Dispatch #34
Read about South Korea’s experiment with social housing, the neon rebellion of China’s shamate subculture, and why West Java’s tremors signal urgent seismic risks.
Hello and welcome to Translator’s weekly Dispatch, where we bring you summaries of compelling stories written beyond the Anglosphere.
This week, from South Korea, an interview explores how the collapse of the long-term lease system has exposed tenants to sudden financial risks – and why advocates believe social housing could offer a way forward.
From China, we revisit the world of the shamate, the flamboyant tribe of migrant workers whose impossible hairstyles and neon dyes turned factory-town survival into a form of visibility and resistance.
And from Indonesia, a report investigates the tremors rattling West Java, arguing that these quakes reveal deeper vulnerabilities in the region’s fault lines and raise urgent questions about disaster preparedness.
We hope you enjoy the read.
P.S.: In the meantime, tell us what you like and dislike, themes you’d like to see explored from the perspective of different linguistic media landscapes. And, as ever, feel free to recommend specific pieces we should summarise for our Dispatches, or translate in full for the magazine.
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Housing for All? Korea’s quiet experiment
The collapse of the long-term lease system has left many Koreans exposed to unexpected risks. In an interview with Slow News, Choi Kyung-ho discusses how social housing might change that.
In South Korea, housing is not merely shelter; it is status, obsession, and for many, the axis around which life itself revolves. The country’s signature jeonse lease system, with long-term deposits paid to the owner in exchange for rent-free occupancy, with the original deposit repaid at the end of the term after having been invested elsewhere by the owner, once seemed a brilliant financial workaround in a high-priced market. But as Choi Kyung-ho, author of Maybe, Social Housing (2024), argues in his interview with Minno for Slow News, the system was always a fragile construct, dependent on the promise of endlessly rising real-estate prices. Once the market wavered, tenants’ deposits became vulnerable, fraud proliferated and homes became associated with financial risk rather than security.
Choi’s verdict is blunt: jeonse has reached the end of its life. And yet, from this twilight, he sees a faint but vital dawn: social housing. The “maybe” in his book title is not mere humility: it is a reflection of Korea’s reality, where social housing represents less than 0.1 percent of total housing stock, compared to 30 percent in the Netherlands or 25 percent in Austria. In the interview, Choi insists that its potential lies not in volume but in philosophy: housing conceived as a social good, rather than a speculative asset.
The conversation reads like a meditation on desire itself. In Korea, a home represents class, identity, even destiny. Where one bought an apartment in the 1990s can still define one’s social position decades later. Choi observes that politicians, intellectuals and citizens alike bow before the altar of real estate, often in ways both absurd and tragic. The interview recalls a notorious statement from a former minister: “I just love the land,” a remark derided at the time yet revealing of a national truth. Choi argues that this fervour, so deeply embedded, makes social housing a radical proposition, not simply a policy intervention, but a cultural one.
What, exactly, is social housing? Choi is precise: it is housing that “realises social value,” created by social enterprises, cooperatives and community organisations that balance financial sustainability with communal purpose. In Europe, such models are mainstream, with familiar labels like “Housing for All” in Denmark. Choi’s own coinage, Dure Housing, harks back to Korea’s pre-colonial cooperative traditions, imagining a network of shared responsibility and mutual aid restored to the modern housing sector.
Yet the interview is far from utopian. Choi candidly recounts the practical obstacles: disputes among residents, noise conflicts, requests for neighbours to leave, and even construction defects. Social housing, he notes, is not magically immune to human quarrels or material failure. Moreover, the sector lacks public support; its official budget is literally zero, forcing providers to cobble together resources from adjacent programs. Compared to the extraordinary privileges once extended to private developers, land expropriation rights, tax incentives and generous financing, social housing operates at a severe disadvantage. Collaboration with the state is inevitable, Choi argues, but autonomy is equally essential if social housing is to cultivate its own identity.
The interview also explores lessons from abroad. While Dutch, Austrian or Danish models cannot be transplanted wholesale, Choi believes Korea can adapt elements such as long-term, low-interest financing and cooperative governance. More importantly, Korea must nurture its own cultural and historical traditions of communal living, even if those roots were disrupted by colonial history.
Why persist in this fragile experiment? Choi’s answer is simple and disarming: because desire builds markets, but hope builds worlds. Jeonse embodied desire; raw, speculative, corrosive. Social housing embodies hope; the hope of living together differently, of making shelter a source of community rather than profit. The interview portrays social housing not as a cure-all, but as a seed of possibility in Korea’s darkest housing landscape.
For anyone fatigued by news of skyrocketing rents, endless speculation, and systemic inequities, Choi’s reflections offer more than policy prescriptions, they offer a vision. Even a “maybe,” he insists, can point toward a dawn.
Original article (“전세의 황혼, 사회주택의 새벽”) by Minno was first published in Korean on 4 June 2025.
It is available here.
Slow News, founded in 2014, is an alternative media outlet dedicated to exploring the structure and essence of news, going beyond the rush of breaking headlines. With over 500 contributors, it produces in-depth analysis, context-rich reporting and solutions-oriented journalism, while fostering open discussion and debate.
Summary by TMH
Shamate: The tribe of Chinese migrant workers
In the dusty streets of China’s factory towns, a generation of rural migrants found belonging in impossible hairstyles and neon dye. The shamates were never just a subculture; they were survival made visible.
In the heart of southern China’s factory belt, lies Shipai, the largest urban village in Guangzhou. Here amid grey dormitories and dust-choked streets, a subculture once flourished that looked nothing like the muted tones of its surroundings. Young domestic migrants, teenagers and twenty-somethings who had left mountain villages with little money and fewer options, turned to neon-dyed hair, sequinned vests and gravity-defying bangs as both a shield and an identity. They called themselves shamates.
Inma Escribano’s chronicle for the Spanish-language publication Revista Late tells their story with intimacy and grit, weaving portraits of the individuals who made this fleeting movement a form of survival. “An urban tribe whose name is a phonetic interpretation of ‘SMART’ in Mandarin,” to him they’re more than an aesthetic rebellion. Shamates are a declaration: we are here.
The article begins with Lan, once a proud member of the tribe, now 26 years old and returning for a last time to his former look: bubblegum-pink hair, sequins, worn jeans. (The article is interspersed with Escribano’s own photographs of the phenomenon). On Shipai’s streets, people still recognise him instantly, pointing and taking pictures. But this return is only temporary, a farewell. Lan has long since set aside his shamate persona, though it once gave him the strength to endure the isolating life of a teenage migrant worker.
His story is emblematic of millions. At 14, Lan left his Guizhou village because his family couldn’t afford school. Factories rejected him for being underage and undocumented until one glassworks finally took him in, apparently blind to the danger of putting a child near burning hot sheets of molten glass. He worked gruelling hours, fearing that a single accident could cost him a limb and any chance of building a future. At night, he shared a cramped dorm with seven others, their faces lit by cell phone screens. It was on one of those nights that he stumbled across Luofuxing, the “father of the shamates”, in the video platform Kuaishou (what the article terms “the Chinese version of TikTok”).
Luofuxing had once migrated to Shipai himself, and in response to the monotony of factory life, he invented a style: hair sculpted into impossible forms, colours borrowed from anime and punk. His defiance spread quickly across China’s industrial towns, attracting more than 200,000 followers at its peak. For migrants like Lan, shamates offered not just a fashion statement but a family.
Shipai, as Escribano describes it, is the perfect backdrop for such a movement. By day, it is a district of relentless labour: saws shrieking in open workshops, dust rising from unpaved sidewalks. By night, it transforms into a makeshift carnival. Vendors push skewers of meat, techno booms from battered speakers, smoke curls into the low, grey skyline. Amid this chaos, shamates gathered: on Sundays they could be found in parks, at skating rinks, in karaoke bars, turning drab industrial towns into temporary stages of colour.
But movements like this do not last long in a country wary of the unsanctioned. Over time, the shamates dwindled. Friends married or moved away. Authorities shuttered their meeting spots and checked IDs in their rented apartments, sending undocumented workers back to their provinces. A culture that once seemed unstoppable began to fade, until today it survives mostly in memory and scattered photographs.
Escribano introduces us to Liu, a barber whose salon profited during the shamate boom of 2014 and 2015. An internal migrant like them, Liu never joined the tribe; but his business thrived on their demand for wild styles. He recalls lines that stretched outside his shop, entire weekends of cutting, teasing, dyeing. The shamates, he admits, were never dangerous – just lonely children raised by grandparents while their parents laboured far away. Styling their hair was a way to matter, if only for a moment.
Another portrait in the article is that of a woman named Beibei, who left her Miao village at the age of 16 for the garment factories of Shipai. Her wages barely covered rent and food, but Sundays offered escape. She experimented with shamate styles, rainbow streaks, glitter, mash-ups of punk and traditional dress. For her, the look was temporary, a weekend indulgence rather than a full identity. Now married young and raising a child in a cramped apartment shared with another family, she laughs at her old photos but recognises what they meant: a way to feel alive in a life built on repetition and sacrifice.
The strength of Escribano’s piece lies in how it connects these lives to broader realities. China’s economic boom rests on the shoulders of 280 million rural migrants, the article notes, a third of its workforce. They leave behind villages where there is no future, only to arrive in cities that treat them as disposable labour. In such spaces, something like the shamates is not frivolous but essential, a way to assert individuality in environments designed to erase it.
Lan, Beibei and Liu all show us different facets of this story: rebellion, pragmatism, nostalgia. Their voices are clear, their circumstances harsh. The dream of shamates has already receded. Lan has cut his hair short, deleted his photos and now dresses like a real estate agent, chasing stability. The skating rink where he once ruled is shuttered. Beibei, now a mother, sees her days blur into routine. Liu continues his work, pragmatic as ever.
And yet, as Escribano makes plain, the shamates left an imprint. They turned hair into armour, parks into stages, Sundays into brief sanctuaries. They remind us that even in the most constrained conditions, people will find ways to resist invisibility. Escribano’s article restores dignity to stories too often dismissed as eccentric or marginal. And it asks a simple question: what becomes of those who shine so brightly, if only for a moment, against the grey?
Original article (“Shamate, la tribu de los trabajadores migrantes chinos”) by Inma Escribano was first published in Spanish in December 2024.
It is available here.
Revista LATE is a non-profit network of Spanish-speaking journalists, founded in Latin America in 2017, that investigates and reports on important stories after the initial news has broken, focusing on issues like corruption, organised crime, environmental destruction and human rights abuses.
Summary by TMH
Cracks beneath the surface
Why West Java’s tremors – felt from the city of Bandung to Bekasi – demand urgent attention to Indonesia’s fault lines.
It began with a shiver beneath the surface.
At 12:28pm on 20 August 2025, a shallow magnitude 1.7 earthquake rattled Bandung Regency in Indonesia’s West Java. Hours later, a stronger 4.9-magnitude quake shook Bekasi closer to the capital city of Jakarta, and felt as far as Karawang. Then, at 8:16pm, a smaller aftershock struck nearby Purwakarta. The day’s tremors were unsettling, but not entirely unexpected. West Java, home to more than 10 active faults, is one of the most seismically restless regions on Indonesia’s most populated island.
This piece from BandungBergerak.id by Muhammad Akmal Firmansyah steps back from the immediate jolts to look more closely at the complex network of faultlines which criss cross the region – and what the pattern of recent earthquakes may be telling us.
The 20 August quakes were traced to two major faults: the Lembang Fault near northern Bandung, and the Baribis Fault, which runs from Bekasi through to Cirebon. The Lembang Fault has a documented history of causing damage, even with small tremors. “It’s showing signs of activity,” said Teguh Rahayu, head of BMKG Bandung, “the public should remain vigilant and strengthen mitigation efforts.”
The Lembang Fault runs for 25 to 30 kilometres and cuts through a string of towns and villages, such as Pagerwangi, Cihideung and Cimareme. Its proximity to central Bandung city makes it especially dangerous. Loose sediment and soft soil in parts of the city – the districts of Gedebage, Turangga and Ujung Berung in particular – make these zones especially vulnerable to shock.
Meanwhile, the stronger quake in Bekasi was attributed to the Baribis Fault. According to geological expert Supartoyo from Indonesia’s Badan Geologi (Geological Agency), this fault system is long and far-reaching. The soft alluvial soil that underpins Jakarta allows tremors to travel farther than expected. “It’s not about predicting when the next quake will strike,” he says, “it’s about preparing for when it does.”
Recent seismic activity recalls earlier disasters which remain etched into public memory. In 2011, a relatively modest 3.3-magnitude quake hit Jambudipa, Cisarua – just a few hundred metres from the Lembang Fault. Nearly 400 homes were damaged, and hundreds displaced. The shallow depth of the fault and its proximity to residential areas made the destruction disproportionate.
In November 2022, a major quake devastated Cianjur: tens of thousands of homes destroyed, hundreds of thousands affected. It marked the start of a troubling pattern – one that hasn’t let up since. In December 2023, Sumedang was struck by a 4.8-magnitude tremor, this time linked to the Cileunyi-Tanjungsari fault. Hospitals were evacuated, homes cracked open and over a dozen villages were impacted.
Then came the September 2024 quake, just a year before the August 2025 cluster. Measuring 4.9 on the Richter scale, it struck southern Bandung and Garut, with its source in the Garsela Fault – a 42-kilometre-long break running across mountainous terrain. This geological setting increased the risk of landslides. More than 600 homes were damaged, along with schools, clinics and places of worship. Just three days earlier, another quake had rippled from the ocean near Sukabumi, its vibrations felt across the region.
Taken together, these events suggest something more than mere coincidence. As Supartoyo notes in the article, West Java’s seismic landscape is shaped by the ongoing collision between the Indo-Australian and Eurasian tectonic plates. That pressure is accumulating – sometimes released quietly, sometimes catastrophically.
Technologically, we’re still far from being able to predict when earthquakes will happen. Instead, the focus has turned to readiness for when they do. The West Java Disaster Management Agency (BPBD) has been mapping damage, assisting families and assessing risks in affected areas. In Bandung, authorities have teamed up with ITB’s Faculty of Earth Sciences to map evacuation routes. Bandung’s 2022 disaster management regulation officially designates locations such as Tegalega Park, GBLA Stadium, Gasibu, the city square, Sabuga and Arcamanik Sports Field as evacuation points.
“Every site is being mapped,” said Bandung’s Deputy Mayor Erwin. “Therefore, people have clear reference points when it’s time to evacuate.”
Still, the sense of fragility lingers. Supartoyo warns that many active faults in Java may not yet be identified. Others remain insufficiently studied. That uncertainty makes public awareness and structural preparedness even more urgent. Earthquakes may come with little warning, but that doesn’t mean society has to remain passive.
The deeper concern, hinted at throughout the article, however is that West Java’s vulnerabilities aren’t only geological – they’re infrastructural and institutional. Many buildings are not earthquake-resistant. Despite an awareness of its importance, emergency preparedness drills are rare. Cities along active faults face enormous risk, often without the resources or planning needed to withstand a major event.
When the ground shakes, the cracks it reveals are not just in the Earth. They’re in planning, response and long-term thinking.
“Focus on preparedness,” Supartoyo urges. It’s a simple call, but one that holds life-or-death consequences in a region where, as recent history shows, the Earth rarely sleeps for long.
Original article (“Memetakan Sesar Aktif Jawa Barat setelah Guncangan Gempa dari Bandung hingga Bekasi” ) by Muhammad Akmal Firmansyah was first published in Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia) on 25 August 2025.
It is available here.
BandungBergerak.id is a data-driven, human-centred journalism platform committed to telling in-depth stories from the Bandung region – stories rooted in local life, historical spirit and social interconnectedness, with a special focus on education, diversity and the environment.
Summary by KLT
That’s all for now – we hope you’ve enjoyed the read. Keep an eye out for our next Dispatch of summaries this time next week!
The Translator team