The Dali Blues
I spent the weekend attending the Dali Music Festival, an event co-sponsored by a local guesthouse business supposedly interested in purchasing and developing land in the Dali old city. Several of my favorite Kunming bands, as well as a couple of acts I hadn't seen before, played in front of an old temple on Friday and Saturday night.
The promotion couldn't have been better; for a foreigner, that is. The organizers, wishing to attract foreigners to their event, offered the first 100 applicants free transportation and accommodation in the old city. Chinese people weren't necessarily excluded from this event, but the fact that the promotion was publicized entirely in English acted as a limiting factor.
Meanwhile, back in Kunming, a new disco has launched a promotion in which foreigners can literally drink as much as they want for free as long as they sit in the front row. The idea behind this scheme, whether or not is works, is that the mere presence of foreigners will attract more Chinese people.
Quite a few people I've spoken to in Kunming are uneasy with this sort of "affirmative action", if you will. A long-term resident married to a local Chinese woman has vowed to boycott the Kunming venue, citing discrimination. This is a sensitive topic and I can certainly see his point.
But discrimination does exist elsewhere. A beautiful, young woman has a far better chance of being admitted into a choice club in New York and London than does a middle-aged single man. Celebrities, to my knowledge, are often paid large sums of money just to show up places. Private nightclub owners should have some say in controlling which clientele frequent their establishments.
The easier way to handle these issues, I think, is letting the market decide. A far amount of foreigners I know in Kunming don't want, necessarily, to associate with the sort of atmosphere that emerges when foreigners are given free alcohol.
Anyway, Dali was fun. Lots of sunshine, cafe lounging, and nice walks in the countryside. It's easy to see how people find it so...difficult...to leave.
April 13th, 2009 - 16:35
Just because discrimination exists elsewhere doesn’t make it right. And the foreigner fetish is just creepy. I got dragged out to a restaurant in Changsha which wanted to make a TV ad featuring foreigners- why the hell foreigners would know more about Chinese food than Chinese I don’t know, but somehow they felt that showing a foreign presence would get them some kind of cache that would have new customers storming the place…. Wrong and creepy, definitely not getting my support.
April 22nd, 2009 - 22:03
That’s weird idea to use foreign presence to attract customers. I don’t think it would work. By the way, the countryside of Dali is beautiful.