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- Foreigners to Face Stricter Regulations
- Dalai Lama’s links to CIA
- Shenzhou-9 spacecraft to return tomorrow morning
- Death by China Movie
- Photo: Workers sort bottles by hand, Yunguiyuan, Guangzhou, by Aaron Webb
- Woman driver strips naked to hinder rescuers after hitting two victims
- Chen Guangcheng: “They Are Scared of the Countryside”
- Sheng Shuren: A Journalist in New China – Part 4 – The Great Leap Forward and Propaganda
- [Bilingual Brew] How Africans Live, and Struggle, in Southern China
- Pictures: Body painting shows at auto accessories trade fair
- Japan: Korean ‘Comfort Women' Photo Exhibit Sabotaged
- Polls Show US Concerns Over a Rising China
- The Great Leap From Myth to History
- Google’s Project Glass
- Officials Linked to Forced-abortion Scandal Punished
- Migrant Workers Riot in Guangdong
- The Daily Twit (@chinahearsay links) – 6/27/12
- Word of the Week: Chāi nǎ (Demolish It)
- Noam Chomsky and Tariq Ali with Julian Assange
- Shanghai Court: Aggressive Spamming is Not Unfair Competition
| Foreigners to Face Stricter Regulations Posted: 27 Jun 2012 11:12 PM PDT The South China Morning Post reports that the National People's Congress Standing Committee is drafting a law that would, among other things, tighten visa restrictions by halving the minimum stay for foreigners working in China:
After protests in Guangzhou last week over the death of an African man involved in a bicycle-taxi fare dispute, The New Yorker's Evan Osnos writes that the issue of immigration is as real in China as it is back in the United States:
Osnos also has a piece on last week's episode of This American Life, in which he examines the expat life and China's perception of foreigners. See also recent CDT coverage of foreigners in China, including a recent "clean-up" campaign initiated in Beijing to weed out those foreigners visiting, living or working in the city illegally. © Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us |
| Posted: 27 Jun 2012 10:16 PM PDT
The Dalai Lama lied about his knowledge of the CIA's support of Tibetan secessionists in the 1950s and 1960s, the Sueddeutsche Zeitung said in a report titled "Seemingly Sacred." The paper claimed that the Dalai Lama has received $180,000 a year from the CIA, which was described as "monetary aid for the Dalai Lama" in confidential documents, according to the newspaper. The report described how an emissary of the Dalai Lama first contacted the US through its embassy in New Delhi and consulate in Calcutta in 1951, and both sides discussed US military and financial aid to Tibetan separatists. The US Defense Department gave the Dalai Lama a letter in which "light weapons" and "financial aid" were promised to the Tibetan separatist movement, according to the report. Though the Dalai Lama has always claimed that he only came to know about the operations afterwards, it should be no later than 1958 that he became aware of the paramilitary training given by the CIA that was closely linked to poisoning, killing and other violent acts, it said. A shadow of violence falls on the divine king, it added. Germany's Der Speigel magazine and the national daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung also carried the story. Unrest that occurred in the past few years in Tibet was instigated by outside forces and people will not be convinced by the Dalai Lama any more as he is, in fact, a hypocrite, wrote an Internet user, "Reqonquista," on Der Speigel's website. The CIA is an annoying organization that stands behind many subversive movements around the world, another Web user "Green mind" wrote. "It's a chance for Westerners to realize that the Dalai Lama isn't a godlike figure who is committed to world peace as he claims. Instead, he is a separatist disguised as a peace advocate," Xiong Kunxin, with the Minzu University of China, told the Global Times. In regard to the circulation and popularity of the German paper, the report unveiling the Dalai Lama's conduct is aimed at German and other Western readers, and is not a propaganda piece, Xiong added. Zha Daojiong, an international studies professor at Peking University, said German press was seeking to avoid stereotyping the issue and offering an alternative point of view. Source: Global Times – Xinhua |
| Shenzhou-9 spacecraft to return tomorrow morning Posted: 27 Jun 2012 09:58 PM PDT
Shenzhou-9 spacecraft and Tiangong-1 lab module has been successfully separated by manual operation this morning, according to the Beijing Aerospace Control Center. It was the first time for China's spacecraft and target module to be disjoined by manual operation. The three Chinese astronauts returned to Shenzhou-9 spacecraft from Tiangong-1 lab module at 6 am today, to prepare for the manual separation attempt. Liu Wang conducted the manual operation to separate Shenzhou-9 spacecraft and the orbiting Tiangong-1. He will continue manual operation and steer the spacecraft to a safety distance. Source: Xinhua |
| Posted: 27 Jun 2012 10:06 PM PDT |
| Photo: Workers sort bottles by hand, Yunguiyuan, Guangzhou, by Aaron Webb Posted: 27 Jun 2012 09:58 PM PDT  Workers sort bottles by hand, Yunguiyuan, Guangzhou © Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us |
| Woman driver strips naked to hinder rescuers after hitting two victims Posted: 27 Jun 2012 12:35 PM PDT
A woman driver has provoked mass outrage online and been referred to as "female version" of Yao Jiaxin, after she fatally hit a mother and four-year-old daughter in a scooter and then even attempted to stop the medical staff from rescuing the victims by stripping herself naked and lying down in front of the ambulance. The incident occurred at a residential community in Linyi City, Shangdong Province, at around 10:30 a.m. on June 17. When the mother was riding in her scooter back from food market with her little daughter, a speeding car suddenly crashed into them. The driver did not stop her car too after hit, and kept running at full speed to hit other parked cars along the way. The eye-witnesses at the residential community called the ambulance immediately. But unexpectedly, by the time when the ambulance arrived on the report, the woman driver, surnamed Zhang, tried to block the ambulance from entering the scene where she had hit the mother and daughter. The driver desperately stripped all her clothes off, and lied down on the road. The medical staff had to get off the ambulance and ran to the two victims. After the victims were held up to the ambulance, Zhang got up from the ground and snatched the 4-year-old girl from the medics all of sudden to drop her on the ground. At the end, with the help of residents around, the insane driver was stopped and the ambulance left for the hospital. Unfortunately, the little girl was pronounced dead in hospital ultimately and the mother was left in critical condition despite of efforts. An eye-witness managed to videotape the incident, and uploaded the clip to the Internet which aroused a huge wave of public outcry. According to neighbors, Zhang was a lecture from a Shangdong medical college, specializing in traditional Chinese medicine. She appeared emotionally unstable that day, but the victim's family said she disguised herself as a mad woman at the time. The suspect was later arrested by the local police for involuntary manslaughter. But a lawyer believed Zhang's behavior has constituted indirect intentional homicide. |
| Chen Guangcheng: “They Are Scared of the Countryside” Posted: 27 Jun 2012 07:55 PM PDT Ian Johnson interviews dissident Chen Guangcheng in a New York University classroom. Continuing the transcript style of his Bao Tong interview, Johnson asks Chen many probing questions, from China's incoming leadership to grassroots political consciousness and spiritual awareness:
Chen also argues that some dissidents and China observers overlook urban-rural differences:
Read more about Chen Guangcheng, who recently arrived in New York after escaping from illegal house arrest in his home village of Linyi, Shandong. © Wendy Qian for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us |
| Sheng Shuren: A Journalist in New China – Part 4 – The Great Leap Forward and Propaganda Posted: 27 Jun 2012 03:37 PM PDT I almost forgot; I had been to Shanghai before. It was the Chinese New Year of 1990, I decided spontaneously to go to a friend's home to spend the holidays. On New Year's Eve, I boarded an airplane in Guangzhou, and landed, several hours later, at Hongqiao Airport in Shanghai. From the airport, I took a taxi to the Shanghai Train Station. I remember it was dusk, the sky overcast, the air chilling beyond a northerner's assumption of Shanghai. There was not a soul on the streets. I don't know why, but right at this moment, I am thinking about six o'clock. Two clicks away now, I know the trip is sixteen kilometers long, and passes a zoo, at least one movie theater, the Sun Yat-sen Park that every major Chinese city has, and streets that once had names like Jernigan Road and Edinburgh Road. But I was either dozing off or lost in wandering thoughts in the taxi, for all I can recall of Shanghai are a section of a gray wall and a few buildings whose shapes are as illusory as objects in a dream. At the train station, I boarded the train, according to my friend's instructions, to go to my destination, Hefei. My friend lived on a university campus where all the students were gone for the holidays and, blanked under a new snow, silence reigned. After the lunar New Year's Day, I walked on the streets of Hefei. Even though I had never been to that city before, or anywhere near it for that matter, everything seemed familiar to me, the streets, the buildings, the shops, and the people; the wintry bareness and the muddy slush underfoot. It was just like my hometown, or thousands of other Chinese towns. It was China. To my ears, the first winter after the summer of '89 was as silent as death, the roar of bulldozers and dump trucks were yet to arrive, and I was preparing to leave the country. I had always known the path I could take would be narrow, but I didn't know I would be up against the wall in only a few short years after college. About the place I was planning to go I had not the faintest idea and, therefore, no fantasy of it to speak of; the only thing I knew for certain was I had to go, anywhere I could. The year after, I left China and came to the United States. In the following days, I talked to Mr. Sheng via telephone and email. I learned that, when his brother was arrested the second time in the north, he was a student of astronomy in Nanjing University with a focus on celestial mechanics. I asked how he would describe celestial mechanics to a layman like me, he said, "It is the mathematics dealing with the motion of the three bodies—the Sun, the Earth and the Moon." I said I still couldn't imagine what mathematics that would be, but I liked the words the sun, the earth and the moon. He said, the broader question was the "n-body problem," or, to predict the motion of celestial objects under mutual gravitation. It was a problem unsolved for the past three hundred years, said Mr. Sheng, and probably wouldn't be in another three hundred years, but I was determined to do just that! He chuckled in self-mockery, but I was very much affected by the young mathematician's ardor. Mr. Sheng escaped the cataclysm that had befallen millions of China's educated class, university students included, during the Anti-rightist Campaign in 1957, but it stoked fear in him as he came to the realization that everything about him, his family background, his disgraced brother and his own education, could be a liability. He said he woke up every morning not knowing what the day would bring and went to bed every night worrying about what awaited him tomorrow. He was one of the top students but not selected to join the faculty of Nanjing University, nor for graduate study. He was assigned to a teaching job at Anhui University in Hefei and has stayed ever since. I told Mr. Sheng about my trip in early 1990 that took me to Shanghai and Hefei, two places I have come to associate with through writing this story. I learned from Mr. Sheng, not without a small sense of wonder, that the Shengs' in Shanghai was only a short walk from the train station except that, at that time, their home at No. 426 Lane, N. Jiangxi Road, had long been empty. At the Mathematics Department of Anhui University, Mr. Sheng found a certain solace and security in pure mathematics. After the ten-year Cultural Revolution, in the early 1980s, he passed the selection exams for faculty studying abroad. He studied and researched in the Université de Strasbourg in France and the Universitat de Barcelona in Spain for three years. I asked Mr. Sheng when he had learned French, and he told me he started in his boyhood when attending the affiliated secondary school of the Université l'Aurore, a French Jesuit institution in Shanghai before the communist liberation, and later in the famed Li Da Institute. In college and later on, he read mathematical literature in French that he could get a hold of. For the first seven years of the 1970s, when he and some of his colleagues, including his department chair, were sent away to the countryside on the bank of Yangtzi River, he worked in the fields, coached a basketball team on loan to the county's Sport Committee, and took part in the Peasants' Propaganda Team. And he also kept up with his mathematics. For entertainment, he tried his hand at translating French literary classics that he had bought from the Foreign Language Book Store in Shanghai published by the Russians for language learning purposes. Carmen, Colomba and Ninety-three were some of the titles he ventured into. With The Lady of the Camellias, he did the novel as well as the play. He enjoyed it a lot, sharing his translations with his old school mates in secret. When I asked about his life in retirement, he said reading, writing and playing basketball. Since retirement, he has published a dozen or so papers and written two books, one was Mathematics in the Social Disciplines that had been printed twice and sold out twice; the other is Geometry of Election that he hopes would be published soon. I said jokingly, from the titles of your books, it seemed that you had turned from the celestial to the earthly.  Cover of Journalistic Practices, 1957 When Sheng Shuren returned to the Xinhua News Agency in 1956, he went alone. He was thirty-six years old, father of four, the youngest a newborn. His wife, a head nurse at a children's hospital, had not wanted to move to Beijing the first time and, with the two years in Beijing ending the way they did, she wouldn't go this time. At Xinhua, Sheng Shuren resumed his old job of translating foreign media. There is no way to retrieve the products of his work except for three articles in his name in Journalistic Practices, a monthly published by the Xinhua News Agency, in 1957. Two of them are translations, one is his own writing. Both translations are from Russian, one describing "the Central Home for Journalists" in Moscow, how it was "a place for all journalists to engage in creative activities." Another relates how, during what it calls "the Hungarian Incident" broken out on October 23, 1956, "political adventurists" (they become "gangsters" and then "an anti-revolutionary group" as the article progresses) occupied media apparatuses and controlled newspapers and journals, and how, after the invasion of the Soviet Union, to which the article avoids making direct reference, Hungarian newspapers were printed more beautifully and, more importantly, how freedom of the press was better serving the interest of the people and socialism without falling into the hands of the enemies of the people and freedom. His translation is smooth, unfolding with clarity when there are multiple modifiers. But what is more telling is probably the unhurried tone with which he writes. When I mentioned his translation from Russian to Mr. Sheng, he was very surprised because he had no idea his brother knew Russian, but he obviously did. Sheng Shuren's own piece appeared in the September issue, and the title, when I first saw it, almost made me jump: The Headquarters of American Fabrications and Intelligence—the U.S. Information Agency. In the few hundred words that followed, he presented USIA from its budget, setup to its operations, using the same composed language and with the same clarity, except here and there, words like "flagrant", "fabrication" would stick out like thorns from an otherwise smooth surface. Then, in the very last sentence, also the concluding paragraph, the tone rises sharply and the language turns into the kind of abusive language that I saw everyday in newspapers when I grew up and still is the standard language of China's state media to threat, to vent and to express displeasure. "It is therefore clear that the USIA is a spy agency that robs over a hundred million dollars from the American people each year to engage in fabricating lies and collecting intelligence." He might have written this himself, or the editor did. In any case, he had to learn to talk like this in the Xinhua News Agency. For a man with a liberal arts education like he had, it had to be a steep remaking of himself even just linguistically. If this article tells anything at all, it shows he still had a long way to go to adjust. In March 1958, Sheng Shuren and Uncle Erning, part of a large group of Xinhua personnel, were sent to Xushui, a county some 200 kilometers away from Beijing in Hebei Province, to help the Great Leap Forward campaign there. Xushui at the time was a national model of the Great Leap Forward promoted by the Central Committee of the Party, and universities and cultural institutions in Beijing, Xinhua included, had been sending their people to participate in this great leap forward to a communist society. In the previous winter, the impoverished county with a population of 300,000 had built more than two hundred reservoirs in response to the call for water management from the Center in Beijing, declaring that, for the first time in history, the county had once and for all eliminated both flood and draught. Literature about the Great Leap Forward in Xushui abounds, and from it I learned people in Xushui lived the life of the People's Commune, eating together in the Communes' canteens and marching with their hoes and baskets in military formation to the fields. They worked twenty-four hours a day in three shifts. The earth was dug as deep as three feet in order to use more fertilizer for higher yield; and grain was planted in improbable density to create agricultural miracles. I also learned that factories sprung up like bamboo shoots, and, overnight, each commune and each village claimed to have dozens of them. By the time the Steel and Iron Production Campaign peaked, "every household built a furnace and everyone was participating." Xushui dared itself to open up universities, and lo and behold, it announced the establishment of 101 universities one day in July. Xushui also had a "Committee for the Movement of Writing" that covered the streets and walls with poems singing the praises of life in the People's Communes and pictures in which farmers picked cotton on ladders, tall silos pierced through clouds, and pigs, as big as cows, were bursting their sties.  The Great Leap Forward in 1958. If all this does not sound busy and tiring enough, study sessions and debates were held frequently. For study, there was the People's Daily that sent the Center's directives everyday. But what was to debate? People—whoever expressed any doubt about the Great Leap Forward and whoever was perceived as being halfhearted or lazy were the objects of the debate. According to documentation, the debatees were encircled, "shoved and pushed…until they were bruised and dizzy, kowtouing to admit they were wrong." The debates were indeed effective, and, according to a piece in the People's Daily on April 17, 1958, that promoted Xushui's practices, "before the debates, 1,400 workers only dug 300 meters of irrigation channel in 14 days; after the debates, 1,000 workers dug 500 meters in 3 days." In July that year, the Party mounted a nationwide campaign called "Bare Your Heart to the Party" and everyone in the Xinhua group was required to describe his or her thoughts and actions during the recent Anti-Rightist Campaign and the Rectification Campaign. During the Purge of Anti-revolutionary Within Campaign in 1955, Uncle Erning, a young man in his twenties, had been reviewed for the uncompleted drafts of poems and stories that he had scribbled during the post-Korean war days when he was still stationed in North Korea as a war correspondent for the Xinhua News Agency, and conclusions had been made that "the ideas behind his works are reactionary and his own thoughts backward." Now, asked to speak his mind to the Party, he hesitated. He was scared, "knowing that …the consequences will be serious." Yet he didn't want to hide it from the Party, "feeling that it would constitute unloyalty and dishonesty to the Party and therefore a crime." So he bared himself: "I am still unable to accept the conclusions made about me by the Agency, but I am willing to be tested by the Party for as long as needed, reform myself and prove myself through my actions." Days after that, Uncle Erning was arrested without warning during an often-held mass gathering of ten thousand people. He was dumbfounded, for he had no idea why they were arresting him (he had committed no crime) and how, in a matter of days, he had been incriminated a step higher to "a reactionary" and expelled from his job at Xinhua. Three hundred people were arrested on the same occasion, including Sheng Shuren. Now I know that, Xushui had newly built three labor camps that year and a local leader had ordered, "Each camp needs 1,000 workers, hurry up to arrest people and send them to the camps." Within a few months, more than four thousand people had been arrested in the same manner in Xushui. Uncle Erning and Sheng Shuren were sent to the August First Camp to receive their "education through hard labor." Behind the barbed wire enclosing the Camp, they were organized, just as people outside, to create "Satellite Fields"—fields that would have such unheard-of high yield that it would be like launching a satellite. They dug, composted, moved rocks, and made cotton-padded shoes in the winter for perhaps the army. Outside the barbed wire, Xushui was becoming the center of attention in all China. Waves of visitors, from leaders of the country to the leaders of the provinces to the generals of the Republic, from the Congress of People's Representatives to members of the People's Consultation Committee, from scientist to literary figures, from foreign diplomats to friendly foreign news reporters, swarmed the place to witness the spectacular new look of a communist county. The People's Daily touted that "the People's Communes in Xushui will bring their members, in the near future, to the most wonderful arcadia in human history, that is, the free kingdom where 'everyone does his best and takes whatever he needs.'" The frenzy peaked in August 4, 1958, when Mao Zedong visited a village in Xushui, only a few miles from the Camp where Sheng Shuren and Uncle Erning were confined. Local officials answered the Great Leader's questions and briefed him about their goals: 10,000 kilos of millet and 500,000 kilos of potato per mu (about 0.16 acre), so on and so forth. "How are you going to eat that much food? What are you going to do with it?" Mao asked. When the officials conceded that they had not thought about that, Mao laughed and continued, "It's certainly good to have a lot of food. The state doesn't want it, others don't need it, and the farmers can eat five meals a day!" We all know what followed was not the question of eating three meals or five meals a day, but a famine that lasted for a few years, resulted in the death of millions, and was labeled "the three-year natural disaster" by the official history book. In Xushui, the famine started as early as in 1959, people left en mass to search for food, and the government set up barriers and checkpoints on roads to stop them from leaving. At the end of 1960, the August First Camp was disbanded, and Uncle Erning and Sheng Shuren, greenish and edematous, were dismissed and told to go back to their respective hometown. I must add now that, while Uncle Erning was in the camp, in Beijing, meetings were held to criticize and "educate" his young wife, my aunt, who was given the choice of being associated with a reactionary or "drawing a line" between him and her. She had been expelled from the Youth League for dragging her feet. Finally she wrote a letter to Erning in the Camp, telling him she had signed the divorce certificate which was brought to her by two men, all filled out and dated already, bearing the name and the seal of the People's Court. The couple then had only been married for eleven months. To be continued tomorrow… A Kindle version is available on Amazon.com Filed under: history, Life in China Tagged: China, Chinese New Year, Great Leap Forward, Hefei, History, journalism, propaganda, Shanghai, United States, Xinhua News Agency         |
| [Bilingual Brew] How Africans Live, and Struggle, in Southern China Posted: 27 Jun 2012 06:30 PM PDT [Please enjoy this Tea Leaf Nation bilingual brew. The article is first shown in English, and then in the original Chinese. 亲爱的读者，欢迎享受我们的 "双语茗茶"。英文翻译在上，中文原文在下。]  Many Africans come to Guangzhou as traders. Via 月中人 On June 19, I saw the oft-retweeted images on Sina Weibo, China's Twitter, which showed black people in Guangzhou city protesting together. My first reaction: This image was from three years ago. Only after an online search did I realize the image was of an incident from last Tuesday, where thousands of Africans amassed on the streets of Guangzhou to demand that police explain the death of a Nigerian national in their custody. The protest of 2009 Africans in Guangzhou staged a similar protest in July of 2009. On July 15 of that year, while attempting to avoid a passport check by police, one African man fell 18 meters from a building and died. The next day, hundreds of his compatriots confronted police in front of the local police station, demanding they "have a talk." Three years ago, Sina had not yet released its Weibo platform. In August of that year, Sina carried out internal tests of the service, and in September it added "@" and private messaging functions. During that time, I was interning at a media organization in Guangzhou, assisting a newspaper office in conducting in-depth interviews of Africans in Guangzhou. The creation of today's Little North Road Before the passport-related incident occurred, domestic Chinese media had very seldom reported on the country's African population. Although we lived in the same city, I was like many around me in having no understanding of African people in Guangzhou. Only after conducting the interviews did I realize that not only did a great number of African people live there, but within the Little North Road and San Yuanli areas of town, an entire African community had come into existence. There were African-style bars, Muslim restaurants, specialized hair salons, stores selling African food products, and even African prostitutes. At the end of the 1980s, Muslims from China's northwest provinces began moving into the Little North Road area of Guangzhou. Later, they brought with them businesspeople from Arab countries, and those Arab businesspeople brought North Africans seeking riches. At the beginning of the new millennium, attracted by their North African compatriots, traders from mid-western Africa moved into the area, and a "African business district" gradually came into being. In May of 2009, Guangzhou's Sun Yat-Sen University conducted a study which showed that district contained people from over 50 countries, with the majority coming from Mali, Togo, Gambia, Guinea, Ghana, Senegal, and Congo along Africa's Gold Coast. In addition to Africans, the area contained Middle Easterners, South Asians, and South Americans. A simple life African businesspeople in Guangzhou mostly engage in the import of textiles and electronics. One South African whom I interviewed named Ossy had managed a convenience store back home. In Guangzhou, he was responsible for purchasing every kind of electronic part and sending it back to South Africa. Ossy said, "I sell everything in my store, according to whatever my friends and relatives back home tell me they want via text message, principally cell phone parts."  Guangzhou's Little North Road fast became an enclave. Via Netease Besides trading, there is little that Africans in Guangzhou do on a daily basis to entertain themselves. Ossy lived in a new African community in the outskirts of Guangzhou–in fact, it was a street next to a business district, with stores on either side and apartments for rent up above. In the evenings, African people who lived there would gather in front of the street's only convenience store to drink beer and chat. The majority of them did not own computers, had no use for smartphones, and did not have local friends. A rented apartment; a convenience store; a wholesaler; to these people, along with their church, those places made up the whole of their lives. The majority of Africans in Guangzhou were men, and the first question they would ask me when we talked was, "Can you introduce me to any girls?" Sometimes, they would ask me to help translate as they gave their favorite Chinese girls a phone call. The girls' first reaction was always to reject their invitations, telling me that the African men courting them were just clients. To them, these foreign businessmen with black skin were not ideal partners. They felt the African people had body odor and bad tempers. This was also the impression that Guangzhou citizens usually had of Africans, even though many of them had never met one. How things get ugly Due to a lack of mutual understanding and to business disputes, conflicts between African people and Chinese people would often occur in the area around Little North Road. A guard there once told a reporter, "In fact the foreigners' tempers are all right, but many Chinese are dishonest, and purposefully try to sell them inferior goods."  A protester in Guangzhou, circa last Tuesday Some taxi drivers also have complaints with Africans. They complain about body odor, and think that Africans tend to haggle over change. As a result, many drivers are unwilling to pick up passengers by Little North Road. Because of this, African people mostly ride in unlicensed cars for hire, also called "black cars." On June 18 of this year, a Nigerian man died because a dispute over fares with a driver escalated into physical conflict. Police took him away, and later informed his family that the African man fell into a coma four hours later, and they were ultimately unable to save him. The sudden death of a compatriot has led to widespread attention among the African community in Guangzhou, and thus the image of a demonstration that I encountered on Weibo. China, now a part of the world Economic globalization and the rapid development of China's economy have attracted more and more foreigners to China, speeding up the formation of "transnational immigrant" communities. During this process, it will be hard to avoid conflicts. Like New York's Chinatown or Little Italy, Chinese cities will also come to have their own foreign business districts. Through development, struggle, and adjustment, they will ultimately integrate into China's cities, becoming a part of local culture. [Translated by David Wertime] 6月19日，我在新浪微博上看到被到处转发的广州黑人聚集示威的照片。第一反应是，三年前的照片被翻出来了。上网搜索了一下才知道，那是上周二发生的事情，上千非洲裔人在广州街头聚集，要求警方对前一天死去的尼日利亚人作出解释。 2009年7月，广州的非洲裔人也发起过同样的集会。7月15日，一名黑人在躲避警方查证护照过程中，从18米高的楼上不慎坠下身亡。次日，他的数百名同胞在当地派出所与警方对峙，要＂讨个说法＂。 三年前，新浪还没有推出微博服务——同年8月，微博实行内测，9月添加@和私信功能——我在广州一家媒体实习，参与了报社对广州黑人群体的深入采访。 查护照事件发生之前，国内媒体对黑人群体的报道很少。虽然住在同一个城市，我跟身边大多数人一样，对他们完全不了解。采访时我才发现，在广州聚居的黑人不但人数多，而且在小北路和三元里一带已经形成了一个完整的黑人社区：这里有非洲风情酒吧、 穆斯林餐厅、专门给黑人理发的发廊、专卖非洲食材的商店，甚至还有非裔妓女。 1980年末，中国西北省份的穆斯林开始在广州小北路一带聚居。后来，他们带来了阿拉伯国家的商人，阿拉伯商人又带来了北非穆斯林国家的淘金者。2000年初，在北非同胞的指引下，非洲中西部传统贸易国家的商人进驻这一区域，"黑人商业区"逐渐发展成熟。2009年5月广州中山大学的一份调查显示：这个区域聚集了超过50个国家的人，其中相当一部分来自马里、多哥、冈比亚、几内亚、加纳、塞内加尔和刚果七个黄金海岸周边的国家；除了非洲人，这里还有中东人、南亚人和南美人。 广州的非洲商人大多从事纺织品和电子产品的出口生意。我采访的南非人Ossy在家乡经营＂便利店＂，他在广州负责采购各类电子配件，托运回南非。Ossy说："我的店里什么都卖，我按照家里亲友发来的短信采购商品，其中以手机配件为主。" 除了做买卖以外，黑人们平日里的娱乐消遣很少。Ossy住在广州市郊一个新兴的黑人聚居区——那实际上是商业区旁的一条街，街两旁是店铺，楼上是出租屋。这里住的黑人每天晚上都坐在街上唯一的便利店门口喝啤酒、聊天。他们大多没有电脑，不用智能手机，也没有广州当地的朋友。出租屋、便利店、批货中心，对一些人来说还有教堂，便是他们生活的全部。广州的非裔商人大部分是男性，我和他们交流时被问的第一个问题都是"你有没有女生介绍？"有时他们还会请我做翻译，给他们心仪的中国女生打电话。对方第一反应都是拒绝邀约，跟我说追求她们的黑人只是客户。对她们来说，这些黑皮肤的外国商人并非理想的交往对象。她们认为黑人有体味，而且脾气不好。这也是市民对黑人的普遍印象，即使很多人没有亲身经历过。 由于互不理解和贸易纠纷，小北路附近时常发生黑人和中国人的冲突事件。保安曾对记者说；"其实老外的脾气还好，但有些中国人不老实，总是故意把次一些的货卖给他们。" 一些出租车司机对黑人也有意见。他们抱怨黑人的体味，还认为黑人们打车计较零头碎钱，很多出租车不愿意在小北路一带接客。因此黑人们更多乘坐私人出租车，也就是"黑车"。今年6月18日死去的尼日利亚人，就是因为与电动车司机因车资发生肢体冲突而被警方带走。后来警方通知家属，该黑人在被捕四小时后昏迷，最终抢救无效身亡。同胞的猝死引起了整个广州黑人群体的关注，才有了我在微博上看到的聚众照片。 经济全球化和中国经济快速发展吸引了越来越多的外籍人口，促进了城市中"跨国移民"聚居区的形成。在此过程中，矛盾冲突在所难免。像纽约的唐人街、小意大利一样，中国城市中的异国商业区以及其中的移民，经过发展、挣扎、调整，最终将融入城市，成为当地文化的一部分。
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| Pictures: Body painting shows at auto accessories trade fair Posted: 27 Jun 2012 09:42 AM PDT
June 27, the 2012 China International Automotive Aftermarket Expo & the 9th China Auto Accessories Trade Fair were held in Zhengzhou, the capital and largest city of Henan province in north-central China. With China's auto aftermarket entering something of a golden age, the competition in the sector is becoming intensifying too. At the grand opening Wednesday in Zhengzhou International Convention and Exhibition Center, many exhibitors put up body painting shows to attract attendees and their potential buyers.
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| Japan: Korean ‘Comfort Women' Photo Exhibit Sabotaged Posted: 27 Jun 2012 04:41 PM PDT Ahn Se-Hong, a South Korean photographer was harassed leading up to and during his exhibition in Japan, where he displayed pictures of aging 'Comfort Women,' a term used for Korean women that were drafted as sex slaves by the Japanese during the World War II. Ahn disclosed that he is facing threats from Japanese right wing groups, who held protests against the photo exhibition. On his Facebook page [ko] photographer Ahn Se-Hong (ahnsehong) revealed that during his exhibition, he was closely watched, placed under surveillance and his visitors were thoroughly searched by security hired by Nikon, the Japanese camera maker, who also owned the building where the exhibit was on display. Nikon first refused to sponsor the location and abruptly cancelled the event a month ago. However, Nikon eventually succumbed to the Tokyo District Court order to sponsor the location. News media speculated Nikon's abrupt canceling of the exhibit was an attempt to fend off the controversy and pressure from conservative groups. The South Korean online space erupted with rage and countless users accused Japanese extremist right-wing groups of not only refusing to admit their war crimes, but attempting to sabotage the art exhibition. Ahn's show "Layer by Layer: Korean women left behind in China who were comfort women of the Japanese military," shows faces of innocent victims who were dragged into inexplicably horrid situations in their teens or early twenties, now wrinkled and crippled. During Japanese colonization, approximately 50,000 to 200,000 Korean women were kidnapped and forced to leave their homes to become military sex slaves. Less than 70 percent of these women managed to return home.  Ahn's Exhibition on Comfort Women. Posted by Ahn on his Facebook. Used with Permission Ahn wrote [ko] on his Facebook page on June 26, 2012 with the photo above. The post has been shared for over 900 times:
I arrived at the Nikon exhibit salon today happy, to prepare for the photo exhibit, but as I entered the place, I realized this is not the picture I had in my mind. Nikon claimed that they will be merely renting out their space without doing anything, but no, they've done far more than that: They blocked media's entrance and forbid media coverage and even individual's from taking photos. Furthermore, Nikon dispatched three lawyers who closely followed and watched me. These lawyers kept overhearing my conversations and recorded me. I've suppressed (my anger) just for my visitors. But I felt as if I were living under the past Japanese Imperialist rule. The reason Nikon let their lawyers stay with me throughout the entire exhibition was to find an excuse to halt my exhibition.  A regular visitor (supposedly Japanese National) being searched by security hired by Nikon upon entering the photo exhibit. Image posted on Ahn's Facebook. Used with Permission. He added this comment [ko] with the photo above.
This is a clear violation of human rights. I am so sorry for everyone who came to see my exhibit. There were small rallies of right-wing groups held in front of the exhibit. Ahn wrote he was expecting such pressure from the start. Last week, Ahn wrote [ko]:
I will be starting the photo exhibit from next week. Now in Japan, right-wing groups' strong attacks have already started. Someone threatened me and said/wrote I should take care of myself and the severity of their threat has moved up a notch. Another user Ahn Hyun shared [ko] her experience on Ahn's Facebook wall.
I could not find any information about the exhibit at the building entrance nor on the Nikon website. When I opened the door to the Nikon salon exhibit, security came to me and they started opening our bags and we were searched with a metal detector. In the morning, several right-wing groups held protests and created commotion. When they tried to hand me a complaint pamphlet but failed, they stirred up even more commotion. Many news outlets came to cover the story, but Nikon blocked us from even having a conversation with journalists, claiming it is forbidden to cover news inside the building. When I fled from the building to escape the eyes of securities, two Nikon personnel followed us outside the building and watched us. Several people endowed flowers to those old ladies [note: referring to comfort women, not clear whether it was given to the women or endowed in front of the photo of the ladies]. But Nikon blocked people from giving flowers. Some donations were made by people— Nikon's lawyers are keeping that, saying those are problematic. Everything was so irrational and pushed me to the verge of anger. But there was support from [ko] Japanese citizens:
Countless people visited the exhibit. Some of them showed support for me and many Japanese people showed condolences to these old ladies. I feel both confused and rewarded throughout today. However, another right-wing protest is planned tomorrow. I don't know how much commotion they will stir up and how long Nikon's surveillance will continue, but neither of these tactics can beat the people supporting these old ladies. Many users, such as @iron_heel, tweeted [ko] said that they will start boycotting Nikon. This is not the first time extremist Japanese right-wing groups have enraged Koreans, Chinese and other Asians, who suffered prior and during the World War II, when Japan colonized Korea and occupied parts of China. On June 21, this Youtube video of some of right-wing members driving a stake into the statue of Comfort Women sparked controversy. They referred to the women as 'prostitutes'. These groups are also gathering signatures for a petition [ko] to remove a monument commemorating Comfort Women in the United States, fueling an old animosity between Japan and South Korea once again. Written by Lee Yoo Eun · comments (0) |
| Polls Show US Concerns Over a Rising China Posted: 27 Jun 2012 05:31 PM PDT Committee of 100 (百人会), a non-partisan, non-profit organization striving to bring "a Chinese-American perspective to issues concerning Asian Americans and U.S.-China relations" recently released the results of their fourth opinion survey. The introduction to their report describes the survey:
An article in the New York Times summarizes the reports findings, and contrasts them with the Gallup-China Daily USA poll from earlier this year:
The results of a survey by KPMG's Global Technology Innovation Center, released today, suggest that China may soon overtake the U.S. as the world's leading technological innovator. The Wall Street Journal reports:
Also see CDT coverage of a recent Pew survey showing that, for the first time, the world sees China as its top economic power. © josh rudolph for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us |
| The Great Leap From Myth to History Posted: 27 Jun 2012 04:25 PM PDT In an article for Asia Times Online posted earlier this month, Peter Lee examines the cooling prohibition on discussion of the disastrous effects of the Great Leap Forward. The collection of hastily enacted policies resulted in mass starvation. What dutch historian Frank Dikötter has called "Mao's Great Famine" has long been labeled "The Three Years of Natural Disasters" [三年自然灾害] by official party nomenclature. As this period moves further away on the historical horizon, public commentary, scholarship, and documentation by Chinese nationals is beginning to happen. After providing historical context, Lee points to netizen outrage provoked by a divisive Weibo post by Lin Zhibo, head of People's Daily Gansu, claiming that accounts of the famine were "lies" used to "bash Chairman Mao". Since the online scuffle in April and May of this year, Chinese media outlets have been exploring the once forbidden topic with an accuracy never allowed in the past. Lee cites Southern People Weekly's series of articles in May, one of which [zh] candidly told the story of Liao Bokang, a Chongqing official who proved that policy failures, and not natural disasters, were the cause of so many deaths. From Asia Times Online:
Lee's piece also mentions this Global Times article from May, in which the English-language "voice of combative nationalism" also helps to debunk some of the national myths about "natural disasters" between 1959 and 1961, and mentions the desire to accurately document this period while its graying survivors are still around:
Also see prior CDT coverage of the Great Leap Forward and projects to historically document it. © josh rudolph for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us |
| Posted: 27 Jun 2012 02:40 PM PDT The following is a live demo of Google's Project Glass at the Moscone Center in San Francisco earlier today, with Google co-founder Sergey Brin hosting. (Click here for another demo showing how Google services are integrated.) It's essentially computer in a pair of glasses, able to see what you see and meshes your smartphone's display into it. It's not that the technology is new, but the fact that Google is bringing it to the masses and integrating with Google Hangout and other of its services that make it ground-breaking. Corporations with deep pockets can make big bets like this. Being an industry leader and having reaped so much profit gives you opportunity to invest. While we don't like Google's politics, as a technology and Internet services behemoth, it's an amazing company. Following is a model depicting how Google envisions the form-factor may look like some day.  Perhaps Google is using Bluetooth or something similar to connect the glasses with the phone. For this model, I'd like to imagine her underwear is the wearable computer. I don't think we are there yet in having everything self-contained in the eye glasses. This is the brain-child of three Googlers, according to Wikipedia: Babak Parviz, an electrical engineer who has also worked on putting displays into contact lenses; Steve Lee, a project manager and "geolocation specialist"; and Sebastian Thrun, who developed Udacity as well as working on the self-driving car project. |
| Officials Linked to Forced-abortion Scandal Punished Posted: 27 Jun 2012 02:34 PM PDT Local officials involved in the gruesome forced abortion case in Shaanxi have been punished, including the head of family planning in the county, who was dismissed. The Los Angeles Times reports:
The victim's family has reportedly been harassed and threatened since news of the abortion went viral online. © Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us |
| Migrant Workers Riot in Guangdong Posted: 27 Jun 2012 01:10 PM PDT More details are coming in about the riots in Shaxi, Guangdong, which were reportedly sparked when a fight broke out between a 15-year-old migrant from Sichuan and a local primary school student. When police intervened and beat the migrant, his family and fellow migrants gathered and began to riot, according to a report in the Guardian, quoting an article from Global Times:
BBC has further details on the situation:
Photos of the riots have been distributed via weibo and other social media, including several posted yesterday by CDT. On Twitter, @YaxueCao has retweeted and translated posts by blogger Wen Yunchao updating the situation, including a graphic photo of an injured woman, posted as evidence that police opened fire:
While news about the incident has managed to leak via Twitter and weibo, authorities are clamping down on online reports, and videos of the incident have been erased from major websites. Several search terms related to the riots have been scrubbed from Sina Weibo. Yesterday, elsewhere in Guangdong, riot police clashed with villagers angered over the government sale of their land. Read about more recent riots in China, and about migrant workers, via CDT. © Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us |
| The Daily Twit (@chinahearsay links) – 6/27/12 Posted: 27 Jun 2012 11:21 AM PDT My schedule is totally and completely ^@$#&* today, so this will not only be published later than usual, but also be rather brief: Foreign Policy: Tale of the Dragon Lady: The long, sordid history behind China's blame-the-woman syndrome — Must-read article of the day by Paul French. Reuters: EU, U.S., Japan seek further WTO steps over China rare earths — I wrote about this last week, suggesting that even though the US in particular is developing its own sources of rare earths and is therefore not as vulnerable to Chinese export quotas as it used to be, there are still reasons for keeping this dispute alive. Sounds like this is indeed moving forward. Here's the USTR press release for your reference. To Improve Kids' Chinese, Some Parents Move to Asia — if sincere, that kind of dedication is admirable, but it makes me wonder how much of this is mid-life crisis masquerading as good parenting. Sorry, I'm a cynic. Telegraph: Silicon Valley to lose innovation crown to China — I don't think that China is poised to out-innovate the West anytime soon, but the Internet sector may be an exception. Global Times: Huawei, ZTE facing new US ITC patent infringement investigation — More bad news for Huawei in the U.S.? This isn't the first patent case they've had to deal with in the US of course (pretty common in their sector), but what with Congressional investigations going on, this probably isn't the best timing. Tech in Asia: Court Rejects Ganji's Unfair Competition Suit Against Baixing — Pudong court finds in favor of aggressive spammer. Read my response. China Daily Show: US student totally forgot to celebrate Dragon Boat Festival — Finally, some yuks. I particularly enjoy this as it pokes fun at expat cultural assimilation, which I wrote about on Monday. © Stan for China Hearsay, 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us |
| Word of the Week: Chāi nǎ (Demolish It) Posted: 27 Jun 2012 12:00 PM PDT Editor's Note: The Word of the Week comes from China Digital Space's Grass-Mud Horse Lexicon, a glossary of terms created by Chinese netizens and frequently encountered in online political discussions. These are the words of China's online "resistance discourse," used to mock and subvert the official language around censorship and political correctness. If you are interested in participating in this project by submitting and/or translating terms, please contact the CDT editors at CDT [at] chinadigitaltimes [dot] net. 拆哪 (chāi nǎ) Demolish it; literally "Where to demolish?"  Bulldozer with the character "demolish" written on it depicted as the extension of the bureaucratic arm. "Chāi nǎ" mimics the sound of the English word "China." Chāi 拆, "demolish," has a special meaning in China. Demolitions, often forced on tenants with little or no compensation, are one of the major sources of social instability in China. Developers and the local government profit greatly from forcibly evicting people from their homes to build on the land. Anger over forced demolition lead the people of Wukan, Guangdong to fight the local government, eventually laying siege to their village in December 2011. Nǎ 哪 means "where" or "which." Hence, "chāi nǎ" also sounds like the question, "Demolish where?" and mocks the ubiquity of demolition. All over China, one sees "拆" spray-painted on the sides of buildings slated for demolition. People who have had their homes demolished are called chāiqiānhù 拆迁户. Victor Mair has a collection of nicknames for China, including chāi nǎ, at Language Log. © Anne.Henochowicz for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us |
| Noam Chomsky and Tariq Ali with Julian Assange Posted: 27 Jun 2012 11:38 AM PDT |
| Shanghai Court: Aggressive Spamming is Not Unfair Competition Posted: 27 Jun 2012 10:49 AM PDT
This strikes me as one of those cases that looks like one thing with a cursory glance but something entirely different when examined a little more carefully. It's also another reason to be careful when commenting on litigation before thinking through the legal analysis. As you can see from the above quote, the actions here by Baixing included aggressive email spamming. They essentially trolled through user listings, extracted email addresses, and spammed the hell out of Ganji users. By the way, that's very easy to do these days and can be done automatically via off-the-shelf software. Scary, eh? Slimy as the practice may be, the question is whether this rises to the level of unfair competition under China law. That's when a deep breath, and some thinking, is required. It also doesn't hurt to take a look at the Anti-Unfair Competition Law itself. What kinds of activities does the law prohibit? To summarize: 1. Creating customer confusion via use of another's trademark, name, or other indicia (Article 5). 2. Various provisions now covered by the Anti-monopoly Law, such as tying/forced purchases and selling below cost (Articles 6, 7, 11, 12). 3. Commercial bribery (Article 8). 4. False advertising (Article 9). 5. Appropriating or disseminating business secrets (Article 10), which are defined as "technical information and business information which is unknown by the public, which may create business interests or profit for its legal owners, and also is maintained secrecy by its legal owners." 6. Defamation (Article 14). That pretty much covers the basics of the Anti-Unfair Competition Law. So for Ganji to prevail on its case, it would have had to successfully argue that email address extraction and spamming fit into one of those categories. I don't know about you, but I don't see it. Yes, these companies are competitors, and yes, Baixing was aggressively marketing itself to Ganji users using contact information it found on the online platform operated by Ganji. However, that information was not a business secret, but email addresses that were publicly available. In other words, Baixing did not crack into Ganji's database and steal these email addresses, which were not proprietary information, or otherwise uncover other business secrets. In spamming these users, it appears that Baixing was just marketing it's own service, not making false statements or holding itself out as being somehow affiliated with Ganji. I'm not aware that there was any question of Baixing making defamatory statements about Ganji in these promotional messages. Not all dodgy business practices are in violation of unfair competition law, and I think the court's decision here makes a lot of sense. That isn't to say, of course, that other methods of aggressive email collection and spamming may not rise to the level of unfair competition — as usual, that would depend on the specific facts. By the way, Ganji is not the first Net company to run into this problem, and there are ways to fix it. One would be to limit access to registered users who must agree to a no-spam policy as part of the sign-up process. Hard to enforce that policy, though, and it sounds as though Ganji has actually turned off some user accounts in the past because of spamming. Another solution, more expensive yet much more effective, is to have an in-network messaging system, whereby users communicate with one another using the operator's domain and not outside email addresses. That way all email communication goes through the operator, and in the case of spamming, they can simply block that activity themselves. © Stan for China Hearsay, 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us |
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