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The most irmpotant reason why China may not invest in the..."
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I am going to have a baby in china , are there USA..."
Steve Jobs, Apple, China and Us [updated] (
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The American CEOs I mentioned are less..."
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I understand that, but look what Erica wrote: “paying too..."
Affordable gadgets vs. Chinese workers’ rights (
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Happy Lantern Festival 2011 from Tianjin, China! (
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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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很多中国的“妻管严”（意思就是怕老婆的人）在家 里对妻子唯命是从，在家外则表现的自己是“大男 人”
有一个赵本山经典的小品叫做《小九老乐》，如果你 看懂了这个小品，就明白我说的是什么意思了。
yabaliu says that some men in China that are henpecked at home but put on a chauvinistic facade outside the home.
Chinese male chauvinism is called 大男子主义; “big-man-ism.” My teachers say that South Koreans are especially notorious for this. Two female university students I practiced Chinese with this week said that they prefer a guy who is “a little bit” this way, but not too much. We often see young couples exhibiting behaviour in line with this, and sometimes it’s disturbing.
yabaliu recommends a classic sketch by Mainland comedian Zhào Běnshān called 《小九老乐》; “xiǎo jiǔ lǎo lè,” but I don’t know how to translate that. You can see it on YouTube (here and here), and Tudou (the Chinese youtube). Apparently if you can understand this sketch, then you’ll understand a lot about Chinese “big-man-ism.”
I tend to agree with yabaliu! Down in Chengdu, folk call the browbeaten men “pa er duo” (lit: soft ear, in the local accent). We also hear that northern men have a problem with “bronchitis” 妻管严。
It’s all about shame and face, isn’t it?
I don’t know what Mainlanders might identify as the main parts of all that. Chinese Masculinities/Chinese Femininities has an article mentioning how wives can use their husband’s ‘face’ as leverage, deliberately standing outside the door and scolding him loudly so all the neighbours can hear. He might not care what she thinks, but he cares about protecting his face, or something like that.
Our teachers talk about how one of the wife’s jobs is to give her husband face. Obviously we don’t do it quite that way in the West, but I think we also have unwritten rules about how a good wife will talk about her man in public, especially if he’s there. A North American husband could be greatly affected by how his wife treats him in front of others.
My impression is that Chinese men are particularly sensitive (threatened) about their masculinity (and thus more prone to masculine displays), but I don’t know if that’s really how it is or if in China such behaviour is simply more obvious to me because I’m a cultural outsider. Like you’re not a man if you don’t drink 白酒, smoke, make your wife do the grocery shopping, etc. But I could easily point to some somewhat silly and conspicuous displays of American masculinity, too (and, for that matter, seriously tragic and misguided expressions of femininity as well). Maybe it’s just that gender roles and identities in China are (still) more tightly defined/differentiated than in the West (where we’d have trouble/raging debate trying to explain what makes a man a man and a woman a woman). Maybe with Chinese society changing so fast, gender roles/identities start to shift (women become less dependent) and men compensate by seeking ways to affirm their masculine identity (like by reaffirming aspects of traditional male chauvinism). Ha, or maybe it’s just fun to play male chauvinism with the boys sometimes, just like it is in North America.
I think it’s hard to talk about Chinese gender issues as a Westerner. There’s plenty to criticize, no doubt, but it’s hard to sort out if our criticism comes more from a real understanding of what’s going, or more from ethnocentric feelings of cultural superiority cloaked in the guise of post-Sexual Revolution notions of sexuality.