Disturbing news, this. A Chinese student was beaten up in his home in Christchurch early on Wednesday morning by three Pakeha intruders with shaved heads.But I want to see how it’s being reported in New Zealand. I also want to see how it’s being reported in Chinese. Anyway, a quick search of the NZ Herald turns up this NZPA article which seems to confirm the details reported in that Xinhua article on china.org.cn. The Press has a more detailed report, naturally, being the local Christchurch paper.
So, the facts that the three reports I’ve found so far seem to be: At 5am on Wednesday morning a 22 year old Chinese man studying in Christchurch answered a knock at his door to have three men between the ages of 17 and 23, of European descent and with shaved heads, storm inside and beat him up while yelling racist abuse.
Now, the odd and frustrating thing is that I can’t seem to find a Chinese language report, even though that first report at china.org.cn was attributed to Xinhua. So has this been deemed not safe for domestic consumption? I wouldn’t think so, because google seems to turn up plenty of old reports on Chinese students getting in trouble in New Zealand. Still, maybe I’ve got my search terms all wrong. After all, I’m not used to googling in Chinese. Baidu wasn’t much better so I changed the search to 新西兰 and so far all I’ve gotten is a reminder of the China-NZ basketball game last night, which apparently China won. lzh can’t find anything either, so it seems at this stage that there just plain isn’t a Chinese version of the story.
So, I’m trying skykiwi, but for some reason it seems to be blocked. So blocked that not even anonymouse will open it. Have to try another proxy. Ah, finally. Now I have to figure out how to find this story, assuming that anybody has bothered to write about it on skykiwi. Well there is a headline, but following it gets me nothing. So I clicked on the Christchurch button, and….. once again, nothing. But that Christchurch page does tell us this:
Chinese student suffers home invasion and racist assault
The Police are investigating the home invasion and assault on a 22-year old Chinese student by three masked white men, injuring him, and shouting insulting words, among which was some racially discriminatory language.
Now, I can’t figure out this ä¸?æ³›, it’s not in the dictionary or IME and I just can’t figure it out.
Anyway, it’s a pity that clicking on that leads to an empty page, because that’s the only sample I can find of any reporting of this incident in Chinese. I don’t know if it’s a problem with the proxy or with skykiwi. I also can’t figure out why skykiwi is so securely blocked that most proxies won’t open. Are Chinese in New Zealand so extremely counter-revolutionary as to attract such heavy blocking? That might explain why Xinhua hasn’t released a Chinese language report on this yet…
Quickly scanning through the skykiwi bbs, haven’t found any talk about this incident yet, but I have found this charming topic.Note: You may have to fiddle with the character encoding for that one.
Well, I’m giving up. I’m surprised that a racially motivated attack on a Chinese student in New Zealand has generated such little coverage or discussion.
Is it meant to mean that the language used was quite bad? (Assuming that the sense here is the third meaning.) Or perhaps something like “specifically”. Seems to be some sort of litotes, at a fairly uneducated guess.
I don’t know, I can’t figure it out. But “specifically” could be right.