Sunday, September 22, 2013

Sunday Globe Special: Chinese Breakfast

As long as it is not rice that smells rancidlamb, chicken, or yogurt I think you are okay. 

"Beijing’s next antigraft target? Popular pastries" by Kelvin Chan |  Associated Press, September 15, 2013

HONG KONG — Mooncakes — the hockey-puck-sized pastries Chinese give each other every year for the mid-autumn festival — were always more about tradition than delicacy: Some people don’t even like them. But in recent years, as corruption eroded confidence in government, the unscrupulous made the dense, calorific cakes even sweeter.

We Americans have had our fill, too.

Luxurious boxes of mooncakes can contain far more than the traditional filling of lotus seed or red bean paste and a salted egg yolk symbolizing the moon. Some have rare ingredients such as abalone, shark fins, or bird’s nest. Gift sets can even include items such as gold coins, top-notch wines, mobile phones, and diamond rings.

Related: 

Shark Fin Soup For Supper
Sunday Globe Special: Vietnamese Bird's Nest 

What's for lunch?

Now, in an effort to combat bribery and extravagant spending, China’s Communist Party leadership has singled out the tradition in its austerity drive. It has banned the use of public money to buy the pastries and associated gifts, dampening demand just as the market hits its usual peak ahead of the Sept. 19 festival.

That's not the kind of "austerity" Americans are under.

‘‘Decadent styles have polluted our festival culture in recent years with the sending of increasingly extravagant gifts such as mooncakes and hairy crabs, drifting further away from our frugal virtues,’’ Vice Premier Wang Qishan, head of the party’s internal watchdog panel, said last week, according to state media.

I blame the you-know-who's that control the AmeriKan media.

Mooncakes — or, more often, mooncake coupons redeemable at stores — have been so common as gifts from offices and state-owned companies to employees that a secondhand market has emerged for the vouchers among scalpers in Chinese cities such as Shanghai. But such commerce has dwindled under President Xi Jinping’s austerity drive.

Xi’s effort already has crimped income at posh restaurants after new party rules were brought in at the start of the year curbing spending on food and drink. It’s part of his effort to gain support in a country where corruption and a widening wealth gap have become sources of public discontent.

Gee, we are not so different after all. 

In fact, given AmeriKa's spying network one could argue that China is better than AmeriKa. 

**********************

Mooncakes are also involved in a peculiar form of tax evasion at Chinese offices....

‘‘The companies are happy because it’s a business tax write-off, the employees are happy because they get money and they don’t have to pay income tax,’’ said Shaun Rein, managing director of China Market Research Group in Shanghai. ‘‘If it’s a state-owned enterprise, it’s the laobaixing — the everyday Chinese — who are bearing the brunt of the costs for these illicit incomes.’’

It's the same in this country!

--more--"

Why don't you guys come on over?

"How Boston is wooing Chinese tourists; Check out our blue skies! Our pitch to a new stream of visitors spotlights some unexpected city virtues" by Leon Neyfakh |  Globe Staff, September 22, 2013

A group that is rapidly growing in size and economic importance all over the world: Chinese tourists.

Over the past several years, cities across America have entered into a strange and unprecedented competition to capture the interest of the world’s most lucrative and fastest-growing stream of travelers. With new wealth, new freedom, a smoother visa process, and the recent introduction of paid vacation days, Chinese tourists are flowing outward and spending huge amounts of money wherever they go.

************************

Not wanting to be left behind, the local tourism industry is trying to figure out what the city and the state can do to capitalize on the steroidal growth of the Chinese market. So far, this project has involved Massport lobbying airline operators to introduce a direct flight from China to Logan Airport, and the Massachusetts Office of Travel and Tourism running seminars for local hotel operators, retailers, and restaurateurs about the quirks of Chinese travelers—that they like warm soy milk at breakfast, for instance, and appreciate it when their rooms come with complimentary slippers and instant noodle cups in the minibar. 

No dairy?

Related: 9/11 Memory Hole: Line at Logan 

Hey, maybe you will find love there.

But at the heart of this campaign is the task of projecting a “Boston brand” that will stand out from America’s other cities and attractions, reflecting the city’s special features in a way that appeals specifically to the Chinese.

**********************

Boston, compared to smog-choked cities like Beijing, feels profoundly peaceful and healthy.

Related: Clearing Out the Chinese Smog

“Bostonians take all of this for granted, all the great parks and the greenery and the waterfront and the Harbor Islands and the blue sky,” said Pat Moscaritolo, the president of the Greater Boston Convention and Visitors Bureau, a nonprofit that works with Sunshine Travel to attract Chinese travelers and promote Boston to Chinese tour operators. He added: “It’s a huge contrast to how people in Beijing and Shanghai live their lives.”

The competition is stiff, as cities around the country scramble to create images of themselves deliberately tailored for the Chinese market. Together, they are conjuring a vision of America, and what it has to offer. 

I've kind of had it with illusions, imagery, and elitism from my regional flagshit. This paper is not being written for people like me.

***

On a recent night in August, a group of about 15 Chinese journalists gathered in the backyard of the city-owned Parkman House, enjoying some wine before a “Taste of New England”-themed dinner. The next day, they would travel to Plymouth, and the day after that, Cape Cod. “Every one of these international visitors is a walking stimulus package!” exclaimed Moscaritolo, who helped plan the trip in hopes of inspiring the journalists to publish stories telling their readers to come to New England.

Not that I'm against tourism or anything, but the $ole focu$ of my paper is making me $ick. 

I guess there is no poverty in China. Where did they go right where we went wrong, huh?

Right now, that is not what most Chinese tourists do when they visit America. Instead—as part of large, organized tour groups—they tend to fly into New York or California, which have direct flights connecting them to Beijing and Shanghai, and which attract by far the largest share of the Chinese tourists bound for the United States.

Related: Slow Saturday Special: Runway Murder

Sort of fell off the radar screen, didn't it?

From there, travelers take buses to see as many nearby sites as they can, often at a breakneck pace. Boston tends to be nothing more than a daylong interlude on the bus tour from New York, with visitors disembarking in Cambridge to see Harvard and MIT before continuing on their journeys.

Those sorts of visits brought in a little less than $300 million last year, according to a report commissioned by the Greater Boston Convention and Visitors Bureau. But in order to get Chinese people to stay longer in Boston and New England—to stay in the city’s hotels and eat at its restaurants for multiple days and nights, then make short trips to other parts of the region—the first order of business, according to Moscaritolo, is convincing an airline to start running a direct flight from China to Logan Airport.

***************************

It’s not just Boston that wants their business, of course: Across the country, a map is emerging of city-specific pitches engineered to the enthusiasms and preferences of the imagined Chinese tourist. In Chicago, emphasis is placed on Michael Jordan and Derrick Rose—massive stars in China, where basketball is popular—as well as the University of Chicago’s record of producing Nobel Prize winners. Seattle uses a popular Chinese romantic comedy that was set there, “Beijing Meets Seattle,” as a marketing hook.

I'm done with breakfast.

“Houston has worked the market very hard from a Jeremy Lin—Yao Ming angle,” said
 Bruce Bommarito, a longtime tourism consultant fluent in Mandarin who has been helping Boston navigate the Chinese market. “Hawaii does very well because of its proximity. Florida is starting to grow, particularly Orlando and Miami, because the Chinese like cruise ships and they like the mouse.” Other cities, meanwhile, “are still in the process of finding their story to tell, or are even still in the process to understand that they need one,” according to Wolfgang Georg Arlt, a professor of tourism in Germany and founder of a research firm that publishes reports on trends in Chinese tourism.

In Boston, the trick has been figuring out what the city can offer besides a chance to visit the educational mecca of Cambridge—a big draw, but not enough to convince tourists to stay here more than a day or two.

??????? With all the wonderful sites the Globe is always telling me about? 

And there is that word again.

*******************************

Some things are obvious. It’s well known, for instance, that Chinese travelers love to shop, because the steep sales tax in China makes luxury goods so much more expensive there. But others are more surprising: American history, it turns out, is of great interest, which makes Boston’s unique role in it a major selling point. “One point I try to market is that Boston is one of the oldest cities in America,” said Jolin Zhou, who moved to Boston from China in 2006 and works at a company called Sunshine Travel Services, adding that many Chinese people don’t realize that historical events they learned about in school, like the landing of the Mayflower, took place near Boston. Part of Zhou’s pitch, for that reason, is that “Boston is the birthplace of liberty and freedom.”

And the shelter-in-place Marathon lock-down put you to shame. 

As for the history I was taught, ugh. The Jewish narrative if history and all its distortions.

Then there’s the nature angle, which positions Boston as a place with fresh air and a gateway to New England, where visitors can enjoy the rolling hills and foliage, go whale-watching, eat fresh lobster, and hike through national parks. That Boston offers such easy access to nature appeals to Chinese tourists looking for respite from the atmosphere back home: “If you consider how polluted, how thick, the air in Beijing and Shanghai is, you will understand this,” said Yang Xiao, a reporter for Southern People Weekly, who arrived in Boston on a Nieman Fellowship just a month ago. Since then Xiao has visited Walden Pond, and is planning a trip to Maine; even being here for a little while, he said, “changes the air in your lungs.”

The outdoors is already part of Chinese travel habits: Domestically, tourists spend occasional weekends relaxing in small farm towns, and if they have more vacation time, they go to Tibet, the Yunnan province, or Thailand.

***********************

In light of China’s growing concerns about pollution, Boston looks practically like a spa destination, a city defined by good health. Adding to this impression are its world-class hospitals.

***

Could Boston, with its traffic jams and barely swimmable Charles River, really develop a reputation in China as a place to go for curative greenery and relaxation?

Related: A snarl in Seaport District’s success story

And I was told the Charles was fine.

************************

The nature of these pitches demonstrates that the appeal of America isn’t always what Americans assume it is. In some ways, we’re an older economy now than China, and visitors from a land of towering apartment buildings and levitating trains will be less surprised by our gleaming skyscrapers than they are charmed by our old-fashioned parks, our bodies of water, and the height restrictions in our neighborhoods.

**********************

From that perspective, Bostonians have more to gain from Chinese tourists—and from our campaign to woo them—than just taxes on luxury goods. By looking at our home through outsiders’ eyes, we notice what might move someone to travel halfway around the world to see it.

Nobody knows what it's like.... 

--more--" 

I like seeing Chinese around here. So cute in their groups.

Related: Sunday Globe Special: House Hunting in Boston

Look who they are pushing out:

"Chinatown residents fear being pushed out" by Nikita Lalwani |  Globe Correspondent, September 07, 2013

Long Lin moved with his parents to Boston’s Chinatown six years ago from Guangzhou, China, a densely populated trading port. They settled in the immigrant-heavy neighborhood because “it felt like home.”

**********************

Lin, whose parents speak little English, worries what would happen if they were forced to move

In AmeriKa? 

It’s a fear that looms large in Chinatown, where developers, capitalizing on the neighborhood’s proximity to downtown, are building new luxury apartments, and residents are becoming casualties of increased property values and rents....

It is a story unfolding in ethnic neighborhoods in big cities across the country, said Mark Huppert, a senior director of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

The fate of one tattered building, at 25 Harrison Ave., offers a case study of the past and future of Chinatown.

**************************

Easier to stay than leave

Chinatown traces its roots to the late 1870s, when Irish workers went on strike at a shoe factory in North Adams. Chinese workers, who accepted lower wages, were brought in from San Francisco to replace the Irish, and, when the contracts of Chinese laborers expired, many migrated to Boston to find more work, historians believe. They settled around Beach Street, where rent was known to be low.

It is what is happening now with immigration work visas.

Once settled, it was easier to stay than to leave, especially because racial discrimination kept them out of predominantly white neighborhoods. 

That has always been a stain on AmeriKa; the hatred of the Asian.

But when the Central Artery was built in the 1950s, construction displaced hundreds of families. And more were forced out in the next few decades by urban renewal and the expansion of Tufts Medical Center. Large Chinese communities arose in Quincy, Cambridge, Malden, and elsewhere.


They had one, too?

“Entities were grabbing land in Chinatown, and families and businesses were being pushed out by the hundreds,” said Thomas Chen, a Tufts University lecturer who serves on the board of the Chinese Progressive Association and is writing his dissertation on the history of Boston’s Chinatown. “It’s the historical context for what’s happening now.”

The influx of high-end developers in Chinatown is a relatively new phenomenon, said Sheila Dillon, director and chief of housing for the Department of Neighborhood Development.

****************************

Many families in Chinatown make even less. So the federal government subsidizes housing with Section 8 vouchers: The family spends 30 percent of its income on rent, and the federal government makes up the difference.... 

What?

--more--"