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I remember a Starbucks cup from several years..."
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China’s ‘century of humiliation’ and the Olympics (
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The most irmpotant reason why China may not invest in the..."
Foreign baby in China essentials: IMPORTED BABY FORMULA (
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damien: "
I am going to have a baby in china , are there USA..."
Steve Jobs, Apple, China and Us [updated] (
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Dr Ross Grainger: "
The American CEOs I mentioned are less..."
Max: "
I understand that, but look what Erica wrote: “paying too..."
Affordable gadgets vs. Chinese workers’ rights (
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Joel 大江: "
Do you know what got him interested in Chinese..."
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Mike Daisey, who is featured in the CBS News article..."
Happy Lantern Festival 2011 from Tianjin, China! (
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Hi Rachel! These photos and video were taken on the..."
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Chinese take-out
Good good study, day day up!
Pronounced: guó bǎo
Literally: National Security/National Treasure
Means: The two terms are homophones, and "national treasure" often means "panda". A writer at Seeing Red in China explains the rest: "how panda becomes the symbol for Chinese security thugs: Chinese national security (more like secret police) is called 国保 (guó bǎo) for short, and it’s pronounced exactly the same as 国宝, national treasure. Netizens sometimes refer 国保 as 国宝, jokingly, hence Panda, China’s national treasure. Kungfu Panda movies provided the basis for Panda to be a martial character."
With the recent confrontation between Batman actor Christian Bale and some infamous Chinese security thugs, online Chinese are been passing around "Pandaman vs. Batman" jokes, and photoshopping "Pandaman" into all kinds of scenarios, including movie posters and images from other security embarrassments and scandals. See here, here and here for more.
- 2011/12/19
InterWǎng Debris
Recent China internet debris.
Affordable gadgets vs. Chinese workers' rights
Three recent news articles (and one response) return the spotlight to the mammoth electronics factories in China that make most of our favourite electronics, pointing out what everybody knows and no one wants to think about:
Happy Chinese workers spell the end of affordable tech (ZDNet)
"Human and worker rights reforms in China would have serious negative consequences for the efficiency and cost of the gadget supply chain.
[...]
"Foxconn’s client list reads like a celebrity tech roster that includes Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Intel, Lenovo, IBM, Cisco/Linksys, Netgear, Microsoft, Sharp, Sony, Motorola, Asus, Acer and Vizio... tablet runners and e-reader champions Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Yes, your Kindles and Nooks are also made by the very same companies with the same awful working conditions that make products for Apple."
The dark side of shiny Apple products (CBS News)
"...our most popular electronic devices are largely made by hand ... MANY hands, as it turns out ... hands that often are very over-worked, or so industry's critics contend."
[...]
""I met workers who were 12. Do you really think Apple doesn't know?"
"But what was news were the suicides..."
In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad (NYT)
and
BSR: New York Times’ Apple-Foxconn article contains untruths, inaccuracies, and misleading info (Mac Daily News)
- 2012/02/06
Those aren't Chinese New Year's fireworks; they're "recreational munitions"
From Nankai Rob's Chinese New Year 2012 post "Spring Festival Time. . .Lock and Load":
"...parties are held on a scale so massive that Caligula would have nodded in approval, and enough recreational munitions are set off to make the Battle of Waterloo feel like a suburban bar mitzvah. You’ll notice my careful word choice here: “recreational munitions” rather than “fireworks.” “Fireworks” as a term carries with it more celebratory, even innocent connotations, but you can’t define Chinese celebratory fireworks by the intent behind them. Certainly they’re set off with great excitement and joy, but you can, after all, also lob a grenade into a dumpster with great excitement and joy, and most of what is being set off these days qualifies for inclusion in the dumpster-grenade category. So: recreational munitions."
For more about the genuinely stunning Chinese New Year fireworks phenomenon with photos and video, see:
Happy Chinese New Year!
- 2012/01/22
Tension rising with Mainland students in American universities
Interesting observations at China Law Blog about how Mainland Chinese students studying in the USA -- in contrast to Chinese from other countries -- are apparently generating a lot of anger among the American students: Chinese Students In America. It's Bad Out There.
It seems that Mainland Chinese attitudes toward education don't play well among their American classmates. For example:
"They cheat all the time. It is pretty unbelievable how often I have seen them cheating. I am always complaining to my professors about this, but they usually just act like they are too important to deign to deal with something like this. Just come watch a test being adminstered and it will be obvious. They are allowed to get away with it because they pay the foreign tuition rate."
"One student told me of how all the students not from China agreed not to speak one day to see what would happen. There was no class discussion and the teacher asked them not to do it again."
- 2012/01/11
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The juxiposition of the currency conflagration and the statue of Mary is quite striking. Interesting concept of sacred spaces.
I’ve started thinking about doing a PhD in history focussing on the intersection of religion and the “public square”. This photo would provide ample fodder for a dissertation.
Is that Manadarin Mary? Thats as crazy as Joel’s African Jesus paintings.
Darren & Ryan – there’s enough camera fodder here to illustrate an entire dissertation. We’re still just beginning to learn the ropes of what is and isn’t culturally appropriate for us re: being present at people’s public religious events/spaces. It’s obvious that the rules are a little different from what we’re used to. In one photo from that trip, taken of the scene right beside the family in the photo above: two guys play Chinese chess and another snoozes with his feet up on the table while a woman in the background takes a break from offering money at another altar to talk on her cell-phone. Even in the cheesiest of contemporary or emergent churches, I have yet to see that happen during Communion. Many altars have a combination of meticulously placed items and old junk laying around (dirty tipped-over buckets and stuff).
I suppose you could say that that particular deity is like Mary… to whatever degree Mary functions as a bodhisattva! But in this case the deity is functionally more like an animistic god/spirit rather than a bodhisattva (they’re relating to her through folk Buddhism rather than ‘high’ philosophical Buddhism). The statue is of ???????, or Guanyin, the Chinese version of Avalokitesvara, the Indian male bodhisattva. English translations call her the goddess of mercy or goddess of ‘heaven’ (in an ultimate/universal/all-encompassing/everything-and-nothing Buddhist sense). She’s apparently the most popular bodhisattva for the Chinese.
This photo is making a great conversation piece for our cultural informants… I sat in the fish soup shop for an hour this afternoon, chatting about it (one of them has good English). Oh, the conversations we could have if we had the language skills! They had great difficulty explaining the address ??, which from what I gathered is sort of a pantheistic version of “Ultimate/all-encompassing/Almighty” – this address is very selectively applied. The next three characters are the name (???), and the last two (??) mean ‘bodhisattva.’
… and those African Jesus paintings aren’t crazy!