There are plenty of '90s 抗日sploitation films—Comfort Women Unit 74 慰安妇七十四分队 (1994) and Doomsday Killer 末日杀手 (1993) among them—but Den of the Milkers 人奶魔巢 (1990) might be the least serious, revolving around a plot about the Japanese farming women for their milk.
The breast milk is being used for some sort of serum to strengthen Japanese men. It could be an interesting concept, like an allegory for depraved imperialist masculinity or whatever... And put in some milking scenes! There's a lot of sadistic torture, but little milking.
Of course, eventually, the agents infiltrate and then launch an all-out assault, turning everyone to hamburger with machine guns. Pretty impressive blending of Hong Kong exploitation esthetic and patriotic anti-Japanese cinema, here.
They machine gun all the milk, if you were wondering what was going to happen there. I think '88-'89 have to be the loosest years for filmmakers. This couldn't have been made before or after, I don't think. It's not even that gratuitous—but just not very good.
This ends with a trope people would know—and I think Guerillas on the Plains 平原游击队 (1955) is the earliest example I can name—of the fighters wasting the commander before he can kill himself. I left the final thank you credits in the clip, too, because they're interesting...
It seems amateurish and the concept is silly, but it's not close to as bad as films of the era could get. It has a plot that's easy to follow and it delivers on girls with machine guns. You can watch it for yourself:
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Coming across Chinese prison fetish videos through social media posts claiming them to be legitimate documentary footage, I scanned through them one night, and contemplated spinning out a thousand words about fetishism of the power of the state itself. Maybe it's there.
They are stranger than I expected. I'm not sure "fetish video" is correct. Most, despite featuring shackles and confinement, don't linger on that aspect, or at least fail, as far as I can tell, to eroticize it. They are heavy on plots intended to produce emotional responses.
They seem, going mostly off my imagination of the latter, closer to morally heavy-handed local state media productions than bondage videos. The episode clipped below is about a city mayor handed the death sentence. She is saved from execution. It is more emotional than erotic.
This is an old piece of industrial boosterism from Wang Xiaodong 王小东, who is identified with what has been called the Industrial Party 工业党. What he advocates is development at any cost, with state resources and direction leading high-tech industrialization. The essay,… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
Competitiveness in an industrial age relies on these factors: making things that others cannot, making things better, and making things cheaper. To do those things relies on skilled technicians, scientists, and workers. China has a good supply of all of them. There are many… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
The next section speaks directly to the split between the Industrial Party and what Wang Xiaodong calls the Sentimental Party, which embraces both the left and right. Although he didn't coin these terms, this essay popularized them.
A 2021 survey in Taiwan found the majority of respondents believed that the Japan Self-Defense Forces would be deployed to save them from the People's Liberation Army. It's possible. However, in this poll, only eleven percent of Japanese respondents agreed with the idea.
Fifty-six percent suggested that logistical support should be the extent of SDF aid. Twenty-seven percent said it would be wrong to work with the American military. Seventy percent suggested that the solution to the Taiwan issue was deepening relations with China.
This reflects thoroughgoing pacifism, I believe, but also fear of breaking with the status quo, perhaps skepticism of American-led foreign policy, and recognition that there's not much in it for the Japanese. Intervention would certainly be a disaster.
On the subsistence of the Japanese on apples, North America is not the right comparison. China loves fruit. These markets are nowhere to be found in Japan. No ladies selling mulberries or rambutan on the street, trucks loaded with pineapple (stuck on a nail, skinned, and bagged).
Look at those peaches! The consumption numbers bear out the conclusion. But, again, China is a continental agricultural superpower. You can't compare it to a temperate, mountainous island chain. That's the final answer: this is life on a string of islands in the North Pacific.
I will attach here another note about dietary conservatism, China vs. Japan. I'm not sure "Westernization" can be quantified, so let's adapt the last term to "dietary diversity." The import supermarket does not exist in Japan (Seijo Ishi doesn't count and Nissin is unique). China… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
I was distracted from my research into the 1995 Ministry of Public Security Notice on Rectification of Drug Rehabilitation Facilities and Kunming heroin markets when this somehow came up in the results: local state monopoly on prostitution, Kunming, 1912-1949.
The system was early on attacked by Confucian societies, merchants, residents, and patriotic women's groups, who demanded that women in the quarter be denied certain hairstyles, as well as unbound feet (they didn't want their daughters mistaken for working girls).
It closed down but eventually re-opened, with more stringent regulation and advanced bureaucratization. State employees administered the brothels. Revenues funded the city. It began to decline in the 1940s when coastal refugees demanded more choice in commercial sex.
Tonight, I enjoyed reading Lin Chengxiang's thesis, "An Epic Poet in the Information Age: Revisiting Haizi at the Intersection of Literature and Science in Postsocialist China." When writing about legal systems engineering and Qian Xuesen, I had not realized he was a key thinker.
Lin lays out Haizi's engagement with Jin Guantao, Alvin Toffler, Hegel, and posthumanism in his academic work, as well as his epic poems. Like Qian, Haizi was interested also in the possibility of qigong and somatic science as more than a metaphor for information theory.
All of this locates Haizi more accurately in the intellectual context of the time. His poetry was informed by currents—cybernetics-enabled interventions in national cultural fever, and qigong-infused takes on three theories fever—that are particularly interesting to me.