| Scholar and Chinapol Founder Dies at 72 Posted: 26 Dec 2012 12:29 AM PST Richard Baum, longtime China watcher, former director of UCLA's U.S.-China Center and founder of the Chinapol listserv, died on December 14 at age 72. An obituary in the LA Times explains his life's work and the path that led him there: During an academic career spanning four decades, Baum traveled to China more than three dozen times, including for a period leading up to the violent clashes at Tiananmen Square in 1989. In the 1990s, building on a small email network of professional contacts, Baum launched Chinapol, a private, Web-based discussion group that has become required reading for China watchers around the world. With more than 1,300 members in 27 countries, including China, it has fostered debates on hot topics like China's economic recovery, spurred news coverage of human rights cases and provided early information on fast-breaking events like the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. [...]He stumbled into his life's work while a UCLA senior, when he took a class on Chinese government and politics to fulfill a major requirement. He wound up teaching that class years later after joining the faculty in 1968. After earning his bachelor's degree in political science from UCLA in 1962, Baum went to UC Berkeley, where he received a master's in 1963 and a doctorate in 1970, in political science.[...]
An article in the New York Times has more on the origins of Chinapol: In the 1990s, Dr. Baum spent parts of several years in Japan. He had a steady e-mail dialogue with several dozen other China experts, but keeping it going while he was overseas became increasingly expensive because of Internet charges, which were steep at the time. To save money, he started Chinapol, a Listserv group whose first members were mostly academics. The group steadily expanded to include ambassadors, business leaders and journalists — all seeking insight and perspective as China rose as an economic and political power. Participants had to be approved by Dr. Baum — a recommendation from another member helped, as did an affiliation with a prominent news organization — and advocacy, attacks and self-promotion were not allowed. Violators could be quickly culled, an intolerance that some joked evoked that of China's leaders. "Rick was lovingly known as 'Chairman Rick,' " said Clayton Dube, a longtime friend and colleague who leads the U.S.-China Institute at the University of Southern California. The forum has been especially useful for journalists working in China. Although posts on Chinapol are confidential within the group, a reporter can contact a member separately to follow up on a post or to request permission to quote from it.
An in-depth interview with Baum about the listserv that is his legacy was published in 2010 by the National Bureau of Asian Research's Asia Policy journal, and can be read in full online. Also see prior CDT coverage of Dr. Richard Baum, including his reading list on obstacles to political reform, a review of his most recent book, and a glimpse into a Chinapol discussion.
© josh rudolph for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: China scholars, Chinapol, obituary, richard baum
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| Photo: Winter in Beijing, by cesar casellas Posted: 25 Dec 2012 03:30 PM PST |
| 11 Kindergartners Killed in Van Accident Posted: 25 Dec 2012 02:20 PM PST Amid the recent knife attack on a primary school injuring 22 school children, Chinese state media say an van accident has killed 11 kindergarteners, from The Washington Post: Xinhua says an initial investigation found that the seven-seater van — carrying 15 children and two adults — was speeding on a rural road that was undergoing repairs and ended up in a 3-meter (yard)-deep pond Monday morning. Three children died at the scene, while eight others died later in hospital. Most of the victims were the children of migrant workers and lived with their grandparents. Xinhua said Tuesday that the privately run kindergarten had operated without a license and officials have ordered it closed.
According to the BBC, four of the children survived the crash in Jiangxi: Many vehicles in rural parts of China are badly maintained. In November last year, the deaths of 18 young children in a bus crash caused public outrage and led authorities to promise more money for school bus services. It is unclear what caused this latest accident, but police have detained the driver of the van. State broadcaster China Central Television suggested the van was travelling too fast and had swerved to avoid a parked vehicle before crashing.
The Ministry of Education also commented on the recent string of incidents involving children, from the Wall Street Journal: In a circular issued on Tuesday, the ministry described such events as "heartbreaking" and singled out the Monday crash involving a school van from a privately owned kindergarten in China's southeastern Jiangxi province. The ministry's statement outlined steps aimed at increasing protection offered to young children, calling for increased safeguards against traffic accidents, greater security at schools and stepped-up vigilance during the winter months to prevent death and injury from fires, carbon monoxide poisoning and accidents related to ice skating. The ministry said schools should carry out safety education programs ahead of the Lunar New Year holiday—a period when skating and fireworks-related accidents are common.
© Melissa M. Chan for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: accidents, children, Jiangxi, schools
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| Why Does Santa Play a Saxophone? Posted: 25 Dec 2012 01:53 PM PST Mark Fisher from the Washington Post reported on eight fascinating facts on Christmas in China, which included a 'war on Christmas' and Santa's sisters. Fisher also reports on why Santa Claus in China is always depicted playing a saxophone: The nature of Christmas in China is fascinating, as I explored in an article yesterday, but it can also be baffling. In my post on eight fascinating facts about Christmas in China, number six was a trend that has long puzzled me: Chinese depictions of Santa Claus, of which there are a great many, very often portray him as playing the saxophone. There are posters of sax-playing Santa, cardboard cut-outs, plastic figurines, mall mannequins, all jamming on the sax. It turns out that I'm not the only one curious about this trend: it also seems to puzzle a number of Chinese. Beijing-based journalist Helen Gao (who authored afantastic Atlantic article on Christmas in China) emailed that Sina.com, a widely-read Chinese news website, had translated my article into Chinese, changing the headline to "Foreign Media Looks at China: Confusions on Why Santa Plays Saxophone." Sina also deleted a sentence where I had noted China's persecution of Christians and an entire section on the Taiping Rebellion. Perhaps even worse, they did not provide their many readers a link back to the Washington Post site. The Sina.com translation of my article received 400 responses, many of them debating the question of why Chinese Santas so often carry saxophones. Out of all those, Helen writes, "no one seems to know the answer." When she emailed again, 30 minutes later, the number of responses had almost doubled to 700. By contrast, the original Washington Post blog item has received seven comments. Helen's theory echoes one of my commenters, mlouisa70394, who suggests it may have to do with Chinese perceptions of the saxophone as romantic and cool. Helen writes, "My guess is that it perhaps has to do with the fact that saxophone is obviously an instrument with a Western origin, which fits Santa's image, and is portable so Santa can make Christmas music anywhere he goes. Sound like enough reason for Chinese to lump the two together?" One of the Sina.com commenters, according to Helen's translation, joked that it could be worse: "At least our Santa isn't playing erhu!"
In another article Fisher speculates former US president Bill Clinton is responsible for the saxophone playing Santa. From The Washington Post: I would like to add the theory that President Bill Clinton may be partly to blame for this trend. Christmas became popular in China in large part because the government — as it liberalized the economy and some social restrictions against religion in the early 1990s — tolerated its spread. Christianity was and still is restricted, but the version of Christmas popular in China is more about shopping and fun Western culture. Those are two things that Beijing allowed to flourish in Chinese cities, particularly after former leader Deng Xiaoping's 1992 "southern tour" to open up some southern cities to the world. And what could have been a better symbol of hip Western culture, circa 1992 and the immediate years after, than presidential candidate Bill Clinton's June 1992 appearance on "The Arsenio Hall Show," where he played Heartbreak Hotel on a tenor sax while wearing sunglasses. That moment, of course, was a cultural touchstone of the early 1990s. As Chinese culture started to open up to the West and Chinese consumers started to buy up Western stuff, it certainly seems possible that the sax-playing Clinton, still in the zeitgeist, could have gotten mixed up with the Santa depictions. To be clear, I'm not suggesting that China deliberately copied Clinton's Arsenio Hall appearance in its Santa depictions. If there even is a connection, probably what happened is that someone somewhere in China in the early 1990s, as Christmas became popular, put out a saxophone-playing Santa. The depiction might have resonated with perceptions of the saxophone as particularly Western and cool, which would have been heightened in part by Clinton's much-broadcast appearance. The tradition was brand new to many Chinese, after all, so it would have been especially easy for the association of Santa and saxophone to form. Or maybe there was no connection, and the saxophone spread simply by coincidence, or because some early importer in Shanghai or Beijing liked it, or some other theory. But the mere possibility is a reminder of how recently China opened itself to Western culture, and of how those customs can change and shape beyond prediction in their first year.
Aside from images of Santa Claus, Pope Benedict XVI called for freedom in China in his Christmas address, the New York Times reports: He also addressed China, where in recent weeks the Vatican has been increasingly at odds with the government over the ordination of bishops, who cannot hold office without approval from the authorities, to the dismay of the Vatican. "May the King of Peace turn his gaze to the new leaders of the People's Republic of China for the high task which awaits them," Benedict said. "I express my hope that, in fulfilling this task, they will esteem the contribution of the religions, in respect for each, in such a way that they can help to build a fraternal society for the benefit of that noble people and of the whole world." Aggravating tensions, the Chinese Catholic Bishops Council, a government entity, stripped Thaddeus Ma Daqin, 45, the auxiliary bishop of Shanghai, of his title this month, according to Catholic Web sites that cited sources in the Chinese church.
© Melissa M. Chan for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Bill Clinton, Christmas, Pope Benedict XVI, Santa Claus
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| China 2012 News Map Posted: 25 Dec 2012 06:00 AM PST |
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