I’ve started a new blog to jot down things I come across and underline which are not necessarily related to China and Taiwan: Chronicon Mundi.
The reason I’ve picked a Latin name is that all the good English blog names I could think of are taken. Lucas of Tuy’s Chronicon Mundi of 1238 was a scholarly work and in no way my inspiration for this online scrapbook. This blog is just a series of jottings and newspaper clippings meant to amuse me and help me remember what I read.
Fuchsia Dunlop, a connoisseur of Chinese food and BBC World Service contributor, writes in the Financial Times:
As the 2008 Olympic Games approached, the Beijing government embarked on a gargantuan task: to provide approved translations of all the names of dishes English-speaking visitors were likely to encounter on restaurant menus. They were keen, the official Chinese news agency said, to avoid “bizarre English translations” such as “chicken without sexual life” (used to describe a young chicken) and “husband and wife’s lung slice” (a Sichuanese street snack). The agency added, with an unusual burst of humour, that “the images they conjured up were not, one could say, appetising”….
Drawing up accurate translations for even a fraction of Chinese dishes would be a daunting endeavour (Sichuan province alone lays claim to 5,000 different dishes). And the language of Chinese cuisine presents particular challenges. Chinese chefs use a vast vocabulary of terms to describe their cooking methods, many of which are untranslatable. Take, for example, liu, which means to pre-cook pieces of food in oil or water and then marry them with a sauce that has been prepared separately: how to describe this succinctly in English? Even a method like stir-frying has many variations, such as basic stir-frying (chao), fast stir-frying over a high flame (bao), and stir-frying in a dry wok (gan bian). When I trained as a chef in Sichuan province, I had to learn a canon of 56 different cooking methods, and that was just the beginning of my apprenticeship in Chinese cuisine. Translating such a richness of culinary technique into menu shorthand is no easy matter.
Moreover, many types of food have no English-language equivalent. Think of “dumpling”, a blanket term used for all kinds of Chinese snacks, from jiao zi (boiled semi-circular dumplings), to shao mai (steamed dumplings shaped like money bags) and bao (steamed dumplings with twirly tops). And how to translate fen, which can mean powder, meal, noodles, or strips of starch jelly? When taking notes in Chinese kitchens, I find myself jotting in Chinese characters simply because there is no other way of recording precisely what I see, smell and taste….
The final result of the Beijing government’s endeavours is a 170-page book entitled Chinese Menu in English Version. Its suggested translations for more than 2,000 dishes represent a solid achievement, and a great leap forward for linguistically challenged Chinese restaurateurs. The two dozen translators have stuck to their guns in holding on to several useful Chinese terms, like jiaozi for boiled dumplings, tangyuan for glutinous riceballs, and shaomai for those money-bag steamed dumplings. They have avoided some notorious foodstuffs (such as dog), but no one could accuse them of sanitising their menu, because they have included challenging dishes such as steamed pig’s brains and sautéed chicken gizzards.
I’d love to get my hands on that book.
Hat tip: Language Hat
The Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Switzerland’s newspaper of record, reports in its paper edition of August 18 that the Chinese government has announced a program to move 73,300 nomadic ethnic Tibetans in Gansu province into brick houses. Asked by a journalist why the government was forcing nomadic people to give up a way of life they have practiced for thousands of years, Wu Shimin, deputy director of the State Ethnic Affairs Commission, seemed perplexed: “Human society has, after all, always developed from a lower to a higher level. The sedentarization of human beings is part and parcel of the unavoidable progress of history. It is the only way for them to participate in industrialization. For thousands of years, many Tibetans were forced to live as nomads because they were completely dependent on the availability of grassland and water. The [Chinese] government wants nomadic minorities to have a ‘real life’ [ein richtiges Leben].” On Wednesday, the Chinese government gave a press conference under the rubric of “Progress of Human Rights for Ethnic Minorities in China.” Meanwhile, the Asian Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that children representing Tibetans, Uighurs and other ethnic groups in a key part of the Olympics opening ceremony were actually members of the dominant Han ethnic group. Wang Wei, vice president of the Beijing Olympics organizing committee, commented, “I see nothing wrong exactly with (where) the children are from… it is a tradition in China in terms of giving a performance.” Quite.
The Financial Times comments:
The joy of sporting contests is that anything can happen. When you are a totalitarian state, however, this makes it risky to host them. The Chinese government has responded by trying to control every conceivable element of the Olympics, often by rather dubious means.
The stunning, widely used footage of firework “footprints” leading to the Olympic stadium during the opening ceremony was, it transpires, computer-generated. We now know why a film director was asked to run the event.
Lin Miaoke, the little girl who apparently sang the Chinese anthem, was in fact lip-synching to the voice of another little girl. A meeting involving a politburo member decided that although Yang Peiyi was the best singer, she was not pretty enough to take part in the ceremony. She should be heard, but not seen.
Then again, cheering crowds are being bused into stadia by the government, armed with noise-makers and decked in colourful attire to improve the leaden atmosphere inside. In some cases the visitors are taking the places of real fans, who have found themselves unable to buy tickets.
The reality is that the faults officials were trying to correct are not faults at all. No one would have complained that China had not followed its creeping barrage of fireworks with a helicopter. The little girl rejected as the face of the opening ceremony may have had imperfect teeth – but little girls usually do. And, we all know that not all Olympic sports are sell-outs.
Official obsessiveness was, of course, doomed to fail. The 10m air rifle competition was scheduled first so that China would win the first gold medal. But Katerina Emmons, a Czech, set a new world record and won while the Chinese competitor, Du Li, did rather badly.
Foreign companies often complain of Chinese counterfeiting, but the games are spectacular enough without fakery. Rather than announcing China’s arrival as a modern, dynamic country, they risk reinforcing the view that the Beijing government is comprised of control-freaks.
The New York Times reports that China has surpassed the US in the number of internet users:
China said the number of Internet users in the country reached about 253 million last month, putting it ahead of the United States as the world’s biggest Internet market. [...]
Baidu, for instance, said on Thursday that its second-quarter net profit had jumped 81 percent. During that period, Baidu had a 63 percent share of China’s search engine market, while Google had about 26 percent, with Yahoo trailing far behind, according to iResearch, a market research firm based in Beijing.
Tencent, a popular site for social networking and gaming, now has a stock market value of $15 billion, making it one of the world’s most valuable Internet companies. In comparison, Amazon.com is valued at about $30
billion.
One measure of the growth of the Internet here, and its social and entertainment functions, is the popularity of blogs.
The site of China’s most popular blogger, the actress Xu Jinglei, has attracted more than 174 million visitors over the last few years, according to Sina.com, the popular Web portal, which posts a live tally. According to Sina, 11 other bloggers have also attracted more than 100 million visitors in recent years.
5,000 Historic Photographs of China Debut on the Web
Duke Libraries launches Gamble collection
Durham, NC — The Duke University Libraries has launched a digital collection of about 5,000 photographs shot primarily in China between 1917 and 1932 by Sidney Gamble, grandson of *Procter and Gamble co-founder James Gamble. The searchable collection is online here.
Gamble, a sociologist, China scholar and avid amateur photographer, traveled extensively in China from Liaoning province in the northeast to Guangdong province in the south and to the western edge of Sichuan province along the border of Tibet. The web publication of the Sidney D. Gamble Photograph Collection makes all of his China photographs publicly accessible for the first time.
More information here.
Luo Zhou (Ms.)
Chinese Studies Librarian
Duke University Libraries
Chinese Seek a Day in Court
With New Faith in Rule of Law,
More Citizens File Suits
By GEOFFREY A. FOWLER and SKY CANAVES in Beijing and JULIET YE in Hong Kong
Wall Street Journal, July 1, 2008; Page A12
The earthquake that rocked Sichuan province is emerging as an unexpected test of China’s evolving legal system.
Parents in Sichuan whose children were killed when schools collapsed in the May 12 quake are already demanding justice. Huang Lianghe, who lost his son in the collapse of the Dongqi Middle School in Dujiangyan, believes the quality of the school’s construction was at fault and, with other parents, is looking for a good lawyer to take up his cause.
That Mr. Huang has that much faith in China’s courts says much about rising expectations that ordinary Chinese enjoy basic legal rights, including the right to sue their government.
On television and the Internet, a new generation of Chinese lawyers teaches ordinary Chinese people to invoke their rights. At camps for survivors of the quake, volunteers recently distributed “law promotion” handbooks published by the Chengdu Justice Bureau that explain the laws that victims can use to sue government officials for certifying the building codes for thousands of classrooms that crumbled in the quake.
China’s lawyers are filing lawsuits over discrimination, poor labor conditions, even censorship — actions once considered unthinkable. And sometimes they win.
China’s legal system still doesn’t work well, but there’s reason for optimism, says Jerome Cohen, a professor at the New York University School of Law and an expert on Chinese law. “People who have an interest in seeing the rule of law increasingly implemented…are bubbling up from the bottom,” he says. A growing army of lawyers is creating pressure for political change simply by airing the irregularities in the system, Mr. Cohen says.
Today, China has 122,000 full-time lawyers, up from 48,000 in 1997. That is still less than one lawyer for every 10,000 Chinese citizens, compared to about one in 300 in the U.S. But those lawyers are gaining in visibility.
Lawyers advertise and hand out business cards at courthouses. The narrow lane next to Beijing’s Chaoyang District courthouse is crammed with small law offices that have sprung up in recent years to help with last-minute legal needs. On www.carlawyer.cn1, traffic-accident expert Huang Haibo promises, “I will protect your legal rights.”
Despite the legal system’s flaws, Chinese people are increasingly turning to it for help. The number of civil cases filed by Chinese lawyers in 2006 was up 54% from 2001. Citizens with limited financial resources have taken to suing: In the first six months of 2007, China’s 3,000-plus legal-aid centers handled 172,600 cases, a jump of nearly 40% from a year earlier, according to the Ministry of Justice.
On June 1, new legislation took effect aimed at overhauling how the profession is practiced here. Lawyers and their clients gained some rights long taken for granted in the U.S. and elsewhere. Defense lawyers are now allowed to meet with clients without first seeking permission from judicial authorities, although only after the clients have been interrogated without lawyers present. Police will no longer be allowed to monitor conversations between lawyers and clients.
Some Chinese lawyers and academics had hoped for greater change than the new law delivers. The nation’s justice system remains a far cry from what exists in many Western countries, especially when it comes to taking on the government itself. Chinese courts aren’t independent of the ruling Communist Party and often refuse to hear politically sensitive cases. There are no juries.
Amnesty International and other groups have expressed concern about a crackdown on lawyers and other rights defenders who take up politically charged causes. By some estimates, as many as 300 lawyers have been jailed, some of them for speaking out on human rights.
Still, the system’s credibility is growing. Several lawyers recently filed suits that test a law, which took effect May 1, that promises ordinary citizens greater access to government information. One is hoping to expose police “re-education through labor” practices, sometimes used to detain people without due process. Some lawyers manage to work China’s legal system while skirting the political fault lines.
One of the most adept at that balancing act is Liu Xiaoyuan, a lawyer with a knack for self-promotion who writes a popular blog and often appears on TV offering his legal opinions. “You don’t have to kill yourself to be a rights lawyer,” Mr. Liu says. “You just have to be careful about the methods you use and the way you approach the truth.”
Unable to play to a jury, Mr. Liu nitpicks court procedure, appealing to judges about the way they consider evidence and how the police present it. In addition, in Chinese courts “you don’t move around continuously — a lawyer must stay seated,” he explains. If he stood, “the judge could say that it was a breach of courtroom discipline.”
In one of his biggest victories, Mr. Liu secured bigger payouts for the families of migrant workers killed in accidents. In 2006, he agreed to represent the family of Li Xiuneng, a migrant worker born in China’s far-western Gansu province, who was killed by a car while riding her bicycle in Beijing. The driver offered her family wrongful-death compensation of 170,000 yuan, or about $25,000. That is far less than would go to the family of a victim born in Beijing, under local rules. The Li family felt cheated.
Mr. Liu argued that Ms. Li should be counted as a Beijing resident, since she had worked and lived in the city for years. A judge agreed, boosting the award for Ms. Li’s family to 470,000 yuan. In recent months, Mr. Liu has won several similar migrant-death cases, which the news media have hailed as a victory for a new legal concept: “same life, same price.”
Complaints are already mounting against local government officials in Sichuan over the large number of schools that collapsed during the earthquake. Local authorities say they are conducting their own investigations and have promised to report their findings within a month. Parents say they are talking to lawyers and seeking advice.
“It’s still a bit early, but we expect to see a growing number of lawsuits in the coming months,” says Chen Xia, a lawyer at the Henghexin law firm in Sichuan’s provincial capital of Chengdu. Ms. Chen says her firm is likely to send lawyers into the field to offer legal aid once aftershocks subside and conditions improve.
Mr. Liu says he is ready to help, too. “If approached by any parent from that area, I will definitely take the case in accordance with the law,” he says. “This is the lawyer’s duty.”
–Ellen Zhu in Shanghai contributed to this article.
URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121486930573017659.html
China Labor News Translations explains how the Chinese government is ripping off migrant workers’ retirement pensions:
By law, Chinese employers are required to contribute to a government-administered retirement pension scheme for all employees. In theory, it sounds like this provides for some kind of security for migrant workers in their old age. But there is a catch. Migrant workers are highly mobile. In Guangdong province, for example, migrant workers only stay for an average of four to six years (People’s Daily, 8 January 2008 ) and in that time they may well move between several different cities. But when migrant workers leave their city of work, they cannot transfer their pension account either to their new place of work, or to their home town. Generally all they can do is cash in (tuibao) their own contribution. Their employer’s contribution – which is higher than the employee’s – stays with the local government. (Precise contributions differ by place. In Nanjing, for example, employees contribute 8 per cent of their salary, and employers contribute 14 per cent). This is essentially theft of migrant workers’ social security, and this aspect of China’s social security system is in need of urgent reform. No wonder local governments are so keen to enforce the social security regulation on enterprises that have are mainly staffed by migrant workers, because they gain an enormous amount from migrant workers’ social security contribution. That also explains why such factories are reluctant to take out insurance for their migrant workers because they knew that this large sum of money will not go back to the workers, but rather to the local governments….
More here.
A month before the Olympics, Beijing’s air is still filthy, which ought to worry the good people who live there the year round. The BBC reports:
Beijing ‘failing pollution test’
By James Reynolds
BBC News, Beijing
8 July 2008
Officials say the city’s air will be clean enough for the Olympics
Just a month before the start of the Beijing Olympics, the city is still failing to meet international air quality standards, the BBC has found.
When Beijing bid for the Olympics in 2001, it said its air would meet World Health Organization (WHO) standards.
The BBC put this to the test using a hand-held detector to test for airborne particles known as PM10.
We found that the city’s air failed to meet the WHO’s air quality guidelines for PM10 on six days out of seven.
These particles are caused by traffic, construction work and factory emissions. They are responsible for much of this city’s pollution.
On one of these days, the pollution reading was seven times over the WHO’s air quality guideline.
By comparison, recent readings done in London – the site of the 2012 Games – all fall within the WHO’s guidelines.
Beijing insists that there is still time to get things right.
Later this month it is imposing a series of emergency air-quality measures which will take cars off the streets and shut down building sites.
One official has told the BBC that he is confident that Beijing will still fulfil its clean air promise.
But this city does not have all that much time left.
Four entertaining, and erudite, lectures on Chinese history by Jonathan Spence of Yale University. Lecture 4, The Body Beautiful, about the history of sports in China is an absolute delight.
In the opinion of many, including me, no English-language historian of China writes more beautifully (which is why some professional historians don’t much care for him). Spence’s books include: The Death of Woman Wang (1978); The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (1984); The Question of Hu (1987); Chinese Roundabout: Essays on History and Culture; The Gate of Heavenly Peace: The Chinese and Their Revolution 1895-1980; The Chan’s Great Continent: China in Western Minds; and God’s Chinese Son (1994).
Xinhua reports:
Woman imams play indispensable role in China’s largest Muslim region
YINCHUAN, June 23 (Xinhua) — At a tiny courtyard mosque in China’s most populous Muslim region, Jin Meihua leads other women in prayer and chants.
Every day, the 44-year-old dons a black robe and violet scarf and preaches to dozens of women at the Little White Mosque in northwest China’s Ningxia Hui Autonomous region, where most of the country’s Islam-faith Hui ethnic minority live.
Jin has a routine life. “Except attending funerals, I always stay in the mosque, teaching the female Muslims Islamic scriptures.”
She is a female imam or “ahong,” pronounced ah-hung, from the Persian word “akhund” for “the learned.” In China, a female imam is an innovation, despite being rare in Arabic countries.
Jin has 15 students, mostly middle-aged and elderly people. They learn slowly and need two years to grasp “The Holy Qu’ran.”
“Many female Muslims do not have the benefit of a school education. Although they are Muslims, they know nothing about the Qu’ran. I want to teach them the holy scriptures and hope they can be inspired and think independently,” she said.
“Women ahong are the best qualified to do this because they can communicate with the female faithful in ways the male ahongs can’t.”
As early as the late Ming dynasty (around the 17th century), the faithful had set up female Muslim schools around the country. These turned into female mosques operated by women imams in late Qing dynasty (around the 19th century).
The practice of female imams then spread to all the Chinese Muslim societies, said Shui Jingjun, a Henan Provincial Academy of Social Sciences researcher.
In the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), religion was banned. It was revived in the 1980s, increasing the numbers of Buddhists, Taoists, Muslims and Christians, among others. The government’s push for gender equality helped broaden Muslim women’s roles.
However, China’s women imams are not equal with the male prayer leaders. They do not lead salat — the five daily prayers considered among the most important Muslim obligations. The prayers are instead piped via loudspeakers into the female mosques from the nearby male ones.
Still, the female imams guide others in worship and are the primary spiritual leaders for the women in their communities. In the female mosque, the female Muslims can learn the Qu’ran and the Islamic doctrines, as well as the Arabic language.
“The appearance of female mosque and female imams has met the female Muslims’ demand for religious knowledge and promoted harmony in the Muslim society,” said Hei Fuli, vice chairman of the Islamic Association of Ningxia. “The Arabic teachings have also enriched their lives.”
Currently, Ningxia has more than 80 female imams. There are more than 3,600 registered mosques and 6,000 ahongs in the region, he said.
Unlike most of her classmates who went to the coastal areas as translators, Zhao Dongmei, 21, a graduate from the Tongxin County Arab Language School in 2005, chose to be a female imam in Yuanzhou District, Guyuan City. Here, nearly half of the population is Muslim.
The timid girl with a mauve scarf and a pair of glasses, received her imam certificate issued by the local Islamic association before graduation. She became a female imam in the female mosque a month after marriage.
“I teach 10 young girls Arabic and Islamic scriptures. They all come from the countryside,” Zhao said, adding, “They can further their studies, be translators or spread what they have learned in their villages.”
Reporters Without Borders, June 12, 2008
Cyber-dissident Huang Qi kidnapped, foreign journalists arrested in Sichuan
(PNG) Reporters Without Borders is worried about the kidnapping of leading cyber-dissident Huang Qi, the founder of the human rights website 64Tianwang. He and two other activists were forced to get into a car by three unidentified men at around 7 p.m. on 10 June in Chengdu, the capital of the earthquake-hit province of Sichuan.
The Chengdu police claim they know nothing about their whereabouts but their abduction bears all the hallmarks of an operation by the Bureau of Public Security and could be linked to the arrest the previous day of Zheng Hongling, a retired university professor who posted a series of three articles about the earthquake on a US-based website.
“The abduction of Huang and his two companions one month to the day after the Sichuan earthquake shows that the crackdown on press freedom activists continues,” Reporters Without Borders said. “We urge the authorities to conduct an investigation to find out where they are, and to free them at once.”
The press freedom organisation added: “We also voice our support for Zheng, who was just using her right to free expression when she wrote three articles criticising the way the authorities in Mianyang, the city where she lives, handled earthquake relief operations. We call for her immediate release as well.”
The editor of the 64Tianwang website, Zhang Guo Ting, said he thought the abduction was linked to the latest article posted by Huang, which was about Zheng’s arrest on a charge of “divulging information abroad.” Aged 53 and a former professor at the University of Technology of the Southwest, Zheng and her husband fled from the earthquake damage in Mianyang on 12 May and went to stay with a friend, Huang Shaopu, in Chengdu.
From there, Zheng wrote her three articles, entitled “Tales of my adventures during the earthquake,” for Observe China, a Chinese website hosted in the United States. She was charged on 9 June with publishing articles criticising the authorities for not letting NGOs do their job. She is being held in Mianyang prison. Huang Shaopu was questioned by the police because the articles were sent from his computer, but he said he did not know they were being published.
Every since the earthquake, 44-year-old Huang Qi had been posting articles on 64Tianwang criticising the way the relief was being organised. He wrote on 20 May: “The reports we are seeing are biased. In reality, it is very difficult for NGOs to deliver food aid. They are obliged to go through government channels. The government is using its propaganda to portray itself as a saviour to little avail. Few citizens trust the government because of the corruptions scandals that already occurred during similar disasters in the past.”
Huang spent five years in Nanchong high security prison after being arrested on 3 June 2000, the eve of the 11th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. He was charged with subversion under articles 103 and 105 of the criminal code for posting articles about the massacre by exiled dissidents on his website, which he originally created as bulletin board for messages about missing persons.
Reporters Without Borders awarded him its Cyber-Freedom Prize in 2004 for his online defence of free expression and human rights.
Meanwhile police today expelled around 10 foreign journalists from a neighbourhood of Dujiangyan, one of the cities that was badly hit by the earthquake, Agence France-Presse reported. Two of them worked for the French agency. They were trying to do a story about a school that collapsed in the quake. Police manhandled some of the journalists and damaged their equipment.
“We are seeing an all-out hunt for press representatives, with police and soldiers blocking access roads and searching all vehicles,” said Tom Van de Weghe, the China correspondent of Belgian radio and TV broadcaster VRT, who was arrested in Dujiangyan and Juyan. Yesterday, the Sichuan authorities had nonetheless renewed press accreditation for journalists wanting to visit quake-hit areas.
Slate on the gaokao, China’s national college entrance exam:
If the SAT lasted two days, covered everything you’d ever studied, and decided your future.
By Manuela Zoninsein
Slate, June 4, 2008
BEIJING, China—For China’s 31st annual National College Entrance Exam, which takes place on the first Thursday and Friday of June, at least 10 million Chinese high-school students have registered to sit the gaokao, as it is colloquially known. They are competing for an estimated 5.7 million university spots.
Kao means test, and gao, which means high, indicates the test’s perceived level of difficulty—and its ability to intimidate. It is China’s SAT—if the SAT lasted two days, covered everything learned since kindergarten, and had the power to determine one’s entire professional trajectory.
As economic development in China careens forward, interest in and the ability to pay for a college education swell. So does competition. Getting into a top-tier university such as Beijing’s Tsinghua or Peking University—the former the alma mater of four of the nine members of China’s current Politburo, the latter China’s oldest university—might lead to an interview with a major multinational or an elite political gig. At the least, a college education can circumvent a blue-collar job with a slow journey up a long, bureaucratic ladder. (Manual labor is generally reserved for poor farmers left with no recourse other than migrant work.)
Students become aware of the gaokao, the sole criterion for university admission, at an early age. Pressures and preparations begin accordingly. All schooling, especially middle- and high-school curricula, is oriented toward gaokao readiness. Students often joke that it takes 12 years to study for the test. Angel, a freshman studying at the China Foreign Affairs University, where I currently teach, remembers walking out after the first day of testing and hearing her best friend remark, “Well, there goes six years.”
Essentially, Chinese universities accept those students who are good at taking tests. This makes sense for an educational system historically oriented toward rote learning, where students are tested on how well they’ve memorized their teachers’ lectures. Mary, who is about to graduate from the Beijing Foreign Languages University, admitted she had many brilliant friends who simply didn’t test well. They retook the test after another year of studying (the gaokao is offered just once a year) and enrolled wherever their scores permitted.
This style of learning might not encourage creativity or individuality, but for the world’s most populous country, the gaokao provides an objective yardstick by which to measure academic success. In theory at least, students’ social and economic statuses don’t matter: The gaokao “allows someone very poor the opportunity to rise out of poverty,” explained Mary.
Take Michael Yu, founder and CEO of New Oriental, an extremely successful provider of educational services, including gaokao prep. The son of illiterate farmers, Yu took the test three times before he got into Peking U’s English-language program. He is now a model Chinese citizen, known for heading a NYSE-listed company with $2.28 billion market capitalization.
The test is supposed to be uniform nationally, but in reality, the gaokao is modified by each province to accommodate the quality of local education. Among students, it is widely held that Tibet and Xinjiang have the easiest versions, Beijing and Shanghai the most difficult. Each university also sets provincial quotas to guarantee minimum enrollment by minorities and students from poorer provinces and to ensure a lopsided number of local entrants (this is the Chinese strategy for maintaining amicable town-gown relations).
Students are essentially competing against others in their province. Shandong, Anhui, and Sichuan provinces are known for disproportionately high averages not just because of large populations but because bad local economies dissuade young people from staying home to find work. In Shanghai, on the other hand, if a student doesn’t test well, there is no end of work opportunities available.
Scores determine one’s major as much as alma mater. Tsinghua, “the MIT of China,” has an internationally renowned engineering program, so gaokao minimums are out of this world. To enter Tsinghua’s software engineering department in 2007, students needed a score of at least 680, out of top scores in the low 700s, depending on the province. (Consider that in Shandong Province, the highest 2007 score was 675.) The software engineering program at Xibei Sciences University, in Xi’an Province, demanded just 442.
Some provinces, including Beijing, permit students to see their gaokao scores before they apply; others, like Shandong and Anhui, require them to indicate preferences before the results are released. Students are left to guess the best school and department they can get into, which often results in unhappy matches. Mike is about to complete his studies in diplomacy at CFAU. Had he seen his gaokao scores before applying, however, he would have known that he had qualified for his first choice: environmental protection at Peking U. In other cases, students overestimate their scores and are left with no option at the end of the summer but to study another year.
Later this week, China will accommodate millions of nervous gaokao-takers. Traffic cops will redirect vehicles away from test centers, and construction sites will pause their incessant drilling. Even in Sichuan, tents have been erected in case aftershocks require students to be moved from testing centers. Many Chinese citizens find the system painful, inflexible, and ineffective. But even more side with Mary, who told me, “It’s not perfect, but it’s the fairest system.”
The Sichuan earthquake was, of course, a natural disaster, but some of its victims were more equal than others. Just as a bigger percentage of third-class passengers than first-class passengers perished in the Titanic, Sichuanese children in poor schools died in greater numbers than Sichuanese children in schools for the well heeled. The New York Times reports:
The earthquake’s destruction of Xinjian Primary School was swift and complete. Hundreds of children were crushed as the floors collapsed in a deluge of falling bricks and concrete. Days later, as curiosity seekers came with video cameras and as parents came to grieve, the four-story school was no more than rubble.
In contrast, none of the nearby buildings were badly damaged. A separate kindergarten less than 20 feet away survived with barely a crack. An adjacent 10-story hotel stood largely undisturbed. And another local primary school, Beijie, catering to children of the elite, was in such good condition that local officials were using it as a refugee center.
“This is not a natural disaster,” said Ren Yongchang, whose 9-year-old son died inside the destroyed school. His hands were covered in plaster dust as he stood beside the rubble, shouting and weeping as he grabbed the exposed steel rebar of a broken concrete column. “This is not good steel. It doesn’t meet standards. They stole our children.”
There is no official figure on how many children died at Xinjian Primary School, nor on how many died at scores of other schools that collapsed in the powerful May 12 earthquake in Sichuan Province. But the number of student deaths seems likely to exceed 10,000, and possibly go much higher, a staggering figure that has become a simmering controversy in China as grieving parents say their children might have lived had the schools been better built.
The rest of this sobering article can be read here.
Alan Baumler writes in Frog in a Well on Ma Ying-jeou’s inauguration speech:
If you were wondering how different the new Ma government in Taiwan would be from the DPP government it is replacing you should go read Michael Turton’s analysis of Ma’s inauguration speech. (Given in Chinese (I assume Mandarin) with an English translation displayed at the same time)
Ma spends a good deal of time taking digs at his predecessors and promising vague but wonderful things for the future, as is typical is speeches like this. He also refers to the people of Taiwan as part of the 中華民族, rather than 国民 or citizens. How to translate 中華民族? I suppose the most literal way would be “Chinese race” although “Chinese ethnicity” probably sounds better. Both in Taiwan (at least under the KMT) and on the Mainland governments would claim that this “Chinese race” includes ethnic minorities. And, as some of Michael’s commenters point out there are more explicitly Han chauvinist terms he could have used, like 漢族. Still, it is hard to disagree with Michael or with the KMT aboriginal legislator who walked out of of the speech that this term is a lot less welcoming to non-Chinese that the 国民 that the DPP preferred. I also found it sort of interesting that he explicitly outed himself as a mainlander. “Taiwan is not my birthplace, but it is where I was raised and the resting place of my family. I am forever grateful to society for accepting and nurturing this post-war immigrant.” 英九雖然不是在台灣出生，但台灣是我成長的故鄉，是我親人埋骨的所在。我尤其感念台灣社會對我這樣一個戰後新移民的包容之義、栽培之恩與擁抱之情 I thought this was sort of weird. Yes, he is a mainlander, but it seems odd to bring it up, unless he is trying to tie himself more firmly to China. If he pisses off the aborigines that might create trouble. If he goes so far as to piss off the non-mainlanders (whom I guess I would define as people who speak Tai-yu first) he could have real trouble.
He clearly -is- trying to butter up ‘China’, although it is not clear how much this will involve throwing ‘Taiwan’ under the bus. Maybe a lot. “In resolving cross-strait issues, what matters is not sovereignty but core values and way of life” This is actually pretty scary, in that the Taiwan government seems to be at least downplaying and perhaps abandoning entirely the ROC’s claims to sovereignty, and looking to a common ‘Confucian’ culture. At least for Ma Taiwan seems much more part of Greater China than it was before.
On the greater degree of openness in the Chinese media in recent days, Yulin Zhuang writes in the Hypermodern:
Many Chinese will point to the fact that China often shows its poorer face on the news these days. Stricken farmers with piteous situations are often featured in the nightly news, struggling to make a living when there is no water to irrigate their plants with. In this case, disaster victims huddling in the streets, afraid to enter their homes. The key difference is that the blame is on Nature, not the government. The government is not being expected to solve or prevent the problem—merely to mitigate its effects. That is the key difference with the media response to the earthquake. People of any country unite around common disasters, and this represents a golden opportunity to solidify support for the Chinese government by showing off that it is doing everything it can. Put a picture of a woman crying over the dead body of her child next to a picture of a grave Wen Jiabao standing amidst rubble, and you have a propagandist’s dream: a win-win situation for the government. Now that many are perishing before they can be rescued from the rubble, and now that exposure is beginning to take its toll on the survivors, the openness is being reconsidered.
This is not to say that the Chinese government should not be praised for its quick response—it deserves to be lauded. It is outdoing itself in its response to this disaster. Many pundits, however, seem to be surprised by the media openness that is being seen to this disaster, and speculate if it represents a new trend in Chinese thinking. To the contrary, this is merely the continuation of basic principles of news broadcast propaganda that have been followed for years: stir up the people’s emotions against an outsider (be it America, Japan, or Mother Nature) and show them how the government is doing well against them. That is what happened in 1999 for the Belgrade bombing—initial open news coverage was then suddenly throttled—and it is what will happen now with this earthquake.
The rest of Yulin Zhuang’s post is worth reading.
Politics aside, Taiwan gives generously in China quake aid
By Ralph Jennings
TAIPEI (Reuters) – Taiwan, normally hostile to China, has offered its earthquake-hit neighbor one of its biggest outpourings of aid to demonstrate gratitude for help it received when it suffered a similar disaster in 1999.
Taiwan’s government is offering T$2 billion ($71 million), so much that one lawmaker is questioning the source of the funds, for relief in China’s Sichuan province, where a magnitude 7.9 quake on Monday has killed at least
15,000.
The public has massed another T$2.2 billion, local media said. Taiwan companies and entrepreneurs are pledging nearly 300 million yuan ($42.9 million), while others, including president-elect Ma Ying-jeou, donated smaller sums of money or supplies such as tents, sleeping bags and medicine.
“It’s hard to say for sure this is the world’s highest amount (of aid for this disaster), but according to the news out there so far, it should be,” said Tung Chen-yuan, vice director of the Taiwan government’s Mainland Affairs Council.
China has claimed sovereignty over self-ruled Taiwan since the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949, and the relationship between Beijing and Taipei has been stormy. Beijing has vowed to bring the island back under its rule, by force if necessary.
But China on Thursday accepted a Taiwan-based China Airlines offer to fly relief materials to Sichuan province, Xinhua news agency said. For security reasons and political concerns, Taiwan aircraft seldom land in China.
A Taiwan Red Cross search-and-rescue crew was cleared to head for China on Friday, the island’s government said. The crew will share Taiwan’s 1999 earthquake aftermath experience with beleaguered Chinese search-and-rescue
personnel.
Officials and donation collection agencies said because Taiwan received aid after its own deadly quake in 1999, many on the island feel obligated to give back. The September 21, 1999 quake measured 7.1 and killed 2,416 people.
“Taiwan has gone through quakes before, so we have that unique experience,” said Master Chueh-pei, spokeswoman for Taiwan’s Fo Guang Shan Buddhist organization, which sent medicine to the frontlines. “And then China is right next to us, so there’s a brother-like relationship and a sense of racial similarity.”
(Editing by Jonathan Hopfner and Valerie Lee)
Book Review: Jiang Rong’s ‘Wolf Totem’
By Pankaj Mishra
International Herald Tribune, Friday, May 2, 2008
Wolf Totem By Jiang Rong. Translated by Howard Goldblatt. 527 pages. $26.95, The Penguin Press; £17.99, Hamish Hamilton Ltd.
Lu Xun, China’s most revered modern writer, was a student of medicine in 1906 when he saw a lantern slide of Japanese soldiers decapitating a Chinese prisoner. It was a particularly low moment in China’s national self-esteem, and what appalled Lu Xun most was the passivity of the Chinese spectators. “The people,” he later wrote, “of a weak, backward country, even though they may enjoy sturdy health, can only serve as the senseless material of and audience for public executions.” Convinced that art could goad his compatriots toward “spiritual transformation,” he presented them in his first story, “The Diary of a Madman,” as hypocritical cannibals. His later work abounded in such pitiless depictions, inaugurating a modern Chinese literature marked by what the critic C.T. Hsia called “an obsessive concern with China as a nation afflicted with a spiritual disease and therefore unable to strengthen itself or change its set ways of inhumanity.” Certainly history imposed this tormented self-reckoning on Chinese writers. For much of the 20th century, their country suffered prodigious violence and social trauma: millions were consumed by the civil war, the Japanese invasion and Maoist disasters like the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. In comparison, China in the last decade has known extraordinary stability. The middle class in particular has enjoyed undreamed of affluence – so much so that the great popularity of Jiang Rong’s long, bleak novel about an obscure province inhabited by an ethnic minority is deeply intriguing.
Set during the Cultural Revolution, “Wolf Totem” describes the education of an intellectual from China’s majority Han community living with nomadic herders in the grasslands of Inner Mongolia. Not much was known about the pseudonymous author on the book’s first publication in 2004; only last year was Jiang Rong revealed as Lu Jiamin, a recently retired professor at one of Beijing’s most prestigious academic institutions. It is also now clear that he was one of the former Red Guards who, following Mao’s advice that urban intellectuals re-educate themselves in the countryside, traveled to Inner Mongolia in the late 1960s.
Jiang Rong, who invokes Lu Xun’s ambition to transform “national character,” clearly wishes to use a fictionalized account of his life with the nomads to advance an argument. But the author’s preoccupation with his Chinese audience may not be the only source of frustration for foreign readers of Howard Goldblatt’s generally fluent translation. Jiang Rong seems to have barely attempted to transmute his experiences and epiphanies into fiction; his book reads like an extended polemic about the superiority of nomadic people and the dangers of a triumphant but brutishly ignorant modernity.
The pastoral education of the protagonist, Chen Zhen, proceeds through an awkwardly paced narrative full of set-piece didacticism. Chen learns about the delicate balance of power between nomads and animals on the grasslands; he even raises a wolf cub. But he never assumes much complexity and density as a character. Unlike most memoirs of the Cultural Revolution, “Wolf Totem” omits significant emotional as well as political detail. Out in the Mongolian fastness, Chen scarcely remembers his past life.
Denied a populous human setting with its diversity of wills and motives, a narrative like this can be quickened by a feeling for mood and landscape. And, especially in its depictions of wolf hunts, Jiang Rong’s novel succeeds in conveying the romantic desolation of the Mongolian steppes. This seems, though, to be due more to his almost photographic memory than to any gift for evocative narration. In the end, “Wolf Totem” engages the foreign reader only in its attempts to diagnose the spiritual malaise of contemporary China.
The main line of inquiry is announced on the very first page when a suitably old and wise Mongol tells Chen: “You’re like a sheep. A fear of wolves is in your Chinese bones.” As if on cue, Chen is soon “saddened to have been born into a line of farmers” who have “become as timid as sheep after dozens, even hundreds, of generations of being raised on grains and greens, the products of farming communities; they had lost the virility of their nomadic ancestors.” Jiang Rong tries to defuse Chinese pride in their splendid agrarian civilization, even disparaging Confucius, now belatedly embraced by the Communist Party. There are laments about how timid Chinese peasants fell prey to canny Westerners who, as “descendants of barbarian, nomadic tribes such as the Teutons and the Anglo-Saxons,” have the blood of wolves in their veins. Chen concludes that the Chinese “are in desperate need of a transfusion” of such “vigorous, unrestrained blood.” This sort of parade-ground bellicosity echoes the rhetoric of China’s neocon intellectuals, eager to see their country beat the West at its own game. Yet Jiang Rong, who was jailed as a democracy activist after the Tiananmen Square massacre, also mentions “freedom and popular elections” as among the salutary “traditions and habits” contemporary Westerners inherited from their nomadic ancestors.
As the novel glacially proceeds, however, paeans to the vigorous West are supplanted by warnings about China’s ecological balance, threatened by human greed and hubris. As the old Mongol puts it, “the grassland is a big life”; if it dies, “so will the cows and sheep and horses, as well as the wolves and the people, all the little lives. Then not even the Great Wall, not even Beijing will be protected.” The real heart of Jiang Rong’s vast pedagogical project comes into view as settlers arrive on the grassland. Chen, who has declared his opposition to Han chauvinism, is forced to accompany his compatriots on a wolf hunt. He also witnesses the casual brutality of men forcing marmots from their dens with firecrackers. Toward the end, he must kill his wounded pet wolf, and not even Jiang Rong’s intrusive commentary (“he felt he’d developed a spiritual and emotional dependence on the cub”) deprives the scene of a certain tragic power.
In an epilogue, Chen travels from Beijing to a grassland that, 30 years later, has been brutally cleansed of wolves. China’s swift and reckless modernization has fulfilled the old Mongol’s grim prophecies as dust storms from an encroaching desert periodically smother Beijing. Jiang Rong now uses Chen to make his strongest protest against Han Chinese treatment of other ethnic groups. “Current government policy has developed to the stage of ‘one country, two systems,”‘ he says, referring to Chinese control of capitalist Hong Kong, “but deeply rooted in the Han consciousness is still ‘many areas, one system.”‘ It seems strange that the Chinese censors missed this indictment of Han imperialism. It’s even more remarkable that a novel so relentlessly gloomy and ponderously didactic has become a huge best seller, second in circulation only to Mao’s little red book. This success may be due, at least in part, to its exhortations to the Chinese to imitate the go-getting spirit of the West.
However, “Wolf Totem” also captures a widespread Chinese anxiety about their country’s growing physical and moral squalor as millions abandon the countryside in search of a middle-class lifestyle that cannot be environmentally sustained. The novel’s literary claims are shaky; and Jiang Rong’s apparent wish to transform China’s national character through a benign conservationism is compromised by his boy-scoutish arguments for toughness. Yet few books about today’s China can match “Wolf Totem” as a guide to the troubled self-images of so many of its people as they stumble, grappling with some inconvenient truths of their own, into modernity.
In a fascinating article entitled “The Dynamics of Tibetan-Chinese Bilingualism: The Current Situation and Future Prospects,” Nicolas Tournadre (Peter Brown trans.) argues: “linguistic and educational policies are playing a considerable role in the way in which Tibetans conceive of their own language. By excluding Tibetan from the administrative spheres and giving Chinese a predominant position at school and university, by offering only a handful of professional openings based on a command of Tibetan, the authorities have contributed to giving Tibetan the image of a ‘useless’ language. The Tibetans, who are very pragmatic and have a great ability to adapt, have quickly turned away from their own language.”
Tournadre concludes:
“[L]inguistic and educational policies are playing a considerable role in the way in which Tibetans conceive of their own language. By excluding Tibetan from the administrative spheres and giving Chinese a predominant position at school and university, by offering only a handful of professional openings based on a command of Tibetan, the authorities have contributed to giving Tibetan the image of a ‘useless’ language. The Tibetans, who are very pragmatic and have a great ability to adapt, have quickly turned away from their own language.
In less than fifty years, Tibetan, which is currently part of the cultural heritage of China, has become an endangered language, condemned to an irreversible decline, if not to outright extinction within two generations, if the present linguistic policy is maintained. The responsibility of the regional and central governments in this is obvious. Spoken Tibetan, associated as it is with a major literary language and which benefits from the growing interest of the West, will not of course disappear body and soul, but considerable damage may well be inflicted on it. Moreover, the development of ra-ma-lug skad (Tibetan-Chinese mixed speech) in the Tibetan Autonomous Region and the Autonomous Prefectures is detrimental to the learning of Tibetan and Chinese alike.”
A few days ago, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd delivered a remarkable speech in Chinese to students at Peking University.
Geremie Barme, a professor of Chinese history at the Australian National University in Canberra, offers an assessment of the content and implications of Rudd’s historic speech:
Sydney Morning Herald, April 12, 2008
Rudd rewrites the rules of engagement
Geremie Barme
On Wednesday, the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, made a speech to an audience at Peking University, China’s pre-eminent tertiary institution. Given the tensions over Tibet and the Olympic torch relay, as a practised diplomat Rudd could have taken the easy path by speaking in platitudes about the strength of the bilateral relationship and any number of mutually acceptable and anodyne topics.
Instead, with finesse and skill, he chose to address the students on the broad basis for a truly sustainable relationship with the economically booming yet politically autocratic state that is China. In doing so, he rewrote the rules of engagement in a way that can only benefit Australia and our relationship with this important country.
First Rudd acknowledged where he was: at a university that, more than any other educational institution in China, has helped shaped that country’s modern history, one known for its contributions to Chinese intellectual debate, political activism and cultural experimentation. He mentioned some of China’s 20th-century intellectual heroes whose careers were entwined with Peking University. Some were involved in reshaping Chinese into a modern language capable of carrying urgently needed political, cultural and historical debate. One was a leading democratic thinker.
He also made three references to Lu Xun (1881-1936), China’s literary hero, unyielding critic of authoritarianism and principled dissenter, noting that Lu Xun personally designed Peking University’s crest. It would not have been
lost on his audience that the Prime Minister’s choice of intellectual exemplars acknowledged China’s dominant communist ideology while pointing to the traditions of free speech and debate that have made Peking University so important.
Rudd’s strategy was thus first to honour the place where he was speaking and its connection to significant, complex historical and cultural figures. He went on to speak more personally of his own educational and political trajectory, and about Australia’s national interest. Appealing to his youthful audience to consider what positive role they could play in China’s rise as a world power, he evoked the concept of harmony (hexie), embraced by the present Chinese leadership, before making a canny digression. This was to note that 2008 is the 110th anniversary of the Hundred Days Reform movement, during which an enlightened emperor struggled to enact a process of political reform and modernisation similar to the Meiji Restoration in Japan that had taken place not long before. Rudd didn’t need to say that this movement failed and its leaders were beheaded; his audience would know that. Instead he noted that one of the leading lights of the reforms, the thinker Kang Youwei, who survived by fleeing into exile, went on to write about “the Great Harmony” (datong), “a utopian world free of political boundaries”. Thus, in a manner both subtle and eminently clear to a Chinese intellectual audience, he linked the officially approved concept of harmony to the broader course of political reform, change and openness.
Rudd then spoke about China joining the rest of humanity as “a responsible global stakeholder” – a lead-in to addressing the pressing issue of Tibet. By framing his comments in such a manner, he established his right – and by extension the right of others – to disagree with both Chinese official and mainstream opinion on matters of international concern. There is a venerable Chinese expression for this position: “A true friend,” Rudd went on, “is one who can be a zhengyou, that is a partner who sees beyond immediate benefit to the broader and firm basis for continuing, profound and sincere friendship.”
The subsequent Chinese media discussion of Rudd’s use of the powerful and meaning-laden term zhengyou – the true friend who dares to disagree – has been considerable. That is because the more common word “friendship” (youyi) has been a cornerstone of China’s post-1949 diplomacy. Mao Zedong once observed, “The first and foremost question of the revolution is: who is our friend and who is our foe.”
To be a friend of China, the Chinese people, the party-state or, in the reform period, even a mainland business partner, the foreigner is often expected to stomach unpalatable situations, and keep silent in the face of egregious behaviour. A friend of China might enjoy the privilege of offering the occasional word of caution in private; in the public arena he or she is expected to have the good sense and courtesy to be “objective”, that is to toe the line, whatever that happens to be. The concept of “friendship” thus degenerates into little more than an effective tool for emotional blackmail and enforced complicity.
Rudd’s tactic was to deftly sidestep the vice-like embrace of that model of friendship by substituting another. “A strong relationship, and a true friendship,” he told the students, “are built on the ability to engage in a direct, frank and ongoing dialogue about our fundamental interests and future vision.”
The distinction was not lost on the Chinese. The official newsagency Xinhua reported: “Eyes lit up when [Rudd] used this expression … it means friendship based on speaking the truth, speaking responsibly. It is evident that to be a zhengyou first thing one needs is the magnanimity of pluralism.” Of course, in the land of linguistic slippage it is easy to see that while for some zhengyou means speaking out of turn, for others it may simply become another way for allowing pesky foreigners to let off steam.
Of course, there are dangers, not mentioned in the Chinese media. Perhaps the most famous zhengyou relationship of modern times was that between Mao and Liang Shuming, a Confucian thinker and agrarian reformer. Mao declared that although their politics were different, Liang was a true zhengyou.
Liang advised Mao on rural policy from the 1940s into the early ’50s. But, in 1953, Liang dared to venture that class struggle was having a calamitous effect on rural life. He asked Mao whether he had the “magnanimity” to accept his views. The Chairman shot back, “No, I don’t have that
magnanimity!” Shortly thereafter, Liang was denounced and silenced.
On the other hand, there are examples from Chinese history where a zhengyou has played a key role in bringing about good governance and prosperity.
The most famous zhengyou was Wei Zheng, a friend and critic of the Emperor Taizong of the 7th-century Tang Dynasty. Wei told the ruler that “if you listen to wise counsel all is brightness; if, however, you give in to bias
darkness falls”. When Wei died, some years later, the emperor bitterly mourned his death. He offered this tribute: “One looks at a reflection in a mirror to see if one’s dress is in order. One studies history to understand
the changing fortunes of time. And one seeks wise counsel to avoid mistakes. Wei Zheng has died, and I have lost my mirror. To have a zhengyou is to be fortunate indeed.” The metaphor is used by China’s leaders and the media
even today. One can only hope that when they look in the mirror they do not do so with eyes wide shut.
By introducing the term zhengyou with all of its liberating connotations into our dealings with China, Kevin Rudd has achieved something of considerable significance.
Geremie Barme is a professor of Chinese history at the Australian National University.
