another first for today
Posted by wangbo in Uncategorized on July 26, 2007
So this is my first test post using Windows Live Writer. My first reaction is, cool, I get to see this post more or less as it will appear in real life. SEcond reaction is that unlike what I expected, WLW did not see that I’m using a Chinese version of XP then automatically set itself to Chinese. Well, that’s a logical thing for software to do when you install it, set itself to the language the OS is in, but it gets irritating when there’s no way to change the language. Or in the case of, I think, AVG, you have to pay to change the language. Also, the layout seems pretty cool. Quite style-y for a Microsoft product. And does the ‘windows live map’ option under ‘insert’ mean I can stick maps in my posts, too? That could be cool. Well, so far I’m impressed. But I’m getting tired, and it’s getting time to get offline, so I guess the playing around and seeing just how cool this new toy is (or is not, perhaps) will have to wait till tomorrow.
another
Another one of those
WTF?!?!?!?!
                                                                    stories. “Hospital sued over boy’s death“, says the headline. Go check out the story for yourself. Let’s just say that had it any child of mine whose life the doctors in question were playing with, this:
The artificial heart soon began to fail and it is alleged doctor Liu Zhongming with the hospital suggested a stem cell transplant, claiming it would make the boy’s own biological heart re-grow.
is about the point where Dr Liu would’ve become a long-term, high-dependency patient of his own hospital. And that’s assuming my patience would’ve lasted that long. But this story only gets worse.
So go, people, sue, and keep suing until you own the hospital and all of Dr Quack Liu’s assets.
Mongolian Ping Pong
Posted by wangbo in Chinese study, life in Beijing on July 26, 2007
Watched a film last night. Actually, I watched three. lzh only managed two, because the first one I started watching while she was still on her way home from work. But that first one was the coolest by far. As you may perhaps have guessed, it was called Mongolian Ping Pong in English, or 绿�地 in Chinese, directed by �浩/Ning Hao. Yes, that Ning Hao. Unfortunately, as you may have noticed by following all those links, the Chinese Movie Database does not have a lot of information on either the film or the director.
Anyway, it’s a cool film that follows a group of Mongolian kids way, way, way out on the grasslands, so far out everybody speaks Mongolian and some poor bugger has to hold a beer can and coat hanger tv aerial way up high at the end of a pole at a specific angle for them to get even the haziest tv signal. And they seem to be living a more or less traditional semi-nomadic herding life. And they have a portrait of Genghis Khan in the yurt. Needless to say, the scenery is amazingly beautiful. One of the boys finds a ping pong ball in the stream one day, and, never having seen a ping pong ball or heard of ping pong or many other things, the kids try to figure out what it is.
Well, I was about to spoil the whole film for you, but I won’t. Instead I’ll tell you about a few little things in this film I found interesting:
Language:
The film was entirely in Mongolian, with Chinese and English subtitles (cheap DVD, you got both sets of subtitles at the same time, no choice). At first I was a little confused about where the film was actually set. Every other Mainland Chinese film I’ve seen has the characters speaking Putonghua, with at most a local accent and a few local words, but this was a Chinese film entirely in Mongolian. The continued use of Mongolian script suggested it was indeed in China’s Inner Mongolia, as Mongolia switched to Cyrillic ages ago [tangent- the wikipedia article on Mongolian script seems to be blocked for some reason. Odd], but it took me right up until the local cop’s ute (pick up truck) came into enough focus for me to see “è?‰åŽŸ” emblazoned on the side of the vehicle for me to be fully convinced this was happening inside China.
Also, having both Chinese and English subtitles running at the same time made for some interesting comparison. Whoever did the English subtitles should not have been paid for that mess. Don’t get me wrong, the subtitles were certainly useable, but comparing the English and the Chinese suggested that the translator didn’t really understand the appropriate usage of such words as ‘fuck’, and sprinkled that word through the subtitles in places where the Chinese suggested a milder word would’ve been more appropriate.
I do feel sorry for the translator, though, despite his weak grasp of English swear words. One major part of the film played on the kids’ misinterpretation of the Chinese word 国家ç?ƒ- the kids, having never seen so much as the outside of a school, interpreted this to mean that the ping pong ball they had in their hands belonged to the nation and should be returned. Hilarity ensued. Well, actually, it was pretty funny. Anyway, 国家ç?ƒ literally means ‘national ball’, but really means ‘national sport’. But how the hell could you translate that joke adequately anyway?
But does that national ball joke work in Mongolian? Or should I assume that the script was written in Chinese then translated? Or would a Mongolian speaker find that episode just as funny, but for slightly different reasons? After all, the kids had gotten the idea that their ping pong ball was The National Ball from their misinterpretation of a tv programme, so would a Mongolian speaker laugh at the evident mistranslation from Chinese into Mongolian?
The Police:
Part of my confusion over where exactly this film was taken place was due to the local cop and his ute and their first couple of appearances, when both he and the ute where to far in the background and out of focus to be seen clearly. But when finally a scene with the cop and his ute came up close enough to be seen clearly, the confusion was ended. Part of that was the cop’s uniform: Once he appeared close enough to see, it was clearly a Chinese uniform, but one that looked like what the Armed Police would wear if they were doing regular police work instead of standing around outside government buildings and diplomatic missions.
Chinggis:
Genghis Khan’s portrait was mounted very prominently in the yurt. A certain chairman was conspicuously absent.
Good film. Watch it.
irritations
Well, one irritation with blogdesk is that when I open it the computer tries to install some Windows 2000 thing several times. It takes quite a bit of clicking ‘cancel’ to get that thing to stop, and the annoying thing is that whatever it is that it’s trying to install doesn’t install anyway.
And now let’s see if removing two Chinese characters allows this post to be uploaded… Ah, yes, it seems blogdesk doesn’t like Chinese. That’s another mark against it.
photos?
So one thing blogdesk is supposed to do is make it a lot easier to put photos in blog posts, and not just that, but help you manipulate and chop and change the photos to suit your blog a bit better. This is my first try of the putting-photos-in-your-post function. So far it seems to work . Well, I guess the amount of space that photo took up was not appreciated.
Blogdesk
So after a bit of random googling I came across this thing called blogdesk which is supposed to help me write my blog from offline, or something. So here I am trying it now. So far I’ve found it almost as difficult to change the default dictionary from American to English as in Word, but I hardly ever use spellcheck anyway, so who cares? And I really don’t see how using this will actually help my blogging. I guess if I installed it on my laptop instead of the university-supplied desktop, it might be more useful, but wireless means there aren’t too many places I can’t get online, and it’s writing offline that seems to be the really huge advantage of using an offline blogging thingy like blogdesk. Anyway, this is the first test post using blogdesk. So far it seems to be working alright. Let’s see if it actually posts this, though.
unexpected
Seems today is a day for the unexpected.
Thanks to Responsible China, I found my way to this article about China’s shrinking deserts. Yep, you read that right. And I did say today is a day for the unexpected. Here’s a wee snippet:
Desert coverage has been falling by about 1,200 square kilometers (460 square miles) each year for the past five to six years, Zhu Lieke, deputy director of the State Forestry Administration, said at a news conference.
“This has been a trend that has been ongoing,” he said. “This is a good thing that we have witnessed.”
Zhu said his data was backed up by satellite imagery and scientists in the field.
I was under the impression that despite China’s best efforts, the deserts were still spreading, that China was only managing to slow the rate of desertification, not turn the deserts back. But it seems I was wrong and China is managing to reclaim land from the deserts. Excellent news.
And the title of Responsible China’s latest post pretty much sums up what I feel about the weather this summer: Schizo Enviro. Yep. While the rest of the country, even Gansu and Xinjiang, seems to be flooded out, Beijing is shrouded in thick, murky, humid haze. It has rained about as often as the sky has been blue this summer, it seems.
quite a rant
Wow, this is quite a rant by somebody going by the name Beifeng (found via ESWN). Now, I don’t really want to comment on the Oiwan case. Somehow I just couldn’t see it as being as important as others have argued. And although I’m generally supportive of non-violent civil disobedience in support of a good cause, I can’t see the cause in question as being so important or having reached the stage where civil disobedience becomes necessary. And besides, before you engage in civil disobedience you have to understand and accept that such actions have certain legal consequences. Civil disobedience should not be undertaken lightly. Dammit, now I’ve gone and told you my views on the Oiwan case, and I didn’t really want to comment on it at all. Silly thing is, I haven’t really thought much about the case, just observed it from my little corner of Chaoyang, and the opinions I just expressed when I didn’t really want to express them just came out of nowhere. Thinking out loud, if thinking on a computer screen can be called out loud.
Anyway, before this develops more tangents than a high school maths textbook, the subject at hand: That letter to Oiwan linked to above is quite a rant. It contains some very good points and some digressions and tangents that make this rant seem on topic and some…. odd things, too. And the title of the letter is an oddity:
 To a Chinese Trapped in White Morality
Uh oh.
As is the opening:
You must have heard before how the gweilo pronounce 林? Lamb. They just can’t get the intonation right. Perhaps they have defective tongues. All of them.
Well, I won’t speak for Hong Kong’s gweilo, but I assure you this laowai pronounces æž— ‘Lin’.
But, as I said, some good points are made:
Yet, the moment you begin that thought, you invariably suggest you know what is true morality. And when you challenge TELA with a pair of open tits, you are, in effect, asserting your individual sense of moral worth; you are saying your righteousness is lawfully right, and TELA’s is wrong. But your righteousness is your definition of morality. Why, then, should anybody accept your moral definition by sparing money for your defence, regardless of whether the morality is lawful or not?
And:
It is the called the Control of Obscene and Indecent Articles Ordinance. That, ultimately, is the law you have to fight not TELA or its functionaries. Presumably, your defence is that the article or photograph is not within the definition of indecent. Again, whose definition? Your definition? Why should anybody accept your definition?
In short, there is a lot of subjectivity in definition. Weighed also into the individual interpretation of what is called decent or indecent, there are social circumstances, culture sensitivities, and moral age. To accuse TELA of being unreasonable, or without common sense, misses the point.
And:
All moral statements – “my exposed tits are decent�, for example – are purely subjective, argumentative statements. They are neither true nor false; they are nonsensical, and they merely represent your wish. Your wish, unfortunately, may not be TELA’s and may not be consonant with the law. In TELA, there is no double standard because there is no fixed, good for all times, for all purposes, single objective standard in the applicable law.
Well, I’m not convinced that the fight should be with the law instead of with TELA or its functionaries. It seems to me that a large part of the problem is TELA’s cackhanded application of the law. But yes, absolutely: Who is Oiwan Lam (or Rebecca Mackinnon or Roland Soong or me or anybody) to arbitrarily shout “TELA is wrong, I am right, this photo is not indecent!” It does often seem that liberals are not really as liberal as they claim and they spend just as much time trying to impose their standards on society as the conservatives who seem to have taken over TELA. But on the other hand, I don’t think this is the point. Oiwan’s posting of a photo of a topless woman may have been ill-advised, and Beifeng does make a good point in that Oiwan sounds like a TELA official arbitrarily imposing standards of what is decent or indecent, but the point of posting that photo was to expose the serious problems in TELA’s application of the law and the absurdities that result from TELA’s actions.
And another problem with this rant is that Beifeng flies off into some odd little tangents:
This kind of liberalism has lead countless white men, and now you, into believing the following: relativity, no values, diversity and so on.
Uh…. Why is the invocation of “white men” necessary here?
This is why your situation looks perverse and absurd inside a Chinese society: a white ideological convert now has to fight the law on the same white terms that converted her – and she doesn’t even know it.
Oh, I see, now Oiwan is some kind of neo-colonial subject. Right.
Guess who passed those laws? That’s not even the end of the matter, Hong Kong now imports more white liberals, like MacKinnon, to educate the Chinese? What do they “educate�? How to be liberal like you?
This, then, is the situation: Hong Kong in the past imported white preachers to tell the Chinese god exists, all should accept his morality or go to hell. Now it imports other secular preachers to tell us the morality that came before is actually … relative, subject to individuals. Don’t you see: this is the present day absurdity in western societies that you look up to?
Ah, yes, clearly it is a case of the continued colonisation of Hong Kong. The white governors and preachers may have gone, but now the educators have taken their place. Oops, should’ve put scare quotes around “educators”.
We, our generation and generations to come, have to pay for the sins of colonialism, and you don’t even realise it.
Welcome to the real world, Beifeng, it’s the same in every former colony, even for those of us descended from the colonisers.
By the way, Hong Kong, by demographics, by culture, by constitution, by geography, by history, by politics, by sovereignty, by blood, by birth right – the rights derived from our forefathers and as descendents of Huangdi – is a Chinese not a cosmopolitan city. Get that straight.
Oh no, why did you have to do that? Why’d you have to resort to the fenqing tactics and reasoning? This is a really good way to shoot yourself in the foot, this kind of argument. Take an honest look at China and its history: Currently there are 56 officially recognised ethnic groups, and the largest is so diverse in language, culture, “blood” (genetics, really, get that straight) that I find it hard to accept as one single ethnic group. Now, add in the myriad ethnic groups that have passed through, settled down and been absorbed into the Han and the constant and massive cultural, scientific and technological exchange between China and the outside world that has been happening for millienia all of a sudden ‘Chinese’ looks like a synonym for ‘cosmopolitan’. Sorry, appeals to nationalism never work. Why? Because it is so easy to show up such ranting for what it is: silly, childish, ill-informed nonsense.
Now, can you see why you are not TELA’s victim? You are the victim of an ideological import, available today via your white liberal buddies. They and their moral, aesthetic and cultural relativism and their postmodernist pieties – free expression, body art, “high cultureâ€?, diversity, human rights – goaded you into this mess which they and their ancestors before them had jointly cooked up in the first place in their own homes - one against the other - and which Hong Kong subsequently imported.
Now, I would agree that Oiwan is not TELA’s victim, but if you’re going to free Hong Kong of these pernicious ideological imports, then what is next? Should Buddhist temples be burned down and the monks shipped off to Qinghai for reeducation? Isn’t Buddhism an Indian ideological import keeping Chinese minds enslaved? Or maybe Oiwan should ignore you and continue on with one of China’s oldest and finest traditions: importing from outside that which is good and useful and adapting it to Chinese needs. After all, Beifeng, that is how you got to be writing a blog in English.
Post Script: If somebody again tells you “hang in there�, tell the person: It is not your neck at the end of the rope, so shut up.
Excellent point. On this, I agree with you whole-heartedly.
Well, despite the many flaws in it, this rant of Beifeng’s certainly counts as the most interesting and entertaining episode in the ongoing saga of Oiwan, and Beifeng does have some good points to make. Trouble is, Beifeng also manages to reinforce my impression that the nationalists who react to colonialism are just as colonised as the “Uncle Toms”.
Having said all that, let me just make this statement: Although I disagree with Oiwan’s tactics and I don’t see this issue as being as important as some are making out, I am generally supportive of the goal of sorting out TELA and the problems it has created. I would probably be more supportive if I lived in Hong Kong. I would certainly be supportive if there was any evidence that TELA was going to start calssifying inconvenient political speech as indecent or obscene as part of some government conspiracy to harmonise Hong Kong, but the real issue with political speech, so far as I can tell, is media self-censorship, and not TELA prudes getting all hot and bothered at the sight of a nipple.
windfarm
So I came across this article most likely via Danwei. It’s about the Beijing Guanting Wind Farm, or it’s installation. I saw that it was called ‘Guanting’ and thought, wow, that must be in Yanqing. But no, lzh informs me it is actually in Hebei, but very close to Beijing. Well, most of Guanting Reservoir is in Hebei, so that makes sense. Anyway, the article is entitled “风太大大风扇停装” or “Wind too big big fan stopped installation”, or “Installation of Large Wind Turbine Stopped Due to Strong Winds” or whatever. Anyway, here’s the article with my crappy translation:
昨天上午，北京官厅风电场一期工程的33台大风车进入最后施工阶段，直径70米的巨大风扇开始向基座上吊装。不过昨天由于风太大，风扇吊装到3米后只好临时暂停，推迟到今日继续吊装。
Yesterday morning the first phase of the Beijing Guanting Windfarm project’s 33 large wind turbines entered the last stage of construction, the giant fans with a diameter of 70 metres began to be hung from their bases. But because the wind was too strong yesterday, after the fan had been lifted to 3 metres it had to be stopped temporarily, and the installation was postponed until today.
上午10点，指挥部一声令下，第一座大风车开始吊装风扇。这面由玻璃钢制作的大风扇由三片巨大的螺旋桨叶组成，每扇桨叶都像一面巨大的帆板，桨叶重5.6吨，整个大风扇的扇面直径达70米。风扇由一大一小两座吊车徐徐吊起。据现场工程指挥人员介绍，为了吊起这些巨大的扇面，工程项目部启用了北京最大臂力的吊车，其中大吊车臂力达350吨。
At 10 am, the command post ordered the installation of the fan of the first wind turbine to begin. This fibreglass fan made up of three giant blades, each blade looking like a giant windsurfer and weighing 5.6 tons, the diameter of the entire fan reaching 70 metres. The fan is gently lifted by two cranes, one small and one large. According to the introduction by one of the project’s directors, in order to lift these giant fans, the project’s logisitcs department [what the hell is a 工程项目部?] started using the cranes with the greatest arm strength [help! technical term?] in Beijing, one crane among them having an arm strength of 350 tons.
但由于现场风太大，大风扇吊起3米左右就停在了半空。风电场筹建处总工程师李曰华告诉记者，风扇吊装的技术难度非常高，受天气因素影响很大。一般来说，风速小于8米/秒才能顺利吊装，昨天基座顶端65米高的风速已经达到12米/秒，为了不让风吹扇面磕碰基座，所以只好暂停吊装。
But because the wind at the site was too strong, the big fan was stopped in mid air when it had been lifted to about three metres. The chief engineer of the windfarm’s construction planning department, Li Yuehua told the reporter the degree of difficulty of the technique of installing the fans is very high and is very strongly influenced by the weather. Generally speaking, if the wind speed is less than 8 metres per second the fans can be successfully installed, yesterday the wind speed at the top of the 65 metre high base had already reached 12 metres per second and to prevent the fan from knocking against the base they had to suspend the installation.
And I translated all of that because there’s some cool states about the size of the turbines in there. That’s all. Otherwise it’s a pretty boring report, actually. Anyway, when I asked lzh about this windfarm, the conversation went like this:
lzh: “is near yanqing but it belongs to hebei”
me: “ok. the first thing I saw about it said it was in Beijing, I saw it was called guanting, so I thought must be Yanqing”
lzh: “but beijing municipal government wanted to keep it as its own hebei never agreed”
me: “so Beijing stole some of Hebei?”
lzh: “u can say this”
Read into that what you will. I can’t be bothered finding out about the history of this project, myself.
back to normal
Posted by wangbo in life in Beijing on July 23, 2007
Well, kind of back to normal. Don’t want to speak too soon, because as I clicked “write”, all of a sudden thins slowed down again…. But no, it seems the broadband is broad again.
So yes, I read books pretty much all day yesterday. I started with Mark Salzman’s Iron and Silk, which was pretty good. No deep insights, not even the pretence at offering any deep insights, but a series of light sketches of his life in Changsha from 1982 to 1984. And that’s what made it good, no pretence, no bollocks, just Salzman finding his way. I especially liked reading about Changsha way back then. In fact, certain aspects of Changsha had absolutely not changed one bit when I arrived there back in October 1999. The overcrowded buses, for example. I’m also impressed with how Salzman managed to get himself involved in everyday life even way back then, everything from finding wushu and calligraphy teachers to meeting a family of fishermen. Still, of all the schools I’ve worked at here, the teachers of my school in Changsha were by far the most open and friendly and willing to hang out with the foreign teachers. Actually, that book kinda made me homesick for Changsha.
Then I got started on Lin Yutang’s My Country and My People. I tried reading it years ago, but I gave up very quickly, finding it far too stuff and pretentious and generally full of shit. But I decided to give it another go, and apart from some really outdated ideas (race? racial degeneration? Quick, pass me my copy of Mein Kampf!) I’m finding it a bit easier going than the first time. And Lin was man enough to admit in the preface or prologue or one of those other endless bits tacked on the front of his book that it was only his opinion and China being China he could easily help anybody find stacks of evidence to prove the exact opposite of what he wrote. The result is that some points he makes I completely disagree with, on other things I can see his point but think reality is somewhat more complex, and some things he’s got pretty much right. And I love his description of the Old China Hand. Anyway, it’s a much more detailed, involved book than Iron and Silk, so it’s going to take a lot more reading.
And then, having seen a å…?è´¹ç?车 to the nearby Tesco passing by, going down either Xidawanglu or Wushenglu, we went out looking for it yesterday evening. And we completely failed. lzh suggested we get a taxi, but I objected. How are we supposed to get a taxi to a shopping centre when we don’t know where it is? All we know is it’s somewhere on the eastern Fourth Ring Road south of Sihui. We’ll try again later when we’ve figured out where Tesco is and how to get there.