Ryan Pyle - Photographer

Ryan Pyle Blog: Losing Interest

2011-05-21T21:00:00.002+08:00

Hello.

When I started blogging, back several years ago I was passionate and dilligent. Needless to say things have changed.

With the introduction of social media I feel that services like Facebook and Twitter allow me to express my opinions and feelings on a more regular basis and often with "real time" feedback. So, I had to ask the question a few weeks back: should I continue to blog? The answer was yes, but much less regular. I'll continue to blog when I have something long and profound to say, which is rare to say the least.

Until I can muster up the prose to write something interesting, I'll continue to babble and amuse on my social media pages: You can follow me on Facebook & Twitter for more regular updates.

--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle Blog: Is Brazil the New China?

2011-05-13T21:00:00.003+08:00

Hello,

I found this article a few days back on Reuters and I thought to myself, wow.....really? It seems that Foxconn and Apple are teaming up to build iPhones and iPads in Brazil. The reason behind it seems to be that Apple is under-performing in Brazil and the consumer market there is growing rapidly as new wealth expands the middle class. High import taxes seem to price most of these products out of reach for most consumers, so why not build them in Brazil and cut prices.

But I think it's important to look beyond just producing for the Brazil market. Foxconn and Apple will most likely aim to export to the rest of South and Central America as well as the United States, and perhaps even in a few decades Foxconn will ship iPads from Brazil to China.

With China's increasing wages, raising currency and a spurt of suicides last year; it's become obvious that the cost of doing business in China is on the way up. Foxconn need to start thinking global if they want to continue to produce high-tech products. We are also less than a decade away from Foxconn opening up a plant in Africa some where as well.

For those people out there who think that China will always be the workshop of of the world, think again. These jobs now flow across borders like trade winds. The moment a country becomes too expensive or "un-friendly" companies move to other countries offering better tax breaks.

I'll never forget back in 2004 when my landlord in Shanghai was telling me how he just moved his factory to Vietnam because China was getting too expensive - and that was 7 years ago. Times are changing. The Foxconn / Brazil / Apple article is below.

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Original Link: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/06/us-brazil-foxconn-idUSTRE7454H120110506
Copyright: Reuters
Foxconn Brazil iPad deal facing barriers: reports
Fri, May 6 2011

SAO PAULO (Reuters) - Taiwanese electronics giant Foxconn wants to begin assembling iPads in Brazil by July, but it is still seeking tax breaks and other government concessions as part of an investment plan that could be worth up to $12 billion, Brazilian media reported on Friday.

Foxconn Technology Group, maker of Apple Inc's iPhone and iPad, announced its intention to dramatically ramp up production in Brazil last month during a visit to China by Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff.

Foxconn has moved up its desired start date for assembling iPads in Brazil to July from November, seeking to tap massive demand for the device in Brazil's booming consumer market, according to newspapers Estado de S.Paulo and Folha de S.Paulo. Their reports quoted government officials.

"It's a daring timeline. Whatever is within our reach, we're going to work on making that viable," Science and Technology Minister Aloizio Mercadante told Folha.

Foxconn's plans have generated excitement among Brazilian officials, who are hoping their country can move up the value-added manufacturing chain despite extremely high labor costs, taxes and an overvalued currency that have made business difficult for other factories in recent months.

The project could also give Foxconn and Apple a better foothold in Brazil, where high-tech gadgets are often priced out of the market because of import tariffs and production costs. Apple's cheapest iPad currently retails for about $860 in Brazil, versus $400 in the United States.

Several obstacles remain to the deal's full implementation. Rousseff recently received a long letter from Foxconn chief Terry Tou detailing several conditions for both short-term and long-term investments, the reports said, quoting Mercadante.

The company is negotiating tax incentives for production and other measures that would make it easier to import components for local assembly, the reports said. Foxconn also wants government assistance in dispatching 200 Brazilian engineers to China for training as soon as possible.

Foxconn intends to first begin assembling iPads in Brazil using imported parts, and then start producing screens and other parts locally in coming years, the reports said.

Skilled labor shortages and the likely need for a local partner in the venture have caused some Brazilian economic officials to privately question whether the total investment will reach anywhere near $12 billion, the amount cited by Rousseff last month.
The deal will also require funding from Brazil's BNDES state development bank, Mercadante said, which is under pressure to slow loan growth amid a rise in inflation.
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--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle Blog: Article - Hurt on Assignment?

2011-05-06T21:00:00.000+08:00

Hello,

In light of some of the world events that have happened this year, an Arab Spring, a Tsunami and a Civil War; there has been a rush of photographers who have selflessly thrown themselves in to danger to report the story visually. Some of been badly injured. Some have died. But do all photographers who report on this kind of news actually know the risks involved and know what can happen to you if you get hurt in the line of work.

This article by Jay Malin is pretty revealing when it comes to just how expendable, and how vulnerable, photographers really are. I'm very found of photographers who can risk their own lives to report on dangerous stories, if it wasn't for them how would we ever know what things "look like" on the ground. But the risks, as we've learned this year, are absolute.

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Copyright: PDN Magazine

ORIGINAL LINK

What To Expect If You’re Injured on Assignment

MAY 03, 2011

By Jay Mallin

[Editor's Note: This article was researched and written in March, weeks before the April 20 rocket attack in Misrata, Libya, which killed two photojournalists and also wounded two others. The injured were not on assignment. Thanks to help from many colleagues, the injured were evacuated and are now recovering; however, we believe the questions this article raises remain relevant.]

When Bangkok-based photographer Philip Blenkinsop returned home after having a bomb blow up a few feet in front of him while photographing in southern Thailand for Time Asia, he got a lesson in the sort of assistance and protection freelancers on assignment can expect from their clients.

“I had a lovely bouquet of flowers waiting for me when I got home,” remembers Blenkinsop. “And I was offered an extra day rate.”

To be fair, Blenkinsop, who had won recognition for his previous work for Time, says he did not ask his editors for any special consideration after the blast, and initial reports indicated his injuries were not serious. But the effects of the 2007 incident left him unable to work for about eight months. Of the flowers and the extra money, he says, “It felt a little like after carrying someone’s bags for 10 kilometers through the streets of Paris or New York, they’d tipped you a dollar, you know?”

With multiple wars, revolutions and a possible nuclear disaster, 2011 is shaping up as an unusually dangerous year for journalists. At least three photographers died in conflicts in the first three months of the year, while others suffered permanent injuries and hazards like kidnapping. Also on the minds of many is Joao Silva, recovering from a mine explosion that took both his legs in Afghanistan.

Incidents like Silva’s might be expected to spark discussions among photojournalists and their photo editors. Instead, many photographers and clients are treating the “what if’s” of a photographer injured or killed in the same way they always have— with silence.

“I don’t know how many years I’ve been working for different magazines [and] I’ve never seen anything in any contract that says anything about what happens if I get shot or killed or get my legs broken,” says Teru Kuwayama, who was injured in a car crash in Pakistan in 2009 that saw the driver killed and another photographer injured.

As for the clients, when contacted by PDN they were uniformly unwilling to talk. Editors and spokespeople either declined to speak for publication or were simply unreachable.
“We don’t discuss personnel matters,” said Daniel Kile, executive director of public relations for Time.

“They just don’t like me talking about it,” explained an editor at another publication.

At The New York Times, which has been praised for hiring long-time freelancer Silva as a staffer after he lost both his legs below the knees to a landmine, an editor was similarly reluctant to say anything.

Photographers themselves seem split between those who’ve never addressed the issue at all, and those who trust in a combination of passed-on lore (“use a platinum American Express card to qualify for free medevac”), half-remembered precedents (an anecdote that photojournalist Tim Page successfully sued Time magazine following his Vietnam-era brain injury), and faith in the compassion and camaraderie of their photo editors.

“[Photographers] assume—especially with publications that they have good relationships with—you make this assumption that they are going to take care of you if something happens,” says Ron Haviv, a photographer with VII Photo Agency who has covered conflicts around the world. “But I don’t think anyone knows in the end what will happen when you start getting people outside our circle involved, like lawyers and corporate people.”

Haviv has it right there, says one editor who was willing to discuss the subject, thanks to having moved on to a job in academia. Tom Kennedy, Alexia Foundation Chair Professor for Documentary Photography at Syracuse, has worked as director of photography for National Geographic and editor for Washingtonpost.com.

“I don’t know that there is an industry standard,” Kennedy says. “I think it’s very much company by company, and I think it is somewhat contingent obviously on what company practice is as dictated by lawyers.” Corporate lawyers may overrule photo editors who want to do what they can for colleagues.

“My experience is that the legal department and to some extent HR [human resources] tend to drive the contractual arrangements that an organization settles on,” Kennedy says. “Most organizations that I am familiar with that are working with freelancers regard them as independent contractors who are responsible for their own insurance, their own well-being.”

That was different at Geographic, he says, where contracts specified that the magazine did take on some of the risks. And conversations with photographers and editors who spoke off the record showed that in some cases, with some publications, magazines do take precautions like buying insurance for photographers being sent into unusually dangerous areas. But it’s often not discussed, and it’s not standard practice.

Veteran photojournalists say there has been an evolution in the industry’s approach to the problem since Operation Desert Storm in 1990. In the Nineties, the Balkan wars and Chechnya coincided with a decision by magazines to turn from assignments and day-rates to space guarantees. With a guarantee, a magazine pays the photographer a minimum fee (expenses are typically not included) in exchange for a first look at the photographers’ pictures. Many photographers believe the move from assignments to the more arm’s length guarantee arrangements made it easier for publications to cut loose freelancers in trouble.

That doesn’t mean they always were cut loose—photographers say there have been many cases where magazine publishing companies have helped photographers, even those who were not on assignment. At the same time, others on assignment found such assistance was not granted. (The local drivers and translators news organizations rely on in dangerous areas are typically paid by the day; provisions are rarely made in the event they are injured or killed in the line of work.)

Some photographers signed on for combat-zone training offered by former Special Air Service-types in Britain. A benefit of that training was it allowed them to qualify for specialized war-zone insurance at rates photographers could afford—Haviv remembers paying about $1,600 annually for coverage good in most countries.

He has since turned to insurance through Reporters Without Borders (http://en.rsf.org/), which starts at 1.4 Euros a day and increases depending on the country and the benefits desired: medical, evacuation, dismemberment, death.

Haviv believes the costs of such insurance should automatically be part of the conversation between editors and photographers, and added to the invoice like the costs of fixers and hotel rooms. In workshops he teaches for aspiring photojournalists, Haviv tells students: “You just have to make sure you are taking care of yourself in every way possible. You can’t really rely on a corporation, even though you are friends with the editor you are working with.”

How well that message gets out to photographers in the field is questionable. During the uprising in Tahrir Square and the intervention in Libya, for instance, the editor who asked not be quoted said he was flooded with e-mails like one he forwarded: “Dear [name of editor not even filled in], I will be in Libya from the 1st of April. I’ll be moving to the frontline from the East. If you have any interest, requests or ideas, feel free to let me know.”

He wonders how to respond: “Do I say, ‘Yes, I want to see your stuff! Fantastic! Exclusive material for us! And I don’t want to hear from you tomorrow—especially if you get hurt’?”

For a different model of how to handle the situation, American editors and photographers could look to European countries. Photographer Harald Henden covers armed conflicts for the Norwegian newspaper VG. Henden, reached on his way back into Libya, says the practice in Norway today was shaped by a 2008 attack on the Serena Hotel in Kabul in which war correspondent Carsten Thomassen was injured.

“I found him a few minutes later and we basically worked very hard to keep him alive for like two hours before we were able to have him evacuated,” remembers Henden. Thomassen went into shock and died a short time later at a military hospital. Henden says that brought major changes to how Scandinavian publications handle war coverage.

“After this, no Norwegian publication sends someone to war zones without some kind of security and first-aid training,” he says. In addition, “anybody who goes into that kind of area for my newspaper [or others in the region] would be fully covered by a special war-zone insurance [paid for by the paper]. The editors take the responsibility of sending personnel into these kinds of areas much more seriously now,” and at VG, they normally refuse to send freelancers at all.

Henden and others like him have an additional safety net. In Norway and similar countries, if an injured photographer can just make it back to his or her home country, all medical expenses are covered by national healthcare.

Turning away work by freelancers—or at least uninsured free- lancers—might be too draconian a solution for the American market. But ending the general silence on the subject of “when things go sideways”—as one photographer termed it—might be possible.

Peter van Agtmael, a Magnum photographer who was beaten in Tahrir Square this year while on assignment for the Wall Street Journal, says he never discussed the possibility of anything like that with his editor before rushing to Egypt. “The subject, ‘Hey, in case something happens, where does your responsibility lie,’ it didn’t come up.” After he was attacked, the paper quickly said it would take care of getting him out of the country and any medical bills, he says. But van Agtmael added, “I should look at the contract itself.

“I’ve always thought of it as an implied social compact, but I really don’t know. I’ve been lax, and relying on the good will of large media conglomerates to take care of this.”
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--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle Blog: The Gap Between Rich & Poor

2011-04-29T21:00:00.001+08:00

Hello.

For anyone out there who has had this conversation with me, they will know that I feel very strongly about the destabilizing force that the gap between rich and poor is creating in China. Those who have moved in to the cities in search of a better life has more or less found some version of it, those who have stayed behind in rural China have fallen even further behind. The question is why?

China's political leaders have, for the last 30 years, have focused entirely on developing China's cities. And, for the most part they have done a good job. But their focus on China's urban centers has left behind some 70% of the countries population (rural residents) who still have to deal with an often kleptocratic and corrupt local government. So if the gap between rich and poor is so great and the life quality between China's urban and rural residents so large, how does China keep it's 700 million farmers happy? What keeps them loyal to the system that consistently see's them losing out to urban residents? It's a question I have never been able to answer.

One of the most interesting developments in China over the last five years or so has been the media's aggressive push to publish corruption scandals in Chinese newspapers throughout the mainland. In the past year alone there have been several full page spreads about massive corruption at China's SOE's as well as within the government ranks. Leading me to ask the same question again, what keeps this current system afloat? Stability? Fear?

Earlier this year, while 700 million Chinese were living day-to-day, the world learned that the Chairman and CEO of China's High-speed Rail Network at embezzled over USD 100 million and held 18 mistresses; a life style and an amount of money that could never be comprehended in rural China. To top it off his position was mainly a political posting in a publicly traded State Owned Enterprise.

With the gap between rural and urban residents getting bigger, how much longer will people stand for this kind of rampant corruption that exists in China? Perhaps the bigger question, beyond corruption, is just the blatant stupidity shown on a weekly basis by China's privileged class. Below is an article by Reuters that indicates a Sinopec Executive has been disciplined for spending over USD 230,000 on alcohol for a lavish party. Many of the bottles of local alcohol cost USD 1,500 each, as much as 5 times the annual income of a farmer in rural China. Another example of insane decision making by a privileged member of China's SEO elite.

At some stage the political and economic elite in China are going to have to realize that their jobs and careers, and perhaps this country's stability, are at risk because of the corruption, embezzlement and impotent legal system that exists in China. Institutions need to be stronger than the men/women who hold positions of power. Corruption by government officials and SEO executives is a slap in the face to much of China's 1.3 billion people who are striving to create a better life for themselves and their families.

Also make note of the story below: where did the executive get the USD 230,000 for the alcohol purchase? Was the party a corporate sanction party or a personal party? Was the executive using ill gotten corporate money or personal money? Is there a corruption inquiry going on? There are a lot of unanswered questions here. My guess, knowing how things work in China, is that this guy bought the booze using company money and it was sanctioned by corporate bosses and the alcohol was used for corporate smoozing. The equivalent of a big weekend in Vegas. But once the purchase popped up in online chat rooms someone needed to "take the fall" to save the public reputation of the company.

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Original Story: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/25/us-sinopec-drinks-idUSTRE73O3VX20110425

Copyright: Reuters

April 25th 2011

BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese oil refining giant Sinopec has demoted a top executive who bought 1.6 million yuan ($245,900) of wine and spirits after details of the purchase leaked onto the Internet and sparked an uproar over extravagance at the state-owned firm.

Sinopec, which is Asia's top refiner, said Monday that it had demoted Lu Guangyu, who was general manager at the company's operations in the southern province of Guangdong, for "seriously harming Sinopec's image."

The company also fined Lu an unspecified sum and ordered him to pay back 130,000 yuan for alcohol he and his associates had already drunk, it said in a statement on its website (www.sinopecgroup.com).

His purchases included 480 bottles of Moutai, an expensive Chinese liquor traditionally drunk at state banquets, Sinopec said, adding it had re-sold bottles which had not already been drunk.

Some of the bottles cost almost 12,000 yuan each -- far more than the average Chinese earns in a month.

State media and China's spirited internet users said the purchase of the alcohol, which was meant for internal company use, was especially galling considering how much gasoline and diesel prices had risen recently.

Many Chinese are also struggling to make ends meet as inflation climbs. Consumer prices rose 5.4 percent in the year to March.

Sinopec Corp is the company's listed arm. ($1 = 6.507 Chinese Yuan)
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--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle Blog: REMINDER - TONIGHT - MKRIDE @ UofT

2011-04-15T17:00:00.000+08:00

Hello,

I just wanted to update all our MKRIDE Fans that I'll be speaking publicly, for the first time, about The Middle Kingdom Ride, that I completed with my brother Colin Pyle in late 2010. Our 65 day - 18,000km - motorcycle journey earned us both a place in the book of Guinness World Records for the most kilometers completed in a single country. A brief is below. Please be sure to RSVP at the following LINK.

Details:
The Middle Kingdom Ride
Brothers Colin and Ryan Pyle’s circumnavigation of China by motorcycle

Friday, April 15
6:30-8:30 pm
Innis Town Hall
2 Sussex Avenue
(at St. George, south of Bloor)

Join award-winning documentary photographer Ryan Pyle (University of Toronto graduate and AI Affiliate Member) for a discussion of his photography career, his motorcycle expedition, and the challenges of filmmaking. Samples of his photography and video clips from his motorcycle film will be included in the lecture.

An informal reception will follow.

An Asian Heritage Month Event | Register online at www.utoronto.ca/ai

_________________________________________
Cheers,

Ryan Pyle
Motorcycle Rider, Producer, Director, Photographer
Guinness World Record Holder

Film: The Middle Kingdom Ride
A 65 day - 18,000km - Motorcycle Adventure through China

www.mkride.com / ryan@mkride.com

**Charitable Partner** - SEVA FOUNDATION

**Corporate Sponsors** - The Middle Kingdom Ride could not have happened without our wonderful corporate sponsors:
BMW China, Touratech, The Tomson Group, Airhawk, Pelican Products, Kodak, Oakley,
Cardo Systems, Lowe Pro & Mandarin House.

You can follow The MKRIDE at:

@ FACEBOOK

@ YOUTUBE

@ http://twitter.com/#!/MK_Ride

Ryan Pyle Blog: MKRIDE Lecture @ University of Toronto

2011-04-08T21:00:00.000+08:00

Ryan Pyle Blog: Where Did All The Features Go?

2011-04-01T21:00:00.000+08:00

Hello.

In terms of breaking news consumption, the first quarter of 2011 has been intense.

We've had an Arab spring, a devastating earthquake in New Zealand and an double-catastrophe in Japan that as shocked us in to a realization of our fragile our existence is in this world.

And through all that we've had journalists running around dodging bullets, getting arrested, having their lives threatened and working within range of a major nuclear disaster. As one correspondent on CNN mentioned, we've had a years worth of international news coverage in the first 3 months of 2011. So, given that I write a blog about what's it is like being a photographer, and I am pretty self absorbed, my big question is: what does all this mean for people like me, the content producer?

Well, sadly it doesn't mean much. You see, I don't chase; I plot. In other words, I am not a breaking news man, I'm a features guy. I'm not very good at chasing the story, or documenting a breaking news story, or working in a war zone. I prefer to lay low, prepare and plot. I like to set traps and execute. The chaos involved in documenting breaking news is not an easy environment to work in; and I have great respect for the people who risk their lives to report in these situations; but I knew long ago that it wasn't for me.

While the crisis in Japan, New Zealand and the wider Middle East has contributed to some excellent news coverage and wonderful commitment by Newspapers and Magazines, it's been all breaking news all the time; and it's been an exhausting journey. So I have to ask: what happened to the feature story? What has happened to the well researched and well executed peace on a historical, business or cultural aspect of a geographical region or a people? There haven't been any, because there are already so few pages in newspapers and magazines and they have devoted, rightly so, much of their content to documenting the breaking news. I might also add here that there has been some stunning photography coming out the of the Middle East and Japan in the wake of these stories developing.

I was at a meeting with a few writers a couple of weeks ago and we were all joking about how impossible it is to pitch a feature story anymore, because there is so much pressure on the editors not to "overspend" that stories have to be basically a sure thing before anything can get "Green Lit"; and we joked about how boring that has become. One of the best parts about being a documentary photographer was the investigation aspect of the job, about not knowing what it would all look like until you got there, about trying to piece it all together for the folks in New York and London. Now everyone wants a storyboard of what the feature will look like when you don't exactly know what is happening on the ground, which is a huge problem when working in China specifically. Gone are the days of spending time, observing, plotting and executing; because that takes too much time and costs too much money for the newspapers and magazines of today. What's in fashion at the moment, and has been for several years now, is digital breaking news, print first and absorb later. Sure, some of this has worked, some hasn't; but the feature story has an important place in how we share information about what is happening in the world, and this information takes time to collect and it takes time to digest.

Breaking news is obviously crucial, but let's not lose track of the fact that the features stories still have an important role to play in this world of high-tech, speedy content creation.

Note: My blogs often allow me to try my hand at satire. Of course I feel deeply for the people of New Zealand, Japan and the folks striving for greater freedom in the Middle East; I've only used these examples to make a point that the "feature story" is getting lost in the mix of all the breaking news.

--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle Blog: Guinness World Records

2011-03-25T22:00:00.004+08:00

Hello,

In a very round about way, today's blog posting is a "one of a kind". Many of you have followed along as my brother Colin and I rode our motorcycles around China during our 65 day - 18,000km - odyssey. While it was the hardest, and one of the most rewarding experiences of my life, it also appears that it was a first.

My brother and I became the first people to ride a motorcycle around China, and we also were awarded a Guinness World Record for the longest continuous motorcycle journey within a single country. It is a very surreal feeling to know that Colin and I are now Guinness World Record holders for endurance motorcycling. Our press release is below. Please "Like" us on our Facebook page and be sure to stay up to date on our film, DVD and book release.

Online Guinness Record: Follow this LINK.

Follow us on FACEBOOK.

Our Website: www.mkride.com
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March 21th 2011
PRWEB Press Release

HEADLINE:
Canadian Brothers Set a World Record for their 18,000km Journey around China on BMW Motorcycles.

SUMMARY:
Canadian brothers Colin and Ryan Pyle are honored to receive an award by the Guinness World RecordsTM for their 18,000km odyssey around China on BMW F800GS motorcycles. Their journey will become a documentary film and book entitled The Middle Kingdom Ride.

QUOTE:
"It’s an honor to be recognized by the GWRTM for what was 65 of the most exhilarating, exhausting, and rewarding, days of my life. We have taken our BMW motorcycles through the toughest terrain in the world, and we’re alive to tell the story!” Ryan Pyle

BODY:
On March 09th 2011 Canadian brothers Colin and Ryan Pyle received a confirmation by the Guinness World RecordsTM that they had indeed set a World Record for their motorcycle journey around China. According to the Guinness World RecordsTM the name of the record they received was for the “Longest Journey by Motorcycle in a Single Country”.

Canadian brothers Colin and Ryan Pyle completed their epic motorcycle journey by returning back to Shanghai on Sunday October 17th 2010, after 65 days on the road circumnavigating China on their BMW F800GS motorcycles. Their journey was a unique one, as they have become the first riders to fully circumnavigate China by motorcycle in one single journey. During their remarkable 17,674km odyssey the brothers have encountered some of the most intense changes in culture, weather, altitude and terrain that exist in the world. They tackled heavy rains, flooding, landslides, freak hailstorms, extreme altitude (above 5000m/16,000ft), sand, gravel, thousands of kilometers of road construction and even bureaucratic / military interference.

Colin and Ryan intend to produce both a documentary film and a written book on their experiences in China, which have been far from regular. Anytime someone puts him or herself out there, into the wild, and opens themselves up to the experiences of such a vast and unique country one can’t help but encounter moments of danger, humor, sadness, gratification and personal gain and setback. Their journey will prove to be both colorful and dramatic, both intense and fulfilling.

Colin and Ryan Pyle are brothers from Toronto, Canada. But that’s about all they have in common. Ryan has spent the last decade in China building his career as a http://www.ryanpyle.com [Documentary Photographer]. Colin stayed closer to home, in Toronto, and built up, and sold, his own successful currency trading company. Together they plan to showcase much of China’s change and development from factory to farm. The general purpose of the trip is to put China on display. To explore the visual and cultural wonders that is China. With a massive population, crowded cities, abundant minorities and its stunning natural landscape; China offers a traveler an experience like no other. Colin and Ryan have titled their project, “The Middle Kingdom Ride”, as China’s historical name was once The Middle Kingdom.

Ryan and Colin will be raising money for the http://www.seva.org [SEVA Foundation] during their journey. SEVA, is a San Francisco based charity that has, for more than 30 years, been serving people around the world who are struggling for health, cultural survival and sustainable communities.

You can follow The Middle Kingdom Ride at http://www.mkride.com [MKRIDE.com], http://www.facebook.com/mkride [FACEBOOK], http://www.youtube.com/user/TheMKRIDE [YouTube] and http://twitter.com/MK_Ride [Twitter].

The Middle Kingdom Ride would have never happened without our amazing sponsors: http://www.mandarinhouse.cn [Mandarin House Language School], BMW China, Touratech, The Tomson Group, Airhawk, Pelican Products, Kodak, Oakley, Cardo Systems, and Lowe Pro.

--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle Blog: Being Gay in China

2011-03-18T22:00:00.001+08:00

Hello,

I read an article by Nicola Davison a few weeks back on what it was like to be gay in China, and I thought the article was revealing and interesting and well worth sharing. Please be sure that while China has it's own problems with gay people, so does much of the rest of Asia, notably Japan and Muslim Indonesia.

For what my opinion is worth, I really enjoyed this piece by Nicola. I like how she followed the stories of a few people and showed the lengths that people will go to in order to hide who they really are. A copy of the article is below, as is the original link.
__________________________________________________________________
Copyright: SLATE

Original Store: LINK

Title: Gay Marriage With Chinese Characteristics. A visit to a Shanghai fake-marriage market, where lesbians and gay men meet to find a husband or wife.

Written By: Nicola Davison

SHANGHAI, China—"I'm here to find a lesbian, to be with me and to build a home," No. 11 says to the crowd clustered on floor cushions at a sunlit yoga studio in Shanghai. No. 11 is a muscular man in a flannel shirt and cargo pants, and he easily commands the attention of the crowd of 40 or so young men and women who are gingerly sipping glasses of wine and whispering to their neighbors.

"In my view, a 30-year-old man should start thinking about having a family, but two men can't hold each other's hands in the street. We're not allowed to be a family," he says. The crowd nods.

I'm at a fake-marriage market, where Chinese lesbians and gay men meet to find a potential husband or wife. In China, the pressure to form a heterosexual marriage is so acute that 80 percent of China's gay population marries straight people, according to sexologist Li Yinhe, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. To avoid such unions, six months ago, Shanghai's biggest gay Web site, inlemon.cn, started to hold marriage markets once a month.

Thirty minutes earlier, I triple-checked the address scrawled in my notebook. The studio—located in a high-rise apartment complex—seems an unlikely spot for a fake-marriage market. "The boss of the yoga studio is very kind to us," says Fen Ye, my guide. Slipping off my shoes at the doorway, I pad up stairs lined with Buddhas in the red plastic flip-flops provided. When Fen slides open a door to reveal men and women chatting quietly, conversation falters. "They weren't expecting a foreigner," he whispers, adding, "and don't tell anyone you're a reporter. I'll just say you're my lesbian friend." He bustles me to a cushion on the floor and hands me a glass of Chinese red wine.

Precautions are necessary for an event like this. Though there are an estimated 30 million to 40 million gay people in China—there has been no official count—even simple actions such as trying to access Wikipedia's "LGBT" page often result in a "This webpage is not available" message. Chinese society has adopted a "don't ask, don't tell" policy. A 2007 survey by Li Yinhe found that 70 percent of Chinese people think homosexuality is either "a little" or "completely" wrong, and only 7.5 percent of respondents said they knew a gay person.

While past generations buried their sexuality in straight marriages, the people gathered at the yoga studio are trying a new approach. No. 8 (the men sport numbered buttons in a pleasing shade of blue, the women's are pink), a pretty 22-year-old woman with curly dyed chestnut hair, skinny jeans, and Snoopy slippers wants a fake marriage to ease parental pressure, but she doesn't want a baby. No. 15, a strikingly tall man with side-swept bangs, says: "I want to get married for my parents, but I think lying to them will make me feel terrible. So I want to have a fake marriage with a lesbian girl, but just for one or two years, and then I want a divorce to show my parents that I am not a marriage type." There's one constant: All the participants talk about pleasing their parents.

Influential Zhou Dynasty Confucian scholar Mencius said that the "most serious" way to be unfilial is to not produce an heir. It's an idea that still reverberates through China's family-centric culture. In contemporary slang, single women over the age of 27 are known as sheng nu or "leftovers."

"I could absolutely not come out to my parents. If I could tell them I was gay, I wouldn't have needed to get married," says my guide, 30-year-old Fen, as we sit in a converted Shanghainese shikumen lane house near the popular tourist spot People's Park. We're talking about his lesbian wife, whom he met on inlemon.cn.

"I had a big, traditional Chinese wedding. It lasted for three days, and there were maybe 500 people there. My parents were so happy," says Fen, who knew his wife for seven months before they married. "In your job, in your social life, and for family gatherings, you need to bring a partner. It's hard to do these things alone in China. My grandfather and grandmother … everyone was waiting for me to get married. The wedding felt like a task I needed to accomplish, something I needed to get through step-by-step, a bit like doing homework."

For many gay men, the chance to experience parenthood—and to provide a grandchild for longing parents—is a distinct advantage of these unions. At the yoga studio marriage market, almost every man says he wants a baby, Fen included. "[On the Web site] I said that I didn't want to have a sex life with my wife—absolutely none." Although he says he and his wife are not "very good friends," they have discussed having a child. "For a baby we will maybe use artificial insemination," he says.

Past generations did things differently. The Lai Lai dancehall, in a rundown corner of Shanghai's Hongkou district, is a refuge for gay but married men. Every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday night, about 200 men crowd the dance floor in their mismatched suits, twirling together in the green light and cigarette smoke. When they're not dancing, they sit in groups around the edge, nursing flasks of tea, though beer is available for 75 cents a glass.

Zhang, who is 55 and married with children, goes every week. "You can find gay bars in every city, but a dancehall like this only in Shanghai," he says. While tinny speakers rattle out familiar patriotic songs, the dancing stays elegant and refined. Flirting is discreet, barely noticeable. "Older gay men feel comfortable in this place," Zhang tells me. "Because the dancehall starts early, they can go home to their families and keep it secret. Though sometimes the wives come to look for their husbands, and then other people have to persuade them that their husband is just dancing."

But 30-year-old Mu Mu knew that her husband was not "just dancing." Just after she became pregnant, Mu Mu's husband started openly dating men. "I knew he was gay before we got married," says the Shanghai resident over the phone to protect her anonymity. "But the word gay was really strange to me. I read that being gay is something you're born as, but other people said it's like a disease that can be healed. Because I loved him a lot, I hoped that maybe he would change." It wasn't until a year after the birth of their daughter, and after her husband brought home another man to live with them, that Mu Mu left him.

Mu Mu is one of China's estimated 16 million to 25 million "homowives"—or tongqi in pinyin (the word is an amalgamation of the Mandarin for gay and wife)—women who are married to gay men.

"The happiest time of our marriage was when I gave birth to our daughter," says Mu Mu. "That one week when I was in the hospital, he took care of me and the baby. Much of the rest of the time I felt abandoned."

For many women, speaking out about their gay husbands is more difficult than staying in loveless marriages, but in the last few years Web-based support groups have started to form. Li, 33, is a volunteer on a homowife support forum on QQ, a Chinese social networking site. Her job involves giving advice and answering questions, and she is often the only person the homowives confide in. "The women are desperate," she explains over iced tea on a busy shopping street in central Shanghai. "At first they feel shock, and they don't know what to do, because people don't know much about gay people. They think their husband is a disturbed person."

While it's relatively easy to get divorced in China, Li says, many women stick with the marriages for complicated reasons. "Some stay because they still love their husband. He's a good person, and a good father, and they want their children to have a father," she says. Another reason is social stigma. "Most of the women can't go to their friends, they don't think they will be able to accept it or understand. Which is true. I think in China people make a moral judgment about it. [The women] think people will think, 'Wow, your husband would prefer to be with a man than with you—what a loser.' "

But there are tentative signs of change. Pink Space, a Beijing-based sexuality research center, started a support group for homowives earlier this year—the first of its kind in China. Zhang Beichan, a director at the China Sexology Association, thinks the homowife "problem" is shrinking. "In 2005, a TV station put out a program about gay issues, and I introduced a homowife who talked about her problems. This was one of the first times this issue was introduced to the public. It had a very big impact—some gay men still share that program with their families when they are pressured into getting married. Also, there are more and more gay men coming out of the closet, and more awareness of gay issues."

Back at the fake-marriage market, Fen Yu and his friends see themselves as the "transitional" generation. While they can't come out to their parents, they can, at least, be open about their sexuality among friends, go to gay bars, and date. "For the generation after ours, it might be easier," he says, "Our parents have no idea what homosexuality is. It's very difficult, because it's just opening up."

If Fen becomes a father, his will be a different approach: "I might not be able to tell my parents," he says, "but when my child grows up, I will tell them the real story about why it happened and who I am."
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--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________

Ryan Pyle Blog: Huffington Post Purchase

2011-03-11T22:00:00.001+08:00

Hello,

I know most of the media world has moved on, but I think it's worth while to revisit what this purchase means and what it might (or might not) mean for content producers like myself. Uh, I cringe when I use that term to describe my art work, but alas my imagery is the content that fills pages of magazines and using "Account-Speak" I am a content producer and nothing more. Sad but true, but let's stay on track and get back tot he point of this blog - The Internet Publishing Model.

Back a few weeks ago the world all learned, as I did, that online media is worth something. Sure, the big story here is that AOL is trying to remake itself, but that issue is secondary for me. The real headline grabber is that an online newspaper that started off with a USD 1 million investment and operated much like a blog was just purchased for USD 315 million. Wow, that's a lot of Chinese RMB.

Is this a game changer for online media? Will online portals start paying for writers and photographers to create content? Could this be the beginning of a turn around for content producers like myself? Sadly, I don't think so. The Huffington Post seems to operate in a real niche market and tends to be very writer driven, which is odd for an online publication. The rumors I've heard is that they pay a few "big name" columnists a lot of money, and the rest of the content they pull in at very low cost from wire services and bloggers.

As a person who does not frequently visit the Huffington Post portal I was pretty surprised by its coverage: being a unique mix of one half politics, one half economics and one half celebrity. On top of that it seems to do well covering local markets, like Chicago and Denver, no doubt pulling audiences away from local newspapers and magazines in those areas.

I think a big congratulations goes out to the Huffington Post owners and management team for creating value out of online content. Will this deal shake the industry? Maybe not right away, but the next time a online publications contacts you asking for free imagery for writing you can call their bluff and let them you know exactly what online media is worth. Let's pray it's a game changer.

Original Story LINK
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Copyright: The New York Times

AOL’s Bet on Another Makeover
By VERNE G. KOPYTOFF
SAN FRANCISCO — AOL is trying to remake itself, yet again.

The new strategy in many ways resembles the old strategy: make acquisitions to attract traffic and reverse a continuing decline in advertising and revenue from its dial-up Internet service. In the latest iteration of its do-over, it is paying $315 million to buy the liberal news commentary site The Huffington Post, not long after paying $25 million to buy TechCrunch, the Silicon Valley technology news blog.

But skepticism runs deep that this effort will be any more successful than the many other makeovers it has tried in the last decade.

“My gut says that the clock has run out for AOL, but I’m happy to see someone make a bold bet,” said Salim Ismail, a former Yahoo executive. “Doing nothing is worse.”

AOL has its doubters among investors. Its shares fell 75 cents, or 3.42 percent, to close at $21.19 on Monday.

Even some AOL insiders poked fun at The Huffington Post deal. Michael Arrington, the voluble founder of TechCrunch, who frequently ridicules AOL’s bureaucracy even though he now works for the company, did so again on Monday. “I want to know right now,” he wrote in a post on Twitter to Arianna Huffington, the site’s founder, on Monday morning, “whether or not you had to sit thru the four-hour orientation meeting.” Several hours earlier, he wrote that he liked her, “despite her insane politics.”

AOL is making a big bet on Ms. Huffington. She has been given the task by AOL’s chief executive, Timothy M. Armstrong, of stitching together the company’s disparate content sites into a cohesive news factory for the digital age. But turning that vision into reality will be a challenge, given that AOL is beset by a decade-long decline in its core legacy business of dial-up Internet service as well as declining revenue from online advertising.

Indeed, despite traffic of 112 million visitors a month, AOL’s online advertising fell 26 percent last year, to $1.28 billion, while advertising for the rest of the industry rose 17 percent, according to eMarketer. Revenue from its dial-up subscribers also declined 26 percent, to $1.02 billion.

Finding a way to replace revenue from AOL’s declining dial-up business is an imperative for Mr. Armstrong, who took over as chief executive in 2009.

The company has gone through multiple overhauls over the years, but none of them have worked. It bought a collection of blogs, including Engadget and Joystiq, in 2005. It bought an advertising network, Tacoda, for $275 million in 2007. It lurched yet another direction when it bought Bebo, a social networking site in 2008, but sold that last year for a fraction of the $850 million it paid. It also made its subscription e-mail service free, like Google’s or Yahoo’s, yet it lost users.

Mr. Armstrong is now focusing his turnaround effort on editorial content, one of AOL’s traditional strengths.

Mr. Armstrong’s vision resembles that of another chief executive struggling to resurrect a legacy Internet company, Carol A. Bartz of Yahoo.

Internet users would come get a variety of news from one source. In AOL’s case it would be local news from Patch, technology start-up news at TechCrunch and cultural and political news from The Huffington Post. AOL also would provide information from its Mapquest and Moviefone services.

But AOL has yet to show signs of progress with this model, though AOL executives have said that its display advertising business will pick up in the second half of 2011.

“This huge transition that Tim Armstrong is trying to pull off hasn’t worked yet,” said Ken Doctor, a news industry analyst with Outsell and author of the book “Newsonomics.” Mr. Doctor said, “They have all these assets that aren’t recognizable as a single company.”

AOL finds itself in the rare position of selling less online advertising, while all around it major media companies are selling more. AOL’s problem is that it is still dependent on subscribers, those people who pay a minimum of $10 a month for dial-up service, to support its advertising business. AOL’s paying subscribers peaked at 26.7 million subscribers in 2003, but has now dropped to 3.85 million. That’s 86 percent fewer people looking at ads on AOL.

Mr. Armstrong is counting on The Huffington Post to lift online advertising by lifting traffic and page views. Eventually, AOL hopes to rebuild on this new foundation.

How does Ms. Huffington change that? Huffington Post is a master of finding stories across the Web, stripping them to their essence and placing well-created headlines on them that rise to the top of search engine results, guaranteeing a strong audience. For instance, on Sunday it posted an article that was pure search engine bait, “What Time Does the Super Bowl Start?”

Mr. Armstrong said that he hoped to accelerate The Huffington Post’s growth by tying it in with AOL’s other properties, and in turn lift traffic to those other properties. Expanding The Huffington Post internationally and creating a video version of The Huffington Post are among the planned projects.

Mr. Armstrong said that this time AOL’s remodeling would be different. Unlike the previous failed strategies by his predecessors at AOL, he said in an interview Monday, “We’re betting on something that’s a known quantity and something that’s going to happen.”

Buying The Huffington Post is “doubling down” on that strategy, he said.

He said, for instance, that The Huffington Post created a second front door for users into AOL’s content and gave AOL the ability to cut content in different ways and target advertising.

“Huffington Post is a scaled version of what we’ve been doing.”

AOL can help to improve The Huffington Post, which he says, commands low rates from advertisers. Paring with AOL will lift The Huffington Post’s traffic. AOL increased TechCrunch’s traffic by 30 percent since its acquisition, he said.

Mr. Armstrong acknowledged the skepticism about AOL given its past failed turnaround efforts. But he said that growth in online advertising would ultimately offset the loss in dial-up subscribers sometime in 2013.

“We are essentially two years away from a growth business on the Internet.”

AOL will pay for The Huffington Post out of nearly $802 million in cash on hand at the end of 2010. The remainder provides a cushion for expansion.

“They need to buy their way out of the access business, and this is a pretty big step in that direction,” said Youssef H. Squali, an analyst with Jefferies & Company.
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--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle Blog: New Work: The Butter Lamp Festival

2011-03-04T22:00:00.000+08:00

Hello,

I've recently completed some work that I thought be of interest to my blog followers.

I traveled to the Ganden Monastery, located in Central Tibet, during winter to photograph the Butter Lamp festival. The reason for visiting was that years ago, on a previous assignment, a local once told me that she had always wished to celebrate the Butter Lamp festival at the Ganden Monastery because of the special Thanka (large carpet with painted Buddha) that is unveiled during that celebration. I marked it down on a my list as something that I was keen to photograph. And so I was finally able to make the trip, and it was an amazing visual experience at over 16,000 feet; I spent most of the next two days in bed with altitude sickness after shooting the festival. Details are below.

What is the Butter Lamp Festival?

The Tibet Butter Lamp Festival is celebrated on the final day of the Great Prayer Festival The event was also established way back in 1409 by Tsong Khapa to celebrate the victory of Sakyamuni against heretics in a religious debate. At that time he commissioned monks to make flowers and trees with colored butter. This tradition has been maintained to this day. In the past, various giant butter and butter sculptures, in forms of auspicious symbols and figures, were displayed on Barkhor Street in Lhasa. But today things are toned down an the festival is centered around the display of thousands of small hand held butter lamps.

What is the Ganden Monastery?

The Ganden Monastery was the original monastery in the Geluk order, founded by Je Tsongkhapa himself in 1409, and traditionally considered to be the seat of Geluk administrative and political power. Being the farthest from Lhasa of the three university monasteries, Ganden traditionally had a smaller population with some 6,000 monks in the early 20th century. Ganden Monastery consisted of two principal original colleges, Jangtse and Shartse, meaning North Peak and East Peak respectively. Ganden Monastery contained more than two dozen major chapels with large Buddha statues. The largest chapel was capable of seating 3,500 monks.

Below is an edit of the photography completed at the Ganden Monastery, part of the Yellow Hat Sect of Tibetan Buddhism.
LINK: http://archive.ryanpyle.com/gallery/Tibet-Butter-Lamp-Festival/G0000l.8PTU5UslU

My Favorite Images: LINK#1 & LINK #2

For anyone interested, the work was shot on two Lecia M6's. One had a 50mm f/1.4 and the other had a 28mm f/2.0. The work was shot on Kodak Color 100 VS film.

--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle Blog: Brighton Gallery Exhibition

2011-02-25T22:00:00.004+08:00

Hello.

This is just a remind that I'll be speaking next week at the AM Gallery in Brighton to launch the Intimate China show which begins on Tuesday March 1st and runs for the month of March. A small selection of my work from Chinese Turkestan will be on display.

My talk will take place on Tuesday March 1st at 8pm. If anyone is in the neighborhood, swing by.

The gallery address is:
1 Borough Street, Brighton BN1 3BG, United Kingdom
+44.1273.771228
www.amgallery.co.uk

AM Gallery LINK

The official flier is below.

_________________________________________________________________________________________
AM Gallery presents
Intimate China
A group exhibition of China-based photographers

We are pleased to invite you to a private view & Artist’s talk with Ryan Pyle in accordance with the ArtsFORUM

Tuesday 1 March 2011 7pm-9pm
AM Gallery, 1 Borough Street, Brighton
PLEASE RSVP amgalleryuk@gmail.com by 25 Feb.

The exhibition aims to enhance the interaction between the European public and Chinese art scene through the photographic medium - with more than 70 stunning images in two different shows, viewers will be able to become familiar with the fascinating contemporary Chinese art scene. The fine art photographers display a great combination of people and landscape, while in documentary there is no lack of details about everyday life in China.

Photographers
Show 1: Seppe Van Grieken, Jonathan Browning, Ryan Pyle, Jingyi Yang, Gemma Thorpe, Stefen Chow
Show 2: Boris Austin, Jasper James, David Hartung, Camille Levert, Peikwen Cheng, Simon Dean

Exhibition
Show 1: Open Tuesday 1 – Thursday 10 March 2011
Show 2: Open Friday 11 – Sunday 20 March 2011

Opening Hours
Weekdays 11am-4pm. Sat/Sun 11am-5pm. Monday closed. FREE ENTRY

How to get here
By Bus: 1, 1A, 2, 2A, 5, 5A, 5B, 6, 20, 25, 46, 49, 49A, 71, 81, 81B, N25 (Norfolk Square)
Use Google map or Multi map to find routes to and from the gallery.

About Ryan Pyle
Photography: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
Film: www.mkride.com

More information can be found at www.amgallery.co.uk & theartsforum.blogspot.com/
Wine will be served free.
_________________________________________________________________________________________

--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle Blog: London Visit

2011-02-18T22:00:00.014+08:00

Hello.

This is just a brief note to let anyone out there, followers and non-followers alike, that I'll be visiting London for about 12 days starting next week. I have some engagements while in London and I've listed them below. In case you are interested, the venue's are open to the public and your more than welcome to stop by, listen in and say hello. Details below:

Date: Tuesday February 22nd 2011
Cambridge University: East Asian Society - Time: 5pm to 8pm
Venue: Robinson College
Speaker: Ryan Pyle
Topic: A Lens on China: Sources of Political Change in China
Full Cambridge LINK

Date: Wednesday February 23rd 2011
University of London: SOAS - Time: 3pm to 5pm
Venue: Venue: Russell Square: College Buildings. Room: L67
Speaker: Ryan Pyle and Dianne Aigaki
Topic: Images of Tibet: Two presentations by photographers of contemporary Tibet
Full SOAS Lecture LINK

Date: Thursday February 24th 2011
London School of Economics: Arts Public Lecture - Time: 1-2pm
Venue: Wolfson Theatre, New Academic Building
Speaker: Ryan Pyle
Topic: Documenting China.
Full LSE Lecture LINK.

Date: Monday February 28th 2011
London: BBC Interview - Time: 1pm to 2:30pm
Venue: BBC Studios - London, UK
Interviewee: Ryan Pyle
Interviewer: Mishal Husain
Television Show: Impact Asia with Mishal Husain
Full BBC Interview LINK

Date: Tuesday March 1st 2011
Brighton: AM Gallery: "Intimate China" - Time: 8pm
Venue: AM Gallery, Brighton, UK
Speaker: Ryan Pyle
Topic: Chinese Turkestan
Full AM Gallery Lecture LINK

Back to China and ready for assignments on March 4th.

--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle Blog: Secrets of the Silk Road

2011-02-11T22:00:00.005+08:00

Hello.

This was a news story that caught my eye last week, and I didn't have a chance to comment on it until now. So bear with me.

The Chinese government has a problem with history, especially their own; and especially in contested border regions. Which is why it should surprise no one that the Chinese government recently withheld two mummies and around 100 artifacts from an Exhibition in Philadelphia known as the "Secrets of the Silk Road". The folks in Philadelphia haven't come out and said exactly why the Chinese authorities have withheld important artifacts from the show, but this is simply for fear of repercussions.

One can gather, by the very short article in Reuters, which I've included below, that the Chinese got bent out of shape by something that was included or excluded in the exhibition. You see, the Chinese are bitter about their Silk Road past. Chinese history dictates that the Emperor sitting in Eastern China (be it Xi'an, Beijing or Nanjing) had control over the western edges of China; which in fact they never did. The Chinese are also livid about the "Tomb Raiders", mainly European explorers and treasure hunters, that beat the Chinese to the regions most impressive artifacts in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

As if you needed to add more bitterness to the situation, the Chinese government also continues to insist that mummies of bodies found in Xinjiang in Northwest China are actually Han Chinese; but nothing could be further from the truth. The mummies are mainly Uygur, Central Asia and have more Caucasian features then Han Chinese. The Chinese governments official stand on Silk Road history doesn't exactly match up and this often causes disagreements and in this case, in my opinion, the withholding of wonderful artifacts from the American public.

This is just another example of how skittish the Chinese propaganda machine is. As if the present isn't difficult enough to navigate, now we have to start arguing about the past. Luckily China has plenty of government officials without too much on their agenda to take up the fight.

________________________________________________________________
Original Story LINK
Copyright: Reuters

Title: U.S. Silk Road show to open without Chinese artifacts

PHILADELPHIA (Reuters Life!) - A exhibition about the ancient Silk Road trade route connecting Europe and Asia will open without artifacts and mummies from China that would have been the centerpiece of the show, according to museum officials.

The University of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology said Chinese officials had withdrawn about 100 artifacts and two mummies from the "Secrets of the Silk Road" exhibition, which opens on Saturday and will run until June 5.

The exhibit will include text, images, sound, maps, a recreated excavation site and photographs of the withdrawn items.

The show "has been modified ... at the request of Chinese officials," the museum said in a statement.

Pam Kosty, a spokeswoman for the museum, said the withdrawn items had been part of the show at its earlier stops in California and Texas, but would not be available in Philadelphia.

She declined to say why the Chinese officials had made the decision.

The Chinese embassy in Washington D.C. did not immediately return a telephone call seeking comment.

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Ryan Pyle Blog: China is Funding Terrorism

2011-01-28T22:00:00.001+08:00

Hello.

On December 20th 2010, the Shangdi Guanqun Investment Company signed a letter of intent to invest up to USD 2 Billion in to an port and industrial zone in the Northeast of North Korea. A similar investment was tried in the 1990s but didn't amount to much, but apparently this time around the deal was cemented during a visit by Wen Jiabao in 2009. Upwards and onwards.

So what does this mean? Well, apparently we live in a world where you (a pudgy dictator) can shell a democratic country, kill 40+ civilians and then be rewarded with a USD 2 Billion in investments from an emerging superpower, who is also the world's second largest economy. In other words, it means we live in a pretty sick time; an era of distaste and disbelief.

Make no bones about it, this money being invested will go nowhere. The port and industrial center will not develop and the money will be siphoned off or disappear. It will not help ordinary people in North Korea and will only create jobs that support either the military or the government directly. The Shangdi Guanqun Investment Company is a state-run company that specializes in natural resources and infrastructure development. Ownership, or should I say beneficiaries, of the company is opaque at best.

To me, a China watcher and long time resident of Shanghai, I would have to say that this deal simply amounts to state sponsored terrorism. Strong words, but what more can we believe. Basically a Chinese Government controlled entity is using cheap loans from a Government controlled bank to invest USD 2 Billion in a rouge state that holds most of Asia hostage with nuclear tipped missiles. If something sounds amiss, it's because it is. None of this adds up and it shows the true weaknesses of China: that leadership is fractured and it leaves one asking who is really in charge. Obvious Hu Jintao, while dining with President Obama, wouldn't have green-lit this investment to be announced during his state visit to the USA. Those who did make the deal public clearly wanted to damage Hu Jintao's reputation.

There are a lot of factions in China, all bumping in to each other in an attempt to carve out their own power centers. The political leadership is just one of those factions; the military is another. Former leaders, and their children, who run massive conglomerates and/or investment companies and LBO firms are another. As China becomes more powerful and more foreign investment enters the country having all these powers pushing for power, without a strict rule of law to govern them, will create chaos.

In the US the State governments push the Federal government, the Congress pushes the White House, the Supreme Courts keeps everyone in check. There are power centers and power does shift but there is a Rule of Law that keeps it all in check; and there is a free press that points out when one faction becomes too powerful. In China none of that exists. Some might say that is an advantage to getting things done quickly. That's true, and positive, when it comes to building infrastructure and things like low-income housing; but its clearly negative when it comes to propping up the North Korean regime with a USD 2 Billion investment.

China needs to decide which team it wants to play for: The one that sponsors terrorism or the one that doesn't. An article by the WSJ is below.

___________________________________________________________________
The Wall Street Journal
Date: January 19 2011
Copyright: The Wall Street Journal
Original Link: Article

By: JAY SOLOMON And JEREMY PAGE

A Chinese firm has signed a letter of intent to invest $2 billion in a North Korean industrial zone, representing one of the largest potential investments in Kim Jong Il's authoritarian state and a challenge to U.S. policy in the region.

The agreement was signed with little fanfare in Pyongyang on Dec. 20—a day otherwise marked by pitched tension on the Korean peninsula following the North's shelling of a South Korean island—according to documents viewed by the Wall Street Journal. Confirmation of the deal comes as Chinese President Hu Jintao visits Washington this week in a bid to forge closer security and economic ties with the U.S.

U.S. officials said the administration is aware of the possible Chinese investment, but noted that previous projects haven't gone anywhere. "No investment project will enable North Korea to meet the needs of its people as long as its government continues its destabilizing behavior," said a senior administration official.

The letter of intent involves China's Shangdi Guanqun Investment Co. and North Korea's Investment and Development Group. An assistant to the managing director of Shangdi Guanqun, who identified himself only by his surname, Han, said his company's planned investment is focused on the Rason special economic zone, situated near North Korea's border with Russia.

The zone was called Rajin-Sonbong when it was established in 1991, but failed to attract sufficient investment. It was revived, and re-named Rason, following a visit there in 2009 by Mr. Kim.

Mr. Han said the plan is to develop infrastructure, including docks, a power plant and roads over the next two to three years, followed by various industrial projects, including an oil refinery, over the next five to 10 years. He said the company was waiting for a response from the North Korean government before applying for approval from China's Ministry of Commerce.

"It's all pending at this stage, and it's really up to the Korean side to make the decision," Mr. Han said. He added that the $2 billion figure was what the North Korean side had hoped for, not necessarily what his company could deliver.

Associated Press
North Korean leader Kim Jong Il endorsing a bottle

The company's Web site says the company was "under the administration" of a state-owned enterprise, Shangdi Purchase-Estate Corporation. Mr. Han, however, said his company was "100 percent private."

For the Obama administration, securing China's cooperation in restraining North Korea's military and nuclear-proliferation activities is a cornerstone of a warmer bilateral relationship. But the potential investment is a reminder of possible limits of Chinese cooperation.

The U.S. wants to step up sanctions to force Kim Jong Il to give up his nuclear-weapons arsenal and military activities. China, meanwhile, is increasingly promoting business projects and direct investment to influence the North, say Chinese and American analysts, arguing financial pressure hasn't worked.

China is North Korea's biggest trading partner and aid donor, but the scale of this deal raises concerns in Seoul that Beijing is running its own version of the "Sunshine" policy under which the South boosted investment in the North from 1998 to 2008.

This policy disconnect is expected to be one of the issues Chinese and U.S. officials discuss this week. "These types of deals pursued by China generally present a real challenge to the sanctions" being effective, said Victor Cha, a North Korea expert who helped oversee Asia policy in George W. Bush's National Security Council. "The net effect is that it does make it more difficult for these sanctions to have the desired effect."

Such deals have emerged in the past and have come to nothing, analysts said, and it is possible this one, too, could peter out. A number of similar North Korean economic zones have failed to live up to their billing because of poor infrastructure and corruption, and a lack of economic reform. News of the deal was first reported in the Korean-language press, including the Voice of America's Korean service.

It is unclear how long the agreement has been in the works. But its Dec. 20 signing came on the day South Korea conducted a closely watched artillery test from Yeonpyeong Island near North Korea.

The test marked a high point in tensions after North Korea's surprise late November shelling of Yeonpyeong, which killed four South Koreans. Pyongyang had threatened a swift military response should Seoul carry out an announced artillery test on Dec. 20. But the day's drill came and went amid high security in the South, with the North saying in a statement it "did not feel any need to retaliate."

Top administration officials have recently both praised and chided the Chinese over the North. On a trip to China last week, Defense Secretary Robert Gates commended the Chinese for their "constructive" role in reducing tensions on the peninsula after Pyongyang's recent shelling of a South Korean island. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in a Friday speech pressed China to be more aggressive in helping tamp down the North's nuclear program.

The proposed investment is among the strongest evidence yet of China's strategy of using direct investment rather political pressure to push for change in North Korea. Chinese experts say that after North Korea's first nuclear test in 2006, China tried to make improved bilateral relations dependent on Pyongyang dismantling its nuclear program. But after a second test in 2009, China changed tack.

Beijing now believes, according to Chinese experts, that the North Korean regime won't respond to political pressure and could collapse completely if China cuts off aid and investment, triggering a flood of refugees into northeastern China, and bringing U.S. troops right up to the Chinese border.

The investment strategy was cemented when China's Premier Wen Jiabao visited North Korea in October 2009 and signed a slew of economic and trade agreements. One of those agreements was for China to fund construction of a $250 million bridge across the Yalu River that separates the two countries.

Construction of the bridge, which would link China with another North Korean special economic zone, had been slated to start in August. Local officials said in November it appeared to have been put on hold indefinitely. Now they say a ground-breaking ceremony was held Dec. 31.

U.S. officials are particularly concerned about how China's financial links to North Korea may be facilitating Pyongyang's weapons programs. In November, Pyongyang showed a visiting American scientist 2,000 centrifuges stationed at a cover site, drastically raising fears about the North's ability to expand its nuclear-weapons arsenal.

"China's increased economic support undercuts the rest of the region's efforts to convince Pyongyang that there will be consequences for further belligerence, nuclear weapons development or transfer of nuclear capabilities," said Michael Green, who also served as a senior official on Asia during the Bush administration.
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--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle Blog: The Flavor of the Year

2011-01-21T22:00:00.001+08:00

Hello,

We are about three weeks in to 2011, and I am already trying to figure out who the "flavor of the year" is going to be. You see, every year in this industry there is only one or two magazines, newspapers or online publications that "have a budget" for original documentary photography; which is what I like to think I specialize in.

These "flavor of the year" publications generally buck the trend of diminishing budgets and layoff's. These publications often have money to burn, indeed some even refer to it as a "burn rate" of original imagery they need to purchase per month. Identifying these publications early, and making good pitches for interesting story ideas, can be the difference between having a great, creative and productive year; or having another year of stale and repetitive work.

Past publications that made a statement by funding original reporting include, but are not exclusive to, Portfolio Magazine, MSNBC.com, Portfolio.com, GlobalPost.com and a host of others. Even the WSJ, after it was bought out by News Corp, was flying me all over China to do some really important and interesting stories. But alas all of that has dried up, and so the trend continues. This leaves photographers, like me, bouncing around looking for the next editor who can actually afford a day rate for a whole week of shooting.

Now sure, many of you may be reading this and think that I'm bitter. I'm not. I'm a happy-go-lucky kind of guy and I've had a lot of great memories and moments being a documentary photographer in China. I will also continue to be a documentary photographer in China no matter how bad the industry gets, because I still strongly believe in what I do and I believe that I have a unique vision of China and how to document it. This is what keeps me motivated. This is what gets me up in in the morning.

My blog today, however, is a REALPOLITIK version of what the photo commissioning landscape looks like at the moment outside of a war zone. As one photographer mentioned a few weeks back in a Facebook posting, "It's like a lottery out there, and I am tired of buying tickets." He was referring to the assignment photography industry, just one job out there for hundreds of photographers who have entered the market in the last five years hoping to earn a living as image makers. Competition is fierce and pay rates are dropping.

So as I sit back and write to editors wishing them all the best for a happy and productive 2011, I wonder which magazines I'll be able to collaborate with best this year. Which magazines have the budgets for the ambitious ideas and strong stories that I want to tell. Sadly, my mind is drawing a blank. Most of friends, who are also editors, have lost their jobs in the last two years; forget about photography budgets most say, there isn't enough money to run the magazine let alone fill the pages with content.

Sure there are lots of problems ahead, and that also means there is a lot of opportunity. Let's put our thinking caps on and pull ourselves out of this industry wide funk.

--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle Blog: The NPAC Photo Essay

2011-01-14T22:00:00.003+08:00

Hello.

I recently had some work featured on the National Photographers Association of (NPAC) Canada's website. To be brutally honest I don't know too much about the NPAC. I knew there was an association, much like the American version; but I had never been in touch with them.

Having lived in China for a decade and spending my entire professional career abroad I never found much use in photography associations; but I can acknowledge that they seem to be very worthwhile for a lot of photographers based domestically, and they seem to offer a lot of legal advice and small business advice which I think is really important.

A link to the photo essay is below. The text that accompanies the work is below as well. I was in a particularly gloomy mood when I was writing this. Watch out for the double dip.

NPAC Website LINK
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As we begin 2011 the world is finally showing some signs of economic recovery. Although there is a sovereign debt crisis in Europe and the United States continues to struggle with high unemployment, companies are making money again and banks are behaving more responsibly. As we all look forward to better and brighter times, it’s important that we learn lessons from the behavior that almost caused the end of the financial world as we know it. Not only are banks to blame but we, much of the general public, simply over-consume and spend beyond our means. Do our actions have consequences? The straight answer is yes; especially in places we would never assume.

In October 2008 when Lehman Brothers, the US Investment Bank, went bankrupt the shock-waves were felt around the world. Banks lined up for government hand outs, the public panicked and we all stopped spending. As a result retailers shuttered and global trade came to a screeching halt. For the small factory town of Dongguan, China; that meant that factories that produce goods for US retailers began going under on a daily basis. After years of farmers moving to the coastal cities, like Dongguan, to work in factories, now everyone was heading homes. Factories had gone bankrupt, jobs had evaporated overnight. In the span of about four weeks from October to November 2008 thousands of factories went under and millions of jobs were lost. Entire housing blocks became empty, the streets once bustling now became silent. Those who opted to stay fought harder for fewer jobs. The seen was one of general chaos. These images were taken in November 2008 while on assignment for Newsweek.

Ryan Pyle Bio

Born in Toronto, Canada, Ryan Pyle spent his early years close to home. After obtaining a degree in International Politics from the University of Toronto in 2001, Ryan realized a life long dream and traveled to China on an exploratory mission. In 2002 Pyle moved to China permanently and began taking freelance assignments. In 2004, Ryan Pyle became a regular contributor to the New York Times covering China, more recently he has branched out in to mostly magazine. Ryan Pyle is based in Shanghai, China. Ryan is a reportage style photographer, working almost exclusively in 35mm format range finder cameras. His work drifts between journalism and fine art as he roams through China shedding light on the country and its diverse people.
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--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________

Ryan Pyle Blog: Shanghai Schools

2011-01-07T22:00:00.003+08:00

Hello,

Students in Shanghai middle schools are smart, but how smart? Well, according to a global study that was published a few weeks ago the students that are lucky enough to get in to the best schools in Shanghai are the smartest in the world. Middle School kids in Shanghai, some 5000 of them, outperformed children of the same age from 65 other countries; including the USA and Canada.

How did this happen? Well children in China, and their parents, take their education very seriously. That pressure, combined with discipline and hard work turns out children that are hard working and "book" smart. The same can be said for South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong and Taiwan; where learning is about discipline.

So why is the western world collectively failing in middle school education? Funding? Culture? Rap music? I always find these debates interesting because it is very obvious that the United States, for example, has the best Universities in the world. This is a statement that few could debate. But at the same time the US also has a rotting public educational system and problems with school violence.

After visiting this school in Shanghai, to take the image above, it became pretty obvious that producing a strong educational system requires strong discipline from students and teachers, but even stronger discipline from management. This school in Shanghai was humming with law and order. It wasn't overbearing but it was there. The students all wear uniforms. They all keep themselves, and their desks neat. The hallways are spotless, the school directors office was spotless. How does all this happen?

The key might be respect. The profession of teaching is still respected in China, perhaps less so in the USA. Public school teachers need to be paid properly, and they need to respect themselves in order to gain the respect of their pupils.

One can make an argument that the Chinese system doesn't great entrepreneurs or "free-thinking" adults, or the worlds most creative engineers. And that might be true. But one could also make the argument that the Chinese system provides a better education for the majority of it's pupils. Besides, true genius is rarely found in middle school; those creative forces need to be nurtured and incubated in Universities. Sadly, China's Universities are far far behind the western world; and it's a topic for a whole separate blog.

I'll never forget a friend of mine, named Armstrong. He was my translator and assistant for a week I spent working in Xiamen. He would also tell me that Chinese Universities are horrible, they just want to collect fee's and provide as little as they can. He would also tell me that the education he received in middle school and high school was far superior then his university education.

Food for thought. David Barboza's article is below.

The Original Article is below
Copyright: New York Times
Original Article LINK

Title: Shanghai Schools’ Approach Pushes Students to Top of Tests

By David Barboza
SHANGHAI — In Li Zhen’s ninth-grade mathematics class here last week, the morning drill was geometry. Students at the middle school affiliated with Jing’An Teachers’ College were asked to explain the relative size of geometric shapes by using Euclid’s theorem of parallelograms.

“Who in this class can tell me how to demonstrate two lines are parallel without using a proportional segment?” Ms. Li called out to about 40 students seated in a cramped classroom.

One by one, a series of students at this medium-size public school raised their hands. When Ms. Li called on them, they each stood politely by their desks and usually answered correctly. They returned to their seats only when she told them to sit down.

Educators say this disciplined approach helps explain the announcement this month that 5,100 15-year-olds in Shanghai outperformed students from about 65 countries on an international standardized test that measured math, science and reading competency.

American students came in between 15th and 31st place in the three categories. France and Britain also fared poorly.

Experts said comparing scores from countries and cities of different sizes is complicated. They also said that the Shanghai scores were not representative of China, since this fast-growing city of 20 million is relatively affluent. Still, they were impressed by the high scores from students in Shanghai.

The results were seen as another sign of China’s growing competitiveness. The United States rankings are a “wake-up call,” said Arne Duncan, the secretary of education.

Although it was the first time China had taken part in the test, which was administered by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, based in Paris, the results bolstered this country’s reputation for producing students with strong math and science skills.

Many educators were also surprised by the city’s strong reading scores, which measured students’ proficiency in their native Chinese.

The Shanghai students performed well, experts say, for the same reason students from other parts of Asia — including South Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong — do: Their education systems are steeped in discipline, rote learning and obsessive test preparation.

Public school students in Shanghai often remain at school until 4 p.m., watch very little television and are restricted by Chinese law from working before the age of 16.

“Very rarely do children in other countries receive academic training as intensive as our children do,” said Sun Baohong, an authority on education at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. “So if the test is on math and science, there’s no doubt Chinese students will win the competition.”

But many educators say China’s strength in education is also a weakness. The nation’s education system is too test-oriented, schools here stifle creativity and parental pressures often deprive children of the joys of childhood, they say.

“These are two sides of the same coin: Chinese schools are very good at preparing their students for standardized tests,” Jiang Xueqin, a deputy principal at Peking University High School in Beijing, wrote in an opinion article published in The Wall Street Journal shortly after the test results were announced. “For that reason, they fail to prepare them for higher education and the knowledge economy.”

In an interview, Mr. Jiang said Chinese schools emphasized testing too much, and produced students who lacked curiosity and the ability to think critically or independently.

“It creates very narrow-minded students,” he said. “But what China needs now is entrepreneurs and innovators.”

This is a common complaint in China. Educators say an emphasis on standardized tests is partly to blame for the shortage of innovative start-ups in China. And executives at global companies operating here say they have difficulty finding middle managers who can think creatively and solve problems.

In many ways, the system is a reflection of China’s Confucianist past. Children are expected to honor and respect their parents and teachers.

“Discipline is rarely a problem,” said Ding Yi, vice principal at the middle school affiliated with Jing’An Teachers’ College. “The biggest challenge is a student who chronically fails to do his homework.”

While the quality of schools varies greatly in China (rural schools often lack sufficient money, and dropout rates can be high), schools in major cities typically produce students with strong math and science skills.

Shanghai is believed to have the nation’s best school system, and many students here gain admission to America’s most selective colleges and universities.

In Shanghai, teachers are required to have a teaching certificate and to undergo a minimum of 240 hours of training; higher-level teachers can be required to have up to 540 hours of training. There is a system of incentives and merit pay, just like the systems in some parts of the United States.

“Within a teacher’s salary package, 70 percent is basic salary,” said Xiong Bingqi, a professor of education at Shanghai Jiaotong University. “The other 30 percent is called performance salary.”

Still, teacher salaries are modest, about $750 a month before bonuses and allowances — far less than what accountants, lawyers or other professionals earn.

While Shanghai schools are renowned for their test preparation skills, administrators here are trying to broaden the curriculums and extend more freedom to local districts. The Jing’An school, one of about 150 schools in Shanghai that took part in the international test, was created 12 years ago to raise standards in an area known for failing schools.

The principal, Zhang Renli, created an experimental school that put less emphasis on math and allows children more free time to play and experiment. The school holds a weekly talent show, for example.

The five-story school building, which houses Grades eight and nine in a central district of Shanghai, is rather nondescript. Students wear rumpled school uniforms, classrooms are crowded and lunch is bused in every afternoon. But the school, which operates from 8:20 a.m. to 4 p.m. on most days, is considered one of the city’s best middle schools.

In Shanghai, most students begin studying English in first grade. Many middle school students attend extra-credit courses after school or on Saturdays. A student at Jing’An, Zhou Han, 14, said she entered writing and speech-making competitions and studied the erhu, a Chinese classical instrument. She also has a math tutor.

“I’m not really good at math,” she said. “At first, my parents wanted me to take it, but now I want to do it.”

--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle Blog: China & North Korea

2010-12-10T22:00:00.004+08:00

Hello.

It's no surprise that North Korea is behaving badly, yet again. The collective leadership of the "Hermit Kingdom" know exactly what they are doing, and its incredibly destabilizing for not only Asia but the world. Sadly, trying to get North Korea to behave better or even stop their threatening actions seems impossible. Even leaked Chinese diplomatic cables sighted the North Korean leadership as collective acting like spoiled children.

An advanced ballistic missile program, a nuclear weapons program and now random attacks on South Korea. Who, out there in the diplomatic world, has the power to stop this insane behavior by this impoverished and heavily militarized country?

The only answer to this question is China. While South Korea and Japan bitch and moan all they want, they know any action towards North Korea would result in a backlash by China; and an escalation of military presence in the region. So, why doesn't China step up and squash this little country that is causing all the problems? I think many people could argue that the world would be a safer place, and the civilian population in North Korea would be much better off if the currrent regime were brought down. So why doesn't it happen?

The suggestion that ideological similarities keep China and North Korea in alliance is fodder. China is a global player and can't afford the bad press that comes along with supporting North Korea, so one must beg the question: Why does China continue to support this insane regime hell-bent on destabilizing Asia at least once a month?

Many have pointed out that a collapse of North Korea would send millions of refugee's in to northeastern China, which would not be helpful. Others have pointed out that a collapse of the regime in North Korea would leave the military and weapons systems in the hands of potential terrorists and individual players who might then launch attacks on South Korea and Japan. Those two points would lead to grave situations and they seem to keep the rest of the world bidding time and waiting, but waiting for what? The answer is for China to use its soft power and bring North Korea back into line.

China basically gives/sells North Korea all of its fuel, and food. There are a lot of cross-border businesses that are fairly lucrative for the Chinese; and according to some recent suggestions that tiny financial benefit is what is keeping China involved in propping up this regime. There were rumors in the news that a few lucrative contracts for business done in North Korea was given to some people close to Chinese Premier Wen.

When push comes to shove, the Chinese are all about pure hard cash. And what is the best environment for making money? The answer is stable growth. And that is what the Chinese are striving for within their own borders. North Korea challenges this in every way shape and form. I believe it is only a matter of time, one or two years, before China steps in and really disciplines North Korea. I can only hope there are reunification plans on the table for 2011, and that China does it's part and proves to the world that it is willing to flex its diplomatic muscles for good. I've written too many blogs about how screwed up North Korea is. Lets end the nightmare and shut down this bastard country and help some impoverished people. Below is a recent article about how China continues to defend North Korea. Clearly China needs to sort itself out first, the insanity continues.

Follow this LINK for original story on Reuters.

The story is also copied below. Copyright Reuters.
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China hits back at criticism over North Korea

Written By Sui-Lee Wee and Jeremy Laurence

BEIJING/ SEOUL (Reuters) - China hit back at the United States and its Asian allies on Tuesday for their refusal to talk to North Korea, saying dialogue was the only way to calm escalating tension on the divided Korean peninsula.

China took a more belligerent tone a day after U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton hosted her South Korean and Japanese counterparts in Washington, calling a report that it was shielding Pyongyang's nuclear program an "irresponsible accusation."
Deputy Secretary of State Jim Steinberg will lead a U.S. delegation to China in the next week to try to persuade Beijing to put more pressure on Pyongyang despite Chinese fears that this may destabilize North Korea, a U.S. official said.

Washington, Seoul and Tokyo have been lukewarm toward Beijing's proposal for emergency talks between the six regional powers, worried that they could be seen as rewarding Pyongyang for its deadly attack on a South Korean island two weeks ago.
They want China to bring its ally North Korea to heel and hope that through their joint calls Beijing -- which has traditionally resisted outside pressure on its policies -- may be persuaded to act.

"The responsibility of maintaining peace and stability in Northeast Asia should be shouldered by all parties in the region," China's foreign ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu told a news conference.

"All parties are stakeholders. We call on the parties to positively respond to our proposals to resolve the conflict through dialogue and negotiation."

"We need a clear indication from North Korea that it understands that this pattern of provoking and then hoping that people will reward it to stop the provocations is not one that we are going to sanction," said Steinberg, Clinton's principal deputy.
China, the host of stalled six-party talks with North Korea, has been trying to take a neutral line in the dispute. It was not invited to Monday's trilateral meeting in Washington which put the onus on Beijing to take action.

NUCLEAR TALKS

Clinton said she was open to resuming talks on the North's nuclear ambitions -- the six-party talks include the two Koreas, China, Japan, Russia and the United States -- but Pyongyang must first take steps to end its belligerence and keep its 2005 commitment to abandon its nuclear programs.

"I think the fact that it took (Chinese President) Hu (Jintao) and Obama 13 days even to talk about the attack shows what little chance there is of any real agreement," said Brian Myers, an expert on the North's ideology at Dongseo University.

"I agree with the South Korean consensus that the Chinese are simply trying to look like they're doing something for peace, without having to offend the North."

Analysts say Pyongyang will likely carry out more provocations following last month's attack and its latest revelations of nuclear advances for two reasons: to cement a father-to-son leadership transition and to win concessions at any international talks.
"The bottom line: North Korea isn't going to change is behavior any time soon, and the United States, South Korea and the world will have to live with this reality," said Andrew Scobell, a North Korea expert at the U.S. Army War College.

Analysts said China is reluctant to lean too hard on the North, which is undergoing a leadership transition, for fear of a collapse that could spark an exodus of refugees and allow U.S. troops in South Korea right up to the Chinese border.
"China is in a deepening dilemma: how to struggle with the balance between maintaining ties with Pyongyang and maintaining cooperation with Washington," said Zhu Feng, professor of international relations at Peking University.

"Maybe Beijing may be more motivated now to wake up to a new reality."

LIMITS TO POWER

But the United States also faces limits to the pressure it can apply on China. The two countries are enmeshed in a complicated economic relationship, with Washington looking to Beijing to help pull the global economy out of its slump.

"We hope that in increasing domestic consumption, China can become a catalyst for growth," Steinberg said, noting that better balanced U.S.-China economic ties would benefit both countries.

Senator John Kerry, the powerful Democrat who heads the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said many in Washington were looking carefully at how Beijing handles both the North Korea issue and persistent tensions over its currency.

"This next year will define a lot of the next 10 years of our relationship with China," Kerry told a Washington think-tank audience.

Analysts say Beijing's relationship with Pyongyang provides a valuable communication bridge, but they consider China's influence over the North's as limited.

"China is not in control of North Korea. Most emphatically, it is not. It cannot do much, even if it wishes," said Andrei Lankov of Kookmin University in Seoul.

As South Korea staged live-fire drills around the country, Obama sent his top military officer, Admiral Mike Mullen, to Seoul.

South Korean President Lee Myung-bak said he wants to turn the island that was attacked last month, as well as four others nearby, into "military fortresses" and called for improved living conditions to encourage civilians to return.
His comments came amid worries that many of the residents of Yeonpyeong and the other islands west of North Korea will not return as the North increasingly resorts to violence to reassert its claim over the area.

(Additional reporting by Arshad Mohammed, Andrew Quinn and Jeff Mason in Washington; and Michael Martina and Sui-Lee Wee in Beijing; Editing by David Storey and Christopher Wilson)
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--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle Blog: 100 Eyes Magazine - China Issue

2010-11-26T22:00:00.002+08:00

Hello,

The 100 Eyes online magazine is a great showcase for documentary photography. Their mission statement on their website indicates that they "100Eyes is an online photographic showcase featuring contemporary photography including documentary, art, and alternative photojournalism. Edited and created by Andy Levin, 100Eyes is made possible by the generosity of photographers who donate their work in the spirit of a shared photographic community."

This months issue revolves around China and was edited by Andy Levin. It includes some stunning photography by a host of lovely image makers, I am honored to be among them as some of my work appears in the magazine.

To view the photo essay, which includes a wide range of photography and a wide range of story-telling, follow think LINK.

Enjoy,

--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle Blog: New Work - NYT - GAP in Shanghai

2010-11-19T22:00:00.003+08:00

Hello,

I just wanted to direct your attention to some new work. The GAP has opened up a store in Shanghai and I covered the story for the New York Times. It wasn't as exciting as my motorcycle adventure around China, but it's great to be back taking pictures again. Can't wait to get back in to my photography career.

New York Times Story - GAP opens in Shanghai.

A special thanks to all my clients who wished me luck on my motorcycle ride, and thanks for giving me a chance to continue working for you as we move forward.

Cheers,

--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle Blog: João Silva

2010-11-12T22:00:00.000+08:00

Hello.

I returned from my motorcycle trip around China in mid-October and have been wanting to start up my blog again for some time. So, today I wanted to speak a little about the injury that occurred to João Silva. Please read on below.

Photographers, especially those who work in dangerous and unstable parts of the world, often end up in harms way. It seems to happen all too often, that great men and women who document history in war zones end up losing their lives or getting several injured.

I think it is important to mention that, I have never worked in a conflict zone. I have a limited knowledge of the stress and dangers that exist in that type of environment. Though while never experiencing this myself, I have a great amount of respect for those photographers who continually put themselves in to those situations.

Just over two weeks ago: João Silva, 44, a South African photographer on contract with The New York Times, stepped on the mine while accompanying American soldiers patrolling an area near the town of Arghandab in southern Afghanistan on October 23rd, 2010. Despite immediate help from medics, both his legs were lost below the knees. I never met João Silva, but I have been an admirer of his work for years as he has been documenting life in some of the world's most dangerous places: Iraq and Afghanistan to name a few.

Photoshelter has created a website where you can go and buy some prints of João Silva's lovely imagery. You can follow this link below:

Photoshelter: João Silva

--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle Blog: A Brief Break

2010-08-20T21:00:00.002+08:00

Hello,

I just wanted to update everyone and let them know that at the moment I am in the midst of an epic 60 day - 20,000km - motorcycle journey around China.

Needless to say my days are filled trying not to get killed by crazed truck drivers and bus drivers. The two-wheeled life is a tough one in China. What does this have to do with photography? Well I'll be shooting during my entire trip and that will make me very happy. But it'll mean that between shooting everyday and riding almost 300km per day on dangerous roads, I'll have little time to update this blog. My hope is that you can still find time to connect with me on any of the following forums below. I'll be sure to continue updating my blog in mid-October upon my safe return to Shanghai.

In case you still wanted to follow our, Colin and I, motorcycle journey around China - you can follow us at: www.mkride.com

You can connect with us on: FACEBOOK, TWITTER, YOUTUBE

The Middle Kingdom Ride wouldn't happen without our wonderful SPONSORS: BMW, Touratech, Airhawk, Pelican, Kodak, Oakley, Cardo Systems, Lowe Pro & Mandarin House.

--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle Blog: The Middle Kingdom Ride

2010-08-14T21:00:00.003+08:00

Hello.

I just wanted to write a brief email to introduce you to a new project that I began working on today. It's name is "The Middle Kingdom Ride".

The project will involve both myself and my brother, Colin Pyle, circumnavigating China by BMW motorcycle. To date, no one has ever attempted such a journey; we have the opportunity to be the first. Our 60 day - 20,000km - journey will take us through some of the most remote and populated regions of the world. To say the least, it will be an epic journey. We left Shanghai, China this morning at 6am.

You can follow us on our dedicated website: www.mkride.com.

You can also follow us on our blog: www.mkride.com/blog

Colin and I will be writing throughout our journey with the goal of producing a co-authored book, as well as a documentary film and of course I'll be taking pictures the entire time. Our 60 day journey will take us on a "once in a lifetime" adventure. We hope that you opt to follow our journey and connect with us while we are on the road. We depart on Saturday August 14th 2010 @ 6am from my home in Shanghai, China.

Colin and I will be sure to stay in touch.

You can connect with us on: FACEBOOK, TWITTER, YOUTUBE

The Middle Kingdom Ride wouldn't happen without our wonderful SPONSORS: BMW, Touratech, Airhawk, Pelican, Kodak, Oakley, Cardo Systems, Lowe Pro & Mandarin House.

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Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle Blog: The New China - Yes, it's a Lamborgini

2010-08-06T21:00:00.005+08:00

Hello,

This picture above, and the post below was created by a good friend of mine, Jeffrey Parker. He was in Beijing earlier this week visiting a grocery store when he came past a PINK Lamborgini. Behind the wheel was a barely 20 year old women who clearly couldn't drive or park.

The post is interesting because it is a stark reminder that yes, with all the poverty and the messy politics of China, there are still a lot of people out there who can buy their favorite mistress (one of many no doubt) a pink Lamborgini - so she can drive it to pick up her Sunday groceries.

Check the original link, below, for more pictures.

Original LINK
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his series doesn't really need much explanation. But I'll set the stage. I was on my bicycle, just coming out of the Beijing Carrefour on Sunday afternoon, which of all the worst times to be in the Carrefour parking lot ranks about the top. Only a holiday Sunday it could be worse. So I'm navigating among untold numbers of newbie drivers in their newbie cars, and come upon this:

Is this really what it looks like? Surely it's a kit car -- a converted VW bug. I swing back around for a closer look. You can't quite tell, but it's an, er, sheila, at the wheel, as I suppose might be indicated by the color scheme.

And she's clearly a newbie. She's very unsure of her driving, and finally hops out. The young swain in the passenger seat hops in to finish the parallel parking, while she stands in the street watching.

Here's the dude, inspecting his parking job. Note the owner's shoes, which do not appear to be stock for this model.

No plates on this lovely urban getabout, but what's this? A rhinestone badge!

Couldn't do much about the glare, but this clearly is not a VW conversion kit car, as can be seen through the glass engine cover. That's hardly a surprise. I've only seen maybe two air-cooled veedubs in all my 20 years in China.

Yes, it's really, truly a pink Lambo Gallardo.

Yes, This is China.
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Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle Blog: The Right to Write

2010-07-30T21:00:00.003+08:00

Hello.

Politicians are usually the target of untold numbers of unauthorized biography's. They are public figures and often have their lives open to critical interpretation; that is what comes with the territory. Not so in China. The top 8 law makers in the country that effectively govern the entire country are complete unknowns. Sure, brief bio's can be found online or in government controlled newspapers. They all went to University in China, they all studied in disciplines like engineering and political theory; they all seem common enough.

But who are China's leaders really? How did they come to power? Who helped them? Who made enemies along the way? What do their wives and children do? Do they have siblings? Little is actually known, and the Communist Party prefers it like that. So when an author tries to piece together the history of Wen Jiabao, the current Chinese Premier, to produce an unauthorized autobiography, one might expect trouble. And that's exactly what happened to Yu Jie.

Little is known about Wen Jiabao. His history, rise to Premier and family ties are murky; and yet he comes across in a carefully managed PR campaign as being a "Man of the People". Is that the truth? Can he be trusted? Can years of bitterness and writing in a threatening environment make Yu Jie a creditable source of information? Can any writer in China who lives under constant threat be objective?

The current system is so confused and it leaves everyone strained. Below is a New York Times article about Yu Jie's efforts to publish his unauthorized autobiography on Wen Jiabao.

Original LINK
Copyright: New York Times
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Author Is Threatened Over Book on Chinese Premier
By MICHAEL WINES
BEIJING — A best-selling Chinese author and democracy advocate detained by security agents on Monday said Tuesday that the agents threatened to imprison him if he proceeded with plans to publish a book criticizing Wen Jiabao, China’s prime minister.

The author, Yu Jie, said in a telephone interview that he still intended to publish the book, titled “China’s Best Actor: Wen Jiabao,” by autumn. Because his books are banned in mainland China, Mr. Yu said, he is negotiating with a Hong Kong publisher.

Mr. Yu, 36, said he was questioned for four hours on Monday by police officers and agents of Beijing’s public security bureau who specialize in dealing with political dissidents. One security agent “told me that Wen Jiabao is not some ordinary guy,” he said, “and my criticism against him will be considered as harming state security and the national interest.”

“ ‘If you insist on publishing this book,’ ” he said he was told, “ ‘you will probably end up like Liu Xiaobo, who suffered imprisonment of many years.’ ” Mr. Liu, another writer and rights activist, was sentenced last December to 11 years in prison after leading a public movement calling for democratic reforms and an end to Communist Party rule.

Mr. Yu, who was released Monday after the interrogation, said that he was uncertain whether the agents’ threat was serious, but that he willing to go to prison for his principles.

“As a writer, I consider freedom of speech an essential part of my life,” he said. “Without it I will be a walking corpse, with no meaning and no value.”

Mr. Yu, who has written 28 books, once was a best-selling writer in mainland China, but his political views have led to the banning of his works. His new book’s “best actor” title draws on a nickname — a sly reference to the Academy Awards honor — that critics have bestowed on Mr. Wen.

A populist style and expressions of concern for China’s people have made Mr. Wen by far the best liked of China’s leaders, but Mr. Yu and other skeptics contend that the image only masks the authoritarian bent of China’s leadership.
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Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle Blog: My 200th Blog

2010-07-23T21:00:00.005+08:00

Hello.

Well, somehow over the last few years I've managed to coordinate my thoughts enough to write 200 blogs. They have been a mix of opinion, sharing new work, announcements and commentary on other people's writing and photography.

I don't have much clue as to how many people follow my blog or view it but for those of you who do write, or take the time to make comments I would like to say thanks. Every bit of feedback helps and I appreciate those who take the time to stop by the blog and read a bit.

Hopefully I can find the time to keep this blog moving along in the next few years. Fingers crossed.

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Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle Blog: Xinhua Bylines in Newsweek?

2010-07-16T21:00:00.002+08:00

Hello,

We all need to be ready for it. This is my warning to us all. Large Chinese media conglomerates have their eyes set on storied western media brands, and they are cash rich and ethics poor. A few weeks back the Southern Media Group, based in Guangzhou, made an unsuccessful attempt to purchase Newsweek.

My heart nearly stopped.

Newsweek are one of my clients, and they are in financial difficultly. There has been no secrete that the magazine is up for sale and there have been many suitors. I think the independent global media needs to be very fearful about Chinese media companies expanding abroad on the backs of western brands. The Chinese suitors bring with them a complete set of journalism ethics and morals than those of the west.

Evan Osnos, a wonderful writer and the New Yorkers man in China, sums it all up wonderful in his blog post below.

The New Yorker
Written by: Evan Osnos
Original LINK
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WHAT IF CHINA HAD BOUGHT NEWSWEEK?
Posted by Evan Osnos

The news that bidders for Newsweek included China’s Southern Media Group—a bid that was rejected—has left all sides a bit insulted. For Newsweek, the prospect of being bought by a company in the world’s No. 2 jailer of journalists (Iran is number one) appears to have been too grim to take seriously. For American journalists generally, the implication that our industry is edging toward a fire sale was not especially welcome. And, for the Chinese bidders, it sounds like they’ve been stung by the sense that they were not treated as legitimate prospects. As Xiang Xi, executive editor of Southern Weekly, part of the Southern Media Group, put it in an interview with an Anhui paper: “[T]he seller genuinely does not comprehend the desires of idealistic Chinese media workers and institutions.” (Translated by Global Voices.) Moreover, he said, “Even though the purchase of Newsweek failed, the search for investments will continue.” He encouraged “any media of global influence” that may be interested to drop him a line. He even provided his e-mail address: xiangxi100@hotmail.com.

The fact is that neither side truly understands the other in this case. The prospective buyers are not wrong that they have a right to bid on an American news organization, but they are wrong that they had the remotest shot of succeeding. For the moment, the spiritual gap between them and American news organizations is larger than even the most sober Chinese media baron probably imagines. A sale of this kind is, for the moment, beyond imagination.

But it’s also true that Xiang Xi is not being cynical when he says that most Americans don’t grasp the “desires of idealistic Chinese media workers.” Much of the discussion about the Newsweek bid has been about the Chinese government’s campaign to project “soft power” abroad, and that is relevant. But that is also losing sight of some nuances in the world of Chinese media. Like every newspaper in China, those in the Southern Media Group are owned by the state, and the party appoints the top editors. But the Southern Media Group is not the People’s Daily, and the differences are worth acknowledging.

The Southern Newspaper Group was an oasis of open-minded thinking in the state’s hidebound media empire, and it was known for pushing the limits within the propaganda apparatus. Its most daring publication, a paper based in Guangzhou named the Southern Weekend was winning readers and inspiring journalists across the country by showing how aggressive reporting and elegant writing could be possible despite censorship. On the Communist organization charts, the Group was part of the propaganda bureaucracy, but it also occupied a special place in the informal web of interest groups that made up the party. Ideologically, it was a camp for the party’s liberal wing. The editors of its newspapers were heirs to a tradition that began in 1957 during the Hundred Flowers Movement, when their predecessors launched a paper that gave voice to opinions that differed from the party line. One of the founders … argued that even if political conditions made it impossible for journalists to always write the truth, they should at least refuse to publish lies. Generation after generation, the editors of the Southern Newspaper Group tried to live up to that standard.”

In 2003, one of the Southern Group’s editors, Cheng Yizhong, dared to publish an investigation into the death of Sun Zhigang, a young graphic designer who died in police custody after a beating—a report that led to the discovery and closure of a nationwide network of seven hundred underground police-run detention camps—an astonishing case of the Chinese press influencing national policy. But, as Pan wrote, Cheng was detained for doing it; he spent five months in a detention center and now works in a low-profile media job. His two colleagues were sentenced to long jail terms. Before he went to jail, he gave a speech to his staff that included this line: “Whatever happens, we must not give up the values and beliefs of the Southern Metropolis Daily. We have reason to be proud.”

It was a courageous sentiment from someone working in a profoundly imperfect system. I wouldn’t want to be owned by them either, and I don’t expect it will happen anytime soon. But, let’s not sneer too much. As colleagues in a business that is tough enough, Chinese journalists deserve our respect.
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Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________

Ryan Pyle Blog: Tim Hetherington Interview

2010-07-09T22:16:00.002+08:00

Hello.

Well, Tim Hetherington is a storied image maker. His new film, his dedication to documenting real life with both still and moving images is well regarded around the globe. I read this blog on the NYT and found it very insightful and important. I hope everyone can give it a read and take something from it. Tim is a real visionary, a passionate image maker and documenter of life. He has crafted himself a very special role. I can't wait to see what he gets up to next.

Original LInk to NYTimes Interview: LINK
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JJune 22, 2010, 12:00 AM
“Restrepo” and the Imagery of War
By MICHAEL KAMBER

Michael Kamber was covering the war in Liberia in 2003. He had a Hasselblad. A stranger pointed out that another photographer — this one accompanying the rebels — also had a Hasselblad. “I was sure he was mistaken,” Mr. Kamber recalled. ”Two photographers stupid — or impractical — enough to photograph the war in medium format? Impossible. But the stranger turned out to be correct. The other photographer was Tim Hetherington. We met later on, covered the civil war in the Ivory Coast together and have been friends ever since.”

The documentary “Restrepo,” directed by Mr. Hetherington and Sebastian Junger, will open Friday. Last week, Mr. Hetherington sat down with Mr. Kamber in Midtown Manhattan to talk about the film — and much else besides. Their remarks have been edited for brevity and clarity.

Q. Do you consider yourself a photographer?
A. If you are interested in mass communication, then you have to stop thinking of yourself as a photographer. We live in a post-photographic world. If you are interested in photography, then you are interested in something — in terms of mass communication — that is past. I am interested in reaching as many people as possible.

Q. Right.
A. If we are interested in the outside world and making images of it and translating it and relaying it to as many people as possible, then in some ways the traditional photographic techniques are really not important.

Q. Does that mean we can just Photoshop horses’ heads into a photograph?
A. Absolutely not. Authenticity and making a picture authentic is obviously important. I am not interested in traditional photographic techniques. I am not interested in putting a black border around a photograph as a way of saying that is authentic. You know, “protecting photography.”

Q. There is a whole community of people who are interested in trying to protect the genre’s integrity and the culture of photojournalism.
A. That’s because they haven’t found the answers to their questions.

Q. Which is what?
A. Which is how to make money out of it, to make it pay; how to succeed financially. And how to get it out there and reach an audience.

Q. Do you think they all just really care about money?
A. No, I don’t. But it all depends. We are all interested in the outside world. The heart of every deed is a selfish one. If you have to go out in the world and be effective, you have to make sure you are alive, healthy and strong. Agencies have to make sure that they are financially viable in order to go out and make commentary on the world that is useful to other people. My point about not being a photographer is that we can’t protect photography – forget photography – when we are interested in the authentic representation of things outside of ourselves.

Q. How does your Afghanistan work tie into what you just said?
A. I am interested in visually representing something in as many ways as possible, exploiting as many different forms as possible, to reach as many people as possible.

Q. And how did you do that in Afghanistan?
A. By working across the spectrum, by first saying, “O.K., I’m going to photograph for Vanity Fair.” And that is a platform that has, say, a two or three million readership. Then those images, because I retain the copyright, are syndicated worldwide. They appear in newspapers and magazines worldwide. Great, that’s another valid audience. The image that won World Press Photo gave another spotlight and went global in a way that could lead people to reach my other work. Then I made “Sleeping Soldiers,” which was a digital projection. It was an art piece, meant for galleries – but that’s still a valid audience. Then I made TV. For ABC News, we made two “Nightline” pieces. The first piece, I was told by ABC, reached 20 million people. And then using all that footage and making a feature film out of it. On our own money.

Q. “Restrepo”?
A. “Restrepo.” Working across all these editorial spectrums; not saying, “I am a photographer” or “I am a filmmaker,” just saying: “I am a person who goes out into the world and makes these images. And I want to reach as many different audiences as possible.” To do that, I have to reach into different forms.

Q. And now you have this book?
A. And now I have book coming out in October, with Chris Boot, called “Infidel.”

Q. Can you tell me about that?
A. The first time I went to Afghanistan, in 2007, the world was very much focused on Iraq. People had forgotten – and now we have come to accept – that the Afghan war was going out of control. When I got to the Korangal Valley, and there was lots of fighting going on, it completely surprised me. I was gobsmacked.

Q. Constant combat?
A. Yeah. At the end of October 2007, 70 percent of American bombs being dropped were in that valley, and the casualty rate was at 25 percent wounded. So the images I made were very action oriented. Photojournalism. Reminiscent of classical war photography. I did that because I wanted people to see that there was a lot of fighting going on. Anyway, I go back and the fighting sort of bored me. Because when you are in a lot of combat after a while, a lot of it — you know? If you are inside a base that’s being attacked, like “Restrepo” was, you are in a fairly good position. The likelihood of you being killed was pretty low, unless they put a mortar on you.

Q. Personally, I have yet to be bored in combat.
A. What got me really interested were the interpersonal relationships between the men. It was a facet of war I hadn’t really thought about. It is a big part of fighting and combat, as we know, yet it is rarely ever represented. A lot of the substance of the book brings the idea of male bonding to the front. It is a huge part of the war machine, if you think about it. That really is it. Why war exists is because mankind has worked out: if you take 15 men and put them together, that group, the number in a platoon, is the perfect number, the perfect group. It is like a hard-wired genetic code: if you bring a small group of men together and make them dependent on each other, they will kill for each other.

Q. Tell me what the pictures look like in this book, since we don’t have it in front of us.
A. The pictures show a different image of life in a very small outpost. They are very approachable. I spent enough time that, by the end, the guys were walking around like they were fighting in shorts and flip flops. I was photographing them in a state of undress. You can see the images of the guys, really bonding closely together. There is a lot of play fights and hugging. A lot of the guys would have their bodies tattooed. Part of the book shows you these tattoos. In fact, the title of the book comes from a tattoo. They used to tattoo across their chest the word “Infidel.” The book is about soldiers and their tattoos. You see them playing golf and fighting, and it seems very lighthearted. Then, in the latter part of the book, they go to war and it ends – as war does – in ways that are really upsetting and unpredictable. I totally respect people who go to Afghanistan and document the Taliban, civilian collateral damage and all that. My strategy is different. I thought that the easiest way into the American psyche is to photograph their young men and then subvert that.

Q. Why subvert that?
A. Because otherwise you are being predictable and confirming an idea they have in their heads. I am challenging people with photographs, as I hope the film challenges people.

Q. When does the film come out?
A. The 25th of June.

Q. It will be in theaters around New York?
A. In some theaters around the U.S. We are trying to build the theatrical distribution.

Q. And you really controlled the film; you never turned the footage over to a distributor and let them run with it?
A. No. In terms of the editorial control, we funded it ourselves. A lot of photographers are moving into video and, you know, making images is only part of the business now. It’s not just about image-making. It’s about how do we reach audiences with what we are doing. There is an overproduction of images.

Q. Right. I talked to Joao Silva in Baghdad and I said, “Do you think there are any great images to come out of Iraq, the way there were in Vietnam?” And he said: “The problem isn’t that we haven’t taken that classic image. The problem is that we have taken too many.”
A. We are making so many images, but we aren’t actually connecting these images. We aren’t exploiting what we have made. We aren’t mining it enough to make it into audiences’ minds. A strategy to hit people about this idea of Afghanistan across multiple forms – “Oh, I’ve read Sebastian’s book, “War”; I’ve read the Vanity Fair articles; then I saw the film and the film made me want to see Hetherington’s book” — is a multilayered thing. It is different than the images you see out there that are already lost.

Q. It is sort of a representation of what your experience was in Afghanistan.
A. Yeah. And to make that happen, you have to navigate through the business side of things. That isn’t easy. But if we see ourselves merely as photographers, we are failing our duty. It isn’t good enough anymore just to be a witness.

Q. What it was like to live on that mountaintop with those guys?
A. Being out there was a really unexpected and profound experience.

Q. How many guys were you with?
A. A platoon. So basically about 30 guys.

Q. And you were being shot at?
A. They were patrolling every day. It was continually having to push the enemy back. There were a lot of times there would be contact in the field. Occasionally, the enemy would launch a more direct attack on the camp and main base.

Q. Once, I had a very lucky time with a mortar. I got off a helicopter and put my flak jacket down. For some reason, I wasn’t wearing it. Suddenly, there was a mortar coming up to where you go to get water and stuff. By chance, no one was in there. And it was just shredded. And I was walking around without a vest. You know?
A. It was really basic conditions there. It was like the furthest outposts of the empire. It was on the side of the hill. South of where we were was bad-guy country. This place had no running water or electricity. When we first got there, we used to sleep out in the dirt. It was the edge of the empire. And that was a very interesting place to be.

Q. Tell me about juggling stills and video. How does that work?
A. I have no idea how I actually do it. Hopefully, in the future, we will have only one camera that just does everything. At the moment, I guess I decide that if the event is visually interesting enough, I will take a picture. If the event isn’t visually interesting enough on its own, then it’s probably significant for video, because it is contextualized with sound. So, usually, my default is video. I can be approaching something photographically, then know I’ve made the picture and pick up the video camera. It’s gotten pretty crazy; kind of like John Wayne. I used to attach the two cameras with carabiners to my jacket because then you can drop the camera and it won’t fall. So I would be hooked up and shooting. It’s pretty ridiculous.

Q. But it worked?
A. Yeah, it worked. But there was a lot of video of a camera swinging over my feet in the end of the tapes.

Q. You spent a year?
A. No, Sebastian and I spent about five months apiece, sometimes together, sometimes apart. In terms of coverage, it was about 10 months. The Army didn’t expect us to spend that long with a group of soldiers. When you go to places like Iraq and Afghanistan, if you go into combat with soldiers, you are usually there with them three months maximum. To spend five months with the same platoon is a pretty big amount of time.

Q. Do we need more of this kind of long form?
A. Yeah, we do. The problem isn’t that photographers don’t want to do it. It’s because the media outlets don’t seem to understand. The bean counters don’t understand. People who are being asked to judge quality photographs don’t understand. When you and I look at a photograph or watch a film, it’s all about time. It is the amount of time you spend. That is everything. That is what it’s about. Full stop. No short cut. Eugene Richards does not make amazing work because he is in and out. It’s because he lives it. That’s why the best work — we all know — speaks of time. But when you’ve got people making decisions about what is good and bad photography who haven’t spent the time in the street to know that call, they choose bad images. They don’t really know what they are doing. And they aren’t willing to put the money into it or to spend that time because they think that by filling the front page with a picture, their job is done — rather than asking if there is a better picture. We are all under financial pressure.

Q. Is the direction the business is going these days opposite what you’re talking about?
A. Absolutely and that’s the problem. That’s why when we talk about the vision of the film, we knew we had to carry it on our own. The only people who understood how to make that film was us. We had to make the film ourselves. We had to take control. Up until the point that the film was coming out, everybody else thought it was just not going to happen.

Q. Do you think that America wants to see the film? Is America ready to deal with this film? It’s a hard, hard film to look at.
A. We made a visceral war film; the kind of film that hasn’t been made before. Most of the people who spend a lot of time with soldiers are photographers. There are very few documentary filmmakers who do. We came to making this film after many years as war photographers. We understood what was required to make a good film.

Q. I remember at one point you were really broke and you put everything you had into this film.
A. Yeah. I was in a pretty bad way. I was in debt. It was a crazy thing to do during the recession.

Q. But going back to the question: do you think America wants this film? Or needs to see it?
A. Obviously, I am going to say yes. There are a lot of people out there interested in war. We all know that war sells.

Q. So the next question is: can a documentary film about war sell?
A. A lot of documentary films about war since the start of the “war on terrorism” in 2001 have had political standpoints. By stripping that out of our film, by not having a political standpoint, we ask people to be nonpartisan and experience what those soldiers experienced. As a platform to discuss war, I think that’s useful, because it doesn’t divide people. This country is already so divided about war, I think that’s a good strategy: to build a bridge to people, to get them to engage with the politics about Afghanistan, to see what we are dealing with.

Q. There are people killed in the film.
A. Most people are concerned about whether their wife needs to get the pills from her doctor, or whether they got the dog food, or did they do their health insurance. These are all important concerns. To weigh them down with some heavy guilt trip — “You should be interested in this because this is Afghanistan” — is not a constructive way to engage them. You have to think up more reasonable strategies. My strategy is, initially, to build a bridge to people rather than turn them off with really tough images that challenge them. By making a film about a group of soldiers you get to know — that you are intimate with, that you laugh with and end up crying with — is a way for you to engage with what is really going on. When they awkwardly come across a village where the villagers are all killed, you toss questions out like: How did the villagers die? Were the soldiers responsible? Is that what we are putting our young men through? I think Americans are ready to engage with Afghanistan. They just don’t want to wake up to it. They don’t know how to react to pictures like Abu Ghraib. “Wow. People are out there torturing in our name. This makes me feel bad. Stop reading the newspaper. End of story. I have to go pay for my wife’s health care.” As photographers, as image makers, we have to be realistic about who the people are we are trying to reach, rather than: “I’ve been to Kenya. The ethnic riots are really important. You must have a look at them.” “Well, I don’t have to look at them. I have to figure out how to get my kid to school on time.” I have to think about how I engage the right wing. If I go to them and say, “I’m a liberal and I hate war,” they are going to say, “I’ve got something better to do with my time.” I hope “Restrepo” is the kind of film that does that, that engages people from the left and the right. People have responded very positively to it. Those who have been stirred up are the people who think we should be doing overt political commentary. It makes them angry that we are not. The little bit of criticism we’ve had is from the right — about showing the dead body of an American solider or showing the U.S. military in nonprotocol situations — or the left, who think we should be outright condemning the war. The very fact they are riled up shows you that it is impacting them. They need, perhaps, to analyze why they feel how they do. How they can actually talk about the war in a way that isn’t so cemented? If we can engage each other in a nonpolitical and nonpartisan way, we may actually agree on how to move forward with the war.

Q. What about your personal view? How do you think the war is going?
A. Do I think the intervention in Afghanistan was justified? Yes, I do. I think that al Qaeda definitely was based out there and they went in and they killed 3,000 people here and it was necessary to go in and break up their network – unlike Iraq, which was based on a lie. So, yes. The war in Afghanistan was mishandled. We have seen that less troops have led to the situation now. We have yet to see what there is to see with more troops.

Q. Why didn’t you make the movie with the British?
A. I have never worked with the Brits. I have heard they are more restrictive than the Americans in terms of what you can file and so on. We weren’t really scrutinized by the U.S. press office. It was kind of incredible. We were given a lot of freedom. I was really surprised. Good things can come out of an embed system. In some ways, being an outsider is useful. Blue-collar American soldiers can’t place me. I was this tall British guy. And they were like, “This guy’s kind of weird, but he’s O.K.”

Q. Was it your first time with working-class American culture?
A. Yes, it was. And it’s super interesting.

Q. You get to Middle America and it’s like going to Iraq.
A. Yeah, and it’s probably easier to get around in Iraq than in Wyoming.

Q. What was your impression of America after?
A. If I am proud of the film, it is because it is an honest film. And it is an honest film because you can see that I also like the guys there. I don’t garnish over the awkward bits or bad bits. But I like them as people. The only people who really know about the war are the soldiers. So, of course, I end up respecting them. I had a hell of a lot of respect for them. They are young. They are out there on the American taxpayer dollar. And we ask a lot of them. Not only do we want them to fight, we want them to successfully engage hearts and minds. We are asking an 18-year-old guy from, say, Arkansas, who has never been out of his state before to not only go to Afghanistan, but also to learn Pashtu and Dari, and be empathetic with people who he thinks may be killing his friends. It is a lot for even the most aware person to deal with. We should maybe put some other training procedures into place, and be a little bit more supportive of what they are doing. I have a lot of respect for them, because I think we ask them to do too much.

Q. What do you feel is the future of traditional media? Where is this all going?
A. We who are working in the realm of photojournalism and documentary photojournalism have to focus on whom we want to talk to. We need to know who our audience is. That will help us figure out how to reach them, which language to reach them with. I don’t think enough image-makers do that. We are in flux. Certain contenders are emerging. The Times is still here. It’s been strengthened recently by its online version. It has a lot of viewership, and there are going to be photographers like yourself who have access to an important platform. It’s the equivalent of Life magazine. It is reaching millions of people and it’s an important outlet for what we do.

Q. You don’t think it’s over yet?
A. No, I don’t think it’s over yet. It is about reputation now, and reputation is not just about making stylistic pictures. It is about authenticity; about knowing what you are talking about; showing the ability to reach your audience. By working across the media, you can actually survive. The danger is to go to one area and stay.

Q. So you would encourage young people to do many different things?
A. Not necessarily many different things. I encourage them to look at many different forms. Not to say, “I am a photographer,” but to say: “I am an image maker. I make still or moving images in real-life situations, unfiltered and un-Photoshopped. I am going to look into how I can put this into different streams for different audiences; maybe some on the Web, some in print.”

Q. Earlier you said that traditional photography is dead. These traditional types of straight journalism – you made it sound as if they are becoming passé. But then look at the uproar over Julie Jacobson’s image from Afghanistan of the dying soldier. There are still images that really grab people.
A. But again, they are images. What I am thinking about is this idea that “Photography” is something that has this black border around it and is protected. You know? “I used to develop black-and-white pictures and that’s what photography is.” That kind of old-fashioned thinking is just for an art gallery now. Julie Jacobson shot in digital. What is important in that image is that it is a still picture. As we increasingly have technology that wants us to shoot moving pictures and contextualize with sound, we need to understand the difference. Why am I making a still picture? Why am I making a moving picture? The question you asked me about when I decide to shoot what — I need to be able answer that. Slicing stills out of the video stream means there will be even more images. Which means that the audiences’ expectations are going to change. It’s very difficult for me to know what that expectation will be in 10 years’ time because things are moving so quickly. Do I think people are going to pull 16 megabyte pictures out of video streams and try and print them? Absolutely, that is going to happen. What impact that is going to have on the media, I don’t know. That’s why I think the most important thing for our industry is not style, it is authenticity. It is: “I go to you because I know you have an authentic voice in the work that you have been doing.”

Q. Right. But the trend I am seeing is actually the opposite. What I am hearing is: “We don’t need the media anymore. We’ve got our own photographers because we have cellphone cameras.”
A. But you need to have professional witnesses, people who go out there and do this as a living. What you do – the way that you make an image, the way that you make a story – is different than partaking in that story, like citizen journalism.

Q. The trend seems to be towards citizen journalism.
A. Because it’s cheap.

Q. Even this newspaper is saying, “Send in your readers’ photos.”
A. Again, it’s about profit. It is not about good journalism. We all know that having professionalism in any field is important. We have a weird skill-set. Send us into a difficult circumstance and we will get out there and know how to find a story. That is what we do for a living. That is valuable. It is not part of the problem, it is part of the solution – in addition to citizen journalism, in addition to local photographers. The more, the merrier.

Q. We have a different role?
A. We have a different role.

Q. Are you going to continue to cover war?
A. I have no idea. I have no idea.

Q. Are you thinking about quitting?
A. I am just thinking about getting through “Restrepo.” There are different roles you have to do at different stages of life. Those will change. Maybe I’ll go back in. Or maybe I will be useful to the community in other ways.

Q. Why did you leave Britain? Why did you move to New York?
A. Because it rains all the time and you can’t get a cab and the girls are good looking here. Britain has 60 million people. America has 300 million people. It’s the math. If you are interested in mass communication, you are going to reach more people here. It is still the biggest player in the world. It is a very important audience. To get these people to understand what their military is doing is a natural place to be.
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--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle Blog: Global Times Interview

2010-07-02T21:00:00.005+08:00

Hello,

I was contacted a while back by a reporter from the Global Times, an English language daily newspaper in China. They wanted to do a story about what it was like being a photographer based in China. I thought it would be an interesting story and the reporter seemed genuinely interested in knowing about what life was like for freelancers in China.

The interview lasted about thirty minutes. And the article was posted in the weekend edition of the paper a few weeks back. I never saw a hard copy, but below is the online version I found on SINA.com. It's not too exciting but I thought it would make a semi-interesting read and blog post.

The original story on SINA.com can be found HERE
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When we think of how the 20th century's most important events are best remembered, it's usually as images as opposed to stories. Be it a starving African child covered in flies, a girl fleeing a napalm attack, or a destitute family of the Dust Bowl, each of these epoch-defining images were captured by photojournalists in the field. Our perception of such people can be clouded by romantic notions of daring, intrepid risk and adventure. To find out about real life in the industry, the Global Times sat down with two of Shanghai's most prominent foreign photojournalists to discuss their lives reporting on China through a lens.

Romantic? Think again

Ryan Pyle from Toronto has been working in China as a freelance photojournalist since 2001. Despite having no formal training, the 31-year-old has worked with publications such as the New York Times, News Week and the Sunday Times. During his time in China, Pyle has covered major events such as the Sichuan earthquake, an experience he describes as "very emotional." But he is quick to dispel any preconceived notions about his job. "A lot of people think this job is romantic because you get to travel and see interesting things. But believe me it's not. Not many people realize just how tough it is."

One of the most demanding aspects of the job is having to remain on alert day and night and to be ready to take off whenever a news story breaks. "You might just be given a day, a few hours, or even just half an hour before having to set off." He went on to say that, "we usually stay in cheap hotels where the KTV is on downstairs and you don't get a wink of sleep. I've had many nights like this although hotels in China are getting better."

In addition to being vigilant, Pyle's working hours are often irregular because many of the publications he works for are based outside China. "I wake up at 6 am and deal with people from the US. In the daytime I shoot pictures and then in the evening I talk with publications in Europe. At night I'm back dealing with people in the US again."

Stiff competition

According to Paris-born Tim Franco who works for the French newspaper Le Monde, competition is becoming ever more fierce among photojournalists in China. Franco, 27, believes this is a result of China being increasingly placed under the media spotlight, and as more and more journalists pour into Shanghai every year, assignments are harder to come by.

Ryan Pyle told the Global Times that missing just one phone call from a newspaper can make the difference between getting and losing a job as there is always another photographer instantly available. "Unless you are 60 years old or have won 10 World Press Photo Awards no-one is going to wait for you. Even though I'm 31 years old and fairly experienced, newspapers won't wait for someone like me all the time."

Unfortunately, even for those established in the industry, earnings are relatively low and the work is irregular. While waiting for work, many photojournalists do corporate photography to make ends meet.

"Photojournalism is not a lucrative career - if anything it's a dying profession," said Tim Franco. "Publishing has been squeezed by the recession and photojournalists are the first to be dropped. Clients can use cheaper photo agencies instead. I know people who are published regularly in Time Magazine and they still can't pay their bills. Even the top guys will do advertising work. They have to."

Ryan Pyle agrees, but insists that corporate work isn't necessarily the "cop out" it's painted to be. "It is much more highly paid than editorial work and it can often take you to more interesting places than news assignments. I've been inside the Three-Gorges dam, for example, doing corporate work."

Teamwork

A key element to the work involves collaboration with writers as newspapers prefer the photographer and the writer to share the experience in order to achieve a balanced, coherent narrative. Franco told the Global Times that this bond can be one of the most rewarding aspects of the job. "I love the relationship between myself and the writer. It's like a voyage of discovery." Ryan Pyle said of this alliance between writer and photographer, "When you're on assignment, it's the writer who controls the schedule, but most of the writers I work with are very understanding about the photos. It's mostly an easy-going, collaborative experience."

Photogenic China

Despite the hardship and stiff competition, working as a photojournalist in China presents many attractive opportunities. "It is probably the greatest country in the world to do photography in right now," said Ryan Pyle. "I think the changing social economy of China makes for such rich imagery.

I feel really lucky to be here at this time because in 30 years I don't know what China will look like so I want to document it now. China is such a fascinating country; the diversity of people here alone is probably greater than anywhere else on earth."
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--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle Blog: Work Conditions & Suicides

2010-06-25T21:00:00.002+08:00

Hello,

I few months back I was speaking at Columbia University and a professor sitting in on my talk asked me, "What are the labor conditions like in China at the moment?"

It was a tough question. There are, two sides to the story - and Howard W. French, who was moderating, assisted in answering this question based on his wealth of experience in Central America, Asia and Africa. Some ideas that we both generated during that talk are below.

Working conditions in China have caught a lot of headlines the last few weeks because of a spurt of suicides at Foxconn and a workers strike which has shut down Honda for several days. So, what are China's factories really like? I'll split my answer in to two overly simplified categories, the good and bad.

A) The Good
Manufacturing work, although tough, does allow people from the countryside to move off the land and find work opportunities in cities, suburbs and industrial centers that they wouldn't otherwise have the chance to visit. It allows many to earn a living and explore and have "an adventure" in some cases. This might sound naive to some of the most skeptic readers out there; but I've been to textile factories where a lot of the male workers play basketball after work and workers travel off the factory in the evening to meet friends at other factories and go out for dinner. I have met factory workers who make a decent wage and don't complain too much about working hours and who know that the work is hard but they won't be doing this forever - as they just want to save a bit and return back to the countryside and buy a home. These are some of the more positive stories I've heard in the last few years of visiting factories across China.

B) The Negative
While the "sweat-shop" idea is truly a rarity in China, there are many other factors of obtaining employment and maintaining employment that place significant psychological stress on workers. After years of visiting factories in some of China's most industrious locations I have come across some trends and common situations. Some of these situations are looked at below:

1) The Big Move
All migrant workers have to move. By the very nature of their employment, all migrant workers have to leave their homes, break ties with family and friends and move to a distant location; often without promise of employment. Many have to borrow money in order to leave in the first place; this is the first instance of incurring debt - which may happen often.

2) Agents
Once they arrive in manufacturing areas like Dongguan or Shenzhen they end up in "flop houses" which are full of migrants looking for work, they are not nice places. Some times weeks are spent in places like this while looking for employment at "job fairs" or through "private agents". Job fairs are difficult and exploitative in nature,and ofter jobs at very low salaries because they know that often jobs are in demand. The "private agents" on the other hand often charge potential migrant workers 3-6 months of their future salary to obtain jobs at highly sought after manufacturing companies. Assuming a migrant uses an agent, they may be borrowing money to cover living experience before employment and then have to pay back their "fee's" for up to six months after their first day of work. This is another cause of indebtedness.

3) Work Conditions
The work conditions are grueling, there is no doubt about it. But, with that being said they are humane; and in many cases conditions have improved ten-fold over what working conditions were like in the 1990s. While workers have to work for long hours performing the same tasks again and again, it is understandable that the pressure on the worker can mount and that they become isolated and feeling as though their work is meaningless and that their life is worthless - but this is the minority I feel. Workers safety is still an issue at many factories and many workers do get hurt and killed on the job. This continues to happen and is also a serious issue but I don't believe it is the cause of worker unrest, suicide and strikes.

4) Living Conditions
The living conditions for many migrant workers are not great, and much of the reasons for this are out of their control. For example, migrant workers are often forced to rent accommodation from the factory they work for at inflated rates, many workers are forced to eat at factory cafeteria at inflated rates and purchase snacks and food from company shops at inflated rates; thereby eroding spending power and savings. Yet another form of indebtedness. Social lives vary greatly, many find friends and engage in happy social lives, others fall through the cracks and live in isolation, often feeling estranged; it is these people who can often end up taking their own lives or getting themselves hurt on the job.

5) The Trap
A lot of you out there must just be thinking, why not just quit the job and move back home. It is just not that easy. Many migrant workers feel trapped in their employment for many reasons, the first is often family pressure. Many migrants borrow money and leave home with promises to deliver wealth to the family - but that is more often fantasy than fact. Also remember that for a migrant worker to obtain employment often they are already in debt to various people before their first day of work; and to complicate matters, often workers have their salaries held for at least three months by factories, so they are continuously owed three months salary. This is seen as an insurance policy for the company, forcing workers to return to work after the "Chinese New Year Holiday" where many workers return home and never come back to the factory. All of these pressures build up, and it's easy to see how a young 17, 18, 19 year old migrant, who is not very well educated, could become overwhelmed by negative feelings and hopelessness.

6) The Solution
To be honest, there is no solution. The problem is not always the job, but the system around finding and maintaining employment. There are too many middle-men and too many people out their making huge profits off of China's migrant classes. Basketball courts, swimming pools, better housing, better food, increase in salaries may not help the situation much. It is the infrastructure around finding employment and holding employment are improved.

Expect more suicides and more workers strikes. Sad but true. But that's just my two cents.

--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle Blog: Honda Workers Strike, and the NYT

2010-06-18T21:00:00.001+08:00

Hello.

A few days back there was a workers strike at a Honda car manufacturing plant in southern China. This occurred in late May. Of course thousands of news stories rushed to cover the news, and there was much mis-represented of what was really happening on the ground.

Enter Keith Bradsher and David Barboza. If you don't know who they are, all you need to know is that they are two of the best. Keith and David, both whom I've worked with and have a lot of respect for, are Business correspondents for the New York Times. And they co-wrote an article towards the end of May that I believe cut through and delivered the hard facts about what was happening at the Honda plant in southern China; a story that delivered news and facts that went well beyond that of the other publications.

A few points to keep in mind:

1) Yes, there is a workers union in China. It is considered to be an arm of the Communist Party and is mainly in charge of watching over workers not bargaining with companies for better working conditions. There are no explicit rules about striking.

2) It's true. Nothing in China is allowed to happen without the blessing of The Party. This strike may have first occurred on whim, but it continued because people high up in the food chain thought it was a decent move. Reasons why might include: that it is time for China's manufacturing migrants to earn more income and become part of the consumer economy; that it is time for China's manufacturing class to obtain better working conditions and better workers rights; that China needs to maintain awareness that the gap is growing between the rich and poor; the recent suicides at Foxconn might end up driving home the point that migrant workers in the manufacturing industry are vulnerable and need further employment protection through government regulation; and lastly that Honda is a Japanese company. Had this strike occurred at a GM or VW Joint Venture you can bet it would have been shut down in a matter of moments. There is a still a lot of personal, and government driven, anti-Japanese feelings throughout China.

3) The most interesting point is that this was allowed to carry on for several days. Meaning that there was debate amongst the top leaders about how to address the situation. We are seeing this more often in China; where the leadership is forced to make quick decisions about situations occurring (riots in Tibet / Xinjiang, or workers strikes) and the government goes very quiet, and local officials go in to hiding until they get their directions from higher up the food chain. One of the common mis-conceptions is that the Communist Party is a homogeneous one party entity where people all agree on the same basic plan for country development; well, that couldn't be further from the truth. The "Party" is a mix-mash of people with a mix-mash of ideas and ideals. A friend of mine who has a lot of government dealings told me that for every person in the government leadership who wants China to develop in to a modern economic global powerhouse, there is another person who wants to drive China back in to the Communist dark ages of the 1960s. While I don't know if that's exactly true, it does pose an interesting argument and can be used as a basis for understanding some of the "ying and yang" policy moves that the Chinese leadership continues to pull out of their hat.

The story by Keith and David is below. The link to the original story online is just below. Enjoy the read.

LINK to Original STORY.
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May 28, 2010
Strike in China Highlights Gap in Workers’ Pay

By KEITH BRADSHER and DAVID BARBOZA

FOSHAN, China — After years of being pushed to work 12-hour days, six days a week on monotonous low-wage assembly line tasks, China’s workers are starting to push back.

A strike at an enormous Honda transmission factory here in southeastern China has suddenly and unexpectedly turned into a symbol of this nation’s struggle with income inequality, rising inflation and soaring property prices that have put home ownership beyond the reach of all but the most affluent.

And perhaps most remarkably, Chinese authorities let the strike happen — up to a point.

In the kind of scene that more often plays out at strikes in America than at labor actions in China, print and television reporters from state-controlled media across the country have started covering the walkout here, even waiting outside the nearly deserted front gate on Thursday and Friday in hope of any news. All the Chinese reporters disappeared on Saturday morning, however, as the government, apparently nervous, suddenly imposed without explanation a blanket ban on domestic media coverage of the strike.

A worker at a factory dormitory said on Saturday afternoon that the strike continued, and police were nowhere in sight at the factory or the dormitory. The authorities have been leery of letting the media report on labor disputes, fearing that it could encourage workers elsewhere to rebel. The new permissiveness, however temporary, coincides with growing sentiment among some officials and economists that Chinese workers deserve higher wages for their role in the country’s global export machine.

And without higher incomes, hundreds of millions of Chinese will be unable to play their part in the domestic consumer spending boom on which this nation hopes to base its next round of economic growth.

“This is all because there is a major political debate going on about how to deal with the nation’s growing income gap, and the need to do something about wages,” said Andreas Lauffs, a lawyer at Baker & McKenzie who specializes in Chinese labor issues.

If wages do rise, that could bring higher prices for Western consumers for goods as diverse as toys at Wal-Mart and iPads from Apple.

The Chinese media may also have found it a little easier, politically, to cover this strike because Honda is a Japanese company, and anti-Japanese sentiment still simmers in China as a legacy of World War II. Certainly, the strike is hitting Honda hard, as the resulting shortage of transmissions and other engine parts has forced the company to halt production at all four of its assembly plants in China.

Honda has an annual capacity of 650,000 cars and minivans in China, like Jazz subcompacts for export to Europe and Accord sedans for the Chinese market. Because Honda’s prices in China are similar to what it charges in the United States, the cars tend to be far out of reach financially for most of the workers who make them.

A Honda spokeswoman declined to discuss specific issues in the strike negotiations.

The intense media coverage may evoke historical memories of the 1980 shipyard strike in Gdansk, Poland, that gave rise to the Solidarity movement and paved the way for the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe. But the reality here is much different.

Instead of tens of thousands of grizzled and angry shipyard workers, the Honda strike involves about 1,900 mostly cheerful young people. And the employees interviewed say their goal is more money, not a larger political agenda.

“If they give us 800 renminbi a month, we’ll go back to work right away,” said one young man, describing a pay increase that would add about $117 a month to an average pay that is now around $150 monthly. He said he had read on the Internet of considerably higher wages at other factories in China and expected Honda to match them with an immediate pay increase.

Many workers at other factories in southeastern China already earn $300 a month, but they do so only through considerable overtime. And even that higher income is not enough to embark on the middle-class dream in China of owning a small apartment and subcompact car. Officially, though, the government is discouraging heavy reliance on overtime, and workers here said that Honda was not assigning much.

The strikers said that Honda mainly hired recent graduates of high schools or vocational schools. And so, most are in their late teens or early 20s, representing a new generation of employees, many of whom had not been born when the Chinese authorities suppressed protests by students and workers in Tiananmen Square in 1989 — a watershed event whose 21st anniversary falls next Friday.

The profile of striking workers seems to run more along the lines of slightly bookish would-be engineers — perhaps without the grades or money to attend college — rather than political activists. Besides their low wages, the workers seem focused on issues like the factory’s air-conditioning not being cool enough, and the unfairness of having to rise from their dormitories as early as 5:30 for a 7 a.m. shift.

Workers said that in addition to their pay, they also received free lodging in rooms that slept four to six in bunk beds. They also get free lunches, subsidized breakfasts for the equivalent of 30 cents and dinners for about $1.50.

The striking employees said that some senior workers, known as team leaders, had allied themselves with management. But they insisted that the rank-and-file workers were solidly in favor of walkout — a claim impossible to verify.

Although China is run by the Communist Party and has state-controlled unions, the unions are largely charged with overseeing workers, not bargaining for higher wages or pressing for improved labor conditions. And they are not allowed to strike, although China’s laws do not have explicit prohibitions against doing so.

Workers at the Honda factory dormitory said that the official union at the factory was not representing them but was serving as an intermediary between them and management. Li Jianming, the national spokesman for the All China Federation of Trade Unions, declined to comment.

The workers here have been on strike since May 21, with no resolution in sight. But the strike did not come to broader notice until Thursday and Friday as Japanese media began reporting the shutdown of Honda assembly plants, and as Chinese media and Internet sites were allowed to report extensively on those activities.

The unusually permissive approach of the authorities toward media coverage of the strike follows a decision to tolerate extensive coverage this month of suicides by workers at the Taiwanese-owned Foxconn factory complex in nearby Shenzhen that supplies Apple and Hewlett-Packard.

The official China Daily newspaper ran a lead editorial on Friday that cited the Honda strike as evidence that government inaction on wages might be fueling tensions between workers and employers. The editorial criticized the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security for not moving faster to draft a promised amendment to current wage regulations because of what the newspaper described as opposition from employers.

Zheng Qiao, the associate director of the department of employment relations at the China Institute of Industrial Relations in Beijing, said the strike was a significant development in China’s labor relations history and that “such a large-scale, organized strike will force China’s labor union system to change, to adapt to the market economy.”

Keith Bradsher reported from Foshan, China, and David Barboza from Shanghai. Bao Beibei contributed research.
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--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle Blog: A Real Use for Butts

2010-06-11T21:00:00.000+08:00

Hello.

In the land of 1.3 billion people is it amazing to believe that there are 300+ million smokers. Apparently some 60% of all Chinese men smoke, which if you've travelled in the countryside you'll know that the number is more like 90%.

But alas, someone has figured out a use for cigarette butts. The chemicals found in a cigarette butt are so toxic that they can kill fish, but those same chemicals are also great for protecting steel pipes from rusting.

Finding a practical use for cigarette butts sounds great. But how does one go about collecting them and keeping them off the streets and out of the water system and out of the landfills?

More research needed. You know, I've been trying to visit to photograph a Tobacco plant for years now; the problem is that they are all government owned :(. It may never happen. Original story below:
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Copyright: Reuters
Title: China scientists find use for cigarette butts
Original Story LINK

HONG KONG (Reuters) - Chemical extracts from cigarette butts -- so toxic they kill fish -- can be used to protect
steel pipes from rusting, a study in China has found.

In a paper published in the American Chemical Society's bi-weekly journal Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research, the scientists in China said they identified nine chemicals after immersing cigarette butts in water.

They applied the extracts to N80, a type of steel used in oil pipes, and found that they protected the steel from rusting.

"The metal surface can be protected and the iron atom's further dissolution can be prevented," they wrote.

The chemicals, including nicotine, appear to be responsible for this anti-corrosion effect, they added.

The research was led by Jun Zhao at Xi'an Jiaotong University's School of Energy and Power Engineering and funded by China's state oil firm China National Petroleum Corporation.

Corrosion of steel pipes used by the oil industry costs oil producers millions of dollars annually to repair or replace.

According to the paper, 4.5 trillion cigarette butts find their way into the environment each year. Apart from being an eyesore, they contain toxins that can kill fish.

"Recycling could solve those problems, but finding practical uses for cigarette butts has been difficult," the researchers wrote.

China, which has 300 million smokers, is the world's largest smoking nation and it consumes a third of the world's cigarettes. Nearly 60 percent of men in China smoke, puffing an average of 15 cigarettes per day.

(Reporting by Tan Ee Lyn; Editing by Miral Fahmy)
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--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle Blog: PDN Photo Annual Finalist

2010-06-04T21:00:00.005+08:00

Hello.

I am a bit late on getting around to this, but I just wanted to make you aware of some great news. Some of my work has been included in the PDN Photo Annual 2010. I was a finalist, or received an honorable mention, for two bodies of work: The Chinese Infrastructure project of the Baling River Bridge and the my Black and White work on Chinese Turkestan or China's western Xinjiang region.

For a wider edit of my work on Chinese Turkestan you can view a photo essay that was recently published with PDN Magazine in their photo blog section. While many of you may have seen my images from Chinese Turkestan previously, what is new is the multimedia slide show that I've prepared (hosted on Youtube) to showcase more of the photography combined with audio that I recorded in the region. I hope you enjoy the work and thank you for your time.

1) PDN Photo Annual Gallery: LINK
2) China Infrastructure: BaLing Bridge Gallery
3) Personal Work: Chinese Turkestan Gallery

PDN Photo of the Day Blog: LINK

Chinese Turkestan Multimedia Slide Show LINK

Resolve Blog: My commentary on Multimedia LINK

Thank you,

--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle Blog: Russians Bribe to Solve Problems

2010-05-28T21:00:00.003+08:00

Hello.

I don't often put up blog posts about other countries unless it somehow directly relates to China, and when a topic like bribery comes up it's always a hot topic.

Now, I've never been to Russia but from what I've heard it is full of blatant bribery, so much so that many Russians actually believe they need to pay bribes to get problems solved. Research shows that Russians still need to pay bribes to get better health care, get drivers licenses, bribe police when they get traffic tickets, get children out of military service or a place at the right school.

The Chinese usually have to pay similar bribes they usually come in the form of gifts and are most often both socially acceptable and expected.

Russia is ranked 146th out of 180 nations in the Transparency International ranking for Corruption Perception. China is ranked 79th. India is ranked 84th. Food for thought. Original article is below:

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Copyright: Reuters
Title: Half of Russians believe bribery solves "problems"
Original Story LINK

MOSCOW (Reuters) - More than half of Russians think bribing officials is the best way to "solve problems," according to a new poll.

Fifty-five percent of respondents to a Levada Centre poll of 1,600 Russians said they believed that "bribes are given by everyone who comes across officials" in Russia.

President Dmitry Medvedev, halfway through his four-year term, has pledged to fight Russia's all-pervasive graft and build a law-abiding state, where everyone observes the rules rather than looking for ways around them.

But findings by the Levada Centre showed that Russians still pay bribes to obtain better medical services, prefer to "buy" their driving licences, bribe police when caught violating traffic rules, or pay to ensure that their child can dodge the draft or get a place at the right school.

Ten percent confessed they had even paid to arrange funerals for relatives or loved ones.

Only 10 percent of those polled believe that only "cheats and criminals" bribed officials and 30 percent said that those offering "cash in envelopes" are in fact "ordinary people who have no other way to solve their problems."
Watchdog Transparency International last November rated Russia, a G8 country, joint 146th out of 180 nations in

its Corruption Perception Index, along with Zimbabwe, Sierra Leone, and five other developing nations.
(Reporting by Dmitry Solovyov; Editing by Paul Casciato)

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Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle Blog: AP Taking Assignments

2010-05-21T21:00:00.004+08:00

Hello,

This story broke a few weeks ago and it's taken me a bit of time to come up with a reaction to it. The Associated Press is now taking editorial assignments.

Their online advertisement can be view HERE.

"Our new Editorial Assignments Service offers the power of AP's award-winning photojournalism and global access. Hire AP's elite staff photographers, now available for your next editorial project. AP will capture your vision with depth and authenticity and offer unsurpassed vision and on-point delivery. Book your assignment today."

So the big question is why does a wire service need to start taking assignments. It's true, the AP have some very talented and dedicated image makers, and if those photographers were freelancers they would get a lot of assignments; but this just feels wrong.

Perhaps it's timing. While the career options for a "freelance photographer" are dwindling, we now have another competitor to deal with. The industry is shrinking. Everyone is offering everything and rates are dropping. The future can't really be this bleak, can it be?

I still believe the still image is the most powerful form of communication and story telling there is, but do I have to earn a negative income, spending more money than I make, to pursue my career as a photographer?

Only time will tell.

--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________

Ryan Pyle Blog: Arta Gallery Show

2010-05-17T21:00:00.000+08:00

Hello.

I just wanted to share some details about my Gallery Exhibition (A Group Show) at the Arta Gallery in Toronto, Canada for the Contact Photo Festival. It opened on May 15th and will run until May 27th. I hope if you are in the area you can swing by. Some new work from Chinese Turkestan is on display. Sadly I will not be there. Check out the link below. Cheers,

LINK: Arta Gallery

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Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________

Ryan Pyle Blog: Ryerson Journalism School Questions

2010-05-07T21:00:00.000+08:00

Hello.

I enjoy lecturing and earlier this year I spoke about being a freelance photographer at the Ryerson University School of Journalism in Toronto, Canada. It was a very enjoyable and I feel that my experiences can offer people a lot of insight in to how to get your freelance career started.

Just a few weeks ago a Ryerson student wrote me asking if I could answer a few questions for them; as they wanted to profile my career for a project they were working on. Below are some of those questions and answers. I thought they may be suitable for my blog.

1) What is your impression of the state of the journalism industry today?

I think the state of the journalism industry is in decline. Saying that though, people know more about remote parts of the world, and people generally consume more information now, and in different formats, than they did twenty years ago. Journalism, especially non-professional journalism, is expanding rapidly as the internet and blogging continue to change our lives - and the way we consume media.

But, while non-professional journalism, in general, is proliferating and expanding; professional journalism and career journalism is shrinking and retreating, mainly because advertising revenue's have forced many magazines and newspapers to reduce pages and close up all together. The big question going forward, for people like me who earn a living as professional journalists, is whether the news consumers out there will pay for high quality professional journalism. There are too many bloggers and non-professional journalists out there that are spreading news and information that may not fully understand the ethics and morals of good journalism, and this hurts the industry over time. But there doesn't seem to be much interest for consumers to pay for high-quality, reliable journalism content. The next five years will be very interesting to see what happens.

2) What is it like to be a freelancer right now?

Being a freelancer is very difficult at the moment. Magazines and newspapers, my clients, are cutting back their pages and their assignments. The cutbacks are widespread and everyone is affected. The downturn in the advertising industry for traditional (print) media is the main reason for this, as more advertising spending drifts towards online venues. There are less pictures in magazines, there are less freelance stories and when you do get an assignment they are often shorter and often the pay is less. But while the jobs may be fewer and the pay may be less I still find documenting China visually incredibly rewarding and important. Even though I was able to win some awards in 2009, it is safe to say that last year was my worse income earning year of my career. I'm pleased to say that 2010 is looking better, hopefully the upward trend continues.

3) How much do you (or can you) make per photograph?

My pictures sell for a wide range of prices. In the photo industry the "price" of a picture is determined by the "usage". For example, if HSBC - a global bank - wants to use your picture from a hospital in China for an advertisement then that sale might be USD 10,000. But if the New York Times wants to buy that same picture to illustrate a story about health care in China, you may only earn USD 250. The key is in the usage.

4) What are the greatest challenges of being a freelance photographer?

The greatest challenge of being a freelance photographer is running a small business. Yes, taking lovely pictures is crucial, but if you can not earn a living and pay your bills your freelance career will end very quickly. In every course on journalism they need to have an optional class for those who want to be freelancers, and that class needs to teach people how to manage their costs and understand basic accounting. I know a lot of photographers who make beautiful images, but they don't freelance anymore because they couldn't make a living at it. Another massive challenge is managing contacts and networking but all of that doesn't matter much if you can't keep your books in order.

5) What are the greatest advantages of being a freelancer?

The greatest advantage of being a freelance photographer is that I am FREE. I can work on projects that I think are important. I can take jobs and turn down jobs as I see fit. I am my own boss, my own editor and my own accountant. That might intimidate people but I thrive on it. I enjoy having complete control over the direction of my career and control over the projects I work on. It helps me stay sharp and motivated.

6) And finally, what advice do you have for any journalism students who are looking towards the freelance career in the future.

Freelancing is tough and it will challenge you. It will test your perception of what is normal and what you are capable of. With no stable income and no benefits you have to use your wit and your ingenuity to generate income, and interest in your work. You have to create a following among editors and you need to sustain a comfortable lifestyle. All of this seems near impossible when you first start out. But remember, no one builds a profitable company over night. And you shouldn't expect to build a profitable freelance career over night. It takes time. I've lived in China since 2001. My first five years, yes - 5 years - were very difficult. It is possible, and if you have the ability to tough it out then there will be rewards down the road.

--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle Blog: The Shrinking Path

2010-04-30T21:00:00.000+08:00

Hello,

Well, it appears that being a photographer is actually as bleak as everyone says it is. Even house wives are able to earn an income from Getty Images. Read below. Time to dust off that degree in accounting.

Please follow this LINK to the original story.
The article is also posted below.
Copywrite: New York Times
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March 29, 2010
For Photographers, the Image of a Shrinking Path

By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD

By the time Matt Eich entered photojournalism school in 2004, the magazine and newspaper business was already declining.

But Mr. Eich had been shooting photographs since he was a child, and when he married and had a baby during college, he stuck with photography as a career.

“I had to hit the ground running and try to make enough money to keep a roof over our heads,” he said.

Since graduation in 2008, Mr. Eich, 23, has gotten magazine assignments here and there, but “industrywide, the sentiment now, at least among my peers, is that this is not a sustainable thing,” he said. He has been supplementing magazine work with advertising and art projects, in a pastiche of ways to earn a living. “There was a path, and there isn’t anymore.”

Then there is D. Sharon Pruitt, a 40-year-old mother of six who lives on Hill Air Force Base in Utah. Ms. Pruitt’s husband is in the military, and their frequent moves meant a full-time job was not practical. But after a vacation to Hawaii in 2006, Ms. Pruitt uploaded some photos — taken with a $99 Kodak digital camera — to the site Flickr.

Since then, through her Flickr photos, she has received a contract with the stock-photography company Getty Images that gives her a monthly income when publishers or advertisers license the images. The checks are sometimes enough to take the family out to dinner, sometimes almost enough for a mortgage payment. “At the moment, it’s just great to have extra money,” she said.

Mr. Eich and Ms. Pruitt illustrate the huge shake-up in photography during the last decade. Amateurs, happy to accept small checks for snapshots of children and sunsets, have increasing opportunities to make money on photos but are underpricing professional photographers and leaving them with limited career options. Professionals are also being hurt because magazines and newspapers are cutting pages or shutting altogether.

“There are very few professional photographers who, right now, are not hurting,” said Holly Stuart Hughes, editor of the magazine Photo District News.

That has left professional photographers with a bit of an identity crisis. Nine years ago, when Livia Corona was fresh out of art school, she got assignments from magazines like Travel and Leisure and Time. Then, she said, “three forces coincided.”

They were the advertising downturn, the popularity and accessibility of digital photography, and changes in the stock-photo market.

Magazines’ editorial pages tend to rise or fall depending on how many ad pages they have. In 2000, the magazines measured by Publishers Information Bureau, a trade group, had 286,932 ad pages. In 2009, there were 169,218 — a decline of 41 percent. That means less physical space in which to print photographs.

“Pages are at a premium, and there’s more competition to get anything into a magazine now, and the bar is just higher for excellent work,” said Bill Shapiro, the editor of Life.com, who ran the print revival of Life before Time Inc. shut it in 2007. And that is for the publications that survived — 428 magazines closed in 2009 alone, according to the publication database MediaFinder.com, including ones that regularly assigned original photography, like Gourmet, Portfolio and National Geographic Adventure.

And while magazines once sniffed at stock photographs, which are existing images, not original assignments, shrinking editorial budgets made them reconsider.

“When we began, stock photography or licensed images, preshot images being licensed, was perceived as the armpit of the photo industry,” said Jonathan Klein, the chief executive of Getty Images who helped found the agency in 1995. “No self-respecting art director or creative director would use a preshot image, because it wasn’t original, it hadn’t been commissioned by them, it wasn’t their creativity.”

At the same time, the Internet has made it easier for editors to find and license stock photos — they can do it in seconds with a search term and a few clicks, rather than spending seven weeks mailing film transparencies back and forth.

Concurrently, digital photography took off. “It used to be you really needed to know how to use a camera,” said Keith Marlowe, a photographer who has worked for Spin and Rolling Stone. “If you messed up a roll, you couldn’t redo the concert.” Now, though, any photographer can instantly see if a shot is good, or whether the light balances or other technical aspects need to be adjusted.

That meant a flood of pretty decent photographs, and that changed the stock-photography industry. In the last few years, stock agencies have created or acquired so-called microstock divisions. They charge $1 to $100, in most cases, for publishers or others to rerun a photo, often supplied by an amateur. And Getty made a deal with Flickr in 2008, permitting Getty’s photo editors to comb through customers’ images and strike license agreements with the amateur photographers.

“The quality of licensed imagery is virtually indistinguishable now from the quality of images they might commission,” Mr. Klein said. Yet “the price point that the client, or customer, is charged is a fraction of the price point which they would pay for a professional image.”

In 2005, Getty Images licensed 1.4 million preshot commercial photos. Last year, it licensed 22 million — and “all of the growth was through our user-generated business,” Mr. Klein said. That is because amateurs are largely happy to be paid anything for their photos. “People that don’t have to make a living from photography and do it as a hobby don’t feel the need to charge a reasonable rate,” Mr. Eich said.

With stock-photography payments declining and magazines pulling back on original assignments, some Web sites like Life.com and BurnMagazine.org have popped up as homes for original photography. Life commissions about two projects a month — it sent Mr. Marlowe to Haiti after the earthquake, for instance, and the entertainment photographer Jeff Vespa to cover the European news media tour by the “Avatar” cast.

There seems to be an audience for professional photography on these sites. The average number of photos each visitor viewed for “Michael Jackson: The Memorial” at Life.com was 41, for example, and for “Oscars 2010: The Best Dresses,” it was 38 images.

Still, the pay, compared with print, is “less, for sure,” Mr. Shapiro of Life.com said, since some professional photographers “are really more excited for the exposure than they are to drive a hard bargain.”

But it is hard to live on exposure alone. And some professionals worry that with ways to make a salary in photography disappearing, the impact will be severe.

“The important thing that a photojournalist does is they know how to tell the story — they know they’re not there to skew, interpret or bias,” said Katrin Eismann, chairwoman of the Masters in Digital Photography program at the School of Visual Arts in New York. “A photographer can go to a rally or demonstration, and they can make it look as though 10 people showed up, or 1,000 people showed up, and that’s a big difference. I’m not sure I’m going to trust an amateur to understand how important that visual communication is. Can an amateur take a picture as good as a professional? Sure,” Ms. Eismann said. “Can they do it on demand? Can they do it again? Can they do it over and over? Can they do it when a scene isn’t that interesting?”

But amateurs like Ms. Pruitt do not particularly care. “I never followed any traditional photography rules only because I didn’t know of any — I never went to photography school, never took any classes,” she said. “People don’t know the rules, so they just shoot what they like — and other people like it, too.”
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--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________

Ryan Pyle Blog: Where are all the Girls?

2010-04-23T21:00:00.004+08:00

Hello.

China, and most poor agrarian countries, have a problem with baby girls. It seems that on almost every level they are not desired. The impression is that they can’t work as hard in the fields and once they are of marrying age they’ll be gone and working for another family, so what use are they? Well, actually they are incredibly useful and China is slowly waking up to this fact.

According to the Economist, a few weeks back, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) showed what can happen in a country with too few baby girls. Within ten years, the CASS reported, there will be one in five young men who will be unable to find a bride. This is apparently unprecedented for a country that is not at war.
China, by 2020, will have some 30 or 40 million more men than women. This group of Chinese bachelors, known as “bare branches”, seemed to actually accelerate from 1990 to 2005, and in ways not directly related to the “One Child Policy” which was introduced in 1979. The real reasons behind this male preference are not entirely understood but poverty and ignorance do play their part, so do prenatal sex-determination technology and the general decline in fertility.

While under natural circumstances the average birth ratio is roughly 104 boys for every 100 girls born. In China, from 2000 to 2004, the number is a sky-high 124 boys for every 100 girls. And even today in 2010 the number stands at 123 boys for every 100 girls. While the numbers for China that are quoted here are “national level” statistics, provinces in China contain wild variations. For example, Tibet has what would be considered a natural birth rate of about 104 boys to every 100 girls, but some of the more rural and backwards provinces have birth statistics as high as 130 boys for every 100 girls.

So what does all this mean for China? Well, having lots of energetic young men around without much work and without a woman to keep them tame is one of the telling influences for many of the world’s social revolutions; so yes, political instability could be a potential outcome. Increased crime rates and the deterioration of traditional family values could also be possible side effects; as well as the proliferation of prostitution and brothels. Fulfilling the needs of these young “bare branches” will be an economic opportunity that surely won’t be missed by those who practice the world’s oldest profession.

The original story is posted below:
Please follow this LINK to the original online version.
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The worldwide war on baby girls
Mar 4th 2010

XINRAN XUE, a Chinese writer, describes visiting a peasant family in the Yimeng area of Shandong province. The wife was giving birth. “We had scarcely sat down in the kitchen”, she writes (see article), “when we heard a moan of pain from the bedroom next door…The cries from the inner room grew louder—and abruptly stopped. There was a low sob, and then a man’s gruff voice said accusingly: ‘Useless thing!’

“Suddenly, I thought I heard a slight movement in the slops pail behind me,” Miss Xinran remembers. “To my absolute horror, I saw a tiny foot poking out of the pail. The midwife must have dropped that tiny baby alive into the slops pail! I nearly threw myself at it, but the two policemen [who had accompanied me] held my shoulders in a firm grip. ‘Don’t move, you can’t save it, it’s too late.’

“‘But that’s...murder...and you’re the police!’ The little foot was still now. The policemen held on to me for a few more minutes. ‘Doing a baby girl is not a big thing around here,’ [an] older woman said comfortingly. ‘That’s a living child,’ I said in a shaking voice, pointing at the slops pail. ‘It’s not a child,’ she corrected me. ‘It’s a girl baby, and we can’t keep it. Around these parts, you can’t get by without a son. Girl babies don’t count.’”

In January 2010 the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) showed what can happen to a country when girl babies don’t count. Within ten years, the academy said, one in five young men would be unable to find a bride because of the dearth of young women—a figure unprecedented in a country at peace.

The number is based on the sexual discrepancy among people aged 19 and below. According to CASS, China in 2020 will have 30m-40m more men of this age than young women. For comparison, there are 23m boys below the age of 20 in Germany, France and Britain combined and around 40m American boys and young men. So within ten years, China faces the prospect of having the equivalent of the whole young male population of America, or almost twice that of Europe’s three largest countries, with little prospect of marriage, untethered to a home of their own and without the stake in society that marriage and children provide.

Gendercide—to borrow the title of a 1985 book by Mary Anne Warren—is often seen as an unintended consequence of China’s one-child policy, or as a product of poverty or ignorance. But that cannot be the whole story. The surplus of bachelors—called in China guanggun, or “bare branches”— seems to have accelerated between 1990 and 2005, in ways not obviously linked to the one-child policy, which was introduced in 1979. And, as is becoming clear, the war against baby girls is not confined to China.

Parts of India have sex ratios as skewed as anything in its northern neighbour. Other East Asian countries—South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan—have peculiarly high numbers of male births. So, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, have former communist countries in the Caucasus and the western Balkans. Even subsets of America’s population are following suit, though not the population as a whole.

The real cause, argues Nick Eberstadt, a demographer at the American Enterprise Institute, a think-tank in Washington, DC, is not any country’s particular policy but “the fateful collision between overweening son preference, the use of rapidly spreading prenatal sex-determination technology and declining fertility.” These are global trends. And the selective destruction of baby girls is global, too.

Boys are slightly more likely to die in infancy than girls. To compensate, more boys are born than girls so there will be equal numbers of young men and women at puberty. In all societies that record births, between 103 and 106 boys are normally born for every 100 girls. The ratio has been so stable over time that it appears to be the natural order of things.

That order has changed fundamentally in the past 25 years. In China the sex ratio for the generation born between 1985 and 1989 was 108, already just outside the natural range. For the generation born in 2000-04, it was 124 (ie, 124 boys were born in those years for every 100 girls). According to CASS the ratio today is 123 boys per 100 girls. These rates are biologically impossible without human intervention.

The national averages hide astonishing figures at the provincial level. According to an analysis of Chinese household data carried out in late 2005 and reported in the British Medical Journal*, only one region, Tibet, has a sex ratio within the bounds of nature. Fourteen provinces—mostly in the east and south—have sex ratios at birth of 120 and above, and three have unprecedented levels of more than 130. As CASS says, “the gender imbalance has been growing wider year after year.”

The BMJ study also casts light on one of the puzzles about China’s sexual imbalance. How far has it been exaggerated by the presumed practice of not reporting the birth of baby daughters in the hope of getting another shot at bearing a son? Not much, the authors think. If this explanation were correct, you would expect to find sex ratios falling precipitously as girls who had been hidden at birth start entering the official registers on attending school or the doctor. In fact, there is no such fall. The sex ratio of 15-year-olds in 2005 was not far from the sex ratio at birth in 1990. The implication is that sex-selective abortion, not under-registration of girls, accounts for the excess of boys.

Other countries have wildly skewed sex ratios without China’s draconian population controls (see chart 1). Taiwan’s sex ratio also rose from just above normal in 1980 to 110 in the early 1990s; it remains just below that level today. During the same period, South Korea’s sex ratio rose from just above normal to 117 in 1990—then the highest in the world—before falling back to more natural levels. Both these countries were already rich, growing quickly and becoming more highly educated even while the balance between the sexes was swinging sharply towards males.

South Korea is experiencing some surprising consequences. The surplus of bachelors in a rich country has sucked in brides from abroad. In 2008, 11% of marriages were “mixed”, mostly between a Korean man and a foreign woman. This is causing tensions in a hitherto homogenous society, which is often hostile to the children of mixed marriages. The trend is especially marked in rural areas, where the government thinks half the children of farm households will be mixed by 2020. The children are common enough to have produced a new word: “Kosians”, or Korean-Asians.

China is nominally a communist country, but elsewhere it was communism’s collapse that was associated with the growth of sexual disparities. After the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, there was an upsurge in the ratio of boys to girls in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. Their sex ratios rose from normal levels in 1991 to 115-120 by 2000. A rise also occurred in several Balkan states after the wars of Yugoslav succession. The ratio in Serbia and Macedonia is around 108. There are even signs of distorted sex ratios in America, among various groups of Asian-Americans. In 1975, calculates Mr Eberstadt, the sex ratio for Chinese-, Japanese- and Filipino-Americans was between 100 and 106. In 2002, it was 107 to 109.

But the country with the most remarkable record is that other supergiant, India. India does not produce figures for sex ratios at birth, so its numbers are not strictly comparable with the others. But there is no doubt that the number of boys has been rising relative to girls and that, as in China, there are large regional disparities. The north-western states of Punjab and Haryana have sex ratios as high as the provinces of China’s east and south. Nationally, the ratio for children up to six years of age rose from a biologically unexceptionable 104 in 1981 to a biologically impossible 108 in 2001. In 1991, there was a single district with a sex ratio over 125; by 2001, there were 46.

Conventional wisdom about such disparities is that they are the result of “backward thinking” in old-fashioned societies or—in China—of the one-child policy. By implication, reforming the policy or modernising the society (by, for example, enhancing the status of women) should bring the sex ratio back to normal. But this is not always true and, where it is, the road to normal sex ratios is winding and bumpy.

Not all traditional societies show a marked preference for sons over daughters. But in those that do—especially those in which the family line passes through the son and in which he is supposed to look after his parents in old age—a son is worth more than a daughter. A girl is deemed to have joined her husband’s family on marriage, and is lost to her parents. As a Hindu saying puts it, “Raising a daughter is like watering your neighbours’ garden.”

“Son preference” is discernible—overwhelming, even—in polling evidence. In 1999 the government of India asked women what sex they wanted their next child to be. One third of those without children said a son, two-thirds had no preference and only a residual said a daughter. Polls carried out in Pakistan and Yemen show similar results. Mothers in some developing countries say they want sons, not daughters, by margins of ten to one. In China midwives charge more for delivering a son than a daughter.

Chasing puppy-dogs’ tails
The unusual thing about son preference is that it rises sharply at second and later births (see chart 2). Among Indian women with two children (of either sex), 60% said they wanted a son next time, almost twice the preference for first-borns. This reflected the desire of those with two daughters for a son. The share rose to 75% for those with three children. The difference in parental attitudes between first-borns and subsequent children is large and significant.

Until the 1980s people in poor countries could do little about this preference: before birth, nature took its course. But in that decade, ultrasound scanning and other methods of detecting the sex of a child before birth began to make their appearance. These technologies changed everything. Doctors in India started advertising ultrasound scans with the slogan “Pay 5,000 rupees ($110) today and save 50,000 rupees tomorrow” (the saving was on the cost of a daughter’s dowry). Parents who wanted a son, but balked at killing baby daughters, chose abortion in their millions.

The use of sex-selective abortion was banned in India in 1994 and in China in 1995. It is illegal in most countries (though Sweden legalised the practice in 2009). But since it is almost impossible to prove that an abortion has been carried out for reasons of sex selection, the practice remains widespread. An ultrasound scan costs about $12, which is within the scope of many—perhaps most—Chinese and Indian families. In one hospital in Punjab, in northern India, the only girls born after a round of ultrasound scans had been mistakenly identified as boys, or else had a male twin.

The spread of fetal-imaging technology has not only skewed the sex ratio but also explains what would otherwise be something of a puzzle: sexual disparities tend to rise with income and education, which you would not expect if “backward thinking” was all that mattered. In India, some of the most prosperous states—Maharashtra, Punjab, Gujarat—have the worst sex ratios. In China, the higher a province’s literacy rate, the more skewed its sex ratio. The ratio also rises with income per head.

In Punjab Monica Das Gupta of the World Bank discovered that second and third daughters of well-educated mothers were more than twice as likely to die before their fifth birthday as their brothers, regardless of their birth order. The discrepancy was far lower in poorer households. Ms Das Gupta argues that women do not necessarily use improvements in education and income to help daughters. Richer, well-educated families share their poorer neighbours’ preference for sons and, because they tend to have smaller families, come under greater pressure to produce a son and heir if their first child is an unlooked-for daughter**.

So modernisation and rising incomes make it easier and more desirable to select the sex of your children. And on top of that smaller families combine with greater wealth to reinforce the imperative to produce a son. When families are large, at least one male child will doubtless come along to maintain the family line. But if you have only one or two children, the birth of a daughter may be at a son’s expense. So, with rising incomes and falling fertility, more and more people live in the smaller, richer families that are under the most pressure to produce a son.

In China the one-child policy increases that pressure further. Unexpectedly, though, it is the relaxation of the policy, rather than the policy pure and simple, which explains the unnatural upsurge in the number of boys.

In most Chinese cities couples are usually allowed to have only one child—the policy in its pure form. But in the countryside, where 55% of China’s population lives, there are three variants of the one-child policy. In the coastal provinces some 40% of couples are permitted a second child if their first is a girl. In central and southern provinces everyone is permitted a second child either if the first is a girl or if the parents suffer “hardship”, a criterion determined by local officials. In the far west and Inner Mongolia, the provinces do not really operate a one-child policy at all. Minorities are permitted second—sometimes even third—children, whatever the sex of the first-born (see map).

The provinces in this last group are the only ones with close to normal sex ratios. They are sparsely populated and inhabited by ethnic groups that do not much like abortion and whose family systems do not disparage the value of daughters so much. The provinces with by far the highest ratios of boys to girls are in the second group, the ones with the most exceptions to the one-child policy. As the BMJ study shows, these exceptions matter because of the preference for sons in second or third births.

For an example, take Guangdong, China’s most populous province. Its overall sex ratio is 120, which is very high. But if you take first births alone, the ratio is “only” 108. That is outside the bounds of normality but not by much. If you take just second children, however, which are permitted in the province, the ratio leaps to 146 boys for every 100 girls. And for the relatively few births where parents are permitted a third child, the sex ratio is 167. Even this startling ratio is not the outer limit. In Anhui province, among third children, there are 227 boys for every 100 girls, while in Beijing municipality (which also permits exceptions in rural areas), the sex ratio reaches a hard-to-credit 275. There are almost three baby boys for each baby girl.

Ms Das Gupta found something similar in India. First-born daughters were treated the same as their brothers; younger sisters were more likely to die in infancy. The rule seems to be that parents will joyfully embrace a daughter as their first child. But they will go to extraordinary lengths to ensure subsequent children are sons.

The hazards of bare branches
Throughout human history, young men have been responsible for the vast preponderance of crime and violence—especially single men in countries where status and social acceptance depend on being married and having children, as it does in China and India. A rising population of frustrated single men spells trouble.

The crime rate has almost doubled in China during the past 20 years of rising sex ratios, with stories abounding of bride abduction, the trafficking of women, rape and prostitution. A study into whether these things were connected† concluded that they were, and that higher sex ratios accounted for about one-seventh of the rise in crime. In India, too, there is a correlation between provincial crime rates and sex ratios. In “Bare Branches”††, Valerie Hudson and Andrea den Boer gave warning that the social problems of biased sex ratios would lead to more authoritarian policing. Governments, they say, “must decrease the threat to society posed by these young men. Increased authoritarianism in an effort to crack down on crime, gangs, smuggling and so forth can be one result.”

Violence is not the only consequence. In parts of India, the cost of dowries is said to have fallen (see article). Where people pay a bride price (ie, the groom’s family gives money to the bride’s), that price has risen. During the 1990s, China saw the appearance of tens of thousands of “extra-birth guerrilla troops”—couples from one-child areas who live in a legal limbo, shifting restlessly from city to city in order to shield their two or three children from the authorities’ baleful eye. And, according to the World Health Organisation, female suicide rates in China are among the highest in the world (as are South Korea’s). Suicide is the commonest form of death among Chinese rural women aged 15-34; young mothers kill themselves by drinking agricultural fertilisers, which are easy to come by. The journalist Xinran Xue thinks they cannot live with the knowledge that they have aborted or killed their baby daughters.

Some of the consequences of the skewed sex ratio have been unexpected. It has probably increased China’s savings rate. This is because parents with a single son save to increase his chances of attracting a wife in China’s ultra-competitive marriage market. Shang-Jin Wei of Columbia University and Xiaobo Zhang of the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, DC, compared savings rates for households with sons versus those with daughters. “We find not only that households with sons save more than households with daughters in all regions,” says Mr Wei, “but that households with sons tend to raise their savings rate if they also happen to live in a region with a more skewed sex ratio.” They calculate that about half the increase in China’s savings in the past 25 years can be attributed to the rise in the sex ratio. If true, this would suggest that economic-policy changes to boost consumption will be less effective than the government hopes.

Over the next generation, many of the problems associated with sex selection will get worse. The social consequences will become more evident because the boys born in large numbers over the past decade will reach maturity then. Meanwhile, the practice of sex selection itself may spread because fertility rates are continuing to fall and ultrasound scanners reach throughout the developing world.

Yet the story of the destruction of baby girls does not end in deepest gloom. At least one country—South Korea—has reversed its cultural preference for sons and cut the distorted sex ratio (see chart 3). There are reasons for thinking China and India might follow suit.

South Korea was the first country to report exceptionally high sex ratios and has been the first to cut them. Between 1985 and 2003, the share of South Korean women who told national health surveyors that they felt “they must have a son” fell by almost two-thirds, from 48% to 17%. After a lag of a decade, the sex ratio began to fall in the mid-1990s and is now 110 to 100. Ms Das Gupta argues that though it takes a long time for social norms favouring sons to alter, and though the transition can be delayed by the introduction of ultrasound scans, eventually change will come. Modernisation not only makes it easier for parents to control the sex of their children, it also changes people’s values and undermines those norms which set a higher store on sons. At some point, one trend becomes more important than the other.

It is just possible that China and India may be reaching that point now. The census of 2000 and the CASS study both showed the sex ratio stable at around 120. At the very least, it seems to have stopped rising. Locally, Ms Das Gupta argues†††, the provinces which had the highest sex ratios (and have two-thirds of China’s population) have seen a deceleration in their ratios since 2000, and provinces with a quarter of the population have seen their ratios fall. In India, one study found that the cultural preference for sons has been falling, too, and that the sex ratio, as in much of China, is rising more slowly. In villages in Haryana, grandmothers sit veiled and silent while men are present. But their daughters sit and chat uncovered because, they say, they have seen unveiled women at work or on television so much that at last it seems normal to them.

Ms Das Gupta points out that, though the two giants are much poorer than South Korea, their governments are doing more than it ever did to persuade people to treat girls equally (through anti-discrimination laws and media campaigns). The unintended consequences of sex selection have been vast. They may get worse. But, at long last, she reckons, “there seems to be an incipient turnaround in the phenomenon of ‘missing girls’ in Asia.”
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--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle Blog: Looking back on Columbia University

2010-04-16T21:00:00.002+08:00

Hello.

Last month I was in New York City for a brief visit and I had the chance to speak at Columbia University. The talk was hosted under the Asia Pacific Studies Department and the topic was essentially how I saw political change in China coming about, and what factors may speed up the process. As a photographer who is constantly on the go I feel I have a unique vision and understanding as to some growing pains China is going through.

It's a lecture I had given before, but this time it was different.

This time my talk was a truly unique experience because longtime friend and colleague Howard W. French was present, and not only provided me with a wonderful introduction, but assisted in dealing with many of the complex issues dealt with during the questions and answers.

It was a treat to be able to converse with students and facility, and it was great to be able to agree and disagree with Howard. After Howard basically gave me my first photojournalism job about six years ago we've traveled together what seems like hundreds of times and it was the first time we've been able to discuss our points of view about China in an academic environment.

For those who don't know Howard left the New York Times for an academic position at Columbia University two years ago, he continues to be an active freelance writer and is continuing work on several book projects.

My hope is that I can continue to be active in the academic community and continue to share my perspective and ideas about China's growth and ever changing landscape. Hopefully I can make the journey to Columbia University a regular feature on my stops to New York.

--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle Blog: A Rural Population of 400 million

2010-04-09T21:00:00.004+08:00

Hello.

I live in a mega city; the name of that city is Shanghai. I love my massive city, which is said to be currently bursting at the seams with a population of roughly 20 million people. Whiles the crowds can be intense, I somehow manage to thrive off the energy of the masses. But what will the next 30 years hold?

Whenever I complete a trip in to rural China I am always amazed at how little is there, about how few opportunities exist. While roads and bridges are constantly being build and infrastructure spending is at an all-time high, there are still round 900 million rural residents in China who do very little other than farm, manage a market stall or are involved in basic irregular business. Many of these folks often hold ambitions of moving to the big cities of China, for a chance at a better life, earning a higher wage and having their children attend better schools. So an obvious question looms, how many people can China’s cities really hold?

Can Shanghai really be a functional city with 30 or 40 million residents? Can Beijing’s ill-prepared roads and highway system really handle another one or two million cars? The numbers, once crunched are staggering; and a little scary.

A few weeks back the China Daily, of all sources, ran a story that made me physically shudder. The government of China has predicted that China’s rural population could fall to just 400 million people from its current 900 million. The last 30 years provide most of the proof for this trend of urbanization; you see some 400 million people have moved from the countryside to the cities over the last three decades. So the prediction is that by 2040 there will be another 400 or 500 million people living in China’s cities; that’s an unbelievable figure.

Right or wrong, I am a believer. I strongly believe that China’s urban population will double rapidly increase in the next two or three decades; one only has to visit rural Anhui, Hebei, Henan and Shandong to see how few options exist for those who have chosen to stay closer to home during this current economic boom. As China, over the next 3-5 years eases restrictions on migrant workers and urban registration you could see a flood of people move to the cities, crowding in for better health care and educational services. At the moment the restrictive and complicated Hukou “home registration” system links people to their place of birth, which is often different than where they currently live; and many social benefits can only be claimed in your “home registration” area. This has not restricted the most daring of China’s migrant labor class, but my guess is that once these restrictions are lifted for good, and there is talk of this happening – there will be a biblical flood of people in to urban centers to take advantage of higher living, and service, standards.

So how many of that 500 million will end up in cities like Shanghai? How much more traffic will I have to fight through on my grocery shopping trips? How much longer could the line up get at the bank? My guess is not too many. While 500 million is a large number, my estimate is that Shanghai might double its urban population and become a mega city of 40 million residents. From what I can see at the moment, the creation of suburbs and transportation infrastructure to move people in and out of the city center has hit overdrive. The government is in a real rush to put these pieces in place before Shanghai just becomes a hot and crowded mess.

The real winners in this mass migration, however, will be second tier cities like Hefei, Wuhan, Chongqing, Chengdu, Kunming, Guiyang, Nanning, Xi’an, Dalian, Harbin and other notable provincial capitals. They will, under decent guidance, become more livable and offer better services as their population rises; at least that’s the great hope. Fingers crossed that actually happens or the resulting civil unrest could be a large destabilizing factor to the economy and general political stability. Either way, mass migrations or not, it’ll be an exciting process to watch unfold. I’m very glad I bought my ticket early; I’ve got a front row seat.
The China Daily story is posted below in its original form.

China Daily story LINK:
Copy write: China Daily
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Rural population could drop to 400m
February 25, 2010

The country's rural population may drop to 400 million from the current 900 million in the next three decades because of rising urbanization, a senior official has forecast.

The rural population currently stands at 720 million, the latest population figures have shown. But the number does not include the 180 million rural residents who have left their hometowns to live in cities for more than half a year, Han Jun, a senior official at the State Council Development Research Center, was quoted as saying by Beijing News.

In the past 30 years, the urban population has increased by 400 million to hit 600 million. Of these people, 27 percent now live in cities but are not permanent residents.

"Currently, one in four residents in the cities come from the rural population. The current movement of labor from rural to urban areas is expected to continue in the future," Han said.

The country has about 240 million migrant workers, with about half of them born after 1980 and 40 million of them born in the 1990s, the latest official statistics show.

"Young migrant workers are reluctant to go back to the countryside and are eager to be new residents in cities," Han said.

A major policy document released last month addressed the young as "a new generation of migrant workers" for the first time and made it clear that the government is "striving for substantial reform of the household registration system" to help them to register in cities where they can then receive more social benefits.

"Hundreds of millions of farmers are now working for the development of cities and contribute a great deal to tax revenues where they live. However, they cannot enjoy the public services offered in cities. It is not fair," said Zhang Hulin, a professor with the Party School of the Central Committee of the CPC.

New-generation migrant workers mostly live in cities and work as security guards, waiters, construction and decoration laborers, and deliverymen.

"More and more citizens have felt the importance of migrant workers to their daily life. But low wages have also made many migrant workers unwilling to stay and work, especially in big cities," Zhang told China Daily yesterday.

So far, 13 provinces and cities such as Hebei and Liaoning have already piloted a unified household registration in rural and urban areas. But many say the reform falls short of offering benefits in education, housing and social security to the new population, Han said.
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--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________

Ryan Pyle Blog: Multimedia Blog for Resolve

2010-04-02T21:00:00.003+08:00

Hello.

Throughout the recent digital revolution in photography, I have continued to shoot film, but there is one area where I have happily adopted new lightweight digital capture -- audio. With the technology jumping leaps and bounds, audio that previously required large, complex recorders can now be captured on small digital recorders, perfect for the kind of multimedia storytelling that I've been exploring.

I’ve been intrigued with the advance of multimedia in the last few year, and especially how it can be used to enhance the art of story telling. I have a deep respect for still photographers moving into video -- like Tim Hetherington and his award-winning documentary Restrepo -- but I'm not ready to turn in my viewfinder for a video camera yet. What feels right to me right now is the multimedia slideshow.

You see, I love to write and I enjoy the process of preparing a script to accompany imagery. The multimedia slideshow allows me to go one step beyond the still image, with regards to story telling, but still aligns with my belief that still images are more powerful than moving ones.

My first dabble in multimedia I decided to create a slidewho of my black-and-white fine-art project on Chinese Turkestan in an attempt to reach a wider audience (above). In my visits to the region, several times a year for the last several years, I began recording audio with a small handheld recorder. For the slideshow's audio I used a "Call to Prayer", essentially a man who stands on the top of the mosque and calls everyone to come and pray several times per day. It is something I hear all the time while working in the region and I thought it was fitting.

My goal here was never to produce a “news” piece or include various clips of audio with fuller story telling. I wanted to create a space for the viewer to fully experience the still image. For that reason, the sequencing was incredibly important, and difficult. I payed particular attention to composition and flow, and I'm still working on it, since the project itself is not yet complete.

One of the exciting things about this first foray into multimedia is starting to think about how this slide show can support the still images in terms of publicity and marketing. For instance, I integrated the slideshow into my presentations at a few universities and galleries during a recent trip to the U.S. I was very pleased with both the impact of the slideshow and the feedback I received. Remembering that the end goal is to have my images reach the widest possible audience, I believe an audio slideshow contribute to that in many ways.

I have several more videos currently in production, including ones with a narrative as well as more audio from locations. You can follow the process on my blog.

--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle Blog: The Unwritten Rule

2010-03-26T22:00:00.000+08:00

Hello.

For years there has been an unwritten rule or agreement between the Communist Party in China, and the subjects that they watch over. That rule has been that, the government will maintain breakneck GDP growth, to keep employment high and wages rising, and the average people will stay out of politics and political debate. In a sense, as Yang Yao says below, that the ruling body in Beijing as been tied to a performance based legitimacy, instead of a classical democratic based legitimacy.

Well, that's all fun; but the real question is how is power transfered? In a democracy we for new representatives and that takes place every 2-4 years. Power is handed over peacefully and in a way that is in line with a constitution which sets out these rules. Decisions may be close, or down to the wire, but power is always relinquished and the process moves as smoothly as it possibly could.

But what happens when Beijing's "Performance Based Legitimacy" comes to an end? What happens when China has GDP growth rates of only 2% a year, and unemployment rates of over 20% a year? What happens then? As the performance decreases the government will begin to lack a power base. What happens when the government loses the ability to generate growth? It's a scary scenario, but one that needs to be talked about today, instead of tomorrow.

When the gap between rich and poor, or city dwellers and rural peasants, becomes too great; will there be social instability? Might that lead to some kind of political upheaval? To be honest I have more questions than answers. But the thought of the Communist Party potentially losing control is frightening. While the government can be big, nasty and ineffective, at least they are fairly stable and predictable. What replaces them could be potentially much nastier.

Please give Yang Yao's piece a look below. Raises a lot of interesting questions.

Copyright © 2002-2010 by the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.
_________________________________
The End of the Beijing Consensus

Can China's Model of Authoritarian Growth Survive?

Yang Yao
YANG YAO is Deputy Dean of the National School of Development and the Director of the China Center for Economic Research at Peking University.
Since China began undertaking economic reforms in 1978, its economy has grown at a rate of nearly ten percent a year, and its per-capita GDP is now twelve times greater than it was three decades ago. Many analysts attribute the country's economic success to its unconventional approach to economic policy -- a combination of mixed ownership, basic property rights, and heavy government intervention. Time magazine's former foreign editor, Joshua Cooper Ramo, has even given it a name: the Beijing consensus.

But, in fact, over the last 30 years, the Chinese economy has moved unmistakably toward the market doctrines of neoclassical economics, with an emphasis on prudent fiscal policy, economic openness, privatization, market liberalization, and the protection of private property. Beijing has been extremely cautious in maintaining a balanced budget and keeping inflation down. Purely redistributive programs have been kept to a minimum, and central government transfers have been primarily limited to infrastructure spending. The overall tax burden (measured by the ratio of tax revenue to GDP) is in the range of 20 to 25 percent. The country is the world's second-largest recipient of foreign direct investment, and domestically, more than 80 percent of its state-owned enterprises have been released to private hands or transformed into publicly listed companies. Since the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) lacks legitimacy in the classic democratic sense, it has been forced to seek performance-based legitimacy instead, by continuously improving the living standards of Chinese citizens. So far, this strategy has succeeded, but there are signs that it will not last because of the growing income inequality and the internal and external imbalances it has created.

The CCP's free-market policies have, predictably, led to major income disparities in China. The overall Gini coefficient -- a measure of economic inequality in which zero equals perfect equality and one absolute inequality -- reached 0.47 in 2008, the same level as in the United States. More disturbing, Chinese city dwellers are now earning three and a half times as much as their fellow citizens in the countryside, the highest urban-rural income gap in the world.

How, then, has the Chinese government been able to adopt the principles of neoclassical economics while still claiming Marxism as its ideological anchor? The answer is that China has for three decades been ruled by a disinterested government -- a detached, unbiased regime that takes a neutral stance when conflicts of interest arise among different social and political groups. This does not mean that Beijing has been devoid of self-interest. On the contrary, the state is often predatory toward citizens, but its predation is "identity-blind" in the sense that Beijing does not generally care about the social and political status of its chosen prey -- unlike many governments elsewhere that act to protect and enrich specific social or political groups. As a consequence, the Chinese government has been more likely than other authoritarian regimes to adopt growth-enhancing policies.

For the last 30 years, the CCP has intentionally adopted policies favoring specific groups or regions to promote reform and economic growth. It has helped that the disinterested CCP government was not permanently beholden to certain groups or regions. China's integration into the world economy is a case in point. At the end of the 1970s, the United States was eager to bring China into its camp as a buffer against Soviet hegemony, and China quickly grasped the opportunity. Yet that early adoption of an "open-door" policy gave rise to domestic resistance: special economic zones, such as Shenzhen, enjoyed an abundance of preferential treatments that other parts of the country envied. Moreover, the CCP's export-led growth model required that Beijing embrace an unbalanced development strategy that encouraged rapid growth on the country's east coast while neglecting the interior; today, nearly 90 percent of China's exports still come from the nine coastal provinces.

China's accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001 was also a calculated move. Before accession, it was widely believed that China would have to endure painful structural adjustment policies in many sectors in order to join the WTO. Even so, the central government actually accelerated negotiations with the organization's members. Despite the burdens it placed on the agriculture and retailing sectors, accession boosted China's exports, proving wrong those who worried about its effects. Between 2002 and 2007, Chinese exports grew by an annual rate of 29 percent, double the average rate during the 1990s.

China's astronomic growth has left it in a precarious situation, however. Other developing countries have suffered from the so-called middle-income trap -- a situation that often arises when a country's per-capita GDP reaches the range of $3,000 to $8,000, the economy stops growing, income inequality increases, and social conflicts erupt. China has entered this range, and the warning signs of a trap loom large.

In the last several years, government involvement in the economy has increased -- most notably with the current four-trillion-yuan ($586 billion) stimulus plan. Government investment helped China reach a GDP growth rate of nearly nine percent in 2009, which many applaud; but in the long run, it could suffocate the Chinese economy by reducing efficiency and crowding out more vibrant private investment.

The economy currently depends heavily on external demand, creating friction among major trading partners. Savings account for 52 percent of GDP, and consumption has dropped to a historic low. Whereas governments in most advanced democracies spend less than eight percent of government revenue on capital investment, this figure is close to 50 percent in China. And residential income as a share of national income is declining, making the average citizen feel poorer while the economy expands. As the Chinese people demand more than economic gains as their income increases, it will become increasingly difficult for the CCP to contain or discourage social discontent by administering the medicine of economic growth alone.

Despite its absolute power and recent track record of delivering economic growth, the CCP has still periodically faced resistance from citizens. The Tiananmen incident of April 5, 1976, the first spontaneous democratic movement in PRC history, the June 4 movement of 1989, and numerous subsequent protests proved that the Chinese people are quite willing to stage organized resistance when their needs are not met by the state. International monitoring of China's domestic affairs has also played an important role; now that it has emerged as a major global power, China is suddenly concerned about its legitimacy on the international stage.

The Chinese government generally tries to manage such popular discontent by providing various "pain relievers," including programs that quickly address early signs of unrest in the population, such as reemployment centers for unemployed workers, migration programs aimed at lowering regional disparities, and the recent "new countryside movement" to improve infrastructure, health care, and education in rural areas.

Those measures, however, may be too weak to discourage the emergence of powerful interest groups seeking to influence the government. Although private businesses have long recognized the importance of cultivating the government for larger profits, they are not alone. The government itself, its cronies, and state-controlled enterprises are quickly forming strong and exclusive interest groups. In a sense, local governments in China behave like corporations: unlike in advanced democracies, where one of the key mandates of the government is to redistribute income to improve the average citizen's welfare, local governments in China simply pursue economic gain.

More important, Beijing's ongoing efforts to promote GDP growth will inevitably result in infringements on people's economic and political rights. For example, arbitrary land acquisitions are still prevalent in some cities, the government closely monitors the Internet, labor unions are suppressed, and workers have to endure long hours and unsafe conditions. Chinese citizens will not remain silent in the face of these infringements, and their discontent will inevitably lead to periodic resistance. Before long, some form of explicit political transition that allows ordinary citizens to take part in the political process will be necessary.

The reforms carried out over the last 30 years have mostly been responses to imminent crises. Popular resistance and economic imbalances are now moving China toward another major crisis. Strong and privileged interest groups and commercialized local governments are blocking equal distribution of the benefits of economic growth throughout society, thereby rendering futile the CCP's strategy of trading economic growth for people's consent to its absolute rule.

An open and inclusive political process has generally checked the power of interest groups in advanced democracies such as the United States. Indeed, this is precisely the mandate of a disinterested government -- to balance the demands of different social groups. A more open Chinese government could still remain disinterested if the right democratic institutions were put in place to keep the most powerful groups at bay. But ultimately, there is no alternative to greater democratization if the CCP wishes to encourage economic growth and maintain social stability.

Copyright © 2002-2010 by the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.
All rights reserved.
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Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________

Ryan Pyle Blog: Magazine Revenue 2009

2010-03-19T22:00:00.005+08:00

Hello.

It pains me to have to bring this kind of stuff up all the time, but I thought it was important to publish this list. The list in question is the 2009 revenue from the Magazine Publishers of America. And for people like me, who depend on publishers to spend money on images, it makes bleak reading.

A few highlights on the list:

1) The overall average for the difference in revenue between 2008 and 2009 is -18.1%. That means that on average each magazine lost 17% revenue from 2008 to 2009. No small number. Hence the massive layoffs and huge reduction in picture purchasing, especially in assignments to create original imagery.

2) US News and World Report, once a major picture buyer and huge publisher of photojournalism, was down 88% compared to 2008.

3) Portfolio Magazine, one of my clients, went bust.

4) People Magazine was up 3.8%. Maybe I should start up a celebrity photography business in China.

5) National Geographic was down 14%; and NG's other titles like Adventure (which went bust) and Traveler were down at least 30% from 2008.

6) Organic Gardening was up 16% year on year with 2008. Plant photograph anyone?

And the rest makes pretty tough reading. You'll have to follow the link below to see the actual numbers, I couldn't find a format to properly download the statistics and have them cropped in to my blog. Please see below.

LINK: Magazine Publishers of America

--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle Blog: The 126th Best Job

2010-03-12T22:00:00.004+08:00

Hello.

This news came out a long while ago, but it's taken me a few weeks to reflect on it. When the list of the Best and Worst Jobs for 2010 appeared I was traveling at the time and just book marked the list and forgot about it. When I had a chance to re-read I was motivated to write down a few notes. And below are some interesting observations.

In January the Wall Street Journal published a list of Best and Worst Jobs 2010, which was compiled by a website named Careercast.com. I'm not sure on the methodology of the study, or survey, but I found it hilarious that "Photographer" was ranked at the #126th best job to have in the USA, and "Photojournalist" was the #189th best job to have.

The list ranked 200 jobs in the order of best to worst and they were based on criteria like: environment, income, employment outlook, physical demands and stress. All very important factors.

Now I consider myself to be a photographer, not just a photojournalist. Many of the images I take of no journalism merit at all. So, apparently I've dedicated my life to the #126th best job in the US, or the #74 worst job. According to the study if I am starting out in my career I can expect an income of USD 17,000 per year; if I am in the middle of my career I can expect an income of USD 29,000 per year; and if I'm experienced I can expect around USD 62,000 per year.

All of this seems fine and dandy. I'm glad photographer showed up on the list at all. I know I would never steer any of my friends, relatives or children in to the career unless they had a real stomach for the up and downs of the journalism, photography and art industries. My career progression has never been easy and at times it's been downright exhausting. My brother lives in Canada and works in the finance industry and we often joke about switching jobs, he keen on travel and adventure; and I'm interested in a mildly stable income.

But all that joking aside. I'm really not interested in changing professions and I'm not surprised at the job of "Photographer" being listed at #126. Maybe back in the 1970s and 1980s when there were less photographers, more magazines, more advertising revenue and longer, juicier higher paying assignments the job of "Photographer" could have cracked the top 50. But these days, since the digital revolution, competition has intensified and as Canon likes to say in their advertisements, anyone can be a professional photographer with their new EOS digital cameras.

What interests me most about the list is what jobs appear as "better" or "more appealing" than my job. The job of "Photographer" is #126. But lets take a quick look at what jobs appear higher, or nearby, in ranking:

#2 - Software Engineer (Understandable - Stock Options!)
#9 - Accountant (Really?)
#29 - Parole Officer (Dealing with criminals?)
#46 - Librarian (Do libraries still exist?)
#58 - Receptionist (Seriously?)
#62 - Musical Instrument Repair Person (For the adventurist inside you!)
#65 - Publication Editor (Some of my editors may find that funny)
#81 - Teachers Aid (Really, a TA is better than being a photographer?)
#83 - Janitor (Unbelievable!!!!!!!!!!!)
#108 - Security Guard (Nothing is better than working nights)
#109 - Piano Tuner (Always the life of the party)
#125 - Waitress (Working on tips?)
#126 - Photographer (Poor Little Me)
#131 - A Maid (Cleaning Homes?)

Well, the waitress and the maid being that close to Photographer leaves me feeling a bit uncomfortable. But alas that is the basis of the list compiled. Wacky, wild stuff.

--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle Blog: A Venture into Multimedia

2010-03-12T01:51:00.003+08:00

Hello.

I've made my first venture in to multimedia. A huge leap I know, but I have decided to try and organize my photography in such a way to reach a wider audience. The slide show above is from my Chinese Turkestan series and it includes some captured audio and a wonderful bit of music as well. I have a blog prepared for a little later that will go more in depth in to the multimedia process. I hope you can also enjoy that once it runs.

You can also follow this YouTube LINK.

ps. If you enjoy reading this blog, please do become an official follower.

--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle Blog: PDN Photo of the Day

2010-03-11T01:43:00.003+08:00

Hello.

I just wanted to take this opportunity to share some work with everyone. PDN Magazine has published a selection of my Chinese Turkestan project on their Photo of the Day blog. While the images are displayed the multimedia piece that I have prepared as been linked to. Please be sure to check out the links below:

Photo LINK: PDN Photo of the Day

Multimedia LINK: YouTube Audio Slide Show

ps. If you enjoy reading this blog, please do become an official follower.

--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________

Ryan Pyle Blog: Taking Back the Golf Courses

2010-03-10T12:08:00.003+08:00

Hello.

I wanted to direct you all to a new bit of work I've completed with writer Dan Washburn. The piece is about the government taking back land from illlegal golf courses. Interesting times in the development of China. Please take a look at Dan's article, wild stuff.

LINK: http://www.slate.com/id/2246914/pagenum/2

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The Forbidden Game
China's on-again, off-again war against golf.

By Dan Washburn

Posted Tuesday, March 9, 2010, at 10:04 AM ET

JIANSHAN VILLAGE, Zhejiang, China—Last November, when the Chinese government held a press conference to announce its most recent crackdown on illegal land use, it highlighted five investigations. Three involved heavy industry: a coking plant, a plastics factory, and a rare-earth metals mine. The other two were about golf courses, and they were the ones that made the headlines. "Golf defies rules to gain ground," screamed China Daily.

While the announcement raised a few eyebrows in China's golf industry, it was easy to brush it off as another toothless threat from Beijing. Almost all of the nation's 600 or so completed golf courses are illegal in some way. In order to operate as a golf business in China, you need to have an official license. Since 2004, however, there's been a moratorium on course construction in the country, making the acquisition of such a license impossible. Nevertheless, about 400 new golf facilities have opened their gates in the past six years.

The most generous estimates put the number of golfers in China at a few million—statistically zero percent of the population. While the game is growing in popularity, in many developers' eyes golf courses exist primarily as a means to sell the million-dollar homes that get built around them. On a recent trip to China, a representative of an American course design firm compared the goings-on here to the Oklahoma land run combined with the California gold rush. China, the nation that banned golf development, had somehow emerged as the only country in the world still in the midst of a golf boom.

That was before the government started digging up fairways. The bulldozers arrived at dawn in early December. There were more than a dozen lined up outside the gate of the Anji King Valley Country Club, 140 miles southwest of Shanghai. The convoy drove past the fountain, the bronze knight, and the Tudor-style clubhouse, and arrived at the multimillion-dollar 18-hole course that had been open for little more than a year and was scheduled to play host to a Ladies European Tour event this October. For 10 days, the excavators ripped up turf and snapped irrigation pipes in the soil below.

King Valley's punishment is the harshest thus far, but some in the industry believe government inspectors (the "Beijing golf police," as they have become known on the ground) could make their way throughout the country, one province at a time. Since the beginning of the year, the golf police have been frisking finished and unfinished golf courses throughout central China's Sichuan province, a hotbed of construction activity. Several projects there have been put on hold pending further review.

It makes sense that the "rich man's game" would get special scrutiny. While the Communists lifted their ban on the sport in 1984, golf still suffers an image problem in China, where a weekend round costs $160 on average. Critics have contended that such a high-consumption pastime runs counter to several of President Hu Jintao's primary concerns—among them, rural land rights and the widening gap between rich and poor. Farm land is a precious commodity in a country that must feed 21 percent of the world's population with less than 8 percent of its arable land. China has lost more than 30,000 square miles of agricultural land since 1996, and its current total of about 470,000 square miles is getting dangerously close to the 463,323-square-mile baseline the government believes necessary to sustain its massive population. As such, while golf-related construction accounted for a tiny fraction of the reported 42,000 cases of illegal land usage in China last year, it's good PR for the Communist government to say it's tackling such an elitist activity.

Ironically, it was the Chinese government's reluctance to embrace golf—or at least come up with a set of regulations intended to standardize its inevitable growth—that allowed things to get out of control. China doesn't even know how many golf courses exist within its borders. At the press conference in November, officials at the Ministry of Land and Resources said they were using satellite imagery to get a handle on the number. Back in 2004, when the moratorium was announced, state media reported that only 10 of China's then 176 known courses had received proper approvals from Beijing. One golf developer who wished to remain anonymous—this happens often when reporting on the legally nebulous word of golf construction in China—said the market remains "in chaos," with local governments continuing to approve golf projects despite not having the right to do so.

This was the case in Anji County, where King Valley Country Club is located. Anji had always been one of the poorer parts of Zhejiang province, with bamboo forests its lone claim to fame (some were featured in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon). The area's top government official was fond of telling people he had two dreams for Anji: a university and a golf course. Ask anyone in Jianshan village, where that second dream came to fruition, and they'll tell you that King Valley was a pet project of the local government, designed to attract well-heeled patrons from nearby cities like Hangzhou and Shanghai to the impoverished countryside.

There is some evidence that this effort was successful. While Jianshan remains tied to the past—locals still refer to their "production teams," a holdover term from the pre-reform days of China's communal farming system—a walk through the village reveals many signs of growth: small factories manufacturing decorative bamboo wall-coverings, kitschy hotels and restaurants geared at tourists, and construction sites for new housing complexes. All of this followed the 2005 arrival of King Valley.

The official reason for King Valley's bulldozing is simple: The course's builders didn't have the proper approvals to develop the entirety of their 400-acre plot. (Nearly 35 acres of the tract were farmland.) Dig a little deeper, and things don't look that straightforward. A dirt path along a fence offers views of the golf course's back nine, where most fairways now look like freshly plowed fields awaiting planting season. But a closer inspection reveals peculiarities. All of the greens and tee boxes remain untouched, the cuts around them following neat lines. The greens, and what remains of the fairways, are watered and mowed daily. The cart paths are still there. So are the buildings and the landscaping. Smaller shrubs are wrapped in white plastic to protect them from the winter cold. (Click here for a companion photo essay on King Valley's bulldozing.)

"Don't worry—the course is not going to become farmland," one of several workers who remain at King Valley said reassuringly during a visit in January. He said they were repairing the irrigation system and, since the greens were not destroyed, the course could be rebuilt very quickly. How could this be possible? "The local government has certain guanxi with our company," he said.

That guanxi, or favorable relationship, would seem to be strained these days. When Beijing's focus turned to King Valley, local officials ran for the hills. Many denied knowledge that a golf course existed inside the "Anji China Ecotourism and Fitness Center," as King Valley is officially known. (To get around the 2004 moratorium on course construction, "golf" never appears in planning documents for golf facilities in China.) Their case was flimsy: King Valley played host to a stop on China's domestic pro golf tour last summer; it's the official training center of the provincial golf team; and the large sign the local government installed beside the highway included the stylized silhouette of a man swinging a golf club. "Government officials go there all the time," said a village shopkeeper. "Only a ghost would believe their claims."

Despite the workers' assertions at the course, sources familiar with the situation say the company behind the project—Hangzhou-based real estate firm Handnice Group—is in no hurry to pay for the necessary repairs. Many in Jianshan believe the course destruction was a calculated move by local officials, a grand display intended to shield them from punishment from Beijing. Without assurances that the project is fully legal, the existence of a course like King Valley will always be dependent upon the word of local bureaucrats.

The Handnice Group is no innocent bystander here. The risks associated with opening a golf course in China, though seemingly minimal in recent years, are no secret. And while official land designations in rural areas often change on the whims of those in power, it was obvious villagers were farming on a portion of the land that is now a golf course. In fact, the company paid close to $1.2 million in fines for illegal land use between 2006 and 2008. But after each fine, sources say, the local government urged them to carry on with construction. The fines were viewed as a cost of doing business.

As is often the case with major development projects in China, hundreds of villagers were relocated to make room for King Valley. This is typically presented to farmers as a choice, but more than one Jianshan resident admitted their departure from the land was "kind of enforced." Reports suggest this process got messy. The most heated disputes arose over compensation—they usually do—and the noise surrounding a few key blowups may have gotten the project on the central government's short list for investigation.

Because the state owns all land in China, the developer pays the local government, which then distributes payouts to the villagers. Much of the money gets caught in the government filter—recent data suggests more than half of local government revenues come from land sales. One elderly man in Jianshan said the $15,000 settlement he received was not enough to cover the cost of his new home, and that the $200 he receives in "rent" each year from the golf course (where a round can cost $120) is "definitely not enough." He shrugged his shoulders and added, "But what can you do?"

It's unclear what's next for King Valley. When asked for a status update, a worker at the Anji land bureau said only "that's already been dealt with" before hanging up the phone. Another source said "a conclusion has been reached" but it has yet to be made public. Meanwhile, golf course construction in China continues to chug along. One industry veteran, who says his firm has survived "crackdowns" in the past, didn't sound too worried. The number of leads and new projects he discovers during his monthly trips to China remains "astronomical."

"I've been telling people if they shut down 50 percent, even 70 percent, of the projects there are still too many of them," he said. "A hell of a lot of golf courses are still going to be built."

Alice Liu contributed to this report.

Dan Washburn is a Shanghai-based writer. For more on the development of golf in China, visit his Par for China Web site.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2246914/

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Ryan Pyle Blog: Looking Back on Toronto

2010-03-08T22:54:00.002+08:00

Hello.

I get to visit Toronto roughly once a year. And each time I visit it's an incredibly rewarding experience. Not only do I get to spend a week with friends and family, because I grew up in Toronto, I get to network and discuss my work.

This week I had a busy schedule. I participated in an artist lecture, whereby I got to speak about my work in Chinese Turkestan, to a standing room only crowd at the Arta Gallery in the Distillery District, located in Toronto's trendy lakefront area. A special thanks should go out to the Arta Gallery folks as well as my printers at Elevator Digital for helping to organize the event. After that I went knee deep in to the world of academia, with lectures at the Ryerson University School of Journalism and the University of Toronto's China Program.

The Ryerson visit was my second in as many years and I throughly enjoyed the experience. It was an opportunity for me to talk about what it is like living abroad and trying to document another society and culture. I'm always keen to share my experiences in China with an attentive audience and these journalism students were a fantastic audience and sparked some great discussion. As young students interested in journalism I think it's important that they try to understand what kind of options are available abroad.

The University of Toronto talk was equally as rewarding, talking about Change in China and what the future might hold for this awkwardly emerging super power. It's my third visit to the University of Toronto and my first since becoming an Affiliate Member of the Asian Institute, an academic body at the University of Toronto that deals with all things Asia. The reception was warm and I hope there will be much further collaboration with the University moving forward.

So a gallery talk, and a few lectures plus a Leaf's game and a Raptors' game. I had a full week and did a lot of important networking. I am a firm believer in networking and meeting people face to face. While China is my adopted home and I may never leave the Middle Kingdom, I thoroughly enjoy making trips to Europe and North America to meet with gallery owner and editors, and having a chance to promote my work.

Now I am off to New York, trying to build a network from scratch is never easy. Upwards and onwards.

ps. If you enjoy reading this blog, please do become an official follower.

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Ryan Pyle Blog: China's Fat Children

2010-03-07T21:35:00.005+08:00

Hello.

I like to blog about topics that offer a peak in to the psychological makeup of the Chinese, and this story below by Nick Mulvenney offers a unique glimpse in to the thinking behind one of China's top sports officials.

In the article below the President of Beijing's Sports University says that China's youth are essentially fat and out of shape and incapable of defending China from a future war against the Japanese. That is a unique statement for a sports administrator to make.

Now it's true that the president of the Sports University is trying to be shocking, of course he wants more funding for his school and he is more a politician than an educator. But I love the fact that instead of talking about obesity and health, or diabetes, or any of the other health concerns that can occur with child obesity he chooses to try to strike fear in to people's hearts by saying basically that Japan will attack China at some stage in the future and China must be fit enough to defend itself.

Don't you think that sports administrators and educators should stick to talking about gold medals, university athletics and the physical health of children and adults? At what point should a sports administrator make geo-political statements about potential military conflict against a major trading partner? This kind of talk dates back to the 1960s and 1970s; sadly the mentality of a lot of Chinese officials hasn't changed much since then, even though the country's youth are much more progressive.

This article, and the statements made by the President of the Beijing Sports University, offers a unique glimpse in to how many Chinese, especially the older generations, still feel about Japan; and how they feel about the importance of China have a powerful military.

Imagine for a moment if the Athletic Director at the University of North Carolina, famous for a great sports program, made comments about US obesity and the country not being able to defend itself from an attack by the UK, a formal colonial master, or China, a rising super power - he would most likely be removed from his post or pressured to resign. That kind of war mongering and backwards way of thinking doesn't help. Our world is pretty fragile and we all need to choose our words carefully. Someday, perhaps soon, Chinese officials will learn that as well.

Copywrite: Reuters
Original Story LINK
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Reuters

Title: Children exercise during a weight-losing summer camp in Shenyang, Liaoning province

By Nick Mulvenney – Thu Mar 4, 10:52 am ET

BEIJING (Reuters) – China must urgently address the physical fitness of the nation's youth or run the risk of raising a generation incapable of fighting the Japanese in a future war, the head of the country's top sports university said Thursday.

The government must immediately invest some of its new wealth in ensuring that children take regular exercise, Beijing Sports University president Yang Hua told the sports group of the largely ceremonial advisory body to China's annual parliament.

"It is time for the Chinese nation to improve the physical fitness of our next generation," said Yang. "If we miss the next three to five years a whole generation will be next to useless.

"If there was another war against Japan, would the younger Chinese be able to fight the Japanese one-on-one?

"The government has enough money for banquets and for luxurious office buildings, do they not have money for children's physical education?" he added.

Japan invaded and occupied much of China between 1931 and 1945. Rancour over Japanese wartime atrocities has subsided as a diplomatic flashpoint, but it continues to shape Chinese public attitudes toward Japan and its people.

The fitness of China's young dominated the opening session of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference's sports group, a normally sedate gathering turned into a media circus this year by the presence of hurdler Liu Xiang.

The former Olympic and world champion 110 meter hurdler, unconventionally dressed in jeans with his shirt tails hanging out, was making his first appearance as one of the 22 members of the committee.

"A healthy body is the foundation of everything," he said. "I hope I can be an example to attract more attention to athletics, and encourage our children to be stronger and stronger."

The emphasis on academic education in China -- Chinese teenagers preparing for the university entrance exams often study for more than 12 hours a day -- has been blamed for the lack of exercise undertaken by young.

A year after China's elite athletes succeeded in topping the medals table with a cascade of gold at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, August 8 was declared "National Fitness Day."

"A survey has shown that Chinese teenagers are behind their Japanese peers in almost every indicator it measured," Jiang Xiaoyu, a senior member of the organizing committee for the Beijing Games, told the meeting.

"The physical fitness of the young is a matter of strengthening our country and our Chinese race."

(Additional reporting by Liu Zhen and Ben Blanchard, editing by Patrick Johnston)
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Ryan Pyle Blog: Grand Corruption

2010-03-05T22:00:00.000+08:00

Hello.

It appears that China may be full of corruption. I know, I was shocked as well. But what is even more surprising is that on the front page of the China Daily, the main government mouthpiece, the editor put the mug shots of 4 dodgy bastards who used to be in charge of State Owned Enterprises (SOE) that have been caught for corruption. Let's push through the list and see what we come up with.

First, the headline is "Rampant Corruption". I love that.

The first man on the list is the once invincible Zhang Chunjiang; aged 50. He was the Vice-Chairman of China Mobile, the world's largest mobile phone company, and apparently he falsified accounts that involved some RMB 20 billion ( USD 3 billion) when he was the head of another giant SOE named China Netcom. The best part about this was that after is blatant corruption at China Netcom he was rewarded with the role of Communist Party Official of China Mobile, meaning he had almost no role. I hold shares of China Mobile on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and I find the company structure, the management and the politics involved in the company to be grossly lacking morals. Come on shareholders. Rise up!

The second man on the list is Chen Tonghai; aged 61. This dodgy dude was sentenced to death for taking over RMB 200 million (USD 30 million) in bribes. He was the former Chairman of Sinopec, one of China's largest oil companies, and one of the countries most powerful SOE's. I also own some shares of Sinopec on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Is it not unbelievable that publicly listed companies have Chairman and directors acting so blatantly against shareholder value?

The third mug shot on the front page of the China Daily belongs to Kang Rixin; aged 56. He is a dead ringer for Chairman Mao; but actually he is the former General Manager for the China National Nuclear Corporation; meaning that he is in charge of building all of China's Nuclear power plants. Classy. He somehow misappropriated RMB 1.8 billion (USD 2.5 billion). It's amazing that China can still champion it's legal system and system of SOE's when it appears everyone is just in the business to help themselves.

The last, but surely not the last, is Wang Yi; aged 52. He was the Vice President of the China Development Bank and he was expelled from the party for taking some RMB 10 million (USD 1.5 million) in bribes. Seems to be the least worst.

A few notes. One, everyone knows this happens and executives of SOE's are essentially the same as political figures. It's obscene that the government can claim any moral high ground when basically all of these companies executives are politically placed. Sure, the odd fat cat is knocked off his perch; but for every corrupt executive that gets nailed there must be hundreds that get missed. What boggles my mind is the newspapers and the media never seem to know where all the money went and nobody seems to be working "around the clock" to account for all his assets. Is that offside? Shouldn't be. Everything from his Ferrari to his diamond studded dog collar should be auctioned off. Corporate China is a mess and nobody wants an independent legal system where lawyers can go after these high rollers. A sad state of affairs.

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Ryan Pyle Blog: Market Defies Fear of Real Estate Bubble in China

2010-03-05T10:12:00.003+08:00

Hello,

I just wanted to blog about some new work that I've produced with the New York Times. David Barboza, one of my frequent collaborators wrote a great story about China's property bubble. To say the property market is hot is a vast understatement.

See below for the entire story.

Copywrite: New York Times
Original Link: CLICK HERE
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Market Defies Fear of Real Estate Bubble in China
By DAVID BARBOZA

SHANGHAI — The spacious duplex comes with crocodile-skin bedposts, hand-carved bronze doors inlaid with Swarovski crystals — and a $45 million price tag.

It is still on the market, but Charles Tong, the developer of Tomson Riviera, a luxury riverfront complex in the heart of the financial district here, says he is having no trouble finding takers for similarly priced units.

“We’re selling three to four apartments every month,” said Mr. Tong, seated in a white Versace easy chair. “Now, people here want something more luxurious; they’d like a new lifestyle.”

Everyone agrees China is in the middle of a spectacular real estate boom. The question is whether it is in the middle of a rapidly growing real estate bubble.

When other recent booms collapsed — in the United States, for instance — they depressed entire economies. In China’s case, a bursting bubble could affect much of the world. China is the fastest-growing large economy and, so far, a main engine pulling the world out of recession.

Beijing is clearly concerned. Authorities have recently moved to rein in the easy credit that has helped finance China’s hyperdevelopment, including making it more difficult for home buyers to take out a second mortgage.

Last year, a record $560 billion of residential property was sold in China, an increase of 80 percent from the year before, according to government statistics that are widely considered reliable. And with prices soaring, developers are scrambling to build more mansions, villas and high-rise apartments with names like Rich Gate, Park Avenue and Palais de Fortune.

Signs of exuberance are everywhere. An investor in Shanghai recently bought 54 apartments in a single day; a villa sold for $30 million last year; and in December a consortium of developers paid more than $3.5 billion for a huge tract of land in Guangzhou, one of the highest prices paid for any property, anywhere. In the city of Tianjin, in north China, developers have created a $3 billion “floating city,” a series of islands built on a natural reservoir, featuring villas, shopping malls, a water amusement park and what they say will be the world’s largest indoor ski resort.

“This is wild,” said Andy Xie, a former Morgan Stanley economist who is now an independent analyst. “By all the traditional measures, like rental yield, this is a bubble.”

Speculators are snapping up properties on the expectation that prices will continue to rise, as prices have nearly every year for more than a decade. And powerful developers are working with local governments to transform old cities into urban dreamscapes.

But Shanghai, China’s wealthiest and most dazzling city, is the epicenter of the boom. Prices here have risen more than 150 percent since 2003, pushing the price of a typical 1,100-square-foot apartment up to $200,000, according to real estate experts. (Shanghai residents typically earn less than $5,000 a year.)

A buying frenzy has gripped the city, leading to billion-dollar land auctions and long waiting lists.

“The speed you buy a house here is faster than you buy vegetables,” said Andy Xiang, an advertising executive who recently put down a large cash down payment to get the right to pay $1.3 million for apartment in the city’s exclusive Xintiandi area.

Few residences, though, are as upscale as Tomson Riviera, which consists of four golden-hued towers overlooking the Huangpu River, with a central garden mapped out in the shape of a dragon. The apartment complex’s entrance has original artworks by Salvador Dalí and well-known Chinese artists. The apartments, a few of which have been decorated by Armani and Fendi, as well as Versace, lease for $7,000 to $17,000 a month — to high-level executives from companies like General Motors.

Those who buy an apartment here tend to be extremely wealthy, like Liu Yiqian, an eccentric Shanghai entrepreneur whom Forbes magazine says is worth about $540 million.

Mr. Liu, 47, got his start driving a taxicab in Shanghai but eventually made a fortune investing in the stock market. In an interview this week, he admitted to owning “hundreds” of apartments in Shanghai (he said he could not remember exactly how many), including a 6,000-square-foot apartment in Tomson Riviera, which he bought in 2008 for about $11.5 million.

“I invest in properties,” Mr. Liu said, noting that he also collects art, antiques and jade. “I think in Shanghai in five to seven years the real estate prices will be even higher.”

As they try to modulate the market, local and central governments here are walking a thin line. Land sales were a major source of government revenue, raising about $234 billion last year, an amount equal to over a third of the cost of China’s half-trillion-dollar stimulus program.

Whether the country is in the middle of a bubble has become the subject of a debate. Some economists, like Nicholas R. Lardy at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, say the housing boom is being fueled by a huge urbanization push that is creating premium-priced houses.

Other analysts say prices are being propped up by greedy developers and government policies that are making housing increasingly unaffordable for the masses migrating to big cities.

Despite the fear of a bubble here, Mr. Tong, 38, said his prices were just right, particularly because of so much hidden wealth in China. The publicly listed company is controlled by his family.

“I have a friend,” he said. “She makes maternity clothes. Her company has 20 percent of the world’s market share, and they’re not even a listed company.”

Still, Tomson’s prices are soaring. The most recent apartment sold for about $2,300 a square foot. The average luxury apartment in Manhattan sold for just under $1,900 a square foot in the fourth quarter of 2009, according to Prudential Douglas Elliman real estate.

Indeed, for the price of a Tomson apartment in Shanghai, a buyer could easily purchase a 6,000- square-foot home in Los Angeles built by Frank Lloyd Wright and now for sale ($10.5 million), or a 52-acre site with a 22-room residence in New Canaan, Conn. ($24 million).

But a sales agent at Tomson Riviera says this the future financial capital of the world, not the dying one.

“Look at this bronze door,” said Wang Yaodong. “That costs $50,000! Look at these Gaggenau appliances. They were made in Germany.” The glasses were imported from Belgium, the Jacuzzi from Italy. And don’t worry about losing your key, he said, “This lock can read the palm of your hand.”
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Ryan Pyle Blog: Ethics? What Ethics?

2010-03-01T09:21:00.001+08:00

Hello.

After 13 years, the Communist Party has decided to brush up their ethics code book. And why not, the country has changed significantly since 1997 and government officials need to be brought on board to the new expectations people have for them.

As the original article indicates, see below, Party members are to avoid: Money making deals, property speculation and lavish expenditure. They should not accept gifts or use their influence to help family members. So basically they are being asked to stop doing all the fun things that being a party member allow you to do in China. No more lavish weddings with rows upon rows of pimped out cars that 99% of regular Chinese folks could never afford. No more over the top funerals. No more, no more, no more. While stuff like this may seem obvious to you and I, many in the lower and middle ranks of government here will be taken aback by these new regulations. Yes, there is a different style of thinking in this country when it comes to governing; which seems ancient in so many ways.

If you think Wall Street has an image problem? Corrupting the financial system and hurting Main Street, driving up unemployment and walking away with record bonuses; well that doesn't even compare to the frustration directed by ordinary Chinese people at their government officials. With no vote, no media freedom, no freedom of speech and no freedom of association; there is absolutely no check on government power at any level. No front page New York Times story to shame officials in to resigning, no Wall Street Journal expose about officials stealing millions from State Owned Enterprises. If there is a story about corruption it has been explicitly ordained by the powers that be in Beijing; no one is caught by surprise.

While the Party uses it's own disciplinary committee to remove members and jail the occasional bad apple, it's generally seen as a joke. And the idea of an independent commission, or regulatory body, just doesn't fly in this part of the world. So publicly introducing a new ethics code book is a nice step by the Party, but sadly it won't change a thing, but it is not entirely the fault of individual officials; one might say that it's "the systems" fault and it needs a massive overhaul.

What I mean is that the biggest reason for the immense amount of corruption in China is that government officials are paid next to nothing for their service to the public. So they rely on cars, drivers, kickbacks, bribes and whatever else to make up the difference. And for years, since imperial China, this has been accepted practice. The problem is now that the economy is red hot and these kickbacks are often amounting to millions of US dollars; which just looks bad. Government officials wearing USD 30,000 luxury watches and children at private school in Switzerland are becoming the norm. The regular people, in this developing nation, are pretty feed-up.

The original story is below:

Copywrite: BBC News
Original Link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8533410.stm
_________________________________
By Quentin Sommerville
BBC News, Beijing

In China, the Communist Party has issued a new 52-point ethics code, in an attempt to control growing corruption among officials.

The code bans members from property speculation, money-making deals, and lavish expenditure.

The last set of rules was issued 13 years ago.

Corruption has become an increasingly hot topic among the public - graft often tops the list of issues of most concern for ordinary Chinese citizens.

Party officials should work hard to serve the people and avoid accepting gifts or using their influence to benefit

family members, according to the new ethics code.

The guide bans lavish weddings and funerals, and overseas tours.

Officials should also stay out of profit-making deals, the code says. But few do.

Some of the most senior party officials in China have been on the take - property speculation has been particularly popular.

The richer the country gets the bigger the sums involved.

Spending lavish amounts on government buildings or flash cars is also banned.

In some provinces, party and government headquarters are indistinguishable from plush five star hotels.
The latest luxury sedans are often used to ferry around officials.

China's one-party system has struggled to deal with endemic corruption, much to the annoyance of the general public.
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Ryan Pyle Blog: 2010 Growth Predictions

2010-02-26T22:00:00.002+08:00

Hello.

A few weeks back the Economist magazine came out with GDP growth predictions for 2010. China was right in there at 8.5% to 9% growth for 2010, many even consider that conservative at certain sectors of the Chinese economy seem over-heated, namely housing and the stock market. I wouldn't be at all surprised if China cracked double digit figures this year, but that would depend more on the recovery of the rich world.

But what interested me most about the list was who China's competitors are in the race for the title of fastest growing country - by GDP - in the world.

First on the list was Qatar which is set to grow at 24.5% this year. That's an unbelievable number, funded mainly on natural gas but still remarkable. I don't know much about Qatar, I've never been, but I know they are close to completing the largest natural gas processing plant in the world; which is also the largest man made structure in the world. Would be a great shoot no doubt, I love construction and infrastructure photography.

Second and third on the list are Turkmenistan (11% growth) and Azerbaijan (9% growth). I visited Turkmenistan once on a three day transit visa and I can honestly say that I've never been to a more crazy place. Everyone is dirt poor and there are golden statues everywhere of their former leader who was nicknamed Turkmenbashi, or the father of all Turkmen. Turkmenistan has had a government change, since I bused my way across the country in 2003, and it seems they are opening up and developing their massive natural gas reserves. China just signed a massive pipeline deal a few weeks back. Whether any of that money filters down in to education and healthcare is a different story, it's most likely bound for Switzerland. Azerbaijan on the other hand is much less of a pariah state but suffers from much of the same cronyism. I also traveled through Baku in 2003 and found the city to be absolutely lovely, fantastic people and some stunning old architecture; but the Soviet hangover is very much in the foreground and dodgy border officials, alcoholism and violent crime still haunt Baku. It's also great that they son o the former president took over in his death, I mean, who wouldn't want to control the country's massive oil and gas reserves.

China placed forth at a perky 9%. Almost nobody talks about Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan but all the media limelight is saved for China. In the recent month they've jailed a human rights activist and put to death a British citizen; but in Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan that kind of stuff happens weekly. Bad bank loans are mostly likely going to start showing up on the balance sheets of Chinese banks in the coming months; being made to lend to dodgy people with no collateral must be an incredibly liberating feeling for a Chinese banking executive. Did someone say "State Induced Bubble"? I read something the other day that indicated that 40% of the money lent out by Chinese banks in 2009 ended up in the Stock Market and the Property Market. Sound investments, and is anyone surprised that the government has kept the tap running?

In fifth place is Uzbekistan (8% growth), in sixth is Congo-Brazzaville (7.8% growth), in seventh is Angola (7%), in eight place is Ethiopia (7% growth) and in ninth place is India (7% growth), and rounding off the top ten is newly healing Sri Lanka (6.5% growth).

I guess I am pretty surprised at how many dodgy countries are growing. I felt I was always part of the majority, believing that places like Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan would never amount to much; and as the elite of their countries siphon off the spoils of their countries natural resources that is more and more likely to be true. To my knowledge India is the only true Democracy on the list. Sri Lanka was a complete surprise and Angola is the top ten's biggest oil producer. Of the entire list of top ten growth countries for 2010, one might say that China has the most balanced economy. Interesting list.

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Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle Blog: Artist Lecture @ Arta Gallery in Toronto

2010-02-25T23:00:00.000+08:00

Hello.

Event Coming next week. See below:

March 3, 2010 at 7:00PM

ARTIST LECTURE: CHINESE TURKESTAN by Ryan Pyle

A lecture by award winning documentary photographer Ryan Pyle. Ryan Pyle has been visiting China’s western Xinjiang province regularly since 2001. Formerly known as Chinese Turkestan, this vast expanse of deserts and mountains has seemingly always been at a crossroads between cultures and time. For centuries, criminals, holy men, and traders tramped across the region; and it was out of this tradition that the Silk Road was established. Ryan has just returned to Toronto from a recent series of trips and is commencing a series of lectures on the fast paced development, and rapid loss of cultural heritage, in the region.

“The culture is vanishing before my eyes”, Ryan says, “each time I return something is missing: a market, an old shop full of blacksmiths, a local mosque”.

This talk is a continuation of, and an update to, Ryan's standing-room-only talk given at the Dylan Ellis Gallery in 2009.

(www.ryanpyle.com)

Address is:
Arta Gallery
suite 102, Building 9, 55 Mill St.
Toronto, On M5A 3C4
CANADA
http://www.artagallery.ca

Our telephone:
+1-416-364-2782

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Ryan Pyle
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ryan@ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle Blog: Foreign Policy Magazine - Golf Obsession in China

2010-02-25T09:00:00.000+08:00

Hello.

Dan Washburn and I recently had a lovely slide show in Foreign Policy Magazine. You can find it online HERE.

LINK: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/02/24/chinas_golf_obsession

Shanghai-based writer Dan Washburn and photographer Ryan Pyle teamed up earlier this year for a Financial Times Weekend Magazine cover story about Mission Hills Hainan. For more information about the development of golf in China, visit Washburn's Par for China site.

By: Dan Washburn

The future of golf has shifted to a most unlikely place: China, where statistically 0 percent of the population plays, where up until the mid-1980s the sport was banned by the communists for being too bourgeois, and where the construction of new courses is still technically illegal. It has been said about China, however, that while nothing is allowed there, everything is possible. So even during its supposed moratorium on golf course construction, China has managed to emerge as the only country in the world in the midst of a "golf boom": Hundreds, some say thousands, of courses are expected to open in the next several years.

The epicenter of this growth is China's tropical island province of Hainan, not long ago a lawless place with an economy built largely on smuggling, prostitution, and unchecked property speculation. Beijing is now determined to transform Hainan into a tourist paradise, with golf expected to play a major role (so much so that many joke Hainan is now a "special golf development zone" where mainland restrictions don't apply). While between 100 and 300 courses are expected to be built here, the most mysterious project -- and by far the most audacious -- is the latest offering from Hong Kong's Mission Hills Group, already owners of a 12-course resort in southern China's Guangdong province. Its Hainan club, when completed, will be the world's largest, with some 22 courses covering an area nearly 1.5 times the size of Manhattan. But the highly secretive Mission Hills development, a behemoth undertaking that displaced thousands of villagers, is also the most controversial, so controversial that it required a code name: Project 791.

With the central government guaranteeing a "top international tourism destination" by 2020, Hainan's destiny appears predetermined. No one disputes the poor province's many infrastructure needs, but the prospect of another decade of furious growth has some on the island concerned for its already fragile ecology and centuries-old ways of rural life.

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Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
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Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle Blog: Forced Evictions & Beatings

2010-02-24T23:00:00.001+08:00

Hello.

This is an a story that happens entirely too often, but it doesn't always have a chance to make the news. Apparently, according to the New York Times, thugs were sent in to "remove by force" residents, many of which are artists, that were set to be evicted from their homes in northern Beijing. After getting beaten up they were all arrested in an attempt, the following day, to march in to central Beijing in protest. Once again, dignity is stamped on in the face of development. The full article is below, but first a bit of commentary.

In China, money talks. And it never matters which side of the money question you are on. For example, decades ago artists were lured out of the city center to the remote sections of northern Beijing to create "Artist Villages". These villages were the breeding grounds in the 1980s for many of China's most successful and influential artists as the rent was cheap and there was a lot of collective creativity and collaboration. But more importantly the artists were given long term leases (money talking), some up to 30 years, on their properties and some invested huge amounts to create their dream studios and galleries. To anyone that has been out there, and I have been several times to several of the more remote artist districts, the region has been transformed by the artists. Now, however, the money is talking again.

The Government loves to sell land; especially in the midst of insane property valuations. The Government owns the land, and apparently property rights, leases, contract rights and legal rights don't mean a damn thing. So if the government can offload a huge parcel of land to a property developer for a large sum of money, whether people are still living there or not, they'll do it in a heartbeat. Development, and revenue creation, at all costs.

So this artist village has been sold off to a big property developer who wants to raze the whole place and put up more non-desrcript high rise apartments. The problem is the land is inhabited. And instead of paying people compensation to move, the government and their developer buddies often like to use force and intimidation - and why not when you can get away with a media black out and no legal action against you. The problem is, and this is why the foreign media has an important role in China, is that this kind of heavy handed behavior is exactly what many of Beijing's elite officials don't want outsiders to see. They don't want people in the west, who are keen to invest in China, to see that China is still a country of thugs and money hungry developers that don't mind whacking a few skulls to move things along quickly.

In many parts of the country, even in Beijing and Shanghai, business rules are still defined by a system of "village rules". This country has a lot of problems that it doesn't seem to be ready to address; one specifically being that government officials have little or no respect for the rights of the people they are supposed to be working for, that being the average Chinese inhabitant; I wouldn't dare use a term like citizen, as that would imply a certain level of respect and rights. Government leaders need to remember that their sole role in life is not to great wealth for themselves. Holding a position in government is about serving the people, not beating them with pipes so you can get a big bonus from a property developer. China has 1.3 billion people, and they deserve a high level of service. Is that need being met? I'll leave it up to you to decide. But the corruption that exists in China at every level, and this case wreaks of property developer and local official collaboration, is a prime example of how impossible it is to draw the line between where big business stops and the government begins. And the little man will always get stomped out.

I worked on a story about this with TIME magazine back a few years ago where Bamboo farmers lost their land to a bunch of government officials who wanted to build a hotel and karaoke bar on their land. The same thing happened, no notice. No compensation. No settlement. Just sticks, pipes and beatings. The only difference was that the story I worked on was in a remote part of Jiangsu province. Today it is in Beijing. Scary times. Full story is below.

Time Magazine Story: China's Fighting Farmers

Copywrite: New York Times
LINK to Original Story: LINK
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February 24, 2010
Beijing Police Beat Artists Protesting Evictions

By ANDREW JACOBS
BEIJING — Nearly two dozen artists protesting the forced demolition of their homes and studios marched through the ceremonial heart of the capital before the police intervened and prevented them from reaching Tiananmen Square, the artists said Tuesday.

The protesters said they decided to take to the streets on Monday hours after scores of masked men swinging iron rods swarmed over their community on the northern edge of the city, which has been resisting redevelopment.

Wu Yuren, 39, a photographer and installation artist who was among those who were attacked, said six artists were sent to the hospital with minor injuries. He said the attackers, about 100 men wearing white face masks, had been sent by developers who wanted to clear the area for a large-scale residential project.

“They didn’t say a single word,” Mr. Wu said. “They just started beating us.” The police, he added, did not arrive for an hour and then sat in their patrol car until the attackers fled.

Another of those beaten, Satoshi Iwama, said he received five stitches after a blow to the head.

Although protests against forced evictions have become increasingly common in China, the aggrieved rarely succeed in venting their complaints on Chang’an Avenue, the heavily policed artery that passes in front of the Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square and Zhongnanhai, the residential compound of China’s top leaders.

Ai Weiwei, an artist and dissident who joined the demonstration, sent out a spate of Twitter messages detailing the march, which he said made it only about 500 yards before the police intervened.

“It was instinctive,” he said of the decision to protest. “We made a lot of noise, and I think we had a big impact.”

It is unclear whether the protest will force any action against the masked attackers or alter the course of development that threatens at least 10 clusters of studios where artists live and work on the fringes of the city. The clusters, called “artist villages,” house as many as 1,000 painters, sculptors and performance artists.

For two adjacent art districts that were the scene of the early morning protest, known as Zheng Yang and 008, it may be too late. In November, the developer cut off electricity and water, and most of the buildings have already been destroyed.

Xiao Ge, a curator who helped organize a roving performance last month to draw attention to the evictions, said the developers gave most tenants a week to move out.

Many artists are furious because they were lured to the villages with long-term leases — some for nearly 20 years — and encouraged to invest their life savings in renovations. Gao Qiang, a furniture designer who moved to Zheng Yang last August, said he spent almost $12,000 to fix up his studio after he was given a three-year lease. Although he is angry that he will lose most of his investment, he and other artists say they are most concerned about bullying from developers and, at best, the apathy from the authorities.

“It is not an issue of money, it is an issue of dignity,” said Mr. Gao, 38. He added that on Tuesday, the police told the artists that they would provide better security and try to reconnect severed utilities.

The police declined to comment.

The fight over the future of Beijing’s artist villages coincides with soaring real estate values and ugly scuffles over land expropriation, several of which have led to the suicides of those facing eviction. Widely publicized in the media, the suicides have helped prompt the government to consider modifying the nation’s urban redevelopment regulations.

Even if the proposed reforms, which would provide market-rate compensation for property owners and outlaw coercive evictions, are adopted, it is unlikely that they will help Beijing’s artists. Many artists live in officially designated rural areas, which are not covered by the measures.

Berenice Angremy, who has been a curator and art consultant in Beijing for the past eight years, said the repeated dislocations had been devastating to artists, both financially and psychologically.

“The government is trying to make Beijing a great cultural city, but without artists, it’s not going to happen,” she said.
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Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________

Ryan Pyle Blog: Cyber Attacks

2010-02-19T22:00:00.002+08:00

Hello.

According to a New York Times article today, the cyber attacks that Google reported in January came from two computer science schools in China. A computer scientist professor from one of the schools believes that it could be just a patriotic "nerd", or a bored student, interested in testing his/her hacking skills by trying to crack western websites. But the attacks or hacks that focus on the email accounts of human rights activists leads one to believe there is something much darker going on. The original story is below.

Just a note on this. The Chinese government has an ever-growing dangerous habit of allowing criminal behavior happen as long as it is projected at "foreigners" or non-Chinese entities. These cyber attacks seem to fit that bill. Other behavior that falls in line with this trend were the incredible anti-Japanese protests that shook cities throughout China in May 2005. At that time many university students took to the streets, smashing Chinese owned stores selling Japanese products and attacking the Japanese consulate in Shanghai and embassy in Beijing. Behavior that was condoned and allowed to occur for, in many people's views, for far too long. But what happens on the day that Chinese government ministries are hacked? What happens when bank account details of government officials are leaked to the media, along with the business interests of themselves and their family members? What happens when thousands of student take to the streets and instead of screaming anti-Japanese slogans they are looking for a second party to cheer for?

Just because the behavior is directed at others today, doesn't mean it won't ever be directed at The Party. Tides can change pretty quick in our modern age. Dangerous behavior is dangerous behavior, no matter who it is focused at.

Original Story LINK:
Copywrite: New York Times
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February 19, 2010
Two Chinese Schools Said to Be Tied to Online Attacks

By JOHN MARKOFF and DAVID BARBOZA

SAN FRANCISCO — A series of online attacks on Google and dozens of other American corporations have been traced to computers at two educational institutions in China, including one with close ties to the Chinese military, say people involved in the investigation.

They also said the attacks, aimed at stealing trade secrets and computer codes and capturing e-mail of Chinese human rights activists, may have begun as early as April, months earlier than previously believed. Google announced on Jan. 12 that it and other companies had been subjected to sophisticated attacks that probably came from China.

Computer security experts, including investigators from the National Security Agency, have been working since then to pinpoint the source of the attacks. Until recently, the trail had led only to servers in Taiwan.

If supported by further investigation, the findings raise as many questions as they answer, including the possibility that some of the attacks came from China but not necessarily from the Chinese government, or even from Chinese sources.

Tracing the attacks further back, to an elite Chinese university and a vocational school, is a breakthrough in a difficult task. Evidence acquired by a United States military contractor that faced the same attacks as Google has even led investigators to suspect a link to a specific computer science class, taught by a Ukrainian professor at the vocational school.

The revelations were shared by the contractor at a meeting of computer security specialists.

The Chinese schools involved are Shanghai Jiaotong University and the Lanxiang Vocational School, according to several people with knowledge of the investigation who asked for anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the inquiry.

Jiaotong has one of China’s top computer science programs. Just a few weeks ago its students won an international computer programming competition organized by I.B.M. — the “Battle of the Brains” — beating out Stanford and other top-flight universities.

Lanxiang, in east China’s Shandong Province, is a huge vocational school that was established with military support and trains some computer scientists for the military. The school’s computer network is operated by a company with close ties to Baidu, the dominant search engine in China and a competitor of Google.

Within the computer security industry and the Obama administration, analysts differ over how to interpret the finding that the intrusions appear to come from schools instead of Chinese military installations or government agencies. Some analysts have privately circulated a document asserting that the vocational school is being used as camouflage for government operations. But other computer industry executives and former government officials said it was possible that the schools were cover for a “false flag” intelligence operation being run by a third country. Some have also speculated that the hacking could be a giant example of criminal industrial espionage, aimed at stealing intellectual property from American technology firms.

Independent researchers who monitor Chinese information warfare caution that the Chinese have adopted a highly distributed approach to online espionage, making it almost impossible to prove where an attack originated.

“We have to understand that they have a different model for computer network exploit operations,” said James C. Mulvenon, a Chinese military specialist and a director at the Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis in Washington. Rather than tightly compartmentalizing online espionage within agencies as the United States does, he said, the Chinese government often involves volunteer “patriotic hackers” to support its policies.

Spokesmen for the Chinese schools said they had not heard that American investigators had traced the Google attacks to their campuses.

If it is true, “We’ll alert related departments and start our own investigation,” said Liu Yuxiang, head of the propaganda department of the party committee at Jiaotong University in Shanghai.

But when asked about the possibility, a leading professor in Jiaotong’s School of Information Security Engineering said in a telephone interview: “I’m not surprised. Actually students hacking into foreign Web sites is quite normal.” The professor, who teaches Web security, asked not to be named for fear of reprisal.

“I believe there’s two kinds of situations,” the professor continued. “One is it’s a completely individual act of wrongdoing, done by one or two geek students in the school who are just keen on experimenting with their hacking skills learned from the school, since the sources in the school and network are so limited. Or it could be that one of the university’s I.P. addresses was hijacked by others, which frequently happens.”

At Lanxiang Vocational, officials said they had not heard about any possible link to the school and declined to say if a Ukrainian professor taught computer science there.

A man named Mr. Shao, who said he was dean of the computer science department at Lanxiang but refused to give his first name, said, “I think it’s impossible for our students to hack Google or other U.S. companies because they are just high school graduates and not at an advanced level. Also, because our school adopts close management, outsiders cannot easily come into our school.”

Mr. Shao acknowledged that every year four or five students from his computer science department were recruited into the military.

Google’s decision to step forward and challenge China over the intrusions has created a highly sensitive issue for the United States government. Shortly after the company went public with its accusations, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton challenged the Chinese in a speech on Internet censors, suggesting that the country’s efforts to control open access to the Internet were in effect an information-age Berlin Wall.

A report on Chinese online warfare prepared for the U.S.-China Economic Security Review Commission in October 2009 by Northrop Grumman identified six regions in China with military efforts to engage in such attacks. Jinan, site of the vocational school, was one of the regions.

Executives at Google have said little about the intrusions and would not comment for this article. But the company has contacted computer security specialists to confirm what has been reported by other targeted companies: access to the companies’ servers was gained by exploiting a previously unknown flaw in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Web browser.

Forensic analysis is yielding new details of how the intruders took advantage of the flaw to gain access to internal corporate servers. They did this by using a clever technique — called man-in-the-mailbox — to exploit the natural trust shared by people who work together in organizations.

After taking over one computer, intruders insert into an e-mail conversation a message containing a digital attachment carrying malware that is highly likely to be opened by the second victim. The attached malware makes it possible for the intruders to take over the target computer.

John Markoff reported from San Francisco and David Barboza from Shanghai. Bao Beibei and Chen Xiaoduan in Shanghai contributed research.
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Ryan Pyle
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ryan@ryanpyle.com
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Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle Blog: BBC.com Wine in China

2010-02-16T22:00:00.000+08:00

Hello.

I've put together a few stories about Wine in China over the last few years and today the BBC ran a small series of the work. See below.

The Chinese can drink with the best of them, a fact to which western beer producers have known for decades. But apart from local "rice wines" and beer, a taste for fine wine is building slowly, and both customers and investors are answering the call. As the New York Times stated back in 2008, China could, within a decade, become the "next Chile"; a destination for affordable and quality wine production. As wages rise and more and more Chinese look to acquire the fixings of the the upper class and those associated with a luxurious lifestyle, they will consume finer wines, many of which could be home grown in the future. While much of the landscape of wine growing in China is government run through State Owned Enterprises, there has been an opening for foreign investors and joint ventures. The landscape is littered by privately owned and funded wineries; and among them one of the industry leaders is the Hong Kong based Grace Vineyards who run and operate a handful of vineyards in China; but whose largest operation is the one I visited in Shanxi province.

My production of this work was a truely remarkable experience. The grape vineyards in Shanxi were well maintained and well tended to, the harvasting season was exciting and full of rich visual moments. I think what's important about Grace Vineyards is that they've full embraced the local community, which was obviously a stated goal by the government when considering this type of foreign investment in the region. The Vineyard works with local farmers for maintaining and harvesting, the grape pickers, and women sorted grapes are all hired from nearby villages and towns. It's not only providing an income and training for those involved but it's laying the foundations for future generations of wine development in the region. I wonder what Italian red wine tasted like after only the fifth year in production? That's where much of China is today in production.

In Shanghai there is a real focus on consumption and education. And this is where foreign brands dominate, as schools and importers are setting up shop in an effort to educate the upper reaches of society on the wines of the world. Will China's wine drinking masses follow suit? That's anyone's guess. Is there room for the wine industry to grow? Absolutely, but much of the initial growth is because the industry has started from scratch. Sustainable development will only come in time. Many are watching to see if this industry takes shape to become a global player. Only time will tell. Ryan Pyle - Shanghai, China.

Click here for the BBC LINK.

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Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
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Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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