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A recent photo montage on Tianya, called Smiles of the Past 50 Years. You won't be able to link to it without registering at Tianya, so I'll post some more below the jump.
Early spring1957, Hubei province, Macheng County, Xujia Village, 549 Production Brigade: soldier Yang Zhiyi shows off on the bar.
Spring 1975, Hubei Province, Macheng County, Zhongyi Commune, Wangjiyi Production Brigade: practicing high jumping.
Continue reading "remembering pleasures of the past: Chinese black and white photos" »
Another good source for information on Tibet and other areas in China is the Lonely Planet's Thorntree Forum, the North-east Asia section. Seems to have regular postings such as this one:
Tuesday morning update from sources in Lhasa.
Things are quietening down significantly. Many streets are now open
again and cars and taxis are out and about...even in the old quarter.
There is still a very heavy military presence but restaurants, teashops
and even the Summit cafe with the good coffee is open. A major clean up
operation is underway.
There is a surprising number of people on the streets including many
Chinese tourists who have surfaced from the west end and are going down
to the old quarter so see what all the fuss was about.
All foreigners have not been kicked out of Lhasa...these reports are
false. There seems to be a number of tourists still in town although a
very small number.
Dave's experiment is brilliant. It probably takes this kind of situation to open up new practices across virtual spaces, which even though technically just a click away, tend to seem as far away as Mars.
In a nutshell, he's got a tutorial for non-Chinese readers to sign up to a Chinese twitter-clone called fanfou, in order to start having a dialogue with Chinese folks who can speak English, regarding the current Tibetan protests. Imagine if conversations get started that will continue into the future.
I've signed up for fanfou and got myself a home page, but it's not intuitive, even for someone who reads Chinese. Dave is now my only fanfou friend, and I used Twifan, which appears to search across multiple microblogging apps in Chinese, to search for tweets on Tibet and 西藏 (there are a lot more using the Chinese characters, but this will not help those who need to communicate in English). It's not clear what could happen next. Maybe the problem is that it's 4:30 in the morning on the mainland. We'll see.
Dave is translating Tibet-related tweets here.
So microblogging and online videos are being brought squarely into the fray. Roland Soong writes about what's happening on Youtube:
There is a propaganda war going on YouTube because this is clearly one of the top video news sites. In a propaganda, you win the share of voice and then you can win the share of hearts and minds. Therefore, you want the videos that favor your narrative to dominate. You also want unfavorable videos to be drowned out. Therefore, you mobilize your people to post as often and as much as possible....The point here is that using YouTube to track Tibet developments is low-yield, high-maintenance work.
Photo: Teaching people to distinguish fake goods from real, Zaozhuang city, Shandong, 3/9/08
As an anthropologist, March 15th has always been one of my favorite holidays in China. It's International Consumer Rights Day/ 国际消费者权益日, the day when there are tables set up in public for consumers to learn more about their rights, the streets are festooned with red banners encouraging citizens to envision themselves as consumers, and the media is full of gruesome, horrific, tragic stories of consumption gone wrong. For one day everyone in China focuses on the widespread effects of the unregulated greed and economic desperation that fuels shoddy manufacturing, counterfeit products, lies in advertising. All in the name of creating a better kind of Chinese consumption and a Chinese consumer class (if you can call it that) that can exercise rights (if you can call them that) and is actually encouraged to demand that its rights be attended to. These rights are the rights that can be expressed, pressed, and propagated. Meanwhile, other rights are seen as unjustified.
Sina BBS is giving prominent position to a Sina blog post now become open BBS thread, called 315: Let's stick up for our rights together and speak out. Sina BBS front page is also collecting related posts from blogs and BBS around the country with titles like "Netizen eats nail in Tangyuan cookies," and "These comfortable sanitary pads had flies inside."
The 315 post opens with the following (rough translation as always):
As 3.15 draws near, the main subject of 2008 3.15 International Consumer Rights Day has already been set, namely, consumption and responsibility. It is the responsibility of our whole society to protect the rights and benefits of consumers, and all concerned parties should together strive to do the work of standing up for consumer rights, improving the consumption environment, and pushing for faster, better economic and social development.
In the past few years the home furnishing market has been hot and there are many impressive signs and billboards with slogans such as "China's famous brand furnishings," or "Furniture products exempt from [tax?]," all of which bedazzle consumers. As another Consumer Rights Day arrives, why don't we all describe our experiences from remodeling and buying furniture in the past year?
Speak out freely, net-friends, use our own strength to protect our rights and interests.
And yet, consumer rights do spill over into other kinds of rights, especially when they are the only rights game in town. One netizen shared the following experience:
It's another 3.15, and again one thinks of standing up for the rights of the common people. Actually, standing up for commercial rights is relatively easy but there are some kinds of rights that the common people don't even have anywhere to go to discuss! For instance, Kunshan, Zhou Village officials and the common people have been playing a cat and mouse game. At present our economies are developing quickly and there's an endless stream of illegal buildings. Zhou Village called for a halt to all private buildings. But if there's demand there will be illegal building! You would build, they would take it down, and there wasn't anything more to say about it. But then it turns out that some are out of the ordinary and can't be taken down! The reason, officials say, is that before a certain date it didn't count as an illegal building! Then the people build more and they take them down again but there are always those that don't get taken down and the officials once again say that before such-and-such a date they don't count as illegal. It's made it impossible for the local cadres to know what to say to the people. The work can't be done and there are all these illegal buildings. The officials up above say: get rid of them! The local officials never agreed with the this way of doing things anyhow so they say they've got nobody to do it. The officials say: get rid of them! We have money, we'll call up a truckful of migrant workers and level a couple of small potatos' buildings.
Those who are in official positions are really disappointing us these days! Those illegal buildings mostly belong to low-income people, and some of the cadres don't do things in the interest of the people but just according to their own purposes. How can we establish a harmonious society with these kinds of officials?
If you want more, Baidu has a bunch of related videos.
CityIN's press release arrived in my box this morning, and it looks pretty interesting. It's a Hong Kong-developed social networking service that can work on your mobile, and it uses QR codes, which always seem so smart to me but which have not taken off much of anywhere outside of Japan. The Wikipedia entry says: QR Codes storing addresses and URLs may appear in magazines, on signs, buses, business cards or just about any object that a user might need information about. A user having a camera phone equipped with the correct reader software can scan the image of the QR Code causing the phone's browser to launch and redirect to the programmed URL.
It would be a very interesting development to have them start to actually be used in China--a form of meaning that could be left in public places but not immediately visible to the ordinary passerby. CityIn's press release cites a different use for QR codes, however, as kind of an easy way to get information from one screen (say in an Internet cafe) to your phone screen.
CityIN generates a QR code image for each user-created social events, visitors just need to scan the QR image with their mobile phone camera, and at maximum 4296 English characters (which is more than 1000 Chinese characters) will be read and input into their phone.
Why is this QR code feature important? Think about where many Chinese youngsters go online - Internet café. Do they have pen/paper/mobile-PC usb? So what if they need to note down the address of the party they are going tonight?
It also supports QQ contact importing.
See more at Web 2.0 Asia and 852signal
If you're looking for a place to find people to do translation jobs for you, either from English to Chinese, or Chinese to English (or possibly any other languages), one place to check out is 1x1y.com, or 翻心翻译. On the jobs board you can find people and companies who post their prices, number of words per day, and email addresses. To get to some of the data you have to register. And of course, the site is in Chinese, so if you're not a Chinese speaker you will have to use Google or something else to help you translate. But even so, it should lead you to people who can help you.
I put this together for a talk today and thought I'd share it for those who haven't read the latest CNNIC report (#21) or who don't feel like combing through it for some of the basics. The data comes mostly from that report, but also a bit from ESWN and ars technica.
Number of Internet users, 12/2007: 210 million (compare with U.S. at 215 million...getting close)
Penetration: 5% rural/20% urban/45% Beijing, Shanghai
Cost: 900 yuan a year for home broadband, compared with about 600 in Internet café;
Mobile: About one-quarter have ever used mobile to go online in last 6 months, of those about half are between ages of 18-24, and two-thirds of total are men.
Netease's "news" forum has this item today, on a group of rather shabby streetwide fortune tellers: On those who know the fate of others.
With great difficulty I managed to sneak up on these people and secretly take a few photos. Could it be that they can see their own fates?
Selected responses:
Yes, their fates are to remain this way for the rest of their lives!
They're all fakes!
Maybe they told their own fortunes and found out that this was the best thing for them to do?
Hey, they're making a living.
Fate can be told, but it all depends on who's doing the telling. Really good fortune-tellers don't sit on the street.
When someone dies his or her relatives can't stand the feeling of being separated. Even if one knows it's fake, still sometimes they do make pretty accurate predictions. There's a willingness to spend the money. Whose fault is it, anyway, that China's psychology profession is so backwards?
Apologies for those of you who've been bumped off the RSS feed or accessing strange 404 errors, but we're in the middle of transitioning off of the Typepad platform (not very accessible in China) onto our own servers.
I'm currently hosting the blog myself (it currently forwards to virtualchina.hongkonggong.com), but I'm hoping to throw it on an IFTF server as soon as they'll set it up for me.
Remember, you can always reach us at:
http://www.virtual-china.org
"We are very pleased to announce that 13th FIRA Roboworld Cup China 2008 will take place in Qingdao from 22-25 July, 2008. We would like to invite you to take part in the FIRA Cup and Congress.
13th FIRA RoboWorld Cup China 2008
Date: 22-25 July 2008
Venue: Shinan Software Park, Qingdao China"
Remember the "Numa Numa" song, originally performed by the Moldovan band O-Zone (actual title of song = Dragostea din tei)?
It's been a while since the song, the MTV and its spoofs were circulated around the internet, but I found a witty animated version today on Tudou that transliterated the Romanian words into Chinese:
鲍昆 Bao Kun is (according to billsdue) a renowned photographer in China, who joined the Chinese Photography Association in 1983 and also taught at the University of Science & Technology Beijing.
His photoblog has some great work, including a post (full of photos) about New Cities New Citizens:
Via billsdue.
Fun finding of the day -- a recipe-diagram for cooking chicken with beer! (Rough translations given in maroon.)
Go to original post (currently down) or photo on Yupoo.
Via Global Voices Online's Memedia translation (an old issue). Thank you tian for fixing my translation.
The title says it all. It's a bit slow for my taste and doesn't give me the traditional variants that I want, but check it out -- it's pretty handy and may be right for you.
Link: Firefox add-on link
Link: Author's homepage
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