I spent five years in China. I am no longer expecting to return.  While it seems like barriers to travel – these and a hundred signs say that the country is turning inwards, preparing for some other surprise – will keep casual travellers away for another two years, something more has been broken in me and people like me. One of the strangest inflections of the pandemic for me has been to realize that the virus, however it became a world-plague, likely came from a rainforest in which I briefly stayed. The Mojiang mine, whatever its place in the calamity, was just a few kilometres from where I was working.  Flashing images of the biology…

 A billion balconies facing the sun; still, it means a final goodbye to wars and ideologies…   JG Ballard, Cocaine Nights, (1996)  XI Hails a Historic Free Trade Move / APEC summit endorses route to promote economic integration in Asia-Pacific  The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit yesterday opened a route toward a vast free trade area in the region, host Xi Jinping said, calling it a historic step…   Besides accounting for more than fifty percent of the world’s gross domestic product, 21-member APEC also makes up nearly half of world trade and 40 percent of the Earth’s population. The APEC leaders also endorsed a proposal to work more closely to combat official corruption, Xi said.  Shanghai Daily, cover story, Wednesday 12…

Chimney Blown Up  A 206-metre high chimney owned by Baosteel was blown up on Monday. The structure was the tallest ever to have been blown up in Asia. The chimney, which weighed 1,500 tons, took just two minutes to demolish. The structure was demolished because it was no longer needed.  Shanghai Daily, Metro section, Wednesday 5 November 2014  1. Babylon: Shanghai 2014  Years ago I walked into the Pergamon museum in Berlin. I entered a room and looked up at the Ishtar gate. The effect it had was made up of conflicting feelings and a posture, as I scanned the images on the bricks and the archway. I leaned back and kept staring. I wanted to approach it and to go through it – and to keep a distance at the…

Post-China Post 2 By 鲁科 It was August in 2015. I had been in the country a year. The apartment I lived in with two flatmates had a long, curving balcony, hugging half our shared space like a visor around a face. From it we looked out at a nightscape of southwest Shanghai, at many lights and different neighbourhoods, but few landmarks. A pair of towers in Xuhui that were nicknamed the ‘Lipsticks’ could be seen from it, but little else that you could put a name to. It was almost irresistible to smoke there. Cigarettes costing nothing, we would leave packs on the loose marble shelf with lighters, and indiscriminately take from them. This…