Ari on the web

Though the Shanghai subway is largely useless as a form of transportation (two lines only, takes ages to work to and from the station to most places worth going to, always crowded) is does make a great place to watch the massive pool of migrant workers going about their business. China has tens of millions of migrant workers, who move from town to town as the demand for labour shifts. At the moment there is plenty of construction in Shanghai, and so the city is alive with middle aged men from rural areas trudging around to and from days on the job. The migrant workers look greatly out of place in cosmopolitan Shanghai. Most of them sport a look that is best described as 'Country Bumpkin (with a Chinese twist)' and have a permanent vague stare in their eyes. They also seem to carry around massive amounts of stuff with them, usually in simple cloth bags which are bursting at the seams, and presumably full of every worldly possession owned by the carrier. One has to feel f...

The following line of thinking started off as a casual bar-room conversation with a cluey pom, and now the more I think it through (and add my own twist on things) the more it seems to ring true. China has a massive demographic problem, one that it is only slowly realising. Since the introduction of the one-child policy in 1980, there has been a growing imbalance to the number of males to females who make it through infancy. Due to the partiarchal nature of Chinese society, families would generally rather their one child be a boy rather than a girl, in order to continue the family name, be more likely to find education and work etc. There are various ways to tip the balance in favour of a boy - diet around the time of conception, ultrasound followed by selective abortion, infanticide... The recorded male:female ratio is getting close to 120:100 in some cities. It is worth noting, though, that the one child policy has led to a high level of 'unreporting' of births (presu...

There's no subtlety to the pimps of Shanghai. Walking home late last night down Nanjing East Road, I was approached by a number of young, sleazy looking guys, one at a time. "Wanna fuck a Shanghai girl?" is all they say, completely taking the romance and excitement out of organised prostitution. It's like they were paying their English teacher according to the number of words learnt, and managed to whittle it down to five (although 'Shanghai' they could probably work out themselves). Hey presto, they've got themselves a marketing strategy.

Just a quicky to let the world know that my visa application has been approved for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, better known to the rest of the world as 'North Korea' or 'that fucked little Stalinist hellhole in Asia'. Apparently there was some difficulty in contacting my employer in Melbourne, who were apparently refusing to confirm my employment. After a quick call from me in Shanghai to the embassy in Canberra, all was resolved and I'll be able to pick up my visa from the embassy in Beijing in a fortnight. I've got heaps of stuff I've held back on re observations on NK from my time in SK, and I might just hold on to those for a little longer until I've come and gone from Club Med Pyongyang. Bottom line, though... I'm in!

As predicted, I can write it, but I can't read it, here in the People's Republic of China. Blogging will be a fair bit more difficult, but I'll be doing my best. I've been in Shanghai for just under a day now, and it's barely stopped raining the entire time. It's cold, grey, wet and depressing out there, and no matter how much neon the shop proprietors of Shanghai use, the place still looks drab and unwelcoming. It is a little startling to see the neo-Colonial architecture which lines the Bund and would be more suited to Rome or London, right here in the bustle of mainland China.

A quick bit of admin... Tomorrow I am bound for Shanghai, and will be in China for about a month. As part of its efforts to show the world just how modern and progressive it really is, the Chinese government has blocked access to all blogspot sites. As for whether I'll be able to access the site I use to update the blog, I won't know until I get there. There's a chance I won't be able to update this for a month or so (I don't fancy my chances of doing it in Pyongyang), but then again I might be fine and be able to do it tomorrow. Most likely, I'll be able to update it, but not be able to access the blog itself. Flying blind. Either way, email contact should be fine throughout. You know the drill - absharp@hotmail.com

Korea has a hunger for learning English, and it says plenty about how Koreans see themselves and the world. A whole industry has grown around this desire, with the public school system failing the adequately scratch the English itch and the subsequent growth of private langauge schools, known as Hagwan. Generally staffed by native-English speaking 20- and 30-somethings, the schools work well for both teacher and student. With demand outstripping supply, foreign teachers without a qualification can earn good money and live not too far from the big cities. But why the obsession with learning a foreign language which is only of very limited use on the strets of Seoul or Busan? Part of it is the South Korean education obsession. Parents put unrelenting pressure on their children to learn, beginning at a remarkably young age. The noble notion of education as a good in itself is largely lost, and instead education becomes a highly functional means to an end. Initially, that end is ...