(no subject)
For those of you who haven't seen this yet, here's the "Instant China Journalism Template" that I wrote for December's column in that's Beijing. This is in its original form, pre-editing.
The Foreign Correspondents Club of China offers journalists new to Beijing a useful template for your first files. This has been used with great success by big-name reporters hundreds of times! Just fill in the blank with the appropriate phenomena, supply some names for sources, and voila! Instant China story.
_________ Comes to China
BEIJING, November 18 2004 - China is in the throes of another "cultural revolution," but this time it’s not the Red Guards but a growing class of hipoisie leading the charge. The latest western fad to breach the Middle Kingdom’s fabled Great Wall? (FILL IN THE BLANK), which many are calling the most revolutionary thing to hit China since Mao's Red Army.
"It’s a Great Leap Forward in cool," says (PROFESSOR), who teaches contemporary Chinese cultural studies at (UNIVERSITY). "It’s not for your Average Zhou," he quips, "but ______ is really catching on with young people. And you know what Mao said: One spark can start a prairie fire."
"It’s all the rage these days,” says (CHINESE NAME), who runs a fashionable shop specializing in _____ near the stylish Sanlitun Bar District, where it's not uncommon to see young women wearing makeup, western-style blue jeans, and even sporting dyed hair. Young couples hold hands and even show bolder signs of affection on occasion - behavior that has prudish, older Party stalwarts shaking their heads.
For westerners who cling to images of Mao-suited millions all riding bikes, addressing one another as "comrade" and shouting slogans from the Little Red Book, the fact that ______ can be found in China at all comes a real surprise. But China is changing fast, and the images still prevailing in the West a good five years out of date: Many Chinese have already sampled the American fast-food, and many - at least in the big cities - are familiar with the hot US television series like "Friends."
"Ten years ago, who would have believed they’d have ______ in China?" says (FOREIGN NAME), a long-time Beijing expatriate who has lived in China for almost two years and has witnessed much of the dizzying change. "All the Chinese people I know - my ayi, my driver and my secretary - are already talking about it." ______-related ads are now commonplace on city subways, but they hardly even merit a second glance from jaded Beijingers, who drink Coca-Cola and send one another messages on their cell phones using an advanced technology called "SMS," for Short Messaging System.
China, which has a history of 5,000 years, invented gunpowder, paper, the compass, sericulture, printing and the men's pleather clutch purse. The Middle Kingdom is also credited with discovering green tea as a Chivas mixer. Pride in their own creations makes western fads like ______ difficult for some Chinese to accept.
When ______ first appeared on the streets of Beijing and Shanghai, controversy followed close behind it. Only a few years earlier, authorities - fearing the kind of "spiritual pollution" that fads along like break dancing represented in the China of the 80s, or the "bourgeois liberalization" of the early-90s Klezmer craze - would surely have been strident in their efforts to keep it out, or at least prevent its popularization. But as Deng Xiaoping, diminutive architect of China’s reforms, once warned, "When you have an open door, some flies and mosquitoes are bound to come in."
"How can we Chinese, who have 5,000 years of history and invented gunpowder, paper, the compass, sericulture, printing and the men's pleather clutch purse be so easily seduced by western _____?" he asks. "It’s just a fad, and like McDonalds, Starbucks, and unleaded gasoline," says (CHINESE NAME) as he sips a cocktail of Chivas and green tea in a hip Sanlitun club. "Comrade Deng Xiaoping said, 'It doesn’t matter if it’s a black cat or a white cat, as long as it catches mice. But what color cat is _____? And where are the mice?," (NAME) demands.
But like it or not, ______ is spreading fast, and not just in the cities. In Yellow Peony Gulch Village, a hardscrabble hamlet nestled amidst the dun-colored hillsides of Shaanxi Province, where even today some people still live in caves carved into the loess cliff faces, _____ is already making inroads. "Yes, we've seen ______ on the television. My wife thinks it's naughty, and so do many of the older people here in Yellow Peony Gulch Village. But the youngsters are already picking it up,” says (CHINESE PEASANT NAME), 52, as a gap-toothed grin spreads across his deeply-creased, weatherworn face. "But I'm young at heart, and I think people should be willing to try new things!"