Moganshan

[TB-Racing]

Planning a run out to Moganshan Lodge (23-25 November)

CANCELLED and postponed until further notice.........

[TB-Racing]

Met the biker group going from Beijing to Madrid (Moganshan Mountains) at The M-Lodge: http://www.beijing-madrid.com
They picked up some brand-new CJ's to take on the ride, some of the CJ bikes had just a tad over 200'ks on the clock, riding Shanghai - Moganshan for the first repair and pit-stop..
As always with the POS Chang-Jiang bikes, electrical problems needed attention......

[TB-Racing]

The Spanish biker group..... CJ's, BMW 1200GS / 650GS and a Jialing JH600 (brand-new).....

[TB-Racing]

The Beijing - Madrid ride tour organiser: http://www.chinatierradeaventura.es

[ZMC888]

People always have these crackpot ideas. Enfields in India CJ750 in China.
Why? Because it is the most famous locally made bike. I'm like 'is it actually a good bike?' No it's a POS then the question is why not choose a bike that is best for the conditions?

[MJH]

Those bikes are interesting they have allot of character.
Luca Bar from Bar -Design has a concept bike based on that engine that is inspiring.
http://www.bar-design.net/portfolio/...CYCLE_2012.pdf
He also has a concept in the above portfolio for the Ducati 1100 Monster, that Honda ran with on its VTR250 with the VTR250F.


Some other stuff too equally as interesting.

[TB-Racing]

Great weekend trail riding between Moganshan - Anji - Huzhou, no tourist groups in this part of the mountain range....

[TB-Racing]

Not starting a discussion, just posting a MGS related story here.

A Briton’s Bitter Farewell to China Echoes Loudly


The New York Times (Published: June 14 / 2013)
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/15/wo...&_r=0&ref=asia


“Modern day mainland Chinese society is focused on one object: money and the acquisition thereof.” MARK KITTO


MOGANSHAN, China — MARK KITTO is still here. But he is leaving soon, he swears. It will happen sometime this summer, he said, after a final road trip with his family to the outer reaches of the Chinese empire, where two decades ago as a British soldier he joined a 59-day expedition to cross the Taklamakan Desert.


Mark Kitto last month mapped out a final road trip with his family to western China before he planned to leave the country, his home for 16 years.
The furniture has already been removed from the home he rebuilt atop this bamboo-cloaked mountain three hours from Shanghai. And his Cantonese wife, Joanna Kitto, is handing day-to-day management of their restaurant and three atmospheric guesthouses to others.


Many foreigners in China think Mr. Kitto left the country last summer. But Mr. Kitto, 46, one of the better-known foreign entrepreneurs of his generation in China, is only now making good on the promise that he set forth in a provocative essay titled “You’ll Never Be Chinese.” It was published in August in Prospect, a British literary magazine, and it was Mr. Kitto’s farewell to a time when he made Shanghai and then Moganshan his adopted homes, all after being born Cornish, growing up in Wales, attending college in London and completing service in the Welsh Guards.


In the essay, he laid out why, after 16 years in this country, he would be heading back to his homeland. He wrote about the hardships of sustaining a business here, of a government that sacrifices the well-being of its people to stay in power and finally of very personal concerns over raising his two children, ages 8 and 10, in China.


“I wanted China to be the place where I made a career and lived my life,” he wrote. “I have fallen out of love, woken from my China Dream.”


The dream still looks rather attractive from the perch where Mr. Kitto recently had lunch with a couple of visitors — an outdoor table at a local restaurant with panoramic views of the valley. He pointed to a half-finished Buddhist temple below. Local officials were building it to attract tourist revenue, he said, even though no monks lived in the valley.


But back to the essay: “After that article came out, there was quite a lot of reaction,” he said.


Mr. Kitto’s article became widely circulated among expatriates in China, forcing some to question the basic assumptions they had made in trying to build a life here. Others asked whether Mr. Kitto had been unrealistic in what he had expected from China. And what exactly did Mr. Kitto mean by saying “You’ll never be Chinese?” What foreigner expected to become Chinese anyway?


But Mr. Kitto seems to have been a harbinger. In the months afterward, other expatriates wrote essays about leaving China. The departures appear to have accelerated this year, as people who moved here around 2008, in the prelude to the Summer Olympics, cycle out. Foreigners also increasingly fear the pollution in northern China, among the worst in the world, and the shortcomings in water and food safety.


The exodus seems to be particularly pronounced among expatriates who, like Mr. Kitto, are immersed in the literary and journalistic scene. They have all prided themselves on being engaged with China in a much deeper way than your average corporate employee posted here by a multinational company. They are descendants of the kinds of foreigners that the historian Jonathan D. Spence wrote about in his first book, “To Change China”: students of the language, entrepreneurs, explorers.


“I think Mark sees himself in the continuum of British adventurers in China,” said Harvey Thomlinson, a publisher in Hong Kong who owns the non-American rights to Mr. Kitto’s memoir, “China Cuckoo.”


And Britons do have a colorful history here, whether adventurers like Sir Edmund Backhouse, who claimed to be an insider in the Qing imperial court and a lover of the Empress Dowager Cixi, or the missionaries who built stone villas atop Moganshan in the early 20th century. Each generation of foreigners has a different character, much of it dependent on the changes in China.


“I think Beijing’s entered a new stage in its development,” said Alex Pearson, a longtime British expatriate, bookstore owner and friend of Mr. Kitto who is also leaving China this summer. “You have a new kind of foreigner coming, and young Chinese with different goals. It’s a different vibe than when I came here.”


MR. KITTO’S history here is well documented. He first embraced China while a student at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Then there was the crossing of the Taklamakan in 1993, in a camel caravan led by another British adventurer, Charles Blackmore. But Mr. Kitto is best known for publishing in the late 1990s and early 2000s an authorized expatriate magazine in three Chinese cities — unheard of for a foreigner. The profitable venture was seized by officials in 2004, he said, and Mr. Kitto retreated to Moganshan to start another China career.


Then Mr. Kitto wrote of leaving Moganshan in what he had intended to be his final column for Prospect. Officials in Zhejiang Province took it personally and started an inquiry. Mr. Kitto was in Shanghai en route to the United States when the police questioned his wife.


“She was exploding; she was screaming on the phone: ‘What have you gone and done now? I’ve got the police calling me,'” he said. “She’s Cantonese. She does get excited.”


By the time Mr. Kitto returned a week later, things had calmed down, but the local officials were still determined to find out why he wanted to leave, he said. In part, they were following orders from provincial officials who had apparently become concerned about the potential impact of Mr. Kitto’s essay on foreign investment.


TO a degree, Mr. Kitto’s disenchantment did arise from business regulations. Mr. Kitto said one of his gripes was that you could never truly build a long-term business here without the fear that officials could take it from you at any time. Mr. Kitto and his wife, for instance, can never legally own the land on which their Moganshan homes stand.


But there were more fundamental issues. “Modern day mainland Chinese society is focused on one object: money and the acquisition thereof,” Mr. Kitto wrote. In another section, he wrote, “The government is so scared of the people it prefers not to lead them,” and “the Party only steps to the fore where its power or personal wealth is under direct threat.”


The overriding reason Mr. Kitto offered for his departure was to give his children “a decent education,” away from the test-oriented curriculums of Chinese schools and their propagandistic history lessons.


Mr. Kitto said he stood by the essay, no matter the controversies, and had mapped out his re-entry to England. The family plans to live in a cottage that Mr. Kitto’s father owned in a rural area of Norfolk that is now popular with vacationers.


In some ways, he said, the place is like Moganshan. “It is very beautiful. It’s quiet except for weekends in the summer,” Mr. Kitto said. And from there, Mr. Kitto hopes to do marketing for local businesses and to edit English translations of Chinese books, as he recently did with “The Civil Servant’s Notebook” by Wang Xiaofang, published by Penguin.


Mr. Kitto said that his wife would continue to oversee the business in Moganshan, and that the family would travel back on occasion — at least for as long as the Moganshan homes stay in their hands.


“One of my main points was: Look at the history of foreigners in China,” he said. “The only foreigners who have made a fortune in China are the traders. Buy and sell. It’s what the Chinese do, too. Everything’s short term.”