all the inappropriate media in anticipation of a visit by the police. By inappropriate I mean pirated titles. As you can see by the empty shelf space there really are not many non-pirated titles available. The music and movie industry can continue to try and get self-serving laws passed in America but it will be to no avail. What they might try doing instead is delivering to the Chinese market what it wants. What does the market want? New content--not ten year old movies that the industry could not make money selling in other markets. Their is one other thing the market wants and that is DVDs at an affordable price. Many other types of companies have come to China and managed to make money selling things at prices much lower than those they use in America. Frankly I think that Hollywood will never learn and will eventually be crushed along with their outdated business model. 

A Balanced Diet

Bye Sherry

Back To The Books

Disco Inferno

The Mail Also Waits For The Train

We Are All Lei Feng

We went to eat at a Cultural Revolution themed restaurant in Shijiazhuang before setting out. They serve northeastern style food, heavy on the cornbread and saurkraut, and the decor is really neat. Above the doors are lables that say "The First Collective, The Second Collective," etc... What I found most interesting though is that while the restaurant has the intention of keeping down with the Joneses (rural style cuisine, tin plates, etc...) the prices are very high. A meal here will cost at least the same as one at McDonalds if not more. I often wonder if these types of movements are similar to the Slavophile movements of the mid-nineteenth century in Eastern Europe.  I think that the idea of rich people searching for an ethnic identity is a sign of a desire to set themselves apart from the global McEconomy that they strived so hard to join. This meshes with my understanding of the Slavophile movement which was a reaction of the elite in the Russian empire after they began to have a greater role in the Western European industrial economy.

Mongolian Hot Pot