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”.

Preface: This post is one of the three articles [I hope it can all be done] that talk about Shanghai’s homeless cats. The topic was inspired by my lovely cat, and by a documentary made by Ai weiwei called San Hua, which is about the cat business chain in China. It talks about the homeless cats of Shanghai and the cat trappers who try to catch and ship them to Guangzhou, where a massive cat meat industry sells them to restaurants.

By Jack Zhang, photo by Gillian Bolsover

Cai and her husband are an ordinary retired couple in Shanghai. They live in a small, old flat that hides within a mansion. The original owner was kicked out after the birth of the new republic. The mansion is now occupied by nine people and the Cais’ 31 cats.

Mrs. Cai only owns one small room on the third floor. The narrow, steep staircase, crowded with big bags of cat food and kitty litter, is the only way up. It is not hard to find – just follow the smell of cat urine.

“That’s Huanhuan, the usher cat. She always stays outside and greets the guests,” she points to a cat that is draped over the top of the shoe closet.

Mrs. Cai first saw Huanhuan in a construction site in 2000, where she was being raised by workers. She took her home after the project was done. Huanhuan was reluctant to go back with her, and stayed on top of the closet for more than a month. “I had to clean all the excrement that she left there and bring her water and food everyday. But after she came down, she stayed very close to me,” Mrs. Cai tells me while caressing the cat.

I was a little disappointed when I only saw a handful of cats siting quietly around the room, while three or four others spying on me under the bed. There was no wild scene of 31 cats jumping and fighting and rolling around everywhere, which is what I had expected.

“Cat is an animal that has a human-like nature. They are all hiding under the bed now, because they don’t know you. There’s a guy who lives downstairs who had a lot of rats in his home. I brought all my cats down to catch the rats. After we caught ten or more rats and finished the job, the guy called the police. The police came and asked me how many cats I have. I said, ‘One hundred! If you don’t believe me, you can come up and see it for yourself.’ Because we were both retried from the military hospital, they wouldn’t dare be rude to us. The policeman came up, and all 31 cats hid under the bed – only two were outside. He was too embarrassed to look under the bed, so my cats were saved.” Mrs. Cai tells me this as she crawls around on the floor, trying to get the cats out from under the bed.

Mrs. Cai started raising cats in 1992. She bought two Persian cats for 400 RMB. It was a lot of money at that time. Soon after that, she found out a neighbor was going to abandon their cats. Cai begged them to keep the cats. “I will bring you cat food everyday, just don’t throw them away.”

The noble act lasted for two years until she went for a short trip to pray the Buddha, when she came back, the cat was gone. She was so pissed off and started taking homeless cats back to her home.

In 1996, a friend of hers who knew about her passion for cats told her that there were a lot of cats in Yanzhou Park. “I didn’t want to go and look. They were just too pitiful!” Mrs. Cai told me. But she went there anyway. When she saw the cats eating fish entrails and suffering from diarrhea, shivering in the cold wind of Shanghai’s humid winters, she was touched.

The cash flow for the services is 4000 RMB every month, consisting of 25 RMB every day for fresh fish, 15 kg of rice and 150 kg of cat food. Mr. Cai devotes his entire monthly pension of 3,600 RMB to the cats. The couple lives on Mrs. Cai’s 2000 RMB pension.

Every day at 06:00, Mr. Cai goes out to collect the cat bowls they put out in the evening by bike. The feeding spots are spread over 10 different locations around the neighborhood. At 07:30 they start cleaning all the littler and bowls (from the street and from their home). Mrs. Cai goes out at 09:30 to buy fish and bring them home to clean and cook. Around 12:00, after the fish iscooked,they then take out the bones and mix it with rice. The whole process usually takes around five hours. So at05:00 to 06:00, they go out again to the streets to feed the homeless cats and return to home around19:30.

It’s hard work. The old couple are both in bad shape, Mrs. Cai has a weak heart and suffers from arrhythmia frequently. Mr. Cai has back problems. They worry a lot about who is going to carry on the job after them.

“Every time when I sit down to prayer, Mimi and Huanhuan will come over and sit on my lap, one on each side. They will keep still for two hours, not moving an inch, and always run away as soon as I finish praying and close the text book.”

Mrs. Cai is a serious convert of Buddhism. The cats’ shelter isdecoratedwith a mixture of recitations, chants and figures of Buddha. Cai believes that cats are nuns that violated the ten commandments in the past life, and therefor got trapped in the cat form. And if the cats behave well, the Buddha will forgive them and make them human again. In her eyes, all the problems that the cats face with the trappers, starvation, cold, etc., are just the trials that they must go through before reaching enlightenment.

“We all believe in Buddhism, I just hope that I can help them.”

Updates:

I revisited the Cais’ one week after and Cai told me that the neighbor that lived in the first floor finally got fed up with the cats and raged. Just soon after my visit to the house, the guy came up the stairs fully armed. He threw all the cat food that Cai stored on the side of the stairwells away and sprayed disinfectant fluid all over the place to sterilize the ‘disease’.

“Oh, your arm haven’t been sterilized, let me help you. And your head too, let me help you. So many virus from the cats, let me help you.” He shouted while spraying to Cai, who was trying feebly to stop him.

Finally the police came, but they sided with the neighbor. One of officers said to Mrs. Cai, “The nation doesn’t care about them [homeless cats], why do you care?” Cai repled, “The nation has more important things to take care of, so we help take care of the small things!” in the end hey reached an agreement: Mrs.Cai promised to move everything out of the public spaces within two weeks, and the man agreed not to trouble her further.

But the man came again the next day, even angrier. The argument escalated into a fight. Cai’s husband was punched twice in the chest, and Cai had one of her teeth knocked out.

They told me this story when I came back for a visit. Soon there will be a meeting with police, the property management and the residents’ committee.

I hope the problem could be solved at the meeting but I am not sure about it. What if the Cais’ can not keep their cats anymore? What if they died? Who is going to take care of those cats? Well, it’s just cats, aren’t they?…

Some Extra Notes:

The names of Cai’s 31 cats (or a lesson on how to name a cat in Chinese):

1. Mao Mao（猫猫） 2. Marry（玛丽） 3. Du Du（嘟嘟） 4. Dong Dong（东东） 5. Ling Ling（灵灵） 6. Ji Ji（吉吉） 7. Ding Ding（叮叮） 8. Dang Dang（当当） 9. Mi Mi（咪咪） 10. Hai Hai（海海） 11. Hei Hei（黑黑） 12. La La（拉拉） 13. Mei Mi（妹咪） 14. Xi Xi（西西） 15. Nei Nei（内内） 16. A Qi（阿七） 17. Xiao San Zi（小三子） 18. Jia Li（嘉丽） 19. Xiao Hu（小虎） 20. Ka Ka（卡卡） 21. Amy（艾米） 22. Zhu Zhu（珠珠） 23. Da La La（大拉拉） 24. Bao Bao（宝宝） 25. Bei Bei（贝贝） 26. Mei Mei（美美） 27. Nv Nv（妞妞） 28. Zi Zi（仔仔） 29. Huan Huan（欢欢） 30. Niu Niu（牛牛） 31. Da Niu Niu（大牛牛）

The story of Maomao the Cat, 2001:

The ayi of a rosewood furniture shop found her inside a woven bag lying in the street, and brought her back to the shop on Shunchang rd. Cai saw the cat outside in a cage while passing by, and knew she was malnurished. So she started giving cat food to the shop too. One day the owner told her not to come back because the ayi was planning to take the cat back to her village. But she went there again the next day to make sure, and found the cat was still there. So she brought her home and took her to the vet for diarrhea medication.

When Marry the Cat ran away, 2009:

In 2009, one of the cats named Marry ran away from home. They went looking for her every night, but she would always run away when saw them approaching. It was a cold winter and this lasted for nine days. Finally Cai sid to the cat. “Marry, if you really don’t want to come back, I give up, good luck.” The cat somehow seemed to understand. She walked to Cai, and never left home again.

“In the past, Royal-Canine Brand pet food was all imported and of good quality. A lot of cats stopped getting sick after we switched to it. But now all the Royal-Canine pet foods are made in China, and the quality has become very bad. Now it’s very oily, and doesn’t smell as good as before.”

“Four or five years ago, Whiskas cat food was made of 80% fish. Now it’s only about 30%, and there’s no more variety available. The only flavor available in Shanghai is ‘salmon’.”

Will that hurt because of clapping the whole night? I kinda felt bad for their palms…