Adlerography

Good news!

The kind folks over at the The Bygone Bureau have asked me to write for their travel section while I’m abroad, and my first article for the site was posted today!

While you’re there, poke around the rest of the site.   It’s full of smart, irreverent, and informed critiques and comments on modern life.

More writing for *this* site, too, soon.  I promise.

A hearty ‘ni hao’ to you, from Taichung, Taiwan.  Taichung is the birthplace of my interest in Sister Cities (I spent last summer here studying Chinese), so it occupies a special place in my heart.

I made it here last weekend after a busy, enlightening week in Gunsan.  In the next day or two I’ll post a write-up of the Gunsan experience, focusing on the visit’s most important aspects as they pertain to my research.

Also, there has been a conspicuous lack of new photos on the site.  With all the time I spend on the computer writing, making contacts and such for this project, at the end of the day I have little desire to spend even longer camped in front of the screen filtering and editing photos.  I’ll try to find a way to remedy this situation soon, because keeping up a steady stream of good photos is important to me.

So, stay tuned for more written work, and hopefully some new images, soon.

On the morning of Monday, September 22, I boarded a flight from Santa Barbara to San Francisco, where I would then transfer to a plane bound for Seoul.  On this small upstate flight, literally the first leg of a three-month journey in search of knowledge about the international Sister Cities movement, I was confronted with a blast of pessimism.

“Sister Cities don’t do anything,” my seat-mate assured me, her eyes dimly narrowed as she brushed her hand through the air with a dismissive wave.   A career employee of the San Francisco city government, she followed up by saying “they’re nice, but they’re all surface”.  Knowing that Sister Cities is, in the States at least, a movement sustained at the grassroots level in cooperation with municipal government, I probed her for comments on how she thinks municipal governments truly function. 

Again she framed her answer with her hands.  Palms held parallel, three inches apart, she said that that there is an upper echelon of politicians and decision makers.  They make self-serving choices during short political terms.  Below, her palms spread to two feet apart, is a busy hive of workers who do the actual work but are treated as ‘drones’.   They are dedicated to their jobs, but ultimately go unrecognized for decades of steadfast service, as the political tides swirl above and draw all the attention and credit.  Her own experience came from working for the city comptroller; she purported to have improved payroll accuracy for the city from 50% to 98% over twenty-plus years of service, yet she doubted she would ever get recognized for her contribution.

As she continued on decrying the plight of the drone, I thought to myself: “If she, as an individual, has truly made such a difference, then why does she not believe in the abilities of Sister Cities to effect change?”.  From its inception, the movement was designed to empower individuals; some founders explicitly stated that Sister Cities should even encourage citizens to circumvent the workings of the highest level of government.   Furthermore, the mission statement of Sister Cities International is to “Promote peace through mutual respect, understanding, & cooperation - one individual, one community at a time.” .   What was it that caused her to, despite her own personal contributions, still have little faith in the power of individuals?

 
I do not assume I can reconcile her misgivings with the reality of Sister Cities in this single entry.   For one thing, working only to reconcile these perspectives entails an assumption that she is wrong and Sister Cities is right.  Taking a mission statement as proof of effectiveness lacks the intellectual rigor I hope to achieve.  Rather, I raise her perspective because it inspires a good, honest start to my inquiry.  To what extent is her skepticism deserved?  Is the inertia of government institutions so strong that individuals or those outside the so-called upper echelon cannot have an influence?  Especially important considering Sister Cities’ international scope is the question: does the change-making ability of individuals and those ‘outside the system’ depend on a country’s particular political system?

Our conversation also stimulated thoughts about local or individual reactions to exterior non-local or global forces.  In line with her frustrations towards elected officials, she believed that people are self-serving, and will always first look out for themselves or their constituencies.  I asked her if she thought California’s Proposition 11, on the ballot for November, which would transfer redistricting power from the hands of elected officials to that of an independently selected commission, would make any difference in this regard.  She thought that, should the proposition pass, it would simply put the pandering to one’s base in the hands of a different set of elites than before.  Her comment was that “as the world gets smaller, people get more insular”. 

Her “small world” comment is what really caught my ear.   Because my proposal for this research project centers around Sister Cities and their place within the processes of globalization, I’ve been tuned in to some of the critics who try to describe globalization by categorizing the world by size.  One of globalization’s most popular observers—Thomas L. Friedman - comments in the early pages of The Lexus and the Olive Tree That  the current phase of globalization has shrunk the world from a size “medium” to a size “small” (FYI: the “large” to “medium” shrinkage occurred in an earlier, pre-World War I phase of globalization).  An extreme simplification of his argument is that globalization is defined by interchanges of information, finance, and human populations, that these interchanges now reach to every corner of the globe, and they are sped along by ever-powerful and ever-accessible technology.  These processes are all based on global free-market capitalism. The effect is that we are exposed to “some things that we’ve never seen before and some things that are so new we don’t’ even understand them yet” (p. xix).  This idea of globalization forcing us to confront the unfamiliar always gets my attention.

Using size to describe globalization also appears in the most recent issue of the Economist; the magazine kicks off a special report on globalization with an article titled “A Bigger World”.  (So, big or small—which is it?)  The article considers multinational firms like Lenovo (China) and Tata (India), which are aware of the stultifying power the unfamiliar can have on a firm’s economic prowess; to that end, the authors find the prospects for these firms’ competitiveness to be promising because they “[make a huge effort to] integrate the different cultures within the firm,” or in the case of Tata, have a multicultural origin “which makes it more sensitive to cultural differences than many of its peers in developed countries.” While the Economist authors treat companies and corporations—not countries or communities- as the primary actors who face challenges and opportunities when confronted by globalization (this is a whole separate debate, which I’ll get to in the future”), I think the lesson remains the same for all: the ability to cope with globalization is closely related to integration with and openness to the rest of the world.   I plan to use first-hand research (beginning in earnest today, as I head town to Tacoma’s South Korean Sister City of Gunsan!) to further explore this claim.  

This is a test-test-test post for the blog, which I will be using again soon.

Sorry I didn’t say anything during week one.

It’s been an incredibly busy time here, lately.  For the last 12 days my parents have been visiting, and it was a fantastic visit.  Now that they’re gone I must focus on my end-of-semester workload, which is going to be quite hellish.

So, no new photos until maybe next week, which will be my last in Beijing.  I should be able to manage getting a few more photos up before I leave, but there’s enough left over that I’ll keep posting China shots even after I’m back in the States.   More on that as it develops.

Thanks for your understanding!

And wish me luck.

-Daniel

Hello, you blog-reader, you.

A brief status update.

Last week’s photos were taken in Beijing, on a day of touring Hutongs (courtyard homes), and the official governing center of Buddhism in China.

This week we only have three photos, all from my trip to Wutaishan.

Why only three photos? Because this week, I have some very special guests coming to visit– my parents! We will be heading down South to Guilin and Yangshuo, before coming back and spending some time in Beijing. So, with my time taken up by hosting/guiding/exploring, along with typical end-of-semester work and pressures, don’t be surprised if site updates are in shorter supply.

That’s all!

Pretend I’m giving you a big hugggggggggg (cause I will for reals in 25 days!)

-Daniel

Good morning to you,

For those have been following along with the blog, you know that for the last 4 weeks I’ve been showing pictures from my trip along the Silk Road. Now that I’ve shown all the images I want to share, it’s time to switch gears.

This weekend I went to the Beijing zoo.  This week’s pictures are from the big cat room, and I think they do a pretty fair job of representing the mood of the zoo as a whole.  Through Friday, you can see for yourself!

Another explanatory blog post next week when I do a new set.

Only 39 more days here,

-Daniel

Oh hi again,

Just a quick update to keep things clear.

Why ‘mid-way’? Two reasons.

The first! I am mid-way through posting shots from my Silk Road trip.  I’ve decided to extend the set a bit, from the originally promised three weeks, to three and a half!  That’s because this week I’ll only be able to post Monday through Wednesday (off for *another* trip, this time to a place called Wutaishan).  So, after one week of Xi’an photos, and a week of Xiahe photos, it’s time to head to Kashgar.  This week’s three photos were taken in the Kashgar old town, and next week’s five are from the livestock market.

And the second reason!  I’m more or less half way through my time in Beijing, which means I’m well on my way to finishing this whole crazy journey!  I won’t dwell on it here, but I just wanted to point out that I’m more than 70% of the way through, which means at some point the flow of photos will be affected in some way.

But until then, keep checking back!

Lots of <3 and thanks for your comments.

-D

Howdy do,

Everything Adlerography-related seems pretty stable right now. Flickr’s accessible, I have a good amount of pictures ready to show you, and more time than before to access the internet.

With all those stabilizing factors in mind, I’d like to lay out my game plan for the next few weeks!

It all starts with my favorite photos from my two-week trip along the Silk Road. I began in Beijing, and worked my way west: first to Xi’an, a brief stop in Lanzhou followed by a two-day stay in Xiahe, then several days traveling while stopping in Dunhuang, after that a flight over to Kashgar, then back to Urumqi and finally a return flight back to Beijing. These should all be fairly easy to find on a map!

The three most photogenic places were Xi’an, Xiahe, and Kashgar. Thus, for the next three weeks I will have week-long sets of photos from each! It’ll follow the order of my progress on the road, so this week it’s Xi’an.

Beijing has also given me some good photo ops, and this weekend I’m going to spend the night on the great wall, so you can look forward to shots from those places once the Silk Road series is through!

Thanks for coming!

-Daniel

Good news! I’m back from the Silk Road, all in one piece, with some good photos in hand.  Now that I seem to be uploading pictures without much hassle, this week I’ll get through a few of the Beijing ones I had saved up, and start posting Silk Road pictures next week.

Not much else to report, except that I’m really glad to be getting the Adlerography ball rolling again.  Cross fingers that nothing else gets in the way!

<3,

Daniel