Forums > Travel Yunnan > Cool designs/tribal painting on houses The term is often imprecisely used, generally for any group which has been technologically rather simple in recent history. Tends to be applied, inaccurately and condescendingly, to 'minorities' within a nation-state dominated by somebody else.
In fact, if there is any precision to the word 'tribe', it would be applied to a group of people whose political leadership is in the hands of those selected by age and genealogy - i.e., something like a family writ large.
Forums > Living in Kunming > Why is China so materialistic? Class society produces 2 things: opposition to upper classes and imitation of upper classes. Both become significant internationally as well as nationally, especially with increased globalization and with global media. Happens with intensity with rapid economic rise. Local variations derived from local cultural-historical backgrounds.
Forums > Living in Kunming > Chinese minister's outburst Yes, the western press distorts too, but the question seems like a good one to me. People who can't stand the heat should get out of the kitchen.
Forums > Living in Kunming > The Last Hurrah "Tell us a story about the humans, Grampa. Please, please, prettyplease?"
"Well, my children, once upon a time, way back in the 21st Century, the horrible social machine that they had created for themselves began to produce a competitive individuality so narrow and insecure that, when modern electronic communication was first introduced, they could only turn inside themselves, and it turned out that their narcissism and paranoia had become so intense that everything anyone said was really spoken about himself – and, in a way, to himself. The whole universe awaited, but they ignored it, and even forgot it was there. But then small warm fuzzy creatures like ourselves, whose only function, for over a century, had been to be run over by their cars, rose up..."
Forums > Living in Kunming > Returning to my home country in two months Dudeson, you continue to insist that China is not completely safe. I doubt if anyone here thinks it is - you are beating straw dogs. The only difference between you and the rest of us is that you seem continually excited about the fact.
Around Town: Flying Tigers Museum
发布者The great thing in the Kunming Museum is the pillar from the Nanzhao Kingdom, which shows clearly that it is much too simple to consider that 'Yunnan' was simply one part of 'China' 1300 years ago.
New taxi placards target 'civility'
发布者Magnifico is right - the main concern is profit, and to this end brains are cheerfully twisted through advertising that preys on insecurities derived from the past: "Buy a car and be modern, with a face larger than the moon!" - minor alterations in this message have made it work everywhere; locally the traffic-jam situation in Kunming is the result (almost magically created within a mere 5 years or so - those who have been around awhile can tell you that there were then no taxi or bus problems 5-6 years ago). Now profits can be made by building an underground train system at enormous cost, to relieve the problem that served the competitive greed of corporations and nations (Game of Thrones: You win or you die) rather than the needs of the population.
Interview: Economic ecologist Yi Zhuangfang
发布者I don't understand '...absolutely a capitalist venture, depending on how you look at it.' Also, the article mentions that the rubber was started in the mid-50s, but expanded greatly in the mid-90s - e.g., with government aid to privatized smallholders.
On a grander scale, it's all about capitalism - rubber first planted in time of competition with globally-capitalist world of nations armed to advance their own economic interests; Communist movement was an attempt to break with that, didn't work; the solution, if there will be one (quite likely not - no guarantees from evolutionary theory) cannot simply be 'capitalist', since that's what's brought us to the current state of mutual planetary destruction, which continues to be advanced with every private car sold.
Yunnan county cooks the books for $850 million
发布者Peter99 - "hundreds of years"? I think it's been going on since agriculture was invented and class society came into being, built on the possibility of creating, and 'privatising', a surplus.
Workers' Cultural Palace imploded in Kunming
发布者'the crap that China builds are not made to last' - perhaps an overstatement, and I don't think there was anything structurally wrong with the workers cultural palace. I always liked the building/institution because it represented something from the earlier heavy-'socialist' period that was not at all a bad idea - ie, we hear of the inefficiencies and over-the-top political campaigns etc. of that period all the time now, but it wasn't ALL bad. And now sometimes the baby goes out with the bath water (e.g., rural health arrangements, once based on scarcity of health facilities and personnel but with a real impetus for equality and decent across-the-board development).