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Dolash posted:First off great opening post, really informative and interesting to read, a lot of resources there. Chinese people are just as funny as anyone else. Double-meanings, subtlety and saying something without actually saying it at all is a pretty important part of social interaction in China, and also a great leaping-off point for humor. I've definitely had Chinese people cracking up around me when I am clueless, even though I understood the joke on the surface level. Sarcasm and irony are honed to a pretty fine edge in Chinese culture. China has a strong tradition of stand-up comedy duos that are pretty much instantly recognizable to Westerners as the classic straight-man funny-man team, and I think they must be funny even though I can rarely understand their banter because Chinese people lose their poo poo listening to them on the radio. I've actually been worried about a taxi driver's attention to the road at one point because he was laughing so hard at the show on the radio. Chinese as a language is absolutely full of homonyms, which makes puns really common. Add in the standard slang double-meanings any language has and you can say something very, very different from the literal meaning of the words actually coming out of your mouth. This isn't really different from other languages I guess but the number of homophones in Chinese just makes it even more prevalent. I did an entire presentation on dirty puns in Chinese once, and I have to say theirs are more inventive than ours. I think the Chinese can seem humorless to outside observers sometime because Chinese have a strong sense of decorum and will act very differently in formal setting and informal settings. This is a big part of Chinese culture that you realize very soon when you live in China. Chinese people have a definite "in" group and an "out" group in their lives. The same person who is impassive or cold or stingy to a stranger can be a warm, expressive person to his friends, and will almost always be generous. I think some westerners have never seen the inside of those social circles and get the idea that Chinese are quiet and impassive. The reality is that they can be really drat loud and forward, to the point that even Americans get annoyed sometimes. There's no doubt a lot more to humor in Chinese culture; I haven't included everything I've seen in this post and I'm sure all my personal knowledge is only scratching the surface. The point is Chinese people are funny, but you sometimes have to get to know them before they will show it. With respect to "taking yourself seriously" the Chinese have an almost supernatural ability to pretend everything's fine in almost any situation, and this extends itself to settings where people are supposed to be taken seriously. Speeches and whatnot that I've seen are always taken with absolute seriousness and and attention and respect, and the speaker is usually serious to the point of melodrama even for fairly routine announcements. Afterwards when you ask people about it they'll laugh or shrug or generally tell you what they really thought, but in the event everyone at least pretends that everything is serious and nothing is funny. In fact I've asked the people who actually wrote the speech and got up and said it in front of an audience, and they don't take it too seriously either, they just say that's what official speech sounds like in China. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 10:10 on Feb 16, 2012 |
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Feb 16, 2012 09:59
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sbaldrick posted:The most interesting part of it all was the idea that most of China's consumer economy is basically for show for westerns visiting. Think about how dumb this sounds. Think about what a stupid idea it is. Countries do not go through major economic and class structure shifts for the benefit of foreign opinion. I live with middle-class Chinese people, see them every day, and I am aware of a large number of them that I don't personally know. Granted, I live in a large city, but China's population is rapidly shifting towards urban living. I would say the majority of people I see every day are poor and not middle class, but the middle class definitely exists. And they buy things. The department stores everywhere, electronics supermarkets, clothes retailers huge and small, western franchises moving in, these are supposed to be a facade to impress poor expats like me? The Chinese people I see buying things in them must be part of an elaborate government coverup squad to convince me there's not a huge native consumer economy in my city. Even my Chinese friends must be in on it, they have nice things in their homes sometimes. Oh god, the woman who sells friend noodles and dumplings down the alley who lives in a loft over her store has a television and a washing machine! Where did she get those!? The consumer economy conspiracy is everywhere! 
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Feb 18, 2012 06:33
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Oh hi shots shots shots, are you chiming in on anything relevant to my post or just throwing out random statistics? And do you mean Xi Jinping?
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Feb 18, 2012 09:02
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Oh hey forums poster shots shots shots, glad to see you responded to my question, although it looks like you forgot part of it. I'm gonna guess you were talking about Xi Jinping. Maybe you could have googled him instead of sounding so ignorant? You were responding to my response to a poster who said that Chinese consumer culture was fabricated for the benefit of Western visitors.* I stated that Chinese people do in fact buy things and that their purchasing patterns are not part of a conspiracy to impress Westerners. Do you think your post supports or disagreed with my point? *Sorry, mostly fabricated. Gotta give that guy an out in case he manages to prove Chinese consumer culture is exactly 51% a fraud to convince people like me! Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 14:59 on Feb 18, 2012 |
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Feb 18, 2012 14:54
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I haven't heard of Li Keqiang, which is odd because I was just talking about the upcoming power transfer with one of my Chinese coworkers. Still, it's not my fault shots shots shots never bothered to find the name of the person he was paraphrasing. I think it's hard to be charitable to this: quote:The most interesting part of it all was the idea that most of China's consumer economy is basically for show for westerns visiting though. It's a profoundly stupid idea, or a benign idea that's been badly misstated. Either way, as written, it's silly. Saying that the Chinese consumer economy is small relative to GDP or concentrated in large cities is uncontroversial, but it's not what he said at all.
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Feb 18, 2012 18:43
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hitension posted:Wait, so two people who have never heard of Le Keqiang are arguing about something he may or may not have said? He's pretty much one of the top 5 or so important people in China right now... shots shots shots tends to do that. You may remember when he came into the China Megathread and posted a bunch of unsourced assertions that didn't directly address anything anyone else said yet managed to be argumentative. Hong XiuQuan broke his posts down pretty well so I won't say anything else there. I'm really surprised I didn't know who Li Keqiang was when I looked him up because of this thread, I probably should know someone that important.  But I think we can all agree that prosperity and consumer culture in China is distributed quite unevenly, I don't think anyone would dispute that or has disputed that. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Feb 18, 2012 21:02
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McKracken posted:I'm highly suspicious this is nothing but an attempt to rationalize and justify the abuse of foreign workers, but is there even any truth to this claim? Has the standard of living actually increased an appreciable amount as a direct result of jobs created by outsourcing from first world nations? Much as sweatshop conditions are deplorable, the people who work in them aren't (usually) slaves. They come because despite how hard the work is and how modest the wage, it's better than their other options. You don't just see this in China. For all the bad faith and sheer rapacious greed on the part of the factory bosses and foreign investors, sweatshop workers get a better deal than they would back in their home towns. Companies like Foxconn are deplored in the Western world, but they have trained, employed, and (relatively) enriched literally millions of young Chinese women from the rural countryside. Think about what life means for a teenage girl in a tiny village in Hebei. Wouldn't assembling iPads for 12 hours a day actually seem a lot better? Now, is it lovely? Yeah. And it could be better, I don't think anyone would disagree or say that trying to improve working conditions in 3rd world factories is bad. But just as much as factories go to those countries for a reason, the people who come to the factories go there for a reason too. It's an unfortunate truth that the industrial world went through exactly the same trials and tribulations a hundred years ago. Maybe it doesn't have to be like this, but the way it is is better for the locals than they way it was. Hopefully when this process has played out everywhere it will be over for good. Now the impact of all this globalization on the environment is a different story entirely. I often wonder if the standard globalization apologia argument that I've just laid out has a catch, in that it will destroy the world as we know it before the shining future without sweatshops ever arrives.
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Feb 20, 2012 06:50
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Urban elites made the same argument in the United States in the 1780s. People have been nervous about populations voting the wrong way since forever in democracy. Personally I just think it's class prejudice with no more rationale than, "poor people are dumb and smelly." The idea of people voting the wrong way has never held much water in my opinion, unless the polity exists expressly for the benefit of only part of its population. From what I know about history, the vast majority of people tend to resist expanding the franchise for social reasons while only a few are really concerned about what will happen if the disenfranchised group gets the vote. In the end, when the group gets the franchise, they vote themselves a greater share of resources. Most groups who resisted for social reasons just gradually drift around to supporting the new status quo, and a select few are very upset because they lose out on their previous surplus. I can't really think of any time in history when a newly enfranchised population voted "wrong" but I can think of a lot of times when they voted "wrong" for the interests of a certain part of the previously enfranchised population. I think Chinese culture in general has a lack of empathy with outgroups, and that drives arrogance and hostility towards a lot of people. Urban Chinese opinions on rural Chinese are, I think, just another expression of that tendency to be dismissive and arrogant.
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Feb 21, 2012 06:48
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I think he meant that it's good for the central government to shuffle officials around like they do. It's a classic strategy aimed at preventing individuals from building up a strong regional power base, although of course it has other implications and official justifications. China has had a disastrous history with strong personal power, both in the warlord era and in the Communist era. Personal relationships and patronage networks are still a strong part of Chinese politics and they don't need to get any stronger. I think that it's an understandable and appropriate strategy for Beijing at the moment. At least I think that's what he meant.
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Feb 21, 2012 10:55
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menino posted:e: ^^^ yeah that's about right. I was thinking of the Yuan Shikai era after Sun Yat-sens' government fell apart, and how that just the possibility of that scenario pretty much scares the crap out of Beijing now. I didn't think of that particular example, but there are so many to choose from. The last century of Chinese history has undoubtedly blazed the message DO NOT LET INDIVIDUALS BUILD PERSONAL POWER NETWORKS into the minds of the party elite. The example I was thinking of was the Gang of Four and Mao returning to hijack the entire state because he felt like it. The current leadership (and their anointed successors) are still old enough to remember the Cultural Revolution and its effect on their youth. Obviously there will never be another Mao, but undermining the power base of powerful individuals will be a priority for the party for a long time I think. As an aside, these problems are not unique to China. Young states are often dominated by personal power structures more than the new institutions. China had a long rough patch but with the peaceful and orderly transfers of power of the last 30 years I think its institutions may finally be solidifying their dominance. It's hard to tell though with decision-making so opaque, and I'm not really an expert. I think this might be an interesting question for others in the thread: are the central government's institutions finally gaining dominance over personal patronage networks, at least at the highest levels of government?
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Feb 21, 2012 16:30
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Solis posted:Secondly, I read through Li Zhi-Sui's Private Life of Chairman Mao and I was wondering if this was similarly considered, as it seems to be largely the one man's account. Just from reading Wikipedia about the controversy over the book it seems like there are enough red flags there that the book should be taken with a big grain of salt. If Li really complained that the publisher inserted sensational material that wasn't in his original manuscript, that seems pretty damning. You have to remember the environment it was published in - people in America would be more likely to buy a book that reinforced their preconceptions about Communist leaders. People seem to focus on the more lurid things in the book, at least when they talk about it. I actually visited the Mao museum in Shaoshan recently. It's hardly an unbiased account of his life of course, but some sort of innocuous things that I doubt anyone would bother to fudge don't jibe with what I have heard is in Li's book. Mao was by all accounts an avid swimmer until his late middle age, which sort of contrasts with the picture of a guy who never gets out of bed. The reconstruction of Mao's bedroom there did kind of give the impression that Mao was a bit of a slob on the home front - sort of a goony bachelor actually. His bed was half-covered in stacks of books that no doubt could have been organized and placed elsewhere with the resources of an entire nation. Some of the political recollections seem pretty fishy too. Would Li really have access to the highest-level party meetings as he says he did? Or was he just fabricating a plausible account based on his acquaintance with the people involved and period sources? Anyway, I haven't read it but it seems pretty murky. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 05:57 on Feb 23, 2012 |
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Feb 23, 2012 05:54
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Hong XiuQuan posted:Li never said Mao "never gets out of bed". He pointed out that in Mao's later years he'd rarely leave the bedroom, which I don't think is contrasted by anything you may have seen in ShaoShan. Ah well that makes more sense. Mao had a pretty big bedroom with chairs and side tables and bookshelves; he probably could have entertained guests without leaving the bedroom if he wanted.
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Feb 23, 2012 13:49
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french lies posted:The problem with your points is that you offer up little to nothing to substantiate them. You can't just throw out a claim like "scientific texts will be impossible to write in pinyin", and then not show specific examples of where misunderstandings may arise. What did your researchers say? Where are these papers? You're asking him to prove that something doesn't exist or won't work, which is kind of hard regardless of his position. Do you have an example of a large scale implementation of pinyin that intentionally displaced characters and worked? The Chinese have done a lot of thinking about this themselves and I don't know of any real efforts to promote a phonetic system as a replacement for characters, even though there's been a lot of discussion from people who could potentially enact such a change. Cream_Filling posted:Also, gently caress Chinese transliterations of foreign names. That poo poo is impenetrable and awful, especially if you don't know exactly who they're talking about. Far worse than the reverse situation with pinyin Chinese names, which is for the most part intelligible and doesn't break down as badly. "Gee, I wonder what this '梅德韦杰夫' thing is..." Ugh, yes. But how would you spell foreign names in pinyin? If you just spell them in their native language that's not really any different from writing them in Roman characters amid characters. Either way Chinese people will have a hard time pronouncing them. If pinyin was more commonly used they'd just be more familiar with roman script, not with foreign languages or names. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 02:25 on Feb 24, 2012 |
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Feb 24, 2012 02:22
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french lies posted:DeFrancis has a great article about this which shows some of the efforts that have been made towards this end. This is a good link. The email exchange at the end was surprisingly readable. In fact, I think if that was in characters I would have had to stop to look up some words that I know how to say but might not recognize on a page. So that's definitely got me thinking. There was only one instance of an ambiguous homophone, and would bet a native reader could get it from context even if I couldn't. The word separation was a big help in particular, since all the compound words (is it okay to call them polysyllabic words yet?) were grouped together. I often find it mentally taxing to separate a line of characters into discrete ideas-units if the grammar or vocabulary is somewhat advanced. This was done for me by the writers in the pinyin version. The word separation also made it much easier to figure out meaning from context, since if you know one of the two syllables you can now be sure that they are part of a compound and not two separate ideas. There were a couple compounds related to publishing that I didn't recognize, but I could tell their general meaning because I knew half of the compound. In characters that would have been a lot harder to parse. This has made me question my thinking on writing in pinyin. The homophone issue just did not pop out at me in the examples; instead I found myself noticing how easy it was to read. The homophone thing was just what I was always taught but maybe Chinese professors aren't the most impartial judges. Now I'm not sure. What are the odds someone will mistake a complimentary angle for a banana in context?
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Feb 24, 2012 11:48
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 People who can't read characters know what they mean? Solid blocks of text make skimming easier? Chinese creates new characters every time they need a new word? You and people you know pun with characters instead of sounds?Nothing you just said except the part about dialect-speakers being shut out of written Chinese made sense.
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Feb 24, 2012 14:20
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Pro-PRC Laowai posted:Yes, Yes, No, Yes. Lots of people who are not you speak and read Chinese, so cut out the "yes, no" unsupported assertions. I understand what you are saying and I disagree. I was not asking you questions about your dumb assertions. I was being facetious in an attempt to gently point out the problems with your hyperbolic statements. If you can look at a word and know what it means, you are reading. You said solid blocks of text make skimming easy; whatever I guess that's your opinion, that point's not even about characters. You said new words can't be coined without characters; even if you didn't mean creating new characters, people could still create compound words without characters. Yes, they might be more confusing. You said latinization "completely kills puns and wordplay" which is just plain wrong; there are zillions of phonetic puns. I understand your points and don't even disagree with what you probably actually believe, but all your statements were hyperbolic. I guess you mistook me calling you out on that as a chance to lecture someone. And that "go educate yourself" poo poo is annoying when it's a long English article, doing it with a 6 year old foreign language discussion thread is just obnoxious and in obviously bad faith.
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Feb 24, 2012 18:43
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Pro-PRC Laowai posted:Nope, but what it will do is help put an end to a lot of the random bullshit that pops up out of nowhere... far too many fake rumors get passed off as real things and it's really counter productive. You mentioned the wenzhou crash, and that was a perfect example. Random people yapping around making poo poo up to stir up trouble and build up their account followers. gently caress the impact and trouble it will cause.  Do you by any chance work for the Chinese government in some capacity? Because drat. I understand the rumor mill can cause trouble but are you really serious about eliminating anonymous speech on the internet? That would be (has been) considered an extreme breach of privacy on a video game forum in the U.S. much less the entire internet.
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Mar 4, 2012 06:44
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Pro-PRC Laowai posted:It really wouldn't get rid of it all. The only difference in the end is who is censoring what and for what purpose. It's something that needs to be eased into and regulated properly. This is one nice step towards that goal... holding people responsible for the crap they spew online and when it's something legit, hopefully they will back up their claims with things like evidence. Do you really not understand the chilling effect it will have on all other speech if there is no anonymity? And here you go again with your unsupported assertions! "No" is the totality of your response to french lies' point about censorship. Can you maybe mention why you think that increased legitimacy of official news outlets would not reduce the power of rumors? Good job using anonymous personal anecdotes to explain how damaging hearsay is to public discussion btw.
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Mar 5, 2012 04:20
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I've been listening to the Sinica podcast (and popup Chinese, they have a lot of really useful vocab and colloquial sentence patterns) and the episode about the Tianjin chemical plant really drove home how government lies and censorship have driven people to the rumor mill for their information. Specifically, CCTV advertised an investigative report on the chemical plant and safety in relation to an approaching storm, and then suddenly the whole segment was pulled before it could be aired. Naturally people were alarmed that a CCTV (government news) report on safety issues had been yanked, and the rumor mill went crazy. There were even people reporting that the entire city of Tianjin - millions of people if you don't know - would be killed in minutes if the storm hit the plant. This is not true, but the government news organ had nothing to say because their report on the subject had been pulled. I think this is a fantastic example of how the government has poisoned the well of the traditional media. People simply don't believe it, and are conditioned to believe the absolute worst. It's sort of like how this forum tends to view press reports from Goldman Sachs or the IDF - whenever they say something we tend to assume the opposite is true. It's this way for everything the Chinese public hears from the official media, especially about environmental and safety issues. Blaming Weibo or foreign agitators for the people's alarm at even the slightest hint of a coverup is completely misunderstanding. Maybe willfully misunderstanding the situation. I have to say again French Lies is absolutely right, Sinica is a pro-click.
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Mar 18, 2012 08:10
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This is all according to Sinica, but apparently Bo has a bit of a history of thuggishness. Apparently the incident with the Chongqing police in Beijing wasn't the first time that Bo's detractors have had mysterious things happen to them, it's just the time he was dumb enough to try it within 20 miles of Zhongnan Hai. Sinica also believes that Bo's performance in Chongqing wasn't really what the leadership was expecting, since it differs pretty strongly from what he did during his tenure in Tianjin. Apparently Bo in Chongqing is in bed (to an unusual degree) with the state-owned industries there. In a city that big with that many economic problems and organized crime who knows what the web of relationships between the state, industry, and mafia is. Chongqing sounds like a real bastard to govern in any way without getting your hands dirty what with the decaying heavy industry fiefdoms, entrenched mafia, and utterly massive land area.
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Mar 21, 2012 09:31
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punk rebel ecks posted:Ah. So State-Capitalist. The economic system yes; I like the moniker "Technocratic Authoritarianism" for the political system.
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Mar 24, 2012 10:57
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Sort of as a reply to that Bloomberg article about buying an apartment in Hong Kong I'd like to make a point about the continuing hysteria over young people being unable to buy property in large cities and thus being unable to marry: this is a cultural problem. That it's a problem at all is insane. In no other country (that I know of) in the world do people have this idea that single mid-20s white collar office workers should buy property in metropolitan areas. It's a farcical notion on its face, and I think it's really strange that property ownership has become such a litmus test in urban Chinese culture. Sinica pointed out on a podcast quite a while ago that this is a relatively recent cultural phenomenon as well, since private property ownership is a recent development. Maybe when people get more used to the idea of property markets they will understand how unfair and maddening it is to expect young workers to own an apartment in a major city before considering them responsible adults. People are still apparently flabbergasted by the concept that property prices can actually fall so clearly this is not a mature market. Hopefully as the market matures urban China will work its way out of this weird headspace they've managed to work themselves into.
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Mar 25, 2012 11:38
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Farecoal posted:Hmmmm, why does that sound so familiar? This was pointed out by a Sinica guest and there happened to be an economist on the show at the time, who made the excellent point that in America we should have known better. China has a good excuse in that everyone is naive about property markets because they came into existence so recently. In America people should have known better from the periodic mortgage crises and all-too-common urban property value decay that we have experienced as a mature market. PRC Laowai gives some good reasons why one might want to buy property, but the real problem is property prices up to 80 times yearly income even for white-collar professionals. Sure people would like to own property given the choice between renting and owning in a vacuum, but owning is simply not within most people's means. The idea that somehow it should be is a cultural phenomenon and appears at this point to be the main thing driving the continuing housing bubble. Lots of people are waiting for prices to come down because everyone knows they are overvalued, but because of this cultural pressure there are still people buying at absurd prices and delaying the impending correction. These are the people who are out protesting price drops. The tragedy is not that the price is falling, because it has to fall for people to afford housing, the tragedy is that these people bought at such a high price for reasons which are really cultural.
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Mar 26, 2012 06:15
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I honestly know very little about the Chinese economy beyond what I hear on Sinica, but export taking hard hits isn't difficult to understand. The developed world has hosed itself for the next 10 years with ridiculous macro policy and China's export markets can't escape the drop in demand any more than anyone else can. China's workforce is due to start shrinking next year, I believe, which may sound impossible to people who only know the standard Western narrative about China but is a very real phenomenon that will have serious implications for the Chinese labor and export markets, and for inflation.
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Mar 27, 2012 08:07
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Wow, you make economic re-balancing sound so easy! Everyone agrees what China should do in this scenario, it's blindingly obvious if you've ever cracked an econ 101 textbook. Actually doing it is infinitely harder than saying that it should be done. China has a lot of complicated and difficult work to do on economic re-balancing, a lot of distracting changes it's going through while trying to do it, and some serious entrenched opposition within the state. Worse, a great deal of the macro challenge will be altering the average person's economic habits, which the Chinese government can't simply solve by fiat. Another important point is that the export slump is happening. It is an extant fact that can't be waved away with advice about the future. Sure it's good advice, but reorganizing an export sector takes time, and meanwhile Chinese export firms will suffer. Redirecting capital from export industry to domestic markets and the service industry is even more difficult and time-intensive, and is therefore even more useless to the present situation, no matter how good it is in the long run. The export slump exists, and it is a problem; what China "can" do in the future (actually its ability to do these things well is very much in question) doesn't serve to dismiss the current issue as you seem to have used it. Dismissing current pain with the prediction that eventually China, or anyone, "will do just fine," is a cardinal sin of economists everywhere. After all, to loosely paraphrase Keynes, if all you can predict is that things will be somewhat normal at some time in the future then you're not really saying anything useful at all. The way you dismiss this large, current problem with a facile policy prescription is something that bugs me about economists, especially amateur internet economists, so don't take it personally if it seems like I'm going off on you.
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Mar 27, 2012 09:54
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Throatwarbler posted:You're pretty opinionated for someone who knows "very little about the Chinese economy beyond what I hear on Sinica". I would post the pyramid of responses here if it wasn't such a tall image. You've covered ad hom and responding to tone. Is there anything in what I actually said you'd like to address? My saying I know "very little" is probably just the Dunning-Kruger effect rearing its head; I have formal education in Chinese history and politics, and economics in general. I do however have a gap in my current events knowledge starting at graduation and ending recently as I've started to pay attention to Chinese news now that I live here. So I know very little about some specific subjects but you're right, I am very opinionated because I have spent literally years of my life studying this kind of thing. More on topic, Mike Daisey seems really self-serving to me based on his actions according to what TAL has published. I wouldn't put much credence in any argument he puts out to defend himself; you can go listen to the episode and hear how evasive he is and how willing he is to grasp at any shred of cover. I doubt he's sincere about the "missionary" defense at all; like the monologue, it's just another fabrication that plays well with the American audience. The man is a storyteller after all. He knows his audience.
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Mar 28, 2012 13:44
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Police states require ambiguous laws; if everyone is a criminal you can arrest anyone. China's police state likes to be quiet and unobtrusive but you shouldn't forget that it exists.
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Apr 1, 2012 11:51
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french lies posted:I really recommend Evan Osnos' recent piece on Macau. It's quite long but it has a great hook (random dude that won zillions by playing Baccarat) and some really spectacular writing by Osnos. He covers Macau's sordid history in detail and how it has shaped and been shaped by the Chinese and international players. One thing that jumps out at me is the average income being higher than Europe's. Sure, the average income is sky-high, just like the U.S. It would be nice to have a look at the median or mean incomes to confirm what I think is obvious -- the income inequality is astounding and super-high outliers are dragging the average way beyond the mean. @Throatwarbler I like how the Chinese investors also believe the cliche that they are more conservative than Americans.
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Apr 5, 2012 12:20
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kenner116 posted:Pretty much every classroom at my school has a big drawing of Lei Feng on the back blackboard. The stories of his perseverance and warmheartedness have really resonated with the people here in Chongqing. My classrooms have similar Lei Feng stuff, but one of my smartest classes has a big block of text about him in English that says he was made up by the Chinese government. There's a bunch of errors in the English so it might not actually be copied from Wikipedia either! I think it's pretty funny that they have this anti-propaganda up but nobody who might care to have it taken down can read it.
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Apr 7, 2012 11:59
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Honestly at this point I'm super glad this whole leadership kerfluffle happened just because it's gotten me reading a whole bunch of stuff I never would have looked at before and it's fascinating. Who knew Wen Jiabao's mentor was Bo Xilai's father's enemy in the Cultural Revolution? Not me. From what I've been reading the hereditary entrenchment of party power is a lot scarier than I previously thought.
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Apr 12, 2012 08:44
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I happened to ask a Chinese friend a few days ago and he said the official unemployment rate is 0.5%. Then we laughed.
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Apr 14, 2012 09:16
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New Sinica is out. This one's about the environmental movement and environmental journalism in China. Did you guys know that 10% of rice tested in China contains cadmium? Because that's, uh, that's pretty bad. In fact it actually makes me think staying here and living for a few more years might not be the greatest idea. I mean, the food has cadmium in it. At the very least, if you are in China I guess this means you should keep your iron and other mineral intake up. Apparently low levels of iron makes the body absorb more cadmium from food. So... that's something to tell women? Gently? Man I don't even know. I had (Chinese) students in the U.S. who if I asked about issues that interested them in China they would just go off on an hour-long rant about food safety, but I never really understood the impact of the problem until I was here eating the same food they were talking about on the news.
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Apr 21, 2012 10:28
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Where's the list?
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Apr 21, 2012 15:06
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Sinica has talked about this before (you can go back and listen to their archives from a year ago) and said that the real problem is that there are a zillion food manufacturers in China that simply can't be inspected with the current legal regime. The market is virtually unregulated, even though it's supposed to be, because of the physical difficulty of checking and the lack of government resources to do it. Critically, in most developed countries the burden is on the food producers to prove their food is safe to the government before they can take their food to market, while in China the burden is on government inspectors to go out to millions of individual small producers and prove their food is unsafe. Not only is it not much of a risk for the individual producer, but many of these producers are really small time operations run by people who will lose everything if they admit their food is tainted. It doesn't help that because of cutthroat competition and pressure to keep food prices down, the pressure is on these small-time operations to cut cost in any way they can because you can bet the guy down the street will if they don't.
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Apr 22, 2012 06:49
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Google blocked for anyone else?
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May 2, 2012 01:43
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Is it just me, or is the American media's reporting of the Chen Guangcheng affair hopelessly stupid? Most outlets seem to be treating it as if Chen requested asylum and was denied and thrown under a bus, when State tells a very different story and Chen doesn't seem to be able to keep his story straight. There was only that one quote from the State Dept. guy who seems to understand something about the situation saying something like "we have a fragile deal with the state police and Chen is threatening it with his weird comments" but I don't hear the media even attempt to deal with analysis of that or any kind. They also are quite focused on how this reflects on OBAMA but what can you expect in an election year. There is zero interest it seems in the motives and interests of and constraints on the relevant parties or any attempt to analyze what might happen next. They just seem to have a canned narrative, fake outrage from Americans who won't recognize Chen's name next week, and no real understanding of the situation. I guess it doesn't help that the American government's treatment of the situation is almost willfully stupid, like trying to pass a Congressional resolution to give the guy asylum when, again, he hasn't requested it. The only thing keeping this guy from disappearing is U.S. diplomatic pressure and the fear of public embarrassment, and backroom deals to save face like the "study abroad" deal currently being floated is the only way Chen is getting anything positive out of this situation. I really feel for the State Department here sort of being the only adult in the room on this issue. But the media sure isn't helping. edit: the WaPo articles were good. I guess I should say television news, since those are the outlets I have specifically seen being offensively dumb. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 11:21 on May 6, 2012 |
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May 6, 2012 11:12
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LP97S posted:I took this with a grain of salt because people sometimes get a bit defensive of their country's history but I could see it happening. Whether it's true or not, Koreans have a reputation for making nationalist claims that are a little out there. China and Japan have also been known to make grandiose claims but I think Korea's are often a little weirder because they don't have the obvious historical accomplishments. Yes they were an interesting and at times very innovative people, but I feel like they sometimes, maybe subconsciously, feel the need to lay claim to some things that the Chinese or Japanese wouldn't because they already have that sort of accomplishment in their established history. It's important to remember that in historical terms all Asian states are young states. A lot of the odd things these governments do are common behaviors of young political systems.
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May 9, 2012 13:36
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GuestBob posted:Compared to ... Germany? There are a lot of young states. Germany and France are both pretty young in terms of political systems since they got new ones after the war. Young not compared to anything, really. A state that has had its constitution thrown out and its rules for governance rewritten in the last 50 years I would consider a young state, but that's not an absolute number. It takes a while for a political system to settle into a routine is all. I don't actually have primary sources about Korea! Crazy fact, a lot of people get their information from secondary sources. I know, I should have an exhaustively researched statement for you. But I don't! How shameful! Now I will have to go play Starcraft for 78 hours until I die and the doctors blame the fan in the room.
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May 10, 2012 01:58
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I remember when America first invaded a place no American could find on a map. China's taking its first imperial baby steps.  At least your students had the decency to reconsider their opinions after looking at a map.
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May 10, 2012 10:45
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Fine-able Offense posted:Commercial and residential construction + infrastructure projects make up a truly ridiculous proportion of their GDP, hence Chovanec's research indicating even a small decrease in real estate could reduce GDP by as much as 40% as all the secondary and tertiary spillovers grind the economy to a halt. A small decrease in real estate... what? As written your post implies that land in China may start disappearing. A small decrease in real estate prices? Trade volume? Construction? What are we talking about here? I have a hard time believing that real estate construction will falter hard enough to collapse the economy just because China needs so much housing already. It's not like the construction will slow virtually to a stop like it did in the U.S. There's no overcapacity, just overpricing. Right?
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May 17, 2012 10:14
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