Forums > Living in Kunming > Just landed. Looking for an apartment @caNYC: Sounds like you did okay, welcome to Kunming. 2600 might be a tad expensive for a 2-bedroom flat, even if it's furnished, but then that depends on the place, and I haven't seen your place.
Note for others: second-hand furniture can be bought quite cheaply at the large used furniture market near the North Train Station.
Forums > Living in Kunming > Blocks on Wikipedia - a good thing? @HFCampo: Wiki is certainly not perfect, but what evidence is there that it is a mouthpiece of the US Government?
Forums > Food & Drink > soy sauce and other condiments without msg @Spartans: I'm not suggesting people take silly chances and I'm not questioning your data, but is msg more dangerous than alcohol? Should I keep away from alcohol? Weed? McDonald's? Sex? One can try to keep away from everything dangerous, but that everything would probably include life. You can pick the things you want to keep away from, but there are priorities, relative risks, etc. - and, of course, it's not a bad idea to know what the risks are, although they're all a matter of percentages, and even then you can't know about everything, or anyway it's rather boring to try to do so, takes a lot of time away from healthy activities like, umm, rock climbing, etc. One very serious life-threateneing danger is poverty, often overlooked. In Japan, Hong Kong and I suppose elsewhere, sushi and sashimi are discounted near the end of the day, for obvious reasons - Japan is very strict about food health, and they obviously know a lot about raw fish. I just had some, it was good.
Choose your poisons, okay, but there is no such thing as a safe life.
Forums > Living in Kunming > Smoking in Starbucks @spartans: Fine, make your own choices, but don`t expect that your acts will not be judged by others, just as you judge the acts of others. I.e., freedom/responsibility are flip sides of the same coin. Applies both to smokers at Starbucks and the reactions or overreactions of those who object to it. I`d suggest that ethical responses are those that make advances to solving a problem whitout causing greater problems than the one one is attempting to solve. And yeah, it`s pretty hard to get that one right all the time, so maybe a little communicative slack is better than confrontation, which means at least a temporary breakdown in communication - though there are times for that too. The more temporary, the better. In the end what we want is a highest-common-denominator mutual agreement, not a control system.
Forums > Living in Kunming > Some teaching and visa questions Unless something has changed, you would not be asked to return to you home country, though you` probably have to go to Hong Kong, or somewhere else outside of mainland China (e.g., Chiangmai).
China, US discuss human rights in Kunming
Posted byI think what these governments are most interested in is not human rights, but how not to be accused of violating them.
Inside Kunming's 'dwarf empire'
Posted byTell it to Steven Hawking. A person's physical stature does not limit his/her potential for work that does not rely on his/her physical stature (e.g., English teaching, as well as physics). The cultural attitude that those who are discriminated against because they do not fit the culturally desired norm should be outcast or should be provided for by special environments that can be sold as entertainment venues to those who will not deal with their own prejudices is a cultural attitude that perpetuates discrimination against all who are 'different'. The problem here, as elsewhere, is a matter of dehumanizing those who are 'different' - prejudicial culture that regiments anything that deviates from its standards, rather than dealing with the prejudice itself. Why not have a theme park within which 'foreigners', with all their funny habits, can be kept, so that they do not disturb the 'normality' of cultural prejudices? Actually, there could be many: one for 'black people', one for Tibetans, one for Japanese, one for gay people, one for Han Chinese people who have given up their 'traditional' clothing for 'western-style' clothing (e.g., the great majority of Chinese, over the past century or so) - in fact we could subdivide and subdivide until nothing was left but mutual nonrecognition. All these would help to maintain the narrow identities of 'normality' that can be relied upon to advance support the cultural attitudes that promote the continuing inability of people to recognize each other as human, and to celebrate and accept their differences - not as entertainment items, no matter how 'cute', but as full human beings. How different is all this from apartheid?
This effort to maintain prejudice can, of course, be profitable to those who invest in it, and convenient for social engineers and political elites who want to maintain an elite power status by reliance on it.
The place is an insult to our common humanity and a spotlight on cultural attitudes of exclusion. Those who find that they enjoy such displays should take a good look at the nature of the culture that has formed them so narrowly. Cultures change; cultures have always changed; cultures are presently changing and will continue to do so; there is nothing sacred about cultural attitudes. Our common humanity is an ongoing project, and those who imagine they are not part of such a project are simply contributing their own blindness to it, and limiting themselves in the process. It's not the 'dwarves' who are the problem, its the people who will not accept them as within the boundaries of 'us'.
Around Town: Southwestern Associated University Museum
Posted bySee John Israel's EXCELLENT book on the history of the university:
Israel, John. Lianda: A Chinese University in War and Revolution. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998
Books about universities do not normally strike me as exciting, but this one is.
John has lived in Kunming for several months per year over the past 10 years or more.
Chinese climbers among those murdered in Pakistan
Posted byModern nationalism is a manipulative ideology to manage global capital, and nationalist blindness to actual human beings leads to the punishment of innocents. China is not a communist country. People who murder in Pakistan cannot be extradited to China to be judged for murders of people in Pakistan, even if they're Chinese.
Chinese climbers among those murdered in Pakistan
Posted byWhich regions are 'these regions'?