Recycled: Chinese walls 3 【刻章办证发票 13775404001 刻章办证发票 15051157676 刻章办证发票 13775404001 刻章办证发票 15051157676 刻章办证发票 13775404001 刻章办证发票 15051157676】[part of a series, across 2019 / 2022 / 2024]
<from: Recycled: Chinese walls 2 [part of a series, across 2013 / 2022 / 2024]>【BIG-CHARACTER POSTERS dàzìbào 大字报 to SMALL ADVERTISEMENTS xiǎoguǎnggào 小广告 】_ Here is a wall in Chaoyang. ▤
▤ Let me be creative. I could imagine these walls covered completely by black ink and red paper, as in the pictures of Beijing streets from forty, fifty, sixty years ago. I am imagining the Hundred Flowers Campaign, the Cultural Revolution, but also Xidan. These are the wrong walls. They are too young. □ The right to put up big-character posters was once guaranteed by the Constitution. These were the four great freedoms it protected: to speak out openly—dàmíng 大鸣—to air opinions—dàfàng 大放—to debate—dàbiànlùn 大辩论—and to put up dàzìbào 大字报. Red Guards attacked their enemies on the big-character posters. Factions went to war on them. The big-character posters could carry doggerel and caricature. The form was versatile. □ The big-character poster held on past the end of the revolutionary years. Foreign journalists arrived to photograph the Democracy Wall, where students and workers pasted up arguments for competing visions of democracy and Marxism. The city government moved to restrict the big-character posters with bylaws. When this failed, the right to paste up dàzìbào was removed from the Constitution. ▤
▤ These walls are too young. On the gray door are two xiǎoguǎnggào 小广告—small advertisements—painted over a coverup. 刻章办证发票 13775404001 刻章办证发票 15051157676. The services offered are: the forgery of official seals, the counterfeiting of documents, and production of fake receipts. □ There is, as far as I know, no history of xiǎoguǎnggào. I have misplaced the reference, but a note on informal commercial graffiti that I came across yesterday dated the phenomenon to the 1990s. This makes sense. If we think of the form as a short message and phone number scrawled on a wall, rather than taking a more expansive definition, which could include, say, posters on lightposts, it must have arrived after the mobile telephone network. I am only interested in true guerrilla marketing. This form required untraceable SIMs sold out of newspaper kiosks. It required factories in the Pearl River Delta manufacturing cheap handsets. It required a degree of mass technical literacy, as the big-character posters required a degree of mass conventional literacy. □ It seems not to be helpful to ask anyone about commercial graffiti. Most people barely remember their first kiss, let alone when they first saw bànzhèng 办证 written in black spray paint on a wall. □ I have combed through photographs of Shenzhen and Beijing and Shanghai in the 1990s. The walls are not bare in those pictures. There are legal billboards, as well as the remnants of revolutionary slogans. There are other types of commercial graffiti, noting that a particular rice noodle shop can be found with a left turn and a walk of fifty meters, or that a car wash operates up the block, but I cannot find the xiǎoguǎnggào format seen here, which is, unlike those signs, not connected to a location but to a mobile telephone. □ The late 1990s is a reasonable date. □ I could share my own memories.1 I feel that the xiǎoguǎnggào form peaked in 2010 and has since receded. □ The era of the big-character poster and era of the small advertisement never overlapped, thankfully. The dignity of attacks on bureaucrats and calls for democracy were preserved from scrawled advertisements for forged documents, erotic massage, and impotence medication. ▤
▤ Here is a wall in Chaoyang. It must be near the gray wall in the picture that begins the entry. I can guess that it might be across from the south gate of the People’s Daily compound. □ Again, I can say this: the effect of gray on gray is very beautiful. This is a painting. ▤
▤ But the reason that the small advertisement peaked a decade ago is, I believe, not down to any municipal bylaw enforcement or editorials against making the city ugly. Local authorities painted over xiǎoguǎnggào, but it does not seem, based on the fact that the problem grew for a decade, that they often went to the trouble of tracing numbers or locking up offenders. □ The big-character poster had to be shut down through a change to the Constitution, jail terms, and violence, while small advertisements were tolerated. Maybe this doesn’t require an explanation, but I will give one: expression that challenges the authority of the Party and state will be erased, while everything else is usually tolerated. □ The xiǎoguǎnggào disappeared, or are in the process of disappearing, only because the business has moved online. Artisanal counterfeiters can’t compete with industrial operations. It is strange to imagine that they will one day be as rare as the scraps of revolutionary slogans on old dormitory walls. ▤
Here, I might insert my own stories about xiǎoguǎnggào. I will restrict myself to one. Many years ago, I tagged along with a young woman that tried to buy herself a fake diploma. She was offered a job that required one. She had a two-year degree, but that wasn’t enough. She told the company’s human resources department that she was within a year of finishing a degree at K■■■■■■. Based on that, the hired her, and she decided to see if she could get a forged certificate to cover the lie. I walked with her one morning up and down the P■■■■■■■■ Square, trying to find the right fake document provider from their xiǎoguǎnggào. This proved more difficult than I imagined. Although she had lived for several years in X■■■■■, she struggled to understand the local dialect. That was all the forgers seemed to speak. We eventually took a bus out to meet one of them in front of a zoo in the suburbs. He turned out to be unable to provide a forged diploma from the correct school. He pitched her on other schools she could have attended. Another forger, found from a big splash of yellow paint on the zoo gate, tried the same routine. Although the young woman bravely resolved to tell her employer the truth, she never bothered, and they never followed up. Before it became an issue, she moved back to H■■■■■.