穹顶之下: Rolling 中华人民共和国 / People's Republic of China (PRC) Thread

Xinjiang, photographed by Carolyn Drake - check out entries under 'Wild Pigeon' http://carolyndrake.com/

Why don't American students who want to get a job in China just go there and get a job washing dishes at Pizza Hut or Outback Steakhouse and live 8 to a room w/o papers?

― 龜, Friday, March 13, 2015 12:04 PM (8 hours ago)

i think the maybe equivalent of that is teaching english in an unlicensed school in a third tier city. plenty are still up for doing that.

i would say there are lots of lucrative jobs in china but not many of them require chinese lang proficiency or they require actual chinese lang proficiency + serious literacy + understanding of the country, but not much in the middle.

http://www.nationalpost.com/m/wp/blog.html?b=news.nationalpost.com/2015/03/12/chinese-governments-warning-to-the-dalai-lama-youd-better-reincarnate-on-our-terms

dalai lama says he might not reincarnate

Zhu Weiqun, a Communist Party official who has long dealt with Tibetan issues, told reporters in Beijing on Wednesday that the Dalai Lama had, essentially, no say over whether he was reincarnated. That was ultimately for the Chinese government to decide, he said, according to a transcript of his comments on the website of People’s Daily, the party’s main newspaper.

how many europeans or north americans without chinese ancestry get to that level of proficiency

people learning languages without spending enough time to get anywhere is one of the most delusory practices

I think learning languages is fine if it's a hobby, can be fun, but agree if it's for vocational purposes

i think europeans or north americans without chinese ancestry that get to that level are rare and most are dedicated hobbyists or in academia. but there are lots of people that speak the language well and can't claim anything close to near native literacy and lots in academia with great literacy that speak the language competently but not fluently. it requires i think time in country or longterm immersion combined with longterm, serious study.

Something I've noticed/struggled a bit with is also most high level instruction teaches you very standard PTH

Which is great if all you hang around with are highly literate and educated CCP types or academics

And also great if you're in business, probably

But it's also very hard to learn the local dialect and there aren't many resources to turn to other than find a local dude and hang out w/ dude n buddies

This is true even in Beijing, home of "PTH"

i guess i kind of agree but at the same time teaching dialects or even listening to nonstandard accents is pretty much impossible and native speakers i think are even worse at it than non sinophone learners (they're more used to guessing at phrases from context, less tuned to tonal quirks that throw off native speakers). but it is kind of surprising that even for languages like wu or cantonese with hundreds of millions of speakers and their own distinct culture and literature the learning resources are few.

but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guangzhou_Television_Cantonese_controversy type of stuff so it's not really surprising

now that i'm kind of attempting to learn japanese i get discouraged by flashbacks to sitting at my desk writing characters over and over again, the shame of seemingly not being able to competently ask for the right type of zhongnanhai even after studying the language in university, years of trying to feel my way through conversations that i understood ten percent of, prepping for classes with remarks that i hoped would seem improvised and trying to predict possible professor questions while also trying to figure out a photocopied never translated into english story about an aristocratic family in late ming china written in a combination of vernacular and classical chinese. so, flipping through introduction to hiragana and a book of simple greetings, i know that even mastering those things will take too long and my mastery will be unsatisfying and i will look and feel like an idiot over and over again, even if i work at it for years. but when i get that six figure salary working for toyota it will have been worth it. #futureintlangofbusiness

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0o7lajjzBg

http://en.people.cn/n/2015/0105/c98649-8831651.html

http://i.imgur.com/7fjzkg8.jpg

Photo shows a female SWAT member in Sichuan ripping apart a steel wash basin barehanded. Four hours physical training every day turns an ordinary woman into an invincible soldier. (Photo/CCTV)

lol

Example of the strength of Chinese soldiers, or of the poor quality of Chinese manufacturing

Idk if anybody else still watches 非诚勿扰 but lately they've had an 'anonymous' woman on who only appears in Avatar makeup?

http://i.imgur.com/NIn484z.jpg

http://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/health/article/1742243/changes-chinas-alcohol-use-policies-urgently-needed-researchers-say

For nakh

http://xw.qq.com/news/20150323058980

http://news.sina.com.cn/s/p/2015-03-23/145131635580.shtml

weibo user returns to hometown of handan, hebei. "reports most funerals in the area feature strippers to 'liven things up.' spectators don't know whether to laugh or cry. as soon as the funeral dirge concludes, the strippers hit the stage."

http://hongwrong.com/hong-kong-dystopian/

Kinda cliche'd by this point but I still love it

http://i.imgur.com/h92fGmu.jpg

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150402-the-worst-place-on-earth

Who wants to go with me

always appreciate your links, thanks

can confirm even without having visited toxic lakes that baotou is one of the worst places on earth

http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/04/01/supporters-of-detained-feminists-in-china-petition-for-their-release/?_r=0

i keep feeling like i'm missing something with the detention of these women... they were going to be "distributing stickers and leaflets protesting molestation in buses and subways"? on international womens day? i'm more proparty than the average chinawatcher and i can usually see the fucked up logic they operate on but i really must be missing something here. hillary clinton otm.

http://i.imgur.com/FrQ97Ny.jpg

https://twitter.com/XHNews/status/587838236468256768

http://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/1780225/china-confirms-three-killed-north-koreans-border-village
+
http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/04/29/china-confirms-killings-on-border-with-north-korea/

http://sinonk.com/2015/03/24/parties-with-different-ideologies-chinas-new-ambassador-to-north-korea/

Despite perceptions of China’s allegedly influence over Pyongyang, China operates in a generally unstable climate in which North Korea’s response to overtures such as building roads to connect it to Chinese-financed cross-border activities, indicating intention to restart Six-Party Talks, or toning down relations with South Korea, is tentative and unconvincing. China, therefore, appears to be treading on relatively thin ice.

...

While China has made certain moves in the past year and a half to “normalize” the relationship with North Korea (meaning to deal with North Korea under the auspices of the Foreign Ministry rather than ILD), the appointment of another ILD bureaucrat to staff the Embassy in Pyongyang could indicate that Beijing is not yet prepared to move things too quickly in that direction.

Who wants to go with me

― 龜, Saturday, April 4, 2015 7:04 AM (3 weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i'm in

Nice it is a noize trip

how do you get to there

Start digging s tunnel

http://m.imgur.com/gallery/CoejI5n

pls somebody email that to noah feldman

http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/04/21/what-a-difference-a-decade-makes-xinjiang-film-emerges-from-the-past/

Hope this screens in NYC

is ed hardy a thing in china

No idea

http://i.imgur.com/U7hAYkZ.jpg

potpourri, snack, or both?

Chinese flower/herbal tea is the best fuiud

I hadn't heard of the term "nail house" before encountering it in this article: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32900601

Google image search of "nail house" turns up some pretty incredible photos.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/for-american-pundits-china-isnt-a-country-its-a-fantasyland/2015/05/29/24ba60e0-0431-11e5-a428-c984eb077d4e_story.html

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-01/macau-s-casino-revenue-drops-37-as-slump-hits-one-year

Macau casino revenue down 37%, leading to 24% YOY decline in regional revenue. It's being linked to a crackdown on corruption on the mainland.

Lmao

More Korea than China, but there's a bit of MERS going around:
http://chinadailyhk.com/nation/2015-05/31/content_15270486.html

it's that time of year again

so my parents are in beijing right now. they were at tiananmen square today + apparently most people don't really know anything about 1989? their tour guide said that another group had told them about it but otherwise didn't really know much? it reminded me of a friend (who passed away last year) who came out of the USSR around 1985 and said that until she left the USSR she had no idea that WW2 had anything to do w/ the Jews. she knew that the Nazis killed lots of Russians but apparently it wasn't open knowledge in the USSR that the holocaust had gone on.

that's not that surprising

i guess i'm just surprised that in 2015 a country as large + modern as china could still keep the wraps on that kind of thing. is it that the internet is still pretty monitored? or is it more that you have to make an effort to find out this kind of thing and most people aren't really looking?

state controlled media is an amazing thing

"apparently most people don't really know anything about 1989" is... i think we've talked about this on rolling china etc threads before but no, people know about it. it hasn't been kept secret for 26 years. if you were alive in china 26 years ago and old enough to be watching tv or listening to the radio, you heard about it. if you are a beijing native you've heard of it. not including like... i dunno... most people who are in their 40s, 50s have heard of it.

00 that doesn't mean you want to discuss it with the tour groups you take through tiananmen square.

00 and if you're under the age of like... 30 even if you're vaguely aware you probably don't know a lot about it / care a lot about it and it appears to belong to another era in chinese history. it might as well be the campaign against spiritual pollution or the cultural revolution. if you're a kid working in beijing, the china you grew up in is so different from 1989 that it's like studying ancient history. yo mordy ask some 17-24 year olds what went down on 9-11 and try to get a better answer than "iraq flew planes into buildings."

00 there are people that think 6-4 was a tragedy but was necessary or the only alternative to the fall of the government. they see people that mark the event overseas and in hk as trying to destabilize the party and the people's republic.

00 yeah state controlled media but i think the way the event is remembered in the west and how it's remembered is... maybe out of proportion to what it really means/meant in china

freddie b how much more from the ground do you need? wilfred chan is in hk currently and was there for 2014 as well, born and bred hong konger. i thought it was a pretty good summing up of what the hell is going on over there.

on capital flight i think i agree with sanpaku. it wouldn't be a violent crackdown on protest that would cause capital flight but the potential for beijing to fuck with the money, which is why business elites are not into the extradition bill either. all that money is flowing into hk from the prc now, for the reason that it's safer/more reliable, not because they're a quasi-democracy still. they're also the most vulnerable to interference from beijing. who cares about dissidents getting dragged over to shenzhen, since that's already going on, just ask gui minhai, but if a ceo or two get nabbed and put on trial and they go after their ill-gotten gains, it's a problem. xiao jianhua getting kidnapped from the hong kong four seasons to stand trial in beijing was a sign of things to come.

He could be as much a Hong Konger as possible, but if the story begins with neoliberalism and ends with a call to support Bernie Sanders it's just completely useless to me. Thousands could write exactly the same thing all over the world. And does. I know all that already, so what's the point?

lol fair enough i missed the part about bernie
i think the meat of it though was that hk no longer has the leverage to demand much since their usefulness to the prc is mostly gone, it's become pool of dirty mainland money meaning that the political and business elite can't risk shutting off the tap by calling for political change. those people are out of the game. they've made their plans already. but for most people the place has become an unliveable shithole and they can't get out and are pissed off about their living conditions and the failure of protests in 2014 (and smaller protests through the 2000s and before). so now the protests are "about" about extradition (or the five demands, which are mostly about police brutality, and throw in universal suffrage as an afterthought, bottom of the list, completely impossible) but more about anger, frustration at the state that the political and business elite has left hong kong in, but they're destined to fail because there's no direction, no leadership, "no obvious escape routes, no postcolonial models of self-determination."

i dunno, what's your take on it so far b?

That it's the most important news story of the year... That's basically my take away, and I'm just following along to see what happens. But just looking at history in a broad sense I think it's way too early to dismiss what happens because it's not having direction or leadership, that seems to me to be a misreading of historical upheavals in general. The anger is the point, it's not that they have, like, the right anti-neo-liberal way to look at it. The mainland ledership will seem to have everything under control until the exact point they don't.

same here, buddy. just following along. but i tend to think this is the end of something, the final convulsion of what started in 2005 or 2010, rather than the beginning. i'm not writing it off because of the lack of leadership or direction, but that makes it tougher to call what "their" next move is, and it's nearly impossible to make a call on a prc-managed crackdown with reinforcements from across the border, since there's no precedent and we have no access to what's going on at top levels in beijing.

one more question, frederik b... talking about "historical upheavals in general," which do you think provide the best lessons for those involved here or map onto this protest most accurately? just to name one so that i seem better informed, is it the orange revolution in ukraine?

how do i embed tweets

Police officer had his baton taken from him and was attacked with it. Drew his pistol and aimed at protesters. Astonished nobody killed here tonight. pic.twitter.com/Wox8yziDnz

— Mike Bird (@Birdyword) August 13, 2019

how many times in a situation like that would a cop just shoot someone dead? fucking hell.

No, I'd agree, it seems like an end, almost knowingly trying to confront the PRC into doing... something... no matter what. The obvious historical comparison seems Tiananmen, or the Green revolution in Iran, or the various failed protests against Putin. Although what's going on there at the moment is really interesting as well.

also following the story of the alleged undercover cop who was being struggled, and currently strapped to a luggage cart, it seems.

Pan-dem lawmakers Fernando Cheung and Kwok Ka-ki are now negotiating with protesters who have tied the man to a luggage trolley. Very ugly scene pic.twitter.com/Xk578seTYL

— Austin Ramzy (@austinramzy) August 13, 2019

There's a lot of stress in the world right now, where you can't really be half a dictator anymore, to paraphrase a shitty American tv show.

he was wearing a press vest, they grabbed him, thinking he was a cop, and then found an I❤️警察 t-shirt in his bag...

ICYMI let’s fill in some blanks https://t.co/21Fhvs6QQF

— tricialing (@tricialing) August 13, 2019

hope it doesn't turn out like this

i dunno, imho ideally stop this and get back to occupying government buildings and scuffling with triad thugs

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EB3LhTyU8AAqDS4?format=jpg&name=4096x4096

attacking other HK citizens is terrible tactics, even if they have "i heart the bizzies" t shirts or are wankers who are the HK equivalent to the UK FBPE posse.

turns out he was a reporter for global times.

live feed from hkg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7IvjtgSawY

how do i embed tweets

Police officer had his baton taken from him and was attacked with it. Drew his pistol and aimed at protesters. Astonished nobody killed here tonight. pic.twitter.com/Wox8yziDnz
— Mike Bird (@Birdyword) August 13, 2019
― XxxxxxxXxxxxxxxxXxxxx (dylannn), Tuesday, August 13, 2019 12:07 PM (forty-three minutes ago)

This video is crazy. It was only after watching it a few times that I noticed the bystander with the wheeled luggage trying to hurry by and getting caught in the melee.

congrats on the bbc finding some myopic, thick as pigshit UK twat describing it as a "bitter pill to swallow" cos it has inconvenienced his honeymoon, hope she's shagging the milkman by next week ya weapon!

My (wife's) family in Hubei are in full meltdown about the Coronavirus. Sister-in-law is actually due to fly from Wuhan to the UK next week. Bit concerned.

There's a lot of racist crap out there about "Chinese eat anything" but this cunt has not done anyone any favours, ridiculous that this sort of thing is still being permitted anywhere in 2020.

Photo from Douban of a menu at #Wuhan Huanan Seafood Market. Don't know when it was taken, but they sell all kinds of wild animals incl. live wolf pups & palm civets. 2nd photo taken after outbreak discovered shows this storefront (3rd left) covering word “野 (wild)” in its name. pic.twitter.com/HiQlzX4XBX

— Muyi Xiao (@muyixiao) January 21, 2020

There's a lot of racist crap out there about "Chinese eat anything" but this cunt has not done anyone any favours, ridiculous that this sort of thing is still being permitted anywhere in 2020.

Photo from Douban of a menu at #Wuhan Huanan Seafood Market. Don't know when it was taken, but they sell all kinds of wild animals incl. live wolf pups & palm civets. 2nd photo taken after outbreak discovered shows this storefront (3rd left) covering word “野 (wild)” in its name. pic.twitter.com/HiQlzX4XBX

— Muyi Xiao (@muyixiao) January 21, 2020

My sister-in-laws's flight has been cancelled, so I guess out of our hands now and not to worry about so much, but parents-in-law are in Ezhou, and our feeling is that there the response is a bit half-hearted. it's a sleepy town of a million or so people, lots of them commute into wuhan, seems like an obvious place for the disease to spread from.

Hu Xingdou, an independent political economist, said Chinese people’s love for eating wildlife had deep cultural, economic and political roots.

“While the West values freedom and other human rights, Chinese people view food as their primary need because starving is a big threat and an unforgettable part of the national memory,” Hu said.

“While feeding themselves is not a problem to many Chinese nowadays, eating novel food or meat, organs or parts from rare animals or plants has become a measure of identity to some people.”

I would like to know more about this identity claim. Does the rarity of what's eaten give social prestige, or is it something more personal than that?

things that are rare (to be eaten or otherwise) can get you a degree of social prestige, yes, but also certain animals are supposed to have particular medicinal qualities (not just as an aphrodisiac) which combine with the "you have to be rich to afford this" factor in a way which parallels alleged "superfoods" in the west.

Ok, thanks. Is the "wild"ness of the animal a factor in its having these medicinal qualities?

I know a little about bushmeat practices in Africa but little about them in China, except for the little I've gleaned from time spent in Chinatowns around the world.

CHANG: And why are wild animals so popular as a delicacy in China?

SI: Eating wild animal is considered a symbol of wealth because they are more rare and expensive. And wild animals is also considered more natural and, thus, nutritious, compared to farmed meat. It's a belief in traditional Chinese medicine that it can boost the immune system, you know? Of course, some people eat wild animals just because they were driven by curiosity.

CHANG: (Laughter).

SI: It's really difficult to change the mindset of, you know, eating wild animals is better than eating farmed animals. But it's a common kind of mindset in many parts of China.

Ok, this clarifies things a bit more. The wildness is thought to contribute to its naturalness, and thus its goodness. I don't know much about Chinese Romanticism but now I want to!

I live with it, my wife is training to be (eventually) a TCM doctor (but not the bad kind that use animals! there are a few very different schools of TCM, I have found out)

http://chuangcn.org/2020/02/social-contagion/

He adds that certain species, including primates, bats, and rats, are higher risk than others, because of the number of diseases they harbor and the likelihood of those diseases making the genetic leap required to infect humans. “Some of the Southeast Asian rats are quite big and I’m sure they’re very tasty. There’s nothing wrong with eating them per se, but rodents carry a large number of viruses with zoonotic potential—having them in the food chain is really, really high risk,” he says.

With the Covid-19 pandemic, though, interest in these foods appears to be rapidly diminishing: a survey of almost 100,000 Chinese conducted in the midst of the Wuhan outbreak found that nearly 97 percent of respondents opposed eating wild animals, up from about 50 percent in the 2014 study.

“These are not traditional habits,” says Kang, citing, as an example, how a drink made from antelope horn, a traditional remedy given to children to treat colds, has become a widely consumed daily tonic. “It’s a combination of traditional concepts with business people promoting a modern concept of, ‘We should try interesting new things because we have more income’. Eating exotic species is about people showing on social media that they are cool.”

China’s propaganda machine has recently gone into full gear to undermine that idea. Kang says a spontaneous social media backlash has also driven the point home. A hashtag that translates as #TheSourceoftheNewCoronavirusisWildAnimals quickly racked up 1.2 billion hits on Weibo, the main social media platform in China.

“In my friend circle, there is a person who in the past liked to showcase his experience with wild animal food on social media,” says Kang. “Previously, my friends would say nothing, or they’d say ‘cool’. But now he can’t post those things, because people would say if you continue to do that, you’re not cool.”

https://thefern.org/2020/03/can-asias-infectious-disease-producing-wildlife-trade-be-stopped/

https://m.weibo.cn/search?containerid=231522type%3D1%26t%3D10%26q%3D%23新型冠状病毒来源是野生动物%23&extparam=%23新型冠状病毒来源是野生动物%23&luicode=10000011&lfid=231522type%3D1%26t%3D10%26q%3D%23新型冠状病毒来源是野生动物%23

I am seeing plenty of racism against Chinese online of late, especially from supposedly left-wing animal rights people. Bit depressing, though I knew it was under the surface anyway.

Animal rights people sus af to begin w

Yes. The thing I have been trying to explain to people today is that "wet market" doesnt mean "exotic meat slaughterhouse" and that the vast majority of what is sold there is vegetables, just with some live chickens in one corner, and that if you are "campaigning to shut the wet markets" you are campaigning for factory farming and supermarkets.

I have never found “trying to explain” to be a profitable use of time but the problem is likely on my end

it's true that I am probably wasting my time.

I mean not everything we do has to be profitable

China are using this unprecedented time to make another power grab in HK. There is rioting going on at the moment.

More tear gas rounds are fired in Causeway Bay, near the Sogo. pic.twitter.com/UlNmUiJ5NL

— Hong Kong Free Press HKFP (@HongKongFP) May 24, 2020

Close to $100bn wiped off the edtech market today, following a leaked document saying that the government intends to force tutoring companies to go not-for-profit and ban foreigners from online teaching. The bricks-and-mortar tutoring sector has already been crushed by COVID.

The rationale for this is supposedly the idea that intensive tutoring is stressful for kids, makes education more expensive at a point when the government is trying to encourage people to have more children and makes it easier for wealthier parents to get their kids into selective schools and universities. The more cynical take is that too many middle-class kids are competing for those places with the genuinely well-off, who will still be able to afford 1-to-1 tutoring.

Leaving aside the general academic stuff, it’s hard to see how this wouldn’t lead to a fairly hard stop on the growth of English proficiency, particularly in smaller cities, or even a regression. State provision of English is variable but generally a lot weaker than the private sector can offer and companies like VIPKids that recruit teachers from the Philippines deliver a pretty good, affordable service to millions outside of the big cities, in places where traditional private language schools have been patchy. If New Oriental and others are forced to scale back, it may also impact the number of students going to university abroad.

Which would be a blow to the cashflow of a lot of large universities…

These last few months have seen a series of increasingly troubling announcements from Beijing, not sure if calling it the "second cultural revolution" is right, but the direction is certainly not great.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/10/chinas-cultural-crackdown-few-areas-untouched-as-xi-reshapes-society

My in-laws have not been allowed to renew their passports, and at work all of the Chinese students have decided to work virtually rather than travel to the UK.

the growing cultural authoritarianism of Xi seems very dangerous, but the extreme violence and mass murder that occurred during the OG cultural revolution ... well that was the cultural revolution to end all cultural revolutions or perhaps not. I heard this bizarre shit on the radio a few weeks back on CCCP rappers doing propaganda raps about how great the govt is etc. They can't foist any of that shit on K-Pop ultras!

My sister works at a NGO and scuttle among the world traveller, NGO, panglobalist crowd is that some sort of Taiwan action will occur in the next year or two (my sister bets that it'll happen right after the Winter Olympics in February)