Shanghai (CNN) — The only souvenir that Xie Jinghua has from her stay at a Holiday Inn Express located in a vast tourism park alongside the East China Sea is a room key.

The 52-year-old said she was not able to buy any of the beach toys in the lobby, walk around a lake nearby, or enjoy the ocean just outside of her window. Xie was there, she said, because she was forced to be – held in a hotel room for eight days after she and her 56-year-old husband, Ma Haiming, traveled to Beijing in March to protest the compensation they were given for the demolition of the family’s farmhouse to make way for the expansion of Shanghai’s Pudong International Airport in 2005. When the couple arrived in Beijing, Xie said they were picked up by plain clothes police and forced to travel hundreds of miles back to Shanghai, then held separately at the hotel.

“I really felt quite sick inside,” said Xie, who now lives in a tiny apartment near the airport where her son works as a janitor. Xie said she tried to escape from her third floor hotel room on March 10 via its balcony but was stopped by at least seven guards who, she said, “put me on the bed and used the bedspread” to hold her down. She said she stole the room key when a guard was not looking.

Xie and her husband were not alone. Three other people have told CNN they were held against their will at the Holiday Inn Express Nanhuizui – located in Lingang New City on the outskirts of Shanghai – to keep them from airing grievances to the central government during the 10-day annual meeting of China’s legislature in March. The hotel management and owners deny their claims.

But people being detained without charge is nothing new in China, according to Human Rights Watch, which says authorities use hotels, homeless shelters, mental health facilities, farmhouses and obscure government compounds as so-called “black jails” — unofficial prisons where Chinese officials hold citizens without charge.

However activists say this is the first time a facility run by a western company has been allegedly used for these unofficial detentions.

“I have not come across an American branded hotel being used as a black jail,” said Phelim Kine, a senior Asia researcher with the New York-based Human Rights Watch. “That is a first, and it is noteworthy.”

The InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG), the UK-based firm that owns the Holiday Inn Express brand, said there was no indication that guests at the hotel were being held against their will last March.

“We have found no evidence which would confirm these accusations or any sign that the hotel owner knew or cooperated with (the) government on this hotel stay and the hotel is operated in accordance with PRC [People's Republic of China] local laws and regulations,” IHG said in a statement, noting that it had conducted a “thorough investigation” of the allegations. “As you’ll appreciate, we can’t provide details of the booking or guests due to privacy laws.”

‘Black jails’ in China

According to a 2009 Human Rights Watch report on China’s alleged “black jails,” local courts often refuse to take cases from residents who have complaints against local officials, which means petitioning Beijing is the only option those residents have.

But their trips to Beijing present a major problem for local officials, who face demotions or other forms of retribution from higher levels of government based on the number of petitioners who come to Beijing, according to Human Rights Watch. As a result, local governments intervene, abducting the petitioners either before they leave or once they arrive in Beijing, Kine said.

The forced detention of dissidents has become its own cottage industry as public security offices subcontract people to work for them who “are paid per head for each person that they abduct and hold,” Kine added. “This is a huge grey economy.”

As Communist Party officials meet this week to decide China’s new leadership, outside will be people like Wang Yifeng and Fan Jianjiang who are petitioning government leaders directly for compensation after the demolition of their homes. Both Wang and Fan are among the five interviewed by CNN who said they attempted to make their case last March, but were intercepted by police who took them into custody and held them in the Holiday Inn Express Nanhuizui.

Human rights groups say detentions without charge are common, particularly during times of central government meetings. “We always expect that around significant political events that there will be a tightening of surveillance and control over key individuals who the government considers to be troublemakers,” said Catherine Baber, director of Asia Pacific for Amnesty International. “But certainly in the lead up to the transition, there is a growing list of people who are under house arrest.”

“Phenomenal resources are used for keeping tabs on [petitioners],” Baber said. “Detaining them and bringing them back, putting them under surveillance, sending them to reeducation through labor [camps].”

A spokeswoman for IHG said that during the time in question a group of rooms were booked by a government official from the Pudong district of Shanghai. That area is home to the five alleged detainees. They say their movements are constantly monitored by security officials in their home district after years of appealing for better compensation for their properties. According to the five, local officials have either intercepted them before they arrived in Beijing to make their petitions or tracked them down in the capital and sent them on the 665-mile journey back to the Shanghai area, where they were held.

An official at the Petition Bureau of Zhuqiao Town, home of the five petitioners, denied their claims. “I don’t know what you are talking about, our channels of petitioning are open,” said the official, who declined to give his name when he was reached by phone. “There’s no such thing.”

CNN contacted China’s Ministry of Public Security on November 5 for a response to these claims, but there has not yet been a reply. However, in the past, Beijing has denied the existence of so-called “black jails” in China. The central government also last year issued new regulations outlawing violent forced eviction and offering new protections, including fair compensation.

‘Violent forced evictions’

But rights groups say problems remain. “Violent forced evictions in China are on the rise as local authorities seek to offset huge debts by seizing and then selling off land in suspect deals with property developers,” according to an October report by Amnesty International, called “Standing Their Ground.”

The 85-page report also said there is ineffective redress for Chinese citizens like Xie and her husband, who – without cash to hire legal help – petition the central government directly with local grievances that range from allegations of illegal land seizures and forced evictions to corruption and abuse from local authorities. They often face weeks or sometimes years of forced detentions without charge, human rights groups say.

“From our research and research from domestic Chinese human rights [groups], they are held from a few days to several months and routinely subjected to physical abuse, sleep deprivation and very often they have to buy their way out of custody,” Kine said. “The government has denied there are any such black jail facilities in China. Even though [Chinese] state media run stories about black jails, there is an official disconnect.”

Baber at Amnesty International said it is hard to quantify the number of people who are detained illegally in China, but “it is a large phenomenon,” she said. “Just from the volume of people who put their energies into pursuing petitioning and continue to do so. It will be a large problem still.”

Petitioner: Kept under guard

Xie said there were several guards posted outside of her Holiday Inn Express room and two women who were living in the room with her whose job was to monitor her.

She said while held at the hotel, she was told she would be given “classes about petitioner regulations.” But there were no classes, she added. Xie took a reporter to the hotel to show where she was allegedly detained. The rooms were neatly furnished, with a flat screen TV and abstract art hanging on the walls.

When the front desk worker was asked whether they were aware people had allegedly been held against their will in the hotel, the employee said there were a number of guests who were staying in their rooms and were not leaving, and there were people standing outside their room, but that they had no idea why.

IHG said they interviewed all employees at the hotel in June after being first contacted by CNN, none of whom confirmed this story. A review of hotel security tapes was impossible, the hotel said, because recordings are erased after one month. The hotel had the employees sign affidavits attesting to their version of events, a hotel spokeswoman said.

“IHG is committed to operating our company with integrity and we have a Human Rights Policy applicable across the business. We have signed up to the UN Global Compact, aligning our operations and strategies with the ten universal principles that include commitments to human rights and labor standards,” IHG said in its statement. “Our staff is trained to handle different situations and were a situation to arise, our staff would report an incident to the relevant authorities and IHG.”

China has become a leading market for the InterContinental Hotels Group, which owns the Holiday Inn Express, Intercontinental and Crowne Plaza brands. Greater China led its first half, with a 9.7% increase in revenue per available rooms. IHG, headquartered outside London, generates revenue from 181 hotels in greater China, with plans to open 160 more hotels, according to the company.

IHG’s local partner in the hotel is Shanghai Harbor City Hotel Investment and Management Co.– a subsidiary of Shanghai Harbor City Development Group. Like most of IHG’s properties in China, a local partner legally owns the hotel but IHG manages the property. Zhu Gang, a manager with Shanghai Harbor City Development, said the company “knows nothing about” people being detained at the Holiday Inn Express. “No violence happened in the hotel,” he said.

http://edition.cnn.com/2012/11/14/business/china-hotel-black-jail/index.html

By Lara Farrar and Kevin Voigt, CNN

Photo and Researched by Jack Zhang

Just down the street from Fudan University, one of the top colleges in China, and across from a massive shopping complex that has a Wal Mart, a couple of Starbucks and KFCs, H&M, Sephora and Zara, among other Western brands, lives Feng Zhenghu who for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week is barred from leaving his home.

In 2009, Feng garnered international media attention when he lived in Tokyo’s Narita Airport for several months after the Chinese government repeatedly stopped him from entering the country. He eventually was allowed to return to his apartment in Shanghai in 2010 and since then has faced random detentions in his home, which is also regularly searched for contraband by police.

“I don’t know if there is any surveillance in my house, and I don’t care,” said Feng who is reachable via mobile in his apartment, which is just a couple of buildings away from mine in a complex that has a fish pond, palm trees and a playground. “My phone is recorded, my computer has been taken. They can come to my house anytime without notice as they please. I have no privacy at all, and it is all public to them.”

Feng has become an enemy of the state for the work that he does to educate petitioners about their rights under Chinese law.

China has hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, of petitioners, or people who file grievances with the government against local officials for abuses ranging from corruption to forced land acquisition. They are usually poor, which means they cannot hire lawyers to help them solve their cases, which are also rarely ever heard in local courts. This means that most petitioners make dozens of trips to Shanghai over the course of many years to try to find someone powerful in the central government to help them find justice. Most never find any help at all.

The dissident has made it his mission to push local courts to not dismiss cases from petitioners as well as help petitioners write court documents or other papers outlining their particular complaints. And for this, he has lost his freedom.

In the beginning, when I moved into my apartment back in 2010, the security apparatus was barely noticeable. There were always some random men who looked like the type of men who might be found late at night in a stale diner in a casino in Atlantic City. Thuggish. Gold chains. Greasy hair. One had a broken arm.

They would sit at the gate and smoke. After a while, they started talking to me. Offering me cigarettes. I would stand around and chat about America. It was a good way to practice Chinese. I thought they were part of the complex’s management team. Once I asked what they did, and they replied that just had some sort of random business to do in the neighborhood. I thought nothing of it. Nor, it seemed, did anyone else who lived around me.

I discovered who the men were and why they were there only a few months ago when a Chinese friend of mine who worked for a foreign news agency came to interview Feng. The police arrived to stop him and the foreign reporter from entering Feng’s building so they came to my apartment for tea. Since then, I have been in touch with Feng via phone to ask him some questions surrounding some stories I have been working on about black jails in China and to ask him about what it is like to be in prison in his home.

“If I escape, those guards, the local public security bureau chief, the district governor, all of them will lose their jobs,” he said. “I have been with them for two years, and I understand them. It is also hard for them, so I don’t want to try to run away. Summer is coming, and I worry for them. The sun and mosquitoes are coming, and they have to stay outside. It is a pretty hard life for them as it is for me.”

Since the blind Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng dramatically escaped from house arrest in a rural village in northern Shandong Province at the end of April, the layers of security surrounding my apartment complex have multiplied. The guards are still at the gate. But now there are more who hang around all day near the entryway to Feng’s building. There are new security cameras by the entrance. This week, new ultra bright lights were installed on the grounds.

And now in front of Feng’s building is a police car round-the-clock. I walk by it everyday. On my way to go buy coffee or cigarettes or a newspaper, I peer inside the tinted windows where I see bored officers watching something on their mobile phones. The car is always on. Sometimes there are people sitting in the backseat. Sometimes there are not. Sometimes everyone inside is asleep. Sometimes they sit outside a small tea shop and watch me pass. One night, one even said hello.

Back in April, before the police car arrived out front, my news assistant and I called Feng early one morning. We said we would come to see him from the street. He walked to his window and briefly peered outside. We snapped a photo. He dropped us a package with a note that said he is allowed to walk outside in the afternoon for half an hour for fresh air, and that maybe we could see him then.

Via phone, Feng told us that, unable to take the constant surveillance, his wife has moved to Germany.

“My life has become worse after her departure,” Feng said. “I cannot even go out to buy food. I rely on visitors to bring me food, and I cook a lot at once, and just eat the leftovers for meals.”

Georgie is a neighbor who visits Feng when he is let out of his apartment in the afternoons. Over the years, Georgie has developed a rapport with the guards, which now number at nearly 20 or so. He says they are migrant workers from provinces around Shanghai and make a couple thousand yuan per month to monitor the dissident. When Feng is let out, he talks to the guards about current events or cooking.

They talk about “how to stay healthy or what kind of television they are watching or how to cook fish. That was yesterday’s topic,” said Georgie who requested his full name not be disclosed out of fear that he would no longer be able to visit Feng anymore.

“Some of them, they have a good relationship [with Feng],” he said. “The guards just consider this as any other job.”

The degree to which my neighbors are aware that their neighbor is a dissident who is in prison in his home is unclear. There are daily rhythms of life here. Cars come and go. Children play soccer outside. Elderly men walk their dogs. Women sit around the fish pond and chat in the evenings. Every time I enter the gate, I look left towards Feng’s apartment and wonder what he is doing, whether he will ever get out and whether, for me, if it would have been better to never know that he was there at all.

“They are very worried right now that in Shandong a blind person could escape such heavy security,” Feng said. “They afraid that I might run away too, and then they will lose their jobs. So their days are not easy right now.”

By Lara Farra

Special thanks to Jack Zhang for helping with translation and legwork for this blog post.

Shanghai, China (CNN) — Since the high-profile escape of a blind Chinese activist in April, life has become worse for Feng Zhenghu, a dissident who lives in an apartment on the outskirts of this Chinese metropolis.

Feng, 57, is a human rights activist who garnered international media attention after living for three months in Tokyo’s Narita Airport in 2009 while the Chinese government repeatedly stopped him from returning to the country. He has been living in Shanghai under house arrest for more than two years.

Since Chen Guangcheng, the blind dissident, dramatically escaped from home confinement in northern Shandong Province, the layers of security around Feng’s apartment have multiplied. “They are very worried right now that in Shandong a blind person could escape such heavy security,” said Feng, who ran afoul with authorities for his work helping people fight forced land evictions in China. “They are afraid I might run away too, and then they [security officials] will all lose their jobs. Their days are not easy right now.”

Now, not one, but two police cars sit in front of his apartment everyday, all day. New security cameras and bright lights have been installed at the gate of the complex where Feng lives. There are more than a dozen guards watching him around-the-clock instead of only four or five guards in the past.

Feng, who is reachable via cellphone in his apartment, says that he is “living evidence” that government officials have become increasingly paranoid that other dissidents, too, might find a way to escape. “[After Chen Guangcheng's escape], they even sent somebody to the roof of my apartment building to check if I could go to the roof,” Feng said.

“They can come to my home anytime without notice as they please. I have no privacy. I don’t know why the government thinks I am such a threat and a demon and is so angry by my behavior.”

Chen, who sought refuge in the United States Embassy in Beijing after his escape and is now in New York City, has detailed how he and his family — who were forced to stay in a farmhouse in the Shandong Province for 19 months — faced brutal treatment from local authorities.

In its annual report on global human rights last month, the U.S. State Department said there’d been a “deterioration in key aspects of human rights” in China, including detentions without charge. Beijing countered with a report of its own, criticizing the high level of gun violence in the U.S. and the country’s military action overseas. “The United States’ own tarnished human rights record has made it in no condition, on moral, political or legal basis, to act as the world’s ‘human rights justice,’ to place itself above other countries and release the Country Reports on Human Rights Practices,” said the report, released by China’s State Council Information Office.

Zakaria: China calls out ‘overcritical’ U.S.

Feng is “one of countless individuals who suffer this same kind of abuse and indignity” in China, said Phelim Kine, a senior Asia researcher with the New York-based Human Rights Watch.

Zheng Enchong, a human rights attorney, has been under house arrest in Shanghai since he was released from prison in 2006, Kine said. Liu Xia, the wife of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, “has disappeared,” Kine said. After rights activist Hu Jia was released from a 42-month prison sentence for state subversion, he and his wife, Zeng Jinyan, have been under constant surveillance in Beijing, according to Human Rights Watch.

“It is absolutely appalling. It should not be happening. It goes against any semblance of conception of rule of law, which is part of the Chinese government’s mantra,” Kine said.

“You can bet the order that has gone out is clamp down on everyone so that there are no more Chen Guangchengs, no one is stepping out of line. It is only going to get worse in the months ahead,” he added, referring to once-a-decade transfer of leadership at the top. President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao are both in their final year of office.

Feng’s situation is not dissimilar to Chen’s, but it is different. Chen’s detainment was in a rural village while Feng’s third-floor apartment is across from a mega shopping mall with a couple of Starbucks, a Kentucky Fried Chicken, Wal-Mart, H&M and other Western brands. His home is also just down the street from Fudan University, one of China’s top colleges, where Feng studied.

Unable to deal with the constant surveillance, Feng’s wife recently left for Germany. “The police come all of the time without notice and just take whatever stuff they want,” he said. “I don’t have many things left for them to take, but they are here to give me pressure and make me feel insecure. It is no different than prison to me.”

The only instance of violence Feng has encountered with his guards was an argument over the right to go outside to get fresh air, he said.

“I asked them many times, but they still would not let me,” Feng said. “So I rushed out my door and one guy tried to stop me. We fell together and rolled down the stairs. We both were hurt very badly. My knee was injured, and I had to stay in bed for a week.”

Feng is now allowed to go outside every afternoon for half an hour.

Besides fighting for time outside, Feng also fights boredom. A neighbor who visits the dissident when he is outside in the afternoon said that Feng and his guards usually talk about cooking, what is hot on television and how to stay healthy.

“How to cook fish, that was yesterday’s topic,” said the neighbor, who requested he only be identified by his English name, Georgie. “The subjects are very broad, and also the information that Feng Zhenghu can get is very limited, so they are one of the sources for him to know the news.”

Asked by a reporter, the guards wouldn’t comment on why they are here. Police in Yangpu District, which is where Feng lives, directed CNN inquiries to the press office of the Shanghai police. Calls to that office went unanswered.

Feng’s neighbor said that most of the guards are migrant workers from provinces around Shanghai and make about 1,700 yuan ($266) per month. “It is just another job for them, a way for them to earn money,” he said.

“If I escape, the guards, the local public security bureau chief, the district governor, they will all lose their jobs,” Feng said. “I have been with them for two years, and I understand them. It is also hard for them, so I don’t try to run away. It is a pretty hard life for them as it is for me.”

He added: “If I ever get free, I will stay in Shanghai and continue defending the law. That is my life-long work.”

By Lara Farrar, for CNN

watch it on youtube.

allegedly @pearlher He Peirong helped him, and she was arrest in Nanjing today.

Plainclothes henchmen attacked journalists from two European news organizations on Wednesday as they investigated land grab protests that began earlier this month in the Zhejiang village of Panhe, according to Shanghaiist:

France 24′s Baptiste Fallevoz and his Chinese fixer Jack Zhang tell Shanghaiist they were driving toward the village when they noticed a black car following them. After trying to evade the car and failing, they decided to just ignore it and continue towards the village.

As they approached Panhe, they passed four or five cars parked on the shoulder with men waiting nearby. They saw the men answer their cell phones, hurry into their cars, and join the black car behind them. When Zhang gradually slowed down for a truck crossing in front of them, they were suddenly hit from behind.

About 20-30 plainclothes thugs then surrounded their car and pulled Zhang out, trying to grab his video camera from him (he was not filming at the time). When they got the camera, they threw it on the ground and smashed it in front of him. They then continued to attempt to attack Zhang, hitting him on the head with the camera until he started bleeding.

The second journalist, Remko Tanis from the Netherlands, had a similar encounter before escaping to Wenzhou to write his story. Tanis’ photos from Flickr are regularly featured on CDT. The Committee to Protect Journalists interviewed Tanis about the attack.

The land dispute in Panhe dates back several years, according to The Global Times, when local officials began to gradually seize villagers’ land and sell it to property developers. Villagers elected representatives to negotiate with the government and demand compensation last summer, and say they have received nothing despite claims by some that the settlement payments are in process. The Global Times reported today that the protests had come to an end after security forces detained several people, according to locals:

Two villagers, Lü Xisi, 49, and Lü Yangyu, in his 40s, were taken away by “plainclothes agents” on Wednesday night and yesterday morning respectively, according to a 51-year-old Panhe villager surnamed Lü,

Three protests over land disputes were staged on February 1, 3 and 5. Several dozens of people who took part were detained on Tuesday, local villagers told the Global Times.

According to a notice issued by the a local official news website, the local authorities have paid close attention to the land dispute since the first protest.

A team was soon established by the county government to investigate. The team met with village representatives to address any reasonable demands made, the notice said.

But a few villagers incited others to destroy public property and establish roadblocks, which seriously disrupted social order. Three suspects had been arrested in connection with these events Wednesday, according to the notice.

Observers have referred to the ongoing situation in Panhe as “Wukan 2.0,” after protesters said they modeled their tactics after the Guangdong village which evicted local Communist Party authorities over similar complaints late last year.

Read more about foreign correspondents in China and about violence against journalists, via CDT.

Walk into Southern Belle on a Wednesday night and you’ll probably see 28-year-old Tom Pang sitting alone on the terrace smoking. He doesn’t have a band, there’s no upright bass or banjo in his set, but Pang strums Shanghai’s best bluegrass.

Born and raised in Inner Mongolia, Pang was a troublemaker. His father thought it might keep him in line if he had something stationary to study, so he arranged for a famous violin teacher to visit. Pang was so impressed that he begged for lessons. At age 19 he enrolled in a music university in the provincial capital, Hohhot. Everyone thought he was going to play in a national orchestra one day.

But in 2001 the local rock scene was up and coming and Pang was paying attention. He’d begun hanging out with American exchange students. He complained to friend and fellow musician Liu Shen that he was bored playing the same classical stuff over and over. Then an American gave him a CD by folk trio Nickel Creek and Pang immediately fell in love.

“It was like there was a vast field that expands in all directions and I was standing on a country road in the middle of it. It was so peaceful, so beautiful,” he says.

Pang wanted to learn mandolin, but he couldn’t find one. Hohhot only had a handful of music shops, and none of the owners had even heard of the instrument. Luckily, a friend was opening an import store. The friend called his supplier in Japan and ordered two mandolins. Tom spent all his savings to buy one – no one ever bought the second.

“Last year I went back home, I saw the other mandolin was still hanging there, just the same as nine years ago when I left,” he says, grinning.

Internet was hard to come by in Hohhot at that time, and bluegrass was nowhere to be found. So to learn Pang listened to what little country music he could find – like John Denver’s ‘Take me Home Country Road’ – and played mandolin over the guitar part. After practicing for seven months, Pang and Liu moved to Hangzhou to start performing.

“In Hangzhou I learned how to play some parts of bluegrass songs, but not the whole thing. Because I was just learning from song samples played on iTunes,” Pang says. They stayed in Hangzhou a year and moved to Shanghai in 2005, looking for a bigger crowd.

Eventually Liu moved on, but Pang has been at it ever since. Shanghai isn’t exactly the Promised Land for bluegrass. Apart from twice-weekly shows with guitarist Jeff Davis, owner of Beedees, Pang doesn’t have many other gigs so money is tight.

Pang craves likeminded musicians, but Shanghai has few to offer. Even Davis says Pang wears him out when they perform together, as he’s always ready to play one more and then one more, even for a small audience.

Pang wishes he had the resources to bring together experienced musicians for a serious bluegrass act. “The only problem is money, but maybe I’ll be lucky enough to find patrons who share the same vision and have the dough.”

“Sometimes Tom will cry while he plays this song,” Davis says one night at Southern Belle before they start to strum ‘Csárdás,’ a Hungarian folk dance. The piece starts slow and works into a frenzied crescendo. Tom closes his eyes and lowers his head. Shanghai might be an unlikely home for a dedicated folkster, but his audience is rapt.

See Tom play
Wednesdays, 8pm at Southern Belle
Sundays, 8pm at Beedees

One man’s barbershop trimmings are another man’s industrial protein. And it’s 31-year-old Jiangsu native Wang Wei’s job to get the hair off the floor and to the factory.

When he first began collecting, Wang used to scratch a lot, but he’s been at it for more than 14 years now and a few stray strands no longer make him itchy. Which is good – he works from home, and rivulets of black hair run through every crack in the concrete.

Wang lives with his wife and son in a ramshackle migrant village in Zhabei District. Their rent is RMB350, and they pay an extra 20 kuai for the shed where they store 25 kg sacks of hair. Wang reckons there are more than 100 collectors in his village, while Pudong and Qingpu District have their own hair-collecting villages.

“Competition isn’t too bad,” Wang says. The industry isn’t very well known. With his wife’s help, he can usually make about RMB7,000 per month.

Wang sets off around 8am every day, unless it’s raining (you can’t sort wet hair). Some of the bigger collectors have cars or vans, but Wang rides his motorcycle on his rounds of Shanghai’s salons, looking to buy hair swept off the floor for about 6 kuai per kilo. On a good day he’ll return with 100 kg, on a bad one he’ll get half that. His biggest hauls are just before Spring Festival, since everyone gets their hair cut before the new year.

In the afternoon he returns home and he and his wife set about fishing all the paper, q-tips, cigarette butts and trash out of the tangles. They also separate long hairs from short. Wang says he can work through about 50 kg of hair per hour.

Long hair sells for more since it’s made into wigs and exported, mainly to Africa and the United States. The short hairs go to a factory where they’re distilled to make amino acids for industrial use, including manufacture of cosmetics, pharmaceuticals and food additives (the government banned soy sauce made from human hair several years ago after unsanitary distilleries were uncovered in Hubei Province).
Wang and his neighbors wait until they’ve collected several tons of hair, then a factory in Nantong sends a truck for it. Fan Guohua, the 43-year-old factory owner, is from the same part of Jiangsu as Wang. He too began as a collector and now has more than 20 employees and can make up to RMB500,000 per year processing hair, he says, although business was better at the height of the global financial crisis when everything was cheap.

Wang doesn’t have any designs on following in Fan’s footsteps, not yet at least. “If someone comes along that wants to promote me that would be good,” he says, “but for now I’m just concentrating on the job I have.”

By Leslie Jones, Fixed by Jack Zhang

Just a small clip of how to be Ai weiwei’s creditor.

If you have taobao:fakesheji@gmail.com
If you have paypal:fakesheji@gmail.com
If you have cash and near Construction Bank of China: 中国建设银行北京市分行前门支行幸福大街储蓄所 6222 8000 1013 1006 244 刘艳萍
If you have western union or the like: 北京朝阳区崔各庄乡草场地村258号 100015 路青收

Leave your phone number and email address, so you could be found by Ai when he is able to pay you back!

And his newest work: Enforced Disappearance

The friend who invited me to Huaxi’s 50th anniversary first advertised the weekend as some kind of helicopter festival: “Hey free helicopter rides, wanna go?” First instinct: No thanks, don’t want to die in China. But then he told me it was Huaxi, now internationally renowned as “China’s Richest Village” and home to one of the tallest buildings in the country, a state-of-the-art medical hospital, a fake Great Wall, and 2,000 super wealthy villagers all living in huge houses with luxury cars.

I was interested mostly in going to see for myself which rumors about the village were true. Did they really all have mansions? Did everybody make over $60,000 USD per year? To make that money did they have to work seven days a week? Was it really the ideal communist model village, the pinnacle of socialism gone right?

The trip is a short hour and a half drive north of Shanghai (or only an hour if your driver decides 100mph is a reasonable speed on China’s roads at night.) Our driver told us he was from Da Huaxi, meaning the areas surrounding the central village, where Huaxi has swallowed up multiple other small towns and now encompasses a population of about 50,000 people, give or take. And then I realized that looking only at hukou holders (the 2,000 loaded villa-dwellers) is a silly way to evaluate the town as a whole. The majority of the people living and working in the area aren’t part of this now-infamous social “experiment.”

The weekend itself was designed to impress upon us every awesome aspect of Huaxi, and there were plenty. Despite being somewhat ineptly handled upon arrival (we were supposed to stay with villagers, got passed from PR guy to PR guy, and finally fanoogled our way into the skyscraper hotel thanks to our incredibly capable and bullish fixer friend Jack) I was impressed with pretty much everything.

The houses really are villas, the staff at the Longwish hotel speak decent English and dress impeccably, the breakfast buffet was edible, and the helicopter ride was fucking sweet. And then there’s the renowned fake Great Wall, Arc de Triomphe, Tian’anmen Rostrum, Sydney Opera House, and what we heard was the White House but then found out was more like the Capital Building stacked on top of the White House and topped off with the Statue of Liberty. I like how these people think.

The invite for the 50th Anniversary ceremony (and for the opening of the 328-meter Longwish hotel) was an open invitation to all international media and I got that familiar feeling that they wanted us there less for our coverage and more for the status that foreign faces and media lend to the proceedings. In fact, everything in Huaxi seems designed to schmooze the up-and-ups (we can’t really imagine the hotel will see any substantial tourism, but it is perfect for government meetings.) We also noted that the ceremony’s hour-long speech proclaiming the town’s devotion to the environment, and their interest in transitioning to a more service-sector economy, all seemed cleverly in line with the 12th five-year plan.

For those of you unfamiliar with the place, the story goes like this: Local party secretary Wu Renbao caught the iron and steel industry on the upswing during China’s opening up, made a killing, brought all his fellow villagers into the business and made them all stakeholders. Believe what you will about his intentions. My personal conclusion is Wu Renbao is genius at crafting himself an elaborate safety network of villagers totally reliant on his business and his family for their incredibly comfortable livelihoods. He started from extreme poverty, and he claims that he simply wants his countrymen to enjoy an easier life than he did.

We were told by another driver that the deal for villagers works like this: If they hold a Huaxi hukou they are immediately entitled to a stake in Huaxi’s industries. Villagers are guaranteed something like an minimum income of 100,000RMB per year, but they can’t really spend it. They are obliged to take only a small percentage for themselves (our driver said around 15%) and the rest of the money must be re-invested in Huaxi. Later on, they can then begin to profit more substantially from interest on those investments, which they are allowed to keep for themselves.

We spent the majority of the weekend asking everybody we met whether they were villagers, and if so, what their job was. I’d say about half gave us murky answers at best. We got the distinct feeling that most of them don’t do much at all (and definitely no 7-day work weeks.)

The younger villagers we talked to said they were bored with their jobs but probably couldn’t advance much higher because they weren’t close enough to the Wu family. We also learned that no matter how great you are your job, you’ll never become management if you aren’t a Huaxi villager (a shame for the 20,000 non-locals working there.) You can begin to understand why some accuse the place of being one giant fiefdom structured around guanxi with the despot.

Depending on how you look at it, the village could be seen as representing the ideal socialist community where everybody “owns” the means of production, or just a successfully managed and profitable corporate infrastructure. It was probably that paradoxical communist-capitalist element that left us just as muddled when we left as when we arrived. But I will say this – all this business about a “Huaxi model” is probably nonsense. You can’t replicate the economic environment in China 30 years ago, nor the charisma of Wu Renbao. And they’ve been making billions for years now, but somehow this “model” hasn’t managed to extend beyond a tiny group of 2,000 shareholders? I’m not that impressed.

But one thing is clear: We went expecting to find at least some tarnish on an image as shiny as that one-ton golden ox sitting on the 60th floor of an empty skyscraper. We figured somebody must be exploited to pay for all the villas, BMWs, helicopters, medical facilities, and an 826-bedroom luxury hotel. But we left feeling like Huaxi was simply a lucky industry town run by a competent investor with solid policies and some good strategy. They make their money off the labor of thousands of migrant workers just like everywhere else, to whom they pay a slightly above average salary (3,000RMB average.) But as far as we could see, the system was on the level, and almost everybody we met seemed happy and proud of their village.
If you want to visit, buses certainly run from the Long Distance Bus Station (behind the Shanghai Railway Station) but there are no trains running that direction. But rates at the hotel start at 2,080RMB and quickly climb to this. Helicopter rides cost 1,000RMB for 15 minutes. In other words, unless you get in on their next big anniversary party, you should probably spend your money checking out the real Great Wall.

By Jessica Colwell, Shanghaiist.com

1

Chengdu, March, 2011. When I first meet Gan I was resting in front of a bank outside the Wuhouci with a friend as I chain smoked in the fresh Chengdu air. We were drinking whiskey and chatting about the Chengdu we had experienced that day: the swanky Bookworm, the open-aired spicy noodle shop, the enormous size of the dishes, the massive bowl of oil for dipping that they served at the hot-pot place.

That’s when a white passenger car stopped in front of us. The door slid open and Gan got out. Short and well-groomed, he wore a fake orange Northface fleece over the maroon monk robe reaching all the way to his ankles. He had white gym socks and a pair of orange shoes; resembling the standard cloth shoes that monks wear, but with one exception, a big white Adidas emblem on the heels.

Noticing us sitting there, he threw a friendly smile to me from the side pavement. I waved to him with a smile and he replied me another one. After several silent exchanges of expressions and signs, I invited him to come over and sit with us. Without hesitation, he walked over and sat next to me. I offered him a cigarette and then a pull of whiskey. He politely refused both while glancing curiously at the bottle. He told me that he thought I was Tibetan, confused by my savage style of roadside resting.

Earlier that evening, we had had dinner in a Sichuannese restaurant nearby. It was full of people, mostly Tibetan. Around one of the big round tables that you would see in just any other Chinese restaurant, sat three monks with their golden tall taper hats and maroon robes. They were joined by two middle aged Han-looking couples. There were plastic cups of beer in front of all of them and plenty of meat dishes scattered across the table, many of them unfamiliar to me but they looked promising. Cigarette smoke floated about the top of their hats, like mountains in the clouds. At that moment, they reminded me of all the fake monks sitting in the ‘commercialized’ temples all around China, whose life seems more like profession than a religion.

I asked my new monk friend about my confuse earlier in the restaurant, and he explained to me in simple conversational Mandarin: “Must not harm a life, but OK to accept an offer or have meat in a restaurant, or buy from a wet market and cook it for yourself.” He told me that there are three sacred rules of his branch that can’t be violated: No killing; No lies; No stealing. The others can be altered according to situations. “I already went again rituals by dressing up like this”, he pointed at his orange sweater that has the word ‘training’ on the back, “but it’s not a big deal.”

2

Interviewing a Tibetan monk has been a dream of mine for some time, so I was delighted when he said yes to my request. He chose Gan for a pseudonym.

We met the next day at three thirty outside the Wuhouci, as decided. He suggested we go to a tea house in Jinli nearby. It was Saturday, and the street was jammed by window-shoppingers. There was a wide range of products and services available, from candies to ear-picking.  I caught myself gawking like a typical tourist at each along the way.

I’ve lived in China for twenty one years and still can’t get used to the crowds. Meanwhile, Gan from the grassland of Sichuan, wasn’t fazed. He swayed and swung with the crowd, slowly but steadily moving towards the tea house. “I get used to the crowds in Lhasa. If you happen to be there on a ritual day, you will see a sea of people, it’s enormous compared to this.” Gan looks back with ease, his  broad shoulders dance a perfect rhythm with the wave of flesh in front of me.

The first thing Gan looked at after entering the tea house was the menu. Although I already said it would be on me, he jumped from the seat and stole the bill from me.

3

I learned that in 1982, Gan was born into a nomadic family in the Tibetan quarter  of Sichuan, close to the famous ‘tourist trap’ Jiu Zai Gou. He was the third child of five. His 30-year-old sister has now married, and his 30-something brother remains at home to help tend to the grazing, hunting and farming. His 26-year-old little brother makes a living as a singer in a Tibetan ‘bar’ in Lhasa.

When Gan was five, a monk from the nearby temple visited the family. He was an amiable old man and Gan really loved him. Gan’s family are serious followers, and his father had always wished to have a monk emerge from the family. Tibetan families are usually more than willing to offer their child to Buddhism (if they had more than one male child). It is because the respect that monks receive in Tibetan culture is tremendous and there is a growing shortage of monks to serve the nomadic people who scatter across the plains, Gan explain to me.

So when Gan’s father saw they got along so well, he asked Gan if he wanted to be taken away by the monk to join the temple. Gan agreed without hesitation, but the old monk refused to take such a young boy. He told the father that he would come again after Gan had grown a little older. He then bowed down and reassured Gan before leaving, “If you really want to be a Buddhist, no one can stop you.”

With his words in mind, Gan went to a Chinese preschool at the age of nine and joined the local temple three years later. After eight years of studying Buddhism, he followed his teacher to Lhasa for another three years. By the age of 18, Gan was a monk. That’s when he returned to his local temple. After three years of meditation training, he became a teacher for his temple.

4

Gan’s mission in Chengdu that day was to make fliers and an annual magazine for his temple. He spent a full day on a sleeping bus to get here. The magazine looks like a small note book with a thin color cover illustrating a temple in the grasslands. The writing inside was printed in black on smooth white paper, all in Tibetan. The design was simple and seems was done by a small print shop. He told me that all the articles inside were written by various converts explaining their grasps of the doctrine, mixed with life applications.

On the middle section of the flier, a picture of a big, smiling abbot siting on a chair was largely printed out under the portraits of two living Buddhas next to an old drawing of a Rinpoche  of Gan’s sect who lived on earth a thousand years ago.

I turned it over to find another picture of his temple sitting on flat grasslands at the foot of a mountain with hundreds of tents densely clustered around. Below the image was written the name and address of his temple in Chinese.

5

He told me that although the Tibetans value their language, they prefer to send their children to Chinese-oriented public schools. When faced with the choice between a Mandarin education and Tibetan education, most of the families will choose Mandarin. According to him it is a painfully misleading path for their children, but a concession parents make to ensure of their survival in an increasingly urban, Han-dominated world that threatens life on the grasslands.

According to Gan, most Tibetan youth in their 20s and 30s may have an undergraduate-level understanding of Chinese, but their Tibetan skills were left behind in primary school. It is becoming increasingly difficult to find young speakers of Tibetan these days.

Apart from the language problem, the quality of Tibetan-based education is also dropping fast. With the government support of the Han public schools, teachers in Tibetan schools usually earn significantly lower pay, and the schools have fewer resources to provide students.

6

As I write, China is cracking down on the voice of the subversive, the dissident, and in-harmonious. The freedom of speech is being squeezed, the security of the out-spoken is shaking with every disappearance, arrest, house arrest, and detention, especially in the case of Ai Weiwei, Tan Zhuoren and Gao Zhisheng…

“Unfortunately”, during the interview, our conversation inescapably went onto address the presence of the Chinese government in Tibet. A rough topic for both of us.

Since the birth of the new republic, Tibet’s economy has been developing at a stunning pace. Newly paved roads are lengthening; train tracks expanding all the way up to Lhasa; running water, electricity, gas and many other things that many families, nomadic and stationary, never used before, are now a reality. Welfare, healthcare, and accessible accommodation have also been provided to the Tibetan people. Urbanization, with all of its challenges and benefits, is now facing this once nomadic, grassland people.

But this is just one side of the coin. Gan’s family together makes around twenty thousands RMB annually, the same as twenty years ago, while inflation has sky-rocketed since. They had more than three hundred cows in 1983, but were forced to reduce their holdings by half under the name of ‘preventing environmental damage from large scale grazing’. The government were successful at mandating the policies’ implementation, but terrible at communication and PR.

“Such a big plain, how can 150 cows eat all the grass? Compare to the felling and the farming the government is doing, our way of life is much more in line with mother nature. I think they just wanted to force us to move into the city, so it would be easier for them to ‘stabilize society’,” he told me.

But this is not what annoys him the most. The fading of Tibetan culture and language caused by waves of Han migration flowing into the Tibetan Plateau is his prime concern.

7

He told me that the Tibetan language was in oppression and there were demonstrations organized and performed, because the scholastic situation. “Why can’t we learn our own language?” he said to me.

In August 2010, in the southern part of China, Guangdong, the most open and free province in China, thousands of Guangzhou citizens flooded the streets repeatedly to fight for their right to use their language. The incident was triggered by a new regulation meant to reduce the usage of Cantonese in Guangdong media. After two big demonstrations, the provincial party secretary Wang Yang ended the whole movement with the cancellation of the new rule and a promise, “Even I am learning Cantonese, who dares to desert it!?”

Two months later, the Qinghai provincial government followed suit, deciding to make Mandarin the prominent teaching language in middle schools for all courses except English and Tibetan. On October 19th, a group of middle school students in Tongren county, Qinghai marched in the streets in their school uniforms. They wrote slogans on small teaching blackboards to protest the new changes that were threatening to destroy the last cornerstone of the Tibetan language.

It was well organized. In order to not leave any soft spot to the authorities, no monks or adults were allowed to participate. With its clear demands and peaceful nature, the movement blew across Qinghai to Gansu, and all the way to Beijing without fierce government interference that such demonstrations usually suffer. In the end, the Qinghai provincial government suspended the implementation of the policy.

8

Apart from cultural intrusion, it’s the intensive security pressure that also disgusts Gan. As a Tibetan monk, he has trouble applying for a passport. He must apply for a “monk license” before being officially proved to participate. He told me that he has been constantly singled out and checked by police at the highway checkpoints while on long-distance buses.

While we walked together on the streets in the Tibetan quarter in Chengdu that afternoon after the interview, he pointed to the police cars parked along the road and asked, “Have you seen so many police in other parts of Chengdu?”

The amount of security shocked me. One evening, late at night, I walked along the dusty, illuminated streets of the Tibetan quarter. I saw policemen with shotguns standing on all four corners of each intersection, and silent patrolling police vehicles passed me slowly every five minutes, flashing their alarm lamps.

The locals told me hesitatingly that there was a riot in Chengdu in 2008, and that the police presence has remained “to prevent” such things. The funny thing is, while one person told me it’s not safe on the road because of the Tibetans, another one told me it is super safe because of the police.

Once, Gan and his monk friends decided to travel by airplane. As they passed through security, they were wearing their standard orange monk robes and sky-pointing hats. A young police officer stationed by the entrance was so stunned by the endless flow of monks appearing from the crack of the gray glass panel that he shouted. “Look! There is a Dalai Lama! Oh, look, here! Another Dalai Lama! There is one there too!”

9

I was very curious about Gan’s take on the 2008 Tibetan riots, It seemed like he’d be somebody who might be able to provide some facts and insights. What followed my questioning was quite unexpected. While he had watched the incident closely, his sources were limited to the “media mouthpieces”. He told me that he had seen some monks on CCTV with knives in their hands chasing innocent-looking Han people. He couldn’t believe it, and thought they weren’t doing the right thing. Then he said that he then heard from some friends in Lhasa that those armed monks were actually Uighurs in disguise.

Like most Tibetans, he doesn’t know how to use internet and has never listened to any foreign radio, even the short-wave channels available in China. Limited by language and technical barriers, he struggles to find out the truth by watching CCTV, and compare that to what he hears through the grapevine with a open mind. QQ is the only thing he uses, which is pre-programmed into his cellphone. He uses it to communicate with his friends in miss-spelled, simple Chinese.

10

On the last day of our stay in Chengdu, he invited me and my friends to a traditional Tibetan restaurant. The waiter guided us to the far back room. A stout Tibetan in full monk garb followed by a Chinese boy in a bright blue jacket, followed by a tall Arabic girl, a petite blond German girl, and a long-haired Taiwanese girl we were like a parade.

The Tibetan waitress brought in the milk tea. She served Gan first in his distinguished, decorative tea cup, then me and then the ladies. They spoke in hushed Tibetan for a few seconds and our order was done. While waiting for the dishes, he played a DVD of a popular young Tibetan music video for us. In the video, the performer was dressed in a traditional costume, singing with a big group of Tibetan kids around him. The kids appeared poor and malnourished compared to the tall, handsome, soft-skinned pop star. It was a Tibetan song calling for unification and peace between different Tibetan tribes, urging them not to forget their own culture and language.

During dinner, he invited me to spend the summer with him on the grasslands. We would eat tsampa, drink butter tea, ride horses, sleep in tents, and watch the stars at night while chatting by the camp fire. A truly nomadic life that I would love to experience, but not to live.

Suddenly I heard a sharp metal sound, like someone pulling a sword from its sheath.

“SHRRR RRR RR.”

I turned my head quickly to see where it came from. It’s was only the ringtone of his cell phone.

“It reminds me of my days on the grasslands, it sounds like home,” he explained quickly before answering, “Wei, ni hao”.