What have we got here? "Night in the City," "Circle Game" - oh, "From Both Sides, Now." I'm really glad somebody requested that, because that's a very new song, and I've been driving everybody crazy by playing it twice and three times a night. Gene: Want to do some of the requested songs? Joni in conversation with Gene Shay, "Folklore Program" March 12, 1967: Well something's lost, but something's gained They shake their heads, they say I've changed It’s somehow unlikely that those on the other end of the production line, consigned to dipping snowflakes in red-swamped workshops for us to pick up at the checkout for 99p, feel quite the same way.I've looked at clouds from both sides now According to Cheng Yaping, co-founder of the Boyang Craft Factory, who runs a stall decked out like a miniature winter wonderland: “Sitting here every day, being able to look at all these beautiful decorations, is really great for your mood.” The beaming sales reps of Yiwu market couldn’t sound happier with their life sentence of eternal Christmastime. Santa Claus, says the Economist, is now better known to most Chinese people than Jesus. Still, according to Cai Qingliang, vice chairman of the Yiwu Christmas Products Industry Association, domestic appetite is on the rise, as China embraces the annual festival of Mammon. Photograph: Dan Williams/Unknown FieldsĪiming at the lower end of the market, Yiwu’s sales thrived during the recession, as the world shopped for cut-price festive fun, but international sales are down this year. Santa hats galore … inside one of Yiwu’s Christmas showrooms. Yiwu market, by comparison, stocks a mere 400,000 products. On Alibaba alone, you can order 1.4m different Christmas decorations to be delivered to your door at the touch of a button. It might look like a wondrous bounty, but the market’s glory days seem to have passed: it’s now losing out to internet giants like Alibaba and Made In China. Some of it seems lost in translation: there are sheep in Santa hats and tartan-embroidered reindeer, and of course lots of that inexplicable Chinese staple, Father Christmas playing the saxophone. There are corridors lined with nothing but tinsel, streets throbbing with competing LED light shows, stockings of every size, plastic Christmas trees in blue and yellow and fluorescent pink, plastic pine cones in gold and silver. District Two is where Christmas can be found. The complex was declared by the UN to be the “largest small commodity wholesale market in the world” and the scale of the operation necessitates a kind of urban plan, with this festival of commerce organised into five different districts. The two men produce 5,000 red snowflakes a day, and get paid around £300 a month. It is a heaving multistorey monument to global consumption, as if the contents of all the world’s landfill sites had been dug-up, re-formed and meticulously catalogued back into 62,000 booths. There are whole streets in the labyrinthine complex devoted to artificial flowers and inflatable toys, then come umbrellas and anoraks, plastic buckets and clocks. It is a pound shop paradise, a sprawling trade show of everything in the world that you don’t need and yet may, at some irrational moment, feel compelled to buy. Packaged up in plastic bags, their gleaming red snowflakes hang alongside a wealth of other festive paraphernalia across town in the Yiwu International Trade Market, aka China Commodity City, a 4m sq m wonder-world of plastic tat. It’s a tiring job and they probably won’t do it again next year: once they’ve earned enough money for Wei to get married, they plan on returning home to Guizhou and hopefully never seeing a vat of red powder again. His dad wears a Santa hat (not for the festive spirit, he says, but to stop his hair from turning red) and they both get through at least 10 face masks a day, trying not to breathe in the dust. In the process, the two of them end up dusted from head to toe in fine crimson powder. Together with his father, he works long days in the red-splattered lair, taking polystyrene snowflakes, dipping them in a bath of glue, then putting them in a powder-coating machine until they turn red – and making 5,000 of the things every day. “Maybe it’s like New Year for foreigners,” says 19-year-old Wei, a worker who came to Yiwu from rural Guizhou province this year, speaking to Chinese news agency Sina. Wei gets through at least 10 face masks each day, trying not to breathe in the cloud of red dust.
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