Results tagged “capitalism”

Tonight could have been the night that changed your life. The (International) Noise Conspiracy, "one of the wildest and most uncompromising live acts out there" flying in from Sweden, were to take total charge over the Yuyintang stage, but thanks to certain National Day-flavored machinations, it was cancelled.

You know what else was special about yesterday? After 12 years in the country, Gucci has finally opened a flagship store and it's located in Shanghai, according to Wallpaper magazine. The new flagship takes up two floors in the Golden Eagle Center on Shaanxi Bei Lu and showcases the company's full range of menswear, womenswear and accessories. It joins 28 of its smaller but no less opulent sister stores in China. Wallpaper can't help but throw a comment out about how crazy it is that Gucci's spread out so much in this "communist" country. Funny. We thought jokes about the facade of communism in the PRC were soooo last decade.

Screw Shakespeare and forget that Chinese opera business - right now, preparations are underway to bring a sing-song version of Karl Marx's Das Kapital to the Shanghai theater.

Chinese state-owned media have been going on ad nauseum lately marking the 30th anniversary of China's market reforms. When Deng Xiaoping launched his open door policy, he undoubted had this village in mind, Huaxi, 100 miles north of Shanghai in Jiangsu Province, which is commonly known today as China's richest village. Melissa Chan of Al Jazeera visited the village, and found people there living in huge houses complete with all the latest home appliances and cars and what have you. Life appears to be so good there we ourselves were momentarily tempted to move there.

This latest piece of excellent work from Tony Cheng of Al-Jazeera has some eye-opening footage of what life looks like in Nanjie village (南街) in Henan province, supposedly the last place in China that is run along Maoist lines, where everything has been renationalised and collectivised. The clip reveals that the "village" is really a town that doesn't look all too bad at all, but it also does leave us with a few questions in our minds because the last time Nanjie hit the news, it was said to have finally succumbed to capitalism after it was revealed by the Chinese press to have chalked up arrears of 1 billion yuan and went into bankruptcy.