China prevents “oversized, xenocentric and weird” architecture

China has released a directive that could put an end to the country’s trend for bombastic architecture

Source: China prevents “oversized, xenocentric and weird” architecture

China has released a directive that could put an end to the country’s trend for bombastic architecture.

Just over a year after president Xi Jinping called for an end to “weird architecture”, the country’s State Council has released a document calling for all new buildings to be “suitable, economic, green and pleasing to the eye”, according to the South China Morning Post.

The directive is aimed at tackling the problems associated with the rapid expansion of Chinese cities, as well as increased urbanisation all over the country.

It states that cities will no longer be allowed to grow beyond what their resources can support, and that “oversized, xenocentric and weird” buildings will be forbidden. It also bans gated communities and non-permitted developments.

Xi’s original comments, made in late 2014, attacked projects including the Rem Koolhaas-designed CCTV headquarters in Beijing – one of many unusually shaped projects resulting from China’s construction boom.

Shenzhen architect Feng Guochuan told the New York Times that Xi’s criticism had already influenced local government decisions regarding new projects. “Generally speaking, local governments now tend to approve more conservative designs,” he said.

But the new directive comes as a result of a meeting held by the State Council two months ago – the first of its kind since 1978.

It reportedly stipulates that, instead of unusual architecture, simple modular constructions will be encouraged, and predicts that 30 percent of new buildings will be prefabricated in 10 years time.

Not only will new gated communities be banned, but existing ones will apparently be opened up to improve traffic flow.

Existing shantytowns and dilapidated houses are expected to be transformed, with more parks and green areas created.

Speaking to Dezeen last year, Zaha Hadid Architects director Patrik Schumacher said that work was already drying up in China for foreign architects, partly because the government was trying to promote more local talent.

The firm had previously enjoyed a long run of success in China, delivering projects including the Guangzhou Opera House and the vast Galaxy Soho development in Beijing.

“I feel that there is this attempt by the Chinese leadership to try to make itself more independent and rely on its own talent,” Schumacher said.

Artist at centre of multimillion dollar forgery scandal turns up in China | Art and design | The Guardian

Pei-Shen Qian, acccused, along with two Spanish brokers, of conning New York art collectors, will likely escape extradition

Source: Artist at centre of multimillion dollar forgery scandal turns up in China | Art and design | The Guardian

Qian, who once painted portraits of Chairman Mao for display in Chinese workplaces and schools, arrived in the US on a student visa in 1981. He is said to have been discovered by Jose Carlos later that decade as he was painting at an easel on a lower Manhattan street corner. According to the indictment, he began copying works by artists such as Keith Haring and Jean Michel Basquiat, and forging the artists’ signatures; then, despite knowing “they were essentially worthless imitations,” Jose Carlos would sell the copies to galleries.

By the early 1990s, prosecutors say, Qian was churning out signed fakes from his home studio in Queens under instructions from the Bergantinos Diaz brothers and Rosales. In pursuit of authentic-looking forgeries, Jose Carlos is said to have bought Qian old canvases at flea markets and auctions, and supplied him with old paint.

He also “stained newer canvases with tea bags to give them the false appearance of being older than they really were”, said the indictment, which also claimed that some works were subjected to the heat of a blow dryer, while others were left outside and exposed to the elements.

Works by other modern artists such as Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Sam Francis and Franz Kline were also ripped off by Qian, according to prosecutors, who said he was found to own books and auction catalogues about the artists he copied.

They allege that throughout the 1990s, Qian was sometimes paid as little as “several hundred” dollars for each forgery, but that after spotting one of his creations priced far higher in a Manhattan art show, he “demanded more money” – and got it. By February 2008, Jose Carlos was allegedly writing Qian cheques for up to $7,000 per painting.

Far bigger sums of money, however, were involved when the trio of dealers allegedly sold the forgeries on to respected New York galleries. The prestigious Knoedler & Co, referred to as “Gallery 1” in the indictment, is alleged to have paid $20.7m for Qian’s forgeries – and then made $43m in profit by selling them to wealthy collectors. A second gallery is said to have made $4.5m selling Qian fakes that it bought for $12.5m.

Ordos 100 – YouTube

China Has Overtaken the U.S. as the World’s Largest Economy | Vanity Fair

China Has Overtaken the U.S. as the World’s Largest Economy | Vanity Fair: “”

When the history of 2014 is written, it will take note of a large fact that has received little attention: 2014 was the last year in which the United States could claim to be the world’s largest economic power. China enters 2015 in the top position, where it will likely remain for a very long time, if not forever. In doing so, it returns to the position it held through most of human history.

[…]

China did not want to stick its head above the parapet—being No. 1 comes with a cost. It means paying more to support international bodies such as the United Nations. It could bring pressure to take an enlightened leadership role on issues such as climate change. It might very well prompt ordinary Chinese to wonder if more of the country’s wealth should be spent on them.

[…]

Tectonic shifts in global economic power have obviously occurred before, and as a result we know something about what happens when they do. Two hundred years ago, in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, Great Britain emerged as the world’s dominant power. Its empire spanned a quarter of the globe. Its currency, the pound sterling, became the global reserve currency—as sound as gold itself. Britain, sometimes working in concert with its allies, imposed its own trade rules. It could discriminate against importation of Indian textiles and force India to buy British cloth. Britain and its allies could also insist that China keep its markets open to opium, and when China, knowing the drug’s devastating effect, tried to close its borders, the allies twice went to war to maintain the free flow of this product.

Britain’s dominance was to last a hundred years and continued even after the U.S. surpassed Britain economically, in the 1870s. There’s always a lag (as there will be with the U.S. and China). The transitional event was World War I, when Britain achieved victory over Germany only with the assistance of the United States. After the war, America was as reluctant to accept its potential new responsibilities as Britain was to voluntarily give up its role. Woodrow Wilson did what he could to construct a postwar world that would make another global conflict less likely, but isolationism at home meant that the U.S. never joined the League of Nations. In the economic sphere, America insisted on going its own way—passing the Smoot-Hawley tariffs and bringing to an end an era that had seen a worldwide boom in trade. Britain maintained its empire, but gradually the pound sterling gave way to the dollar: in the end, economic realities dominate. Many American firms became global enterprises, and American culture was clearly ascendant.

World War II was the next defining event. Devastated by the conflict, Britain would soon lose virtually all of its colonies. This time the U.S. did assume the mantle of leadership. It was central in creating the United Nations and in fashioning the Bretton Woods agreements, which would underlie the new political and economic order. Even so, the record was uneven. Rather than creating a global reserve currency, which would have contributed so much to worldwide economic stability—as John Maynard Keynes had rightly argued—the U.S. put its own short-term self-interest first, foolishly thinking it would gain by having the dollar become the world’s reserve currency. The dollar’s status is a mixed blessing: it enables the U.S. to borrow at a low interest rate, as others demand dollars to put into their reserves, but at the same time the value of the dollar rises (above what it otherwise would have been), creating or exacerbating a trade deficit and weakening the economy.

[…]

America’s real strength lies in its soft power—the example it provides to others and the influence of its ideas, including ideas about economic and political life. The rise of China to No. 1 brings new prominence to that country’s political and economic model—and to its own forms of soft power.

Rem Koolhaas: the Most Important Factor in Building Design Is the Age of the Decision Maker | Vanity Fair

Rem Koolhaas: the Most Important Factor in Building Design Is the Age of the Decision Maker | Vanity Fair.

Koolhaas pointed out that decision-makers in countries like China tend to be younger, and therefore are more willing to take on newer and more adventurous aesthetics.

“My final conclusion, and this surprised me, is that the thing that matters most when it comes to designing buildings around the world is the age of the decision maker,” said Koolhaus, who is a professor at Harvard. “In China, the decision maker is 35, in Europe, the decision maker is 55. In America, the decision maker is a trustee, so they might be older.”

“Age is correlated with an appetite for risk,” Koolhaas said.

Wonton font – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Wonton font – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

A wonton font (also known as Chinese font, chopstick font or chop-suey font, type or lettering) is a font with a visual style expressing “Asianness” or “Chineseness”.

Styled to mimic the brush strokes used in Chinese characters, wonton fonts are often used to convey a sense of Orientalism. 

Edward Snowden: The Untold Story | Threat Level | WIRED

Edward Snowden: The Untold Story | Threat Level | WIRED.

The message arrives on my “clean machine,” a MacBook Air loaded only with a sophisticated encryption package. “Change in plans,” my contact says. “Be in the lobby of the Hotel ______ by 1 pm. Bring a book and wait for ES to find you.”

[…]

He is a uniquely postmodern breed of whistle-blower. Physically, very few people have seen him since he disappeared into Moscow’s airport complex last June. But he has nevertheless maintained a presence on the world stage—not only as a man without a country but as a man without a body. When being interviewed at the South by Southwest conference or receiving humanitarian awards, his disembodied image smiles down from jumbotron screens. For an interview at the TED conference in March, he went a step further—a small screen bearing a live image of his face was placed on two leg-like poles attached vertically to remotely controlled wheels, giving him the ability to “walk” around the event, talk to people, and even pose for selfies with them. The spectacle suggests a sort of Big Brother in reverse: Orwell’s Winston Smith, the low-ranking party functionary, suddenly dominating telescreens throughout Oceania with messages promoting encryption and denouncing encroachments on privacy.

[…]

I read a recent Washington Post report. The story, by Greg Miller, recounts daily meetings with senior officials from the FBI, CIA, and State Department, all desperately trying to come up with ways to capture Snowden. One official told Miller: “We were hoping he was going to be stupid enough to get on some kind of airplane, and then have an ally say: ‘You’re in our airspace. Land.’ ” He wasn’t. And since he disappeared into Russia, the US seems to have lost all trace of him.

I do my best to avoid being followed as I head to the designated hotel for the interview, one that is a bit out of the way and attracts few Western visitors. I take a seat in the lobby facing the front door and open the book I was instructed to bring. Just past one, Snowden walks by, dressed in dark jeans and a brown sport coat and carrying a large black backpack over his right shoulder. He doesn’t see me until I stand up and walk beside him. “Where were you?” he asks. “I missed you.” I point to my seat. “And you were with the CIA?” I tease. He laughs.

[…]

He has been in Russia for more than a year now. He shops at a local grocery store where no one recognizes him, and he has picked up some of the language. He has learned to live modestly in an expensive city that is cleaner than New York and more sophisticated than Washington. In August, Snowden’s temporary asylum was set to expire. (On August 7, the government announced that he’d been granted a permit allowing him to stay three more years.)

[…]

Snowden is careful about what’s known in the intelligence world as operational security. As we sit down, he removes the battery from his cell phone. I left my iPhone back at my hotel. Snowden’s handlers repeatedly warned me that, even switched off, a cell phone can easily be turned into an NSA microphone. Knowledge of the agency’s tricks is one of the ways that Snowden has managed to stay free. Another is by avoiding areas frequented by Americans and other Westerners. Nevertheless, when he’s out in public at, say, a computer store, Russians occasionally recognize him. “Shh,” Snowden tells them, smiling, putting a finger to his lips.

[…]

Snowden still holds out hope that he will someday be allowed to return to the US. “I told the government I’d volunteer for prison, as long as it served the right purpose,” he says. “I care more about the country than what happens to me. But we can’t allow the law to become a political weapon or agree to scare people away from standing up for their rights, no matter how good the deal. I’m not going to be part of that.”

Meanwhile, Snowden will continue to haunt the US, the unpredictable impact of his actions resonating at home and around the world. The documents themselves, however, are out of his control. Snowden no longer has access to them; he says he didn’t bring them with him to Russia. Copies are now in the hands of three groups: First Look Media, set up by journalist Glenn Greenwald and American documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, the two original recipients of the documents; The Guardian newspaper, which also received copies before the British government pressured it into transferring physical custody (but not ownership) to The New York Times; and Barton Gellman, a writer for The Washington Post. It’s highly unlikely that the current custodians will ever return the documents to the NSA.

That has left US officials in something like a state of impotent expectation, waiting for the next round of revelations, the next diplomatic upheaval, a fresh dose of humiliation. Snowden tells me it doesn’t have to be like this. He says that he actually intended the government to have a good idea about what exactly he stole. Before he made off with the documents, he tried to leave a trail of digital bread crumbs so investigators could determine which documents he copied and took and which he just “touched.” That way, he hoped, the agency would see that his motive was whistle-blowing and not spying for a foreign government. It would also give the government time to prepare for leaks in the future, allowing it to change code words, revise operational plans, and take other steps to mitigate damage. But he believes the NSA’s audit missed those clues and simply reported the total number of documents he touched—1.7 million. (Snowden says he actually took far fewer.) “I figured they would have a hard time,” he says. “I didn’t figure they would be completely incapable.”

[…]

Snowden speculates that the government fears that the documents contain material that’s deeply damaging—secrets the custodians have yet to find. “I think they think there’s a smoking gun in there that would be the death of them all politically,” Snowden says. “The fact that the government’s investigation failed—that they don’t know what was taken and that they keep throwing out these ridiculous huge numbers—implies to me that somewhere in their damage assessment they must have seen something that was like, ‘Holy shit.’ And they think it’s still out there.”

Yet it is very likely that no one knows precisely what is in the mammoth haul of documents—not the NSA, not the custodians, not even Snowden himself. He would not say exactly how he gathered them, but others in the intelligence community have speculated that he simply used a web crawler, a program that can search for and copy all documents containing particular keywords or combinations of keywords. This could account for many of the documents that simply list highly technical and nearly unintelligible signal parameters and other statistics.

And there’s another prospect that further complicates matters: Some of the revelations attributed to Snowden may not in fact have come from him but from another leaker spilling secrets under Snowden’s name. Snowden himself adamantly refuses to address this possibility on the record. But independent of my visit to Snowden, I was given unrestricted access to his cache of documents in various locations. And going through this archive using a sophisticated digital search tool, I could not find some of the documents that have made their way into public view, leading me to conclude that there must be a second leaker somewhere. I’m not alone in reaching that conclusion. Both Greenwald and security expert Bruce Schneier—who have had extensive access to the cache—have publicly stated that they believe another whistle-blower is releasing secret documents to the media.

[…]

Some have even raised doubts about whether the infamous revelation that the NSA was tapping German chancellor Angela Merkel’s cell phone, long attributed to Snowden, came from his trough. At the time of that revelation, Der Spiegel simply attributed the information to Snowden and other unnamed sources. If other leakers exist within the NSA, it would be more than another nightmare for the agency—it would underscore its inability to control its own information and might indicate that Snowden’s rogue protest of government overreach has inspired others within the intelligence community. “They still haven’t fixed their problems,” Snowden says. “They still have negligent auditing, they still have things going for a walk, and they have no idea where they’re coming from and they have no idea where they’re going. And if that’s the case, how can we as the public trust the NSA with all of our information, with all of our private records, the permanent record of our lives?”

[…]

Snowden keeps close tabs on his evolving public profile, but he has been resistant to talking about himself. In part, this is because of his natural shyness and his reluctance about “dragging family into it and getting a biography.” He says he worries that sharing personal details will make him look narcissistic and arrogant. But mostly he’s concerned that he may inadvertently detract from the cause he has risked his life to promote. “I’m an engineer, not a politician,” he says. “I don’t want the stage. I’m terrified of giving these talking heads some distraction, some excuse to jeopardize, smear, and delegitimize a very important movement.”

[…]

While in Geneva, Snowden says, he met many spies who were deeply opposed to the war in Iraq and US policies in the Middle East. “The CIA case officers were all going, what the hell are we doing?” Because of his job maintaining computer systems and network operations, he had more access than ever to information about the conduct of the war. What he learned troubled him deeply. “This was the Bush period, when the war on terror had gotten really dark,” he says. “We were torturing people; we had warrantless wiretapping.”

He began to consider becoming a whistle-blower, but with Obama about to be elected, he held off. “I think even Obama’s critics were impressed and optimistic about the values that he represented,” he says. “He said that we’re not going to sacrifice our rights. We’re not going to change who we are just to catch some small percentage more terrorists.” But Snowden grew disappointed as, in his view, Obama didn’t follow through on his lofty rhetoric. “Not only did they not fulfill those promises, but they entirely repudiated them,” he says. “They went in the other direction. What does that mean for a society, for a democracy, when the people that you elect on the basis of promises can basically suborn the will of the electorate?”

[…]

Snowden’s disenchantment would only grow. It was bad enough when spies were getting bankers drunk to recruit them; now he was learning about targeted killings and mass surveillance, all piped into monitors at the NSA facilities around the world. Snowden would watch as military and CIA drones silently turned people into body parts. And he would also begin to appreciate the enormous scope of the NSA’s surveillance capabilities, an ability to map the movement of everyone in a city by monitoring their MAC address, a unique identifier emitted by every cell phone, computer, and other electronic device.

[…]

Snowden adjusts his glasses; one of the nose pads is missing, making them slip occasionally. He seems lost in thought, looking back to the moment of decision, the point of no return. The time when, thumb drive in hand, aware of the enormous potential consequences, he secretly went to work. “If the government will not represent our interests,” he says, his face serious, his words slow, “then the public will champion its own interests. And whistle-blowing provides a traditional means to do so.”

[…]

Snowden landed a job as an infrastructure analyst with another giant NSA contractor, Booz Allen. The role gave him rare dual-hat authority covering both domestic and foreign intercept capabilities—allowing him to trace domestic cyberattacks back to their country of origin. In his new job, Snowden became immersed in the highly secret world of planting malware into systems around the world and stealing gigabytes of foreign secrets. At the same time, he was also able to confirm, he says, that vast amounts of US communications “were being intercepted and stored without a warrant, without any requirement for criminal suspicion, probable cause, or individual designation.” He gathered that evidence and secreted it safely away.

[…]

One day an intelligence officer told him that TAO—a division of NSA hackers—had attempted in 2012 to remotely install an exploit in one of the core routers at a major Internet service provider in Syria, which was in the midst of a prolonged civil war. This would have given the NSA access to email and other Internet traffic from much of the country. But something went wrong, and the router was bricked instead—rendered totally inoperable. The failure of this router caused Syria to suddenly lose all connection to the Internet—although the public didn’t know that the US government was responsible. (This is the first time the claim has been revealed.)

[…]

“It’s no secret that we hack China very aggressively,” he says. “But we’ve crossed lines. We’re hacking universities and hospitals and wholly civilian infrastructure rather than actual government targets and military targets. And that’s a real concern.”

The last straw for Snowden was a secret program he discovered while getting up to speed on the capabilities of the NSA’s enormous and highly secret data storage facility in Bluffdale, Utah. Potentially capable of holding upwards of a yottabyte of data, some 500 quintillion pages of text, the 1 million-square-foot building is known within the NSA as the Mission Data Repository. (According to Snowden, the original name was Massive Data Repository, but it was changed after some staffers thought it sounded too creepy—and accurate.) Billions of phone calls, faxes, emails, computer-to-computer data transfers, and text messages from around the world flow through the MDR every hour. Some flow right through, some are kept briefly, and some are held forever.

The massive surveillance effort was bad enough, but Snowden was even more disturbed to discover a new, Strangelovian cyberwarfare program in the works, codenamed MonsterMind. The program, disclosed here for the first time, would automate the process of hunting for the beginnings of a foreign cyberattack. Software would constantly be on the lookout for traffic patterns indicating known or suspected attacks. When it detected an attack, MonsterMind would automatically block it from entering the country—a “kill” in cyber terminology.

Programs like this had existed for decades, but MonsterMind software would add a unique new capability: Instead of simply detecting and killing the malware at the point of entry, MonsterMind would automatically fire back, with no human involvement. That’s a problem, Snowden says, because the initial attacks are often routed through computers in innocent third countries. “These attacks can be spoofed,” he says. “You could have someone sitting in China, for example, making it appear that one of these attacks is originating in Russia. And then we end up shooting back at a Russian hospital. What happens next?”

In addition to the possibility of accidentally starting a war, Snowden views MonsterMind as the ultimate threat to privacy because, in order for the system to work, the NSA first would have to secretly get access to virtually all private communications coming in from overseas to people in the US. “The argument is that the only way we can identify these malicious traffic flows and respond to them is if we’re analyzing all traffic flows,” he says. “And if we’re analyzing all traffic flows, that means we have to be intercepting all traffic flows. That means violating the Fourth Amendment, seizing private communications without a warrant, without probable cause or even a suspicion of wrongdoing. For everyone, all the time.”

[…]

Given the NSA’s new data storage mausoleum in Bluffdale, its potential to start an accidental war, and the charge to conduct surveillance on all incoming communications, Snowden believed he had no choice but to take his thumb drives and tell the world what he knew. The only question was when.

On March 13, 2013, sitting at his desk in the “tunnel” surrounded by computer screens, Snowden read a news story that convinced him that the time had come to act. It was an account of director of national intelligence James Clapper telling a Senate committee that the NSA does “not wittingly” collect information on millions of Americans. “I think I was reading it in the paper the next day, talking to coworkers, saying, can you believe this shit?”

Snowden and his colleagues had discussed the routine deception around the breadth of the NSA’s spying many times, so it wasn’t surprising to him when they had little reaction to Clapper’s testimony. “It was more of just acceptance,” he says, calling it “the banality of evil”—a reference to Hannah Arendt’s study of bureaucrats in Nazi Germany.

“It’s like the boiling frog,” Snowden tells me. “You get exposed to a little bit of evil, a little bit of rule-breaking, a little bit of dishonesty, a little bit of deceptiveness, a little bit of disservice to the public interest, and you can brush it off, you can come to justify it. But if you do that, it creates a slippery slope that just increases over time, and by the time you’ve been in 15 years, 20 years, 25 years, you’ve seen it all and it doesn’t shock you. And so you see it as normal. And that’s the problem, that’s what the Clapper event was all about. He saw deceiving the American people as what he does, as his job, as something completely ordinary. And he was right that he wouldn’t be punished for it, because he was revealed as having lied under oath and he didn’t even get a slap on the wrist for it. It says a lot about the system and a lot about our leaders.” Snowden decided it was time to hop out of the water before he too was boiled alive.

At the same time, he knew there would be dire consequences. “It’s really hard to take that step—not only do I believe in something, I believe in it enough that I’m willing to set my own life on fire and burn it to the ground.”

But he felt that he had no choice. Two months later he boarded a flight to Hong Kong with a pocket full of thumb drives.

[…]

rather than the Russian secret police, it’s his old employers, the CIA and the NSA, that Snowden most fears. “If somebody’s really watching me, they’ve got a team of guys whose job is just to hack me,” he says. “I don’t think they’ve geolocated me, but they almost certainly monitor who I’m talking to online. Even if they don’t know what you’re saying, because it’s encrypted, they can still get a lot from who you’re talking to and when you’re talking to them.”

More than anything, Snowden fears a blunder that will destroy all the progress toward reforms for which he has sacrificed so much. “I’m not self-destructive. I don’t want to self-immolate and erase myself from the pages of history. But if we don’t take chances, we can’t win,” he says. And so he takes great pains to stay one step ahead of his presumed pursuers—he switches computers and email accounts constantly. Nevertheless, he knows he’s liable to be compromised eventually: “I’m going to slip up and they’re going to hack me. It’s going to happen.”

Indeed, some of his fellow travelers have already committed some egregious mistakes. Last year, Greenwald found himself unable to open the encryption on a large trove of secrets from GCHQ—the British counterpart of the NSA—that Snowden had passed to him. So he sent his longtime partner, David Miranda, from their home in Rio to Berlin to get another set from Poitras. But in making the arrangements, The Guardian booked a transfer through London. Tipped off, probably as a result of GCHQ surveillance, British authorities detained Miranda as soon as he arrived and questioned him for nine hours. In addition, an external hard drive containing 60 gigabits of data—about 58,000 pages of documents—was seized. Although the documents had been encrypted using a sophisticated program known as True Crypt, the British authorities discovered a paper of Miranda’s with the password for one of the files, and they were able to decrypt about 75 pages. (Greenwald has still not gained access to the complete GCHQ documents.)

Another concern for Snowden is what he calls NSA fatigue—the public becoming numb to disclosures of mass surveillance, just as it becomes inured to news of battle deaths during a war. “One death is a tragedy, and a million is a statistic,” he says, mordantly quoting Stalin. “Just as the violation of Angela Merkel’s rights is a massive scandal and the violation of 80 million Germans is a nonstory.”

Nor is he optimistic that the next election will bring any meaningful reform. In the end, Snowden thinks we should put our faith in technology—not politicians. “We have the means and we have the technology to end mass surveillance without any legislative action at all, without any policy changes.” The answer, he says, is robust encryption. “By basically adopting changes like making encryption a universal standard—where all communications are encrypted by default—we can end mass surveillance not just in the United States but around the world.”

[…]

“The question for us is not what new story will come out next. The question is, what are we going to do about it?”

China: USB External Hard Drive to the French – Super Colossal

China: USB External Hard Drive to the French – Super Colossal.

In Tianducheng, on the outskkirts of Hangzhou in east China’s Zhejiang Province a Pariisan streetscape facsimile is taking shape. It has all the bits you make expect from an alternate Paris: an Eiffel Tower, a tree lined boulevard, mansard roofs galore. 2000 people reportedly live there,

We are aware that reporting on zany building in China is cliché, but then it struck us: what if China wasn’t behind this after all? What if France was? What if it is an act not of banal facsimile, but one of pre-emptive preservation?

Perhaps France is making a backup copy of itself.

Emails circulated the architecture mail system several times over last year with pictures of Ronchamp sitting in the dusty Chinese city of Zhengzhou. An interesting novelty. But with a portion of Paris also turning up, a pattern is forming.

Could China be the USB external hard-drive of the French built environment? Regular backing up of our data is a just a fact of life for most of us worried that we may lose important data. External USB hard-drives are being made for less and with higher capacities every day, such that the delete button is increasingly becoming irrelevant. So why limit our backups to data? China’s construction industry seems perfect for the task of backing up bricks rather than bits – cheap and powered by the brute force of sheer population. Copies of places may be made in a fraction of the time that it took to create them.

If in the event of a catastrophic episode, the part of France in question could be restored and life would go on as it was before.

What Do Chinese Dumplings Have to Do With Global Warming? – NYTimes.com

What Do Chinese Dumplings Have to Do With Global Warming? – NYTimes.com.

The Sanquan factory in Zhengzhou, China, which produces frozen dumplings and frozen glutinous rice balls. Massimo Vitali for The New York Times

‘In Sichuan, we’re eaters,” said Chen Zemin, the world’s first and only frozen-dumpling billionaire. “We have an expression that goes, ‘Even if you have a very poor life, you still have your teeth to please.’ ” He smiled and patted his not insubstantial belly. “I like to eat.”

[…]

Chinese pot stickers and rice balls are traditionally made in enormous batches, in order to justify the effort it takes to knead the dough, roll it out, mix the filling and wrap by hand a morsel that stays fresh for only one day. Because of his medical background, Chen had an idea for how to extend the life span of his spicy-pork won tons and sweet-sesame-paste-filled balls. “As a surgeon, you have to preserve things like organs or blood in a cold environment,” Chen said. “A surgeon’s career cannot be separate from refrigeration. I already knew that cold was the best physical way to preserve.”

[…]

Using mechanical parts harvested from the hospital junk pile, Chen built a two-stage freezer that chilled his glutinous rice balls one by one, quickly enough that large ice crystals didn’t form inside the filling and ruin the texture. His first patent covered a production process for the balls themselves; a second was for the packaging that would protect them from freezer burn. Soon enough, Chen realized that both innovations could be applied to pot stickers, too. And so in 1992, against the advice of his entire family, Chen, then 50, quit his hospital job, rented a small former print shop and started China’s first frozen-food business. He named his fledgling dumpling company Sanquan, which is short for the “Third Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China” — the 1978 gathering that marked the country’s first steps toward the open market.

[…]

Today, Sanquan has seven factories nationwide. The largest, in which Chen and I were chatting, employs 5,000 workers and produces an astonishing 400 tons of dumplings a day. He showed me the factory floor from a glass-walled skywalk; below us, dozens of workers — in hooded white jumpsuits, white face masks and white galoshes — tended to nearly 100 dumpling machines lined up in rows inside a vast, white-tiled refrigerator. Every few minutes, someone in a pink jumpsuit would wheel a fresh vat of ground pork through the stainless-steel double doors in the corner and use a shovel to top off the giant conical funnel on each dumpling maker. In the far corner, a quality-control inspector in a yellow jumpsuit was dealing with a recalcitrant machine, scooping defective dumplings off the conveyor belt with both hands. At the end of the line, more than 100,000 dumplings an hour rained like beige pebbles into an endless succession of open-mouthed bags.

[…]

An artificial winter has begun to stretch across the country, through its fields and its ports, its logistics hubs and freeways. China had 250 million cubic feet of refrigerated storage capacity in 2007; by 2017, the country is on track to have 20 times that. At five billion cubic feet, China will surpass even the United States, which has led the world in cold storage ever since artificial refrigeration was invented. And even that translates to only 3.7 cubic feet of cold storage per capita, or roughly a third of what Americans currently have — meaning that the Chinese refrigeration boom is only just beginning.

This is not simply transforming how Chinese people grow, distribute and consume food. It also stands to become a formidable new factor in climate change; cooling is already responsible for 15 percent of all electricity consumption worldwide, and leaks of chemical refrigerants are a major source of greenhouse-gas pollution. Of all the shifts in lifestyle that threaten the planet right now, perhaps not one is as important as the changing way that Chinese people eat.

In the United States, the first mechanically cooled warehouses opened in Boston in 1881. America’s Chen Zemin was a Brooklyn-born entrepreneur named Clarence Birdseye, who invented a fast-freezing machine in 1924 to replicate the taste of the delicious frozen fish he enjoyed while traveling in Labrador. (Birds Eye brand frozen vegetables still bear his name.) In the 1930s, the African-American refrigeration pioneer Frederick McKinley Jones designed a portable cooling unit for trucks; by the 1950s, pretty much everyone in America had a refrigerator, and Swanson was delighting working wives with a frozen “sumptuous turkey dinner” that “tastes home-cooked.”

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Americans have become so used to associating refrigeration with freshness that soy-milk manufacturers have actually paid extra to have their product displayed in a refrigerated case, despite the fact that it is perfectly shelf-stable. By contrast, the Chinese didn’t build their first refrigerated warehouse until 1955. And even as skyscrapers, shopping malls and high-speed trains have transformed life in China, the refrigerator represents, on an individual level, a significant step forward. Every Chinese person over age 30 whom I spoke to could remember wistfully the moment he got his first home refrigerator, with the exception of those who still don’t have one.

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Leading up to the 2008 Olympics, the Beijing municipal authorities embarked on an ambitious program of “supermarketization,” designed to get meat and vegetables out of the open-air “wet” markets — where food is cooled by standing fans and the occasional hose down from the cold tap — and safely behind sneeze-guards in modern, climate-controlled grocery stores.

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In practical terms, tax breaks, subsidies and preferential access to land has been made available to anyone aspiring to build a refrigerated warehouse. In 2010, the government’s powerful National Development and Reform Commission made expanding the country’s refrigerated and frozen capacity one of the central priorities in its 12th Five-Year National Plan.

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Encouraged by the government’s Five-Year Plan, Chen’s fellow entrepreneurs are building their own cold-storage facilities to gain “face” — similar to the way a wealthy businessman in the United States might buy a football team. “If an independent private guy builds a cold-storage warehouse, the central government notices,” said Tim McLellan, a director at Preferred Freezer Services, an American company that is about to open its third cold-storage facility in China. “Now he has a picture with Premier Li Keqiang or President Xi.” That is true, he said, even if “the design and technology are 30 years old and they have no idea how to run it.”

Despite the expansion in frozen foods and refrigerators, the critical growth area is what’s known in the logistics business as the “cold chain” — the seamless network of temperature-controlled space through which perishable food is supposed to travel on its way from farm to refrigerator. In the United States, at least 70 percent of all the food we eat each year passes through a cold chain. By contrast, in China, less than a quarter of the country’s meat supply is slaughtered, transported, stored or sold under refrigeration. The equivalent number for fruit and vegetables is just 5 percent.

These statistics translate into scenes that would concern most American food-safety inspectors. In Shanghai, for example, one large pork processor has no refrigeration system; instead, it does all its slaughtering at night, when the temperature is slightly cooler, in a massive shed with open sides to allow for a cross breeze. The freshly disemboweled pigs hang for hours in the smoggy air. In Beijing, at the wholesale market that supplies 70 percent of the city’s vegetables, vendors carefully excavate individual, naked stalks of broccoli from trucks packed solid with ice and hay. A middle-aged farmer, bundled up against the cold, told me that he expects to have to throw away a quarter of the truckload — more when the weather is warm — as the ice melts and the vegetables rot faster than they can be sold. And just 20 minutes down the road from Sanquan’s gleaming, automated dumpling freezer, the central Zhengzhou market has mountains of unrefrigerated chicken carcasses, flopping out of plastic crates onto the concrete floor.

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Death rates from dysentery and diarrhea — serious illness is an all-too-common result of consuming bacteria or parasite-laden food — decreased by more than 90 percent from 1900 to 1950. It stands to reason, then, that a similarly seamless, well-regulated cold chain could stop spoiled food from reaching and sickening Chinese eaters. Food safety comes up in the Five-Year Plan as an issue that is “becoming protruding,” to use the distinctive prose of the Communist Party. In the past few years, all the major frozen-food companies — Sanquan, Synear and the General Mills-owned Wanchai Ferry — have been hit with staph-contamination scandals, despite their own modern facilities.

Mike Moriarty, a lead author on the A.T. Kearney report, said food safety was what initially prompted him to research the Chinese cold chain. The multinationals he works with kept complaining that poor handling was threatening their brand reputation in China. His investigations found that, on average, a Chinese person experiences some kind of digestive upset twice a week — a kind of low-level recurring food poisoning, much of which is probably caused by the kind of bacterial growth that could have been prevented by keeping food cold. “Bad bowels,” Moriarty said, “is just part of the drill for being a food consumer in China.”

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In its Development Plan for Cold-Chain Logistics of Agricultural Products, China set itself the five-year goal of reducing the loss rate for vegetables, meat and aquatic products to less than 15 percent, 8 percent and 10 percent by 2015. If the nation hits those targets next year, the effort could save a large part of the more than $32 billion in food now wasted, but at this point, there is quite a way to go. Nearly half of everything that is grown in China rots before it even reaches the retail market.

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For all the food waste that refrigeration might forestall, the uncomfortable fact is that a fully developed cold chain (field precooling stations, slaughterhouses, distribution centers, trucks, grocery stores and domestic refrigerators) requires a lot of energy.

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Calculating the climate-change impact of an expanded Chinese cold chain is extremely complicated. Artificial refrigeration contributes to global greenhouse-gas emissions in two main ways. First, generating the power (whether it be electricity for warehouses or diesel fuel for trucks) that fuels the heat-exchange process, which is at the heart of any cooling system, accounts for about 80 percent of refrigeration’s global-warming impact (measured in tons of CO2) and currently consumes nearly a sixth of global electricity usage.

But the other problem is the refrigerants themselves: the chemicals that are evaporated and condensed by the compressors in order to remove heat and thus produce cold. Some of that refrigerant leaks into the atmosphere as a gas — either a little (roughly 2 percent a year from the most up-to-date domestic refrigerators) or a lot (on average, 15 percent from commercial refrigerated warehouses). In addition, different refrigeration systems use different refrigerants, some of which, like ammonia, have a negligible global-warming impact. But others, like the hydrofluorocarbons that are popular in China, are known as “supergreenhouse gases,” because they are thousands of times more warming than CO2. If current trends in refrigerant usage were to continue, experts project that hydrofluorocarbons would be responsible for nearly half of all global greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050.

To make matters worse, it’s not even clear that refrigeration reduces food waste over the long term. Logically, it would seem that a refrigerator should result in less food waste at home, slowing down the rate at which vegetables rot and milk sours, as well as allowing families to save leftovers. But Susanne Freidberg, a geography professor at Dartmouth College and author of “Fresh: A Perishable History,” says that refrigeration in the United States has tended to merely change when the waste occurs. Americans, too, throw away 40 percent of their food, but nearly half of that waste occurs at the consumer level, meaning in retail locations and at home. “Food waste is a justification for refrigeration,” Freidberg said. “But at the same time, there are studies that show that, over the longer time frame, the cold chain encourages consumers to buy more than they’re going to eat.”

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In U.S. homes, the size of the average domestic refrigerator has increased by almost 20 percent since 1975, leading the food-waste expert Jonathan Bloom to identify what he calls the “full-cupboard effect,” over and above Garnett’s safety-net syndrome. “So many people these days have these massive refrigerators, and there is this sense that we need to keep them well stocked,” he said. “But there’s no way you can eat all that food before it goes bad.” A four-year observational study of Los Angeles-area families carried out by U.C.L.A. social scientists confirmed this tendency to stockpile food in not just one but in multiple refrigerators.

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For most of these families, as for most Americans, Bloom says, home refrigerators simply “serve as cleaner, colder trash bins.”

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By artificially extending the life span of otherwise perishable fruits, vegetables and animal products, refrigeration changes almost everything about how we know and interact with food: how we shop, what we eat and even the definition of the word “fresh.”

Fuchsia Dunlop, a British cook and author who writes about Chinese cuisine, described how she saw traditional food-preservation skills die out over the past two decades, as refrigeration gained ground. “When I first lived in China, in 1994,” she said, “everything was dried, pickled or salted. On sunny days, people would be laying all kinds of vegetables out to dry in the sun, and some of them afterward would be rubbed with salt and put in jars to ferment. Other vegetables would be pickled in brine and preserved neat. In Chengdu, they would hang sausages and pork under the eaves of the old houses to dry, and there were these great clay pickle jars in people’s homes.”

Now, though, most of those old houses have been demolished. In the new, high-rise apartment buildings that have been built in their place, Dunlop told me, “you do have balconies that are enclosed with bars, so sometimes you can see salt meat and salt fish on coat hangers out on them.” But, she said, it’s rare. At the moment that America’s long-lost pickling, salting and smoking traditions are being revived, China’s much richer and more ancient preservation techniques are dying out.

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By removing constraints of proximity and seasonality, refrigeration can change what Chinese farmers produce. I met with plant scientists at the Beijing Vegetable Research Center who are selecting and optimizing the varieties of popular Chinese greens that stand up best to cold storage. If they are successful, the incredible regional variety and specificity of Chinese fruits and vegetables may soon resemble the homogeneous American produce aisle, which is often limited to three tomato varieties and five types of apple for sale, all hardy (and flavorless) enough to endure lengthy journeys and storage under refrigeration.

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Dai Jianjun is the 45-year-old chain-smoking chef of Longjing Caotang, a restaurant on the outskirts of Hangzhou, the scenic capital of Zhejiang province, which serves an entirely locally sourced, anti-industrial cuisine.

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Over the course of two epic meals, separated only by a short paddle on a local lake to catch fish for dinner, Dai fed me dried vegetables and mushrooms, vinegar-pickled radishes, fermented “stinky” tofu and peanuts that six months earlier had been packed into earthenware jars. I visited his on-site bamboo-walled drying shed, where salted silvery fish halves and hunks of pork hung in orderly rows. Between courses, Dai pulled out his iPad to show me a series of videos that demonstrated how radish preservation varies by topography, with hill people drying the vegetable in the sun before salting it and flatlanders working in reverse order. After our boat ride, as the rest of the fishermen beheaded and gutted the catch on a wooden block, the fish boss, who went by the name Mr. Wang, prepared a particularly delicious yellow-mud-preserved duck egg, which, he told me, keeps at room temperature for 30 days.

The rest of the ingredients were harvested or foraged that day. Dai keeps leatherbound purchase diaries documenting the provenance of every chicken, tea leaf, mustard green and black fungus. Several entries are accompanied by photos of a farmer picking or slaughtering the item in question. Not a single thing I was served that day had been refrigerated.