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Arakan posted:I don't know if this is true though. As a foreigner, when I study Chinese on my own I pretty much always learn the meanings of the written forms first and then learn how to say them in the correct tone. Maybe it is completely different for native speakers where they learn how to say the character first, then learn how to read/write it, but I find it hard to believe this is always the case, especially for a native speaker who starts learning characters at a young(ish) age. Yeah, I can't actually speak for native Chinese speakers, but it seems reasonable to say that it's pretty common for people who've graduated from school/stopped school early to pick up new vocabulary orally or by other means beyond formal study. The kind of people who we're talking about, who have had limited formal schooling, end up more trapped at that level of education and discourse because learning new vocabulary contextually through the process of living your life is arguably easier and more common than sitting there and learning new words from a list like most of us foreign students do. Naturally this is changing, especially now that even some native Chinese speakers have become used to pinyin inputs in computers and such. I once tried to figure out the Wubei system for typing, and was left utterly mystified, so there's that, too. I wonder if anyone has statistics on the comparative popularity of Wubei and other visual input methods versus pinyin-based input methods for computers in the PRC, as well as whatever the character-based system they use in Taiwan is. BTW, with respect to the OP rules, we can say Taiwan, right? Just not the other three-letter acronym? Or is it Chinese Taipei all the way?
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Feb 24, 2012 19:12
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If you are posting stuff in Chinese, make sure to include translations of everything, and post summaries if you're including links to Chinese websites. I'd prefer it if we stick to English exclusively. Otherwise the discussion just becomes too cliquish. Edit: Taiwan is fine.
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Feb 24, 2012 19:12
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Arglebargle III posted:And that "go educate yourself" poo poo is annoying when it's a long English article, doing it with a 6 year old foreign language discussion thread is just obnoxious and in obviously bad faith. Not really in bad faith at all. This is over 6 years worth of discussion on this very topic, by actual native Chinese speakers who all say it's a stupid idea. Starting in 2005 until present day. What I'm trying to get at here, is that every single one of your (and other's) arguments for it have been picked apart for years and years. So it's kind of pointless to even try arguing for a thing that has 0 support and 0 chance of ever happening.
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Feb 24, 2012 19:16
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Cream_Filling posted:I once tried to figure out the Wubei system for typing, and was left utterly mystified, so there's that, too. Wubi input is more or less what anyone who does a lot of typing will use. An average user can get 100 characters per minute without any real effort. Any use in official capacity and you're looking at 200+ required. But 500+ characters per minute is not really that uncommon at all. The learning curve, of course is higher and you have to know the characters you are typing quite intimately.
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Feb 24, 2012 19:27
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Arakan posted:You can look at a character and know the meaning but not know how to say it. I run into this problem a lot learning new words, I always end up learning the meaning first but the pronunciation later so it doesn't seem too far fetched that this might happen to native speakers as well when they are learning characters. I know this discussion is focused more on whether a switch to all Pinyin would benefit Chinese people, but I just wanted to make a point in favor of Hanzi related to the above statement. I have studied Japanese for over ten years and I feel I am near-native in my ability. I just started studying Mandarin this past year. Being able to rely on my knowledge of Hanzi that I have from Japanese has really helped me to learn Mandarin. I have an established set of knowledge (the visual images of the characters) that I can easily connect to my audially-new vocabulary. (Ok, "audially" isn't a word, but what I mean is, often times, the words I am learning are pronounced differently, but they are words I already know because they are used in Japanese too. So the only new part is the pronunciation. Though even when this is not the case, the knowledge of Japanese Kanji still helps me with Chinese.) This has got me thinking that we could drastically improve international communications if we all adopted Hanzi. That's right, not only should we not abandon Hanzi in Mandarin, but we should actually adopt them in other languages. The Japanese system gives us some hints for how to deal with languages that have verb endings, etc. Observe: 我去ent到學校而看aw我y朋友。 "I went to school and saw my friend." Isn't that beautiful? And think of how much easier it would be to learn a foreign language (the written part, anyway) if they all looked kind of like that?
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Feb 25, 2012 16:49
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Pro-PRC Laowai posted:Wubi input is more or less what anyone who does a lot of typing will use. An average user can get 100 characters per minute without any real effort. Any use in official capacity and you're looking at 200+ required. But 500+ characters per minute is not really that uncommon at all. The learning curve, of course is higher and you have to know the characters you are typing quite intimately. Boy, I sure do miss the days when typing was considered a valuable and fairly uncommon technical skill instead of a basic communication ability that all working adults have.
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Feb 25, 2012 19:17
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Inu posted:This has got me thinking that we could drastically improve international communications if we all adopted Hanzi. That's right, not only should we not abandon Hanzi in Mandarin, but we should actually adopt them in other languages. The Japanese system gives us some hints for how to deal with languages that have verb endings, etc. How do you communicate orally? All modern languages are pronouncing the Chinese characters incorrectly. How does one input it on a computer? I recommend reading "The Singlish Affair" chapter in The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy by John Defrancis To promote world communication, the world should adopt Korean Han'gŭl. It is the most efficient alphabet in the world. One can learn it in a few hours, and takes a few days to fully grasp it. It takes a native-Mandarin speaker 7-8 years of study to master enough Chinese characters to be considered well-rounded literate person. Chinese writing is the most inefficient modern writing system. I have studied Chinese for over five years and I feel I am near-native in my ability. I just started studying Korean this past year. Being able to rely on my knowledge of Mandarin pronunciation that I have from Mandarin has really helped me to learn Korean. I have an established set of knowledge (the sounds of the words in Mandarin) that I can easily connect to my new Korean vocabulary. In my personal anecdote, we should all first learn oral Mandarin and then learn Korean and use Han'gŭl script.
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Feb 26, 2012 00:00
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Ronald Spiers posted:How do you communicate orally? All modern languages are pronouncing the Chinese characters incorrectly. How does one input it on a computer? I think you may be missing my point, though I'm not quite sure. It doesn't matter if you pronounce the characters differently from language to language. By using the same chinese characters in all languages, you have a visual connection that transcends those languages. 人 will be read "ren2" in Mandarin and "hito" or "jin" in Japanese, but have the same meaning regardless of the pronunciation. Why not use the character also in English and pronounce it "person"? As things currently are, someone literate in English can, for instance, look at a Spanish newspaper and guess at some of what it means because they use the same alphabet and have some shared vocabulary. However, neither someone literate in Chinese nor in Russian can do that. If we used Hanzi in all languages though, it would enable everyone the world over to guess at the meaning of a sign, or article or whatever, even if they knew none of the language, and even if their language was unrelated to, and shared no vocabulary with, the one they were looking at. Edit: I just started reading that link. So I'm not the first one with this idea, then? I'm not really surprised. Pretty cool. Inu fucked around with this message at 01:29 on Feb 26, 2012 |
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Feb 26, 2012 01:20
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Inu posted:I think you may be missing my point, though I'm not quite sure. It doesn't matter if you pronounce the characters differently from language to language. By using the same chinese characters in all languages, you have a visual connection that transcends those languages. 人 will be read "ren2" in Mandarin and "hito" or "jin" in Japanese, but have the same meaning regardless of the pronunciation. Why not use the character also in English and pronounce it "person"? Because if it takes 7-8 years to gain mastery of just the written language, you might as well just learn a whole 'nother language, both spoken and written, in the same amount of time. Simply using English grammar to write in Chinese would be absolutely unintelligible, and when you learn written Chinese you're also learning the Chinese language except that your efforts are useless for actual speaking. I do feel that Chinese has one niche use where it might be useful - user interface icons for software or consumer goods. If you're going to tell me that a little abstract mercury thermometer with a big dark line is "warmer" and one with a little dark line is "cooler" on the fridge, or that the little half moon is "standby," you might as well just use Chinese because it's almost as unintelligible and arbitrary anyway. Either that or just develop a decently clear basic lexicon for stuff like that. Ronald Spiers posted:I have studied Chinese for over five years and I feel I am near-native in my ability. I just started studying Korean this past year. Being able to rely on my knowledge of Mandarin pronunciation that I have from Mandarin has really helped me to learn Korean. I have an established set of knowledge (the sounds of the words in Mandarin) that I can easily connect to my new Korean vocabulary. In my personal anecdote, we should all first learn oral Mandarin and then learn Korean and use Han'gŭl script. I mean if it's working out for you that's fine, but I don't see how learning Mandarin would benefit your learning spoken Korean in any way. Korean, to my knowledge, is not tonal and doesn't share that much phonetically with Chinese at all. Hangul script is very good for Korean but it's structured entirely around the traits of that language and would be worthless for Mandarin. The concept of breaking apart and visually distinguishing each phoneme is a pretty good idea. However, it also makes things like typewriters, typography, or computer input incredibly complicated.
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Feb 26, 2012 01:37
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Cream_Filling posted:Because if it takes 7-8 years to gain mastery of just the written language, you might as well just learn a whole 'nother language, both spoken and written, in the same amount of time. Simply using English grammar to write in Chinese would be absolutely unintelligible, and when you learn written Chinese you're also learning the Chinese language except that your efforts are useless for actual speaking. Just to be clear, I'm totally divorcing the characters from their Mandarin pronunciation. There would be no need to learn any spoken Chinese. An English speaker would learn their language's phonetic system first, in this case, roman letters, and then they would learn Chinese characters and apply them to the language that they already know. Little kids' books would have Chinese characters with the roman-letter pronunciation written our next to the Chinese character to show pronunciation, etc. This is just how Japanese works, and I'm saying that it could be done with other languages too, and that if it were done, it would improve international literacy in the sense of giving people all over the world a leg-up on languages they haven't studied. I've probably chosen a bad example with English though since our "phonetic" representation system is so bad that learning that AND learning Chinese does seem like a real pain, but see, that's not the fault of my idea so much as it is of the English language's horrible spelling system, and it's a whole separate issue. Imagine what I'm talking about with a language like Dutch where the spelling is very consistent if that makes it easier to picture. You are right that there is more work up front. This is not an idea that would make learning to read your native language easier necessarily. It's an idea that would mean that all written languages all over the world would share vocabulary, even if that vocabulary is not pronounced at all the same. Edit: I realize it's a really pie-in-the-sky idea. Like Esperanto or something. I'll drop it so as not to derail the thread totally.
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Feb 26, 2012 02:12
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Inu posted:Just to be clear, I'm totally divorcing the characters from their Mandarin pronunciation. There would be no need to learn any spoken Chinese. But that doesn't make any sense. You can't write an English phrase in Chinese without translating. They have different grammar. Really basic stuff like word order and sentence structure are radically different. Making languages share vocabulary also doesn't work because different languages have fundamentally different approaches to vocabulary. Even basic stuff like colors are spoken of differently. How would you represent really common words in English that have no equivalent in Chinese? What about subtleties like articles and the like? How would you have a native English speaker write a sentence in your proposed system? How the hell would you expect someone to write their own name? A well-written English sentence, when read aloud, is highly similar to normal speech. This is usually the standard used for prose. You can reproduce normal spoken English with a high degree of precision in written English. You can even try to replicate a particular non-standard dialect like Faulkner or something, and you can also accurately describe newly coined phrases as well as non-standard terms and foreign vocabulary. You can't do that if you're writing English in Chinese. Making someone learn a fundamentally and radically different language just so they can read and write is a terrible, terrible idea unless you're trying to make a social system that restricts literacy to a select few. OXBALLS DOT COM fucked around with this message at 03:01 on Feb 26, 2012 |
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Feb 26, 2012 02:49
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Ronald Spiers posted:How do you communicate orally? All modern languages are pronouncing the Chinese characters incorrectly. How does one input it on a computer? Korean lacks a lot of phonemes in the final position (in addition to "F" "V" and the voiced and unvoiced "TH" anywhere) and has no dipthongs or consonant clusters, meaning you're limited to three glyphs per syllable.
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Feb 26, 2012 05:57
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Inu posted:I think you may be missing my point, though I'm not quite sure. It doesn't matter if you pronounce the characters differently from language to language. By using the same chinese characters in all languages, you have a visual connection that transcends those languages. 人 will be read "ren2" in Mandarin and "hito" or "jin" in Japanese, but have the same meaning regardless of the pronunciation. Why not use the character also in English and pronounce it "person"? The Chinese writing system is not a pictographic writing system. I have never seen a widely used modern writing system that divorces completely its written symbols from its oral language. About 98% of Chinese characters have roughly two graphic elements, one that provides a semantic clue, the other element provides a pronunciation clue. It will be easy for a native-Mandarin speaker from Singapore or the PRC to remember how to write and pronounce "person/人" and "to know/认." How is a native English speaker going to connect graphically "person" and "to know"? I can come up with literally, thousands of other examples that highlight how Chinese language speakers have an inherent advantage over all other languages in able to learn, retain, and use Chinese characters much more quickly and efficiently. I suggest you read the whole thing in regards to the "Singlish Affair" and the rest of the book. It pretty much destroys your argument about Chinese character universalism. Inu posted:Just to be clear, I'm totally divorcing the characters from their Mandarin pronunciation. There would be no need to learn any spoken Chinese. The idea that you divorce the Chinese characters from any form of pronunciation is laughable. You might as well invent a writing system totally based on pictographs that is more intuitive than the Chinese writing system. You point out that it is the English language's writing system's fault for being incompatible with Chinese? I really don't understand where you are going with your argument. Written English, even with its faults in having poor correspondence between sound and letters compared to other European languages like Spanish or German, is still far more efficient than any language that uses Chinese characters. Again, I point out there is no such modern writing system that totally divorces itself from the spoken language from the written language. Japanese is really a poor example for promoting that idea that Chinese characters have a universal appeal for other languages to adopt. Sorry, but the current set of Chinese characters were largely standardized about two-thousand years ago based on a spoken-language that doesn't exist anymore. Even with that obstacle, the spoken modern Chinese languages, Korean, Vietnamese, and Japanese still provide hints of the relation between Chinese characters and the way to pronounce them. The only reason why Japan still retains Chinese characters is pride in tradition that was entrenched for centuries because the Japanese had no other writing system to call their own and had to make due with a foreign writing system. The Japanese realized they were importing a whole different language when they adopted Chinese characters, hence they had to adopt Chinese pronunciations of the writing system borrowed. Oh, and Chinese characters are divorced from modern speech for about two-thousand years, but English writing conventions is only divorced from modern speech for 300-400 years. I think English is still superior in conveying speech with writing than Chinese. If one wants to promote a universal language, you might as well just choose a random language that is used worldwide already, oh wait its English. The idea that the Chinese writing system can be easily adopted by foreign languages is a myth. Chinese writing is not a universal writing system.
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Feb 26, 2012 07:54
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Arglebargle III posted:Do you have an example of a large scale implementation of pinyin that intentionally displaced characters and worked? The Chinese have done a lot of thinking about this themselves and I don't know of any real efforts to promote a phonetic system as a replacement for characters, even though there's been a lot of discussion from people who could potentially enact such a change. Isn't this what the Vietnamese have done? I remember reading somewhere they have basically gotten rid of their character based alphabet and now use a romanized system and only use the traditional characters for aesthetic purposes I don't know how comparable Vietnamese and Chinese are other than that they are both tonal languages with lots of homonyms
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Feb 26, 2012 08:17
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Ronald Spiers posted:A simple internet search provides a list of prominent Huis from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hui_people#Prominent_Hui That's a lot of Ma's there. Anyone got an idea what the name means and/or why it's so widespread among the Hui population?
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Feb 26, 2012 12:57
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Skeleton Jelly posted:That's a lot of Ma's there. Anyone got an idea what the name means and/or why it's so widespread among the Hui population? Muhammad
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Feb 26, 2012 13:21
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Pro-PRC Laowai posted:Muhammad Ahhh, that does make sense. Thanks.
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Feb 26, 2012 13:47
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Does this sperging about Chinese characters really have anything to do with China's political and economic rise?. There's already Chinese language thread that is a more appropriate venue for that. There are much more interesting things to talk about when it comes to China. Let's take Weibo 微博 (微 means 'micro', 博 as in 博客 'boke' blog). This is China's version of Twitter (of which Sina Weibo is the biggest I believe) and from my understanding the best venue Chinese have to vent about injustices since there's way too much going on and the censors can't keep up to it. Even Wen Jiabao is going to start tweeting here. Last year during the Wenzhou train disaster this is where you'd hear about the Chinese government's attempts to mitigate the fallout from the disaster by hiding evidence (literally by burying train cars). Recently another topic that has come up was the disfiguring of a 17 year old girl who was set on fire by a spurned suitor. By itself this probably wouldn't be a popular topic on weibo for long, but the guy in question is a 官二代 (term for children of a government official like 富二代 is for children of the wealthy) and the fact that months have passed without a prosecution of the guy has really angered a lot of Chinese. Many of them believe that because of this guy's privileged position that he's going to get off with a light punishment. These outrageous abuses of the powerful on the general populace are a dime a dozen, but discussion of them does not conform with the idea of a harmonious society. The government's idea to 'harmonize' this discussion is to force all users to post with their real names. Will this kill off this sort of badly needed conversation?
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Feb 26, 2012 16:19
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timtastic posted:The government's idea to 'harmonize' this discussion is to force all users to post with their real names. Will this kill off this sort of badly needed conversation? Nope, but what it will do is help put an end to a lot of the random bullshit that pops up out of nowhere... far too many fake rumors get passed off as real things and it's really counter productive. You mentioned the wenzhou crash, and that was a perfect example. Random people yapping around making poo poo up to stir up trouble and build up their account followers. gently caress the impact and trouble it will cause. If evidence is given in good faith, I am against any actions taken against those who report it. People who just want to stir poo poo up and cause problems, they should be punished to the maximum extent of the law and it needs to be crystal loving clear that that is going to be the consequence. It's akin to shouting fire in crowded buildings... it's not "free speech" it's loving criminal and should be treated as such. edit: also, the government can be rather reactionary at times and having forums such as weibo to monitor social opinion go a loooong way towards satisfying people. The 官二代 is most likely not going to have much leniency given at all. Pro-PRC Laowai fucked around with this message at 18:57 on Feb 26, 2012 |
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Feb 26, 2012 18:55
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Pro-PRC Laowai posted:Nope, but what it will do is help put an end to a lot of the random bullshit that pops up out of nowhere... That is probably true, but are you seriously saying that this won't have any significant chilling effect on speech that is not "random bullshit?" That sounds a bit optimistic, to say the least.
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Feb 26, 2012 19:09
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Fiendish_Ghoul posted:That is probably true, but are you seriously saying that this won't have any significant chilling effect on speech that is not "random bullshit?" That sounds a bit optimistic, to say the least. Debate in China is anything but stifled, there are certain lines* you do not cross as there are anywhere. But as far as being critical of policies and officials, as long as you can solidly back up yourself and either present rational alternatives or concrete evidence... the odds of anything happening to you are very very slim. Furthermore, as far as I am aware, that personal information is not just out there for all in the world to see *lines defined: - revealing state secrets and sensitive information - this one can be fuzzy at times - libel / slander - going together with that evidence thing or being so absolutely certain that you are willing to go through hell to hold your line - questioning the legitimacy of officials or the government - serious no no. constructive criticism is totally fine (Hanhan), screaming to tear things down is not (ai weiwei). - inciting riots by spreading false rumors. honestly, true or not, there are better ways to go about doing things without escalating the situation. - making threats - some other random poo poo in here too. The best part of this is that it should help crack down on not just the rumor poo poo, but also on all those god damned scammers. Chilling effects on legit speech. Like most things in China I assume that there will be a temporary pause to see if it's alright and then ease into the waters and go back to normal. Kind of how you see that big "no smoking sign", but then notice some ash and a butt on the ground... slowly pull out your smoke, light up and keep an eye out for security or someone who might care... get that response ready in your head, and then before you know it 5 others are around you smoking too. (and then you put out the butt in the "O" of the "NO" sign) edit: In all honesty though, this being China afterall... it's just gonna end up with people snapping up ID/Names of others and using throwaway sim cards for verification whenever they are up to no good. If there can be legit controls on under what circumstances personal information is provided to investigators and under what terms of review, there shouldn't be much of an issue. That's the kind of thing that should be pushed for more than anything else. Pro-PRC Laowai fucked around with this message at 20:05 on Feb 26, 2012 |
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Feb 26, 2012 19:52
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What the hell is pinyin?
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Feb 27, 2012 06:29
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The romanization system of Chinese characters.
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Feb 27, 2012 06:34
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Xandu posted:The romanization system of Chinese characters. Oh. And why would they use that instead of just using traditional characters?
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Feb 27, 2012 06:59
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Farecoal posted:Oh. And why would they use that instead of just using traditional characters? There's a lot of characters and it could be done to romanize their language, as the Vietnamese and Turkish languages were. I'm not saying they should, but that is a reason.
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Feb 27, 2012 07:02
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Farecoal posted:Oh. And why would they use that instead of just using traditional characters? In order to help facilitate teaching the masses the proper way to pronounce characters in Mandarin. Also to aid foreigners in learning how to pronounce modern standard Chinese. Also to help represent Chinese words and names for foreign publications that use the Latin alphabet. Pinyin can also be used to type Chinese on computers. A truly revolutionary accomplishment to crush the feudal orthography imposed by previous dynasties of China. edit: And also this article about Chinese elections is interesting. Apparently some of these local elections matter enough for politicians to bribe their constituents very much like their Western counterparts. Campaign 2012 with Chinese Characteristics Ronald Spiers fucked around with this message at 07:20 on Feb 27, 2012 |
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Feb 27, 2012 07:17
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Perhaps a strange question, but I'm in Shanghai and want to buy a harmonica, rather not getting something off of Taobao sight unseen. I don't suppose anybody has any tips? Also, why is it so hard to find stick deodorant around here? Edit: and a tip for Westerners to avoid stomach discomfort - eat all the 麻辣肉丝 you want, just avoid the burritos from Pizza to Go. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Mar 3, 2012 17:44
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Mozi posted:Perhaps a strange question, but I'm in Shanghai and want to buy a harmonica, rather not getting something off of Taobao sight unseen. I don't suppose anybody has any tips? Or fat person clothes. I normally wear an XL in the USA, but I haven't found anything equivalent to a Big and Tall in Taipei.
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Mar 3, 2012 19:15
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Mozi posted:Perhaps a strange question, but I'm in Shanghai and want to buy a harmonica, rather not getting something off of Taobao sight unseen. I don't suppose anybody has any tips? Go ask in the China Megathread in Travel and Tourism. Lots of the regulars live in China, they'll be able to help you. Brennanite fucked around with this message at 22:27 on Mar 3, 2012 |
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Mar 3, 2012 22:05
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Pro-PRC Laowai posted:Nope, but what it will do is help put an end to a lot of the random bullshit that pops up out of nowhere... far too many fake rumors get passed off as real things and it's really counter productive. You mentioned the wenzhou crash, and that was a perfect example. Random people yapping around making poo poo up to stir up trouble and build up their account followers. gently caress the impact and trouble it will cause.  Do you by any chance work for the Chinese government in some capacity? Because drat. I understand the rumor mill can cause trouble but are you really serious about eliminating anonymous speech on the internet? That would be (has been) considered an extreme breach of privacy on a video game forum in the U.S. much less the entire internet.
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Mar 4, 2012 06:44
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Arglebargle III posted:
When has anonymity been considered a right? In order to enforce a harmonious society, the government must expose rabble-rousers and charlatans. Internet-users must have accountability and there needs to be recourse for any damage to society when internet-users abuse their rights to express themselves. Korea for example has taken the right step to stamp-out such rabble-rousers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minerva_(Daum_Agora_user)
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Mar 4, 2012 07:07
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Arglebargle III posted:
When rumors are basically harmless who cares. But rumors here have a history of getting way out of hand and resulting in dead bodies and poo poo getting set on fire. Making poo poo up that is patently false to serve your own agendas is flat out wrong and criminal and should be treated as such. Remember that panic run on salt because of Fukushima? Yep, that was started by someone selling salt. The chaos that resulted was beneficial to no one. Or how about claiming that a massive disaster is about to hit, resulting in half a city sleeping outside out of fear in the rain... whoops, some people die from exposure. There are tons of people who are perfectly willing to stir up domestic rage just to get their names out there in the hopes of sparking a career and getting their name out there. Why is this in any way acceptable? Screaming fire in a crowded theater is not protected speech anywhere. It's an interesting dynamic here, one where if there is an actual investigation and a report, the same types who are more apt to spread a rumor are at the same time more likely to ignore any official statement of fact even if it's 100% legit reporting. It's something that cannot change overnight. Gradual change, sure... and you are seeing it. Far less is off-limits, but you see corruption of the media on the other side where reporters are paid off by corporations to not report on things. Liberalize the media completely, and you'll just be replacing one censor for another and rumor mongering will still be rampant. Want to liberalize the media some more? First step is to stop the rumor mongering and make it 100% clear that it won't be tolerated and there are consequences for spreading bullshit. A recent (really local) example, was someone claiming that our tap water was mixed in with the grey-water (for toilets) line and there was panic over how to check if it was true. People pissed away tons of cash on testing water, but any report saying it was untrue was immediately hit with newer posters claiming the opposite. Hey, look at that, it was all a scam to sell expensive (shoddy) filters. We had the same thing with false claims of break-ins to sell security grates for windows. The hilarious thing about those is that poorly designed grates on the 1st floor, only serve to make the floor above it more vulnerable. There is an entire "marketing" industry out there to help spread this crap and there just simply are not enough resources to stamp it out by investigating it all. And the potential profits from it can be huge. A flip side of this, is that when someone is verified as being who they claim to be and they make a claim... it will be taken a lot more seriously and hopefully people will think more for themselves before passing it on or trying to distort it to their own aims. Whole lotta progress to be made on multiple fronts, but in the meantime this should hopefully put a damper on the issue while it's all being sorted out. Especially as a great majority of the reforms that need to be made are going to be affecting those who really don't want those reforms.. and this should help shut them up and limit their ability to manipulate to some degree.
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Mar 4, 2012 08:57
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Pro-PRC Laowai posted:Remember that panic run on salt because of Fukushima? Yep, that was started by someone selling salt. The chaos that resulted was beneficial to no one. Loosening the restrictions on the media would get rid of much, if not all of the rumor-mongering.
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Mar 4, 2012 09:03
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french lies posted:This is an argument I hear CCP apologists put forward a lot, and I don't think it holds any water. In my experience, Chinese people believe rumors like this precisely because they don't trust official media outlets. The government's handling of the SARS outbreak, the Wenzhou train crash and similar high-profile incidents makes ordinary people extremely suspicious of official reports. It makes them that much more likely to accept extreme rumors that run contrary to what the official line says. It really wouldn't get rid of it all. The only difference in the end is who is censoring what and for what purpose. It's something that needs to be eased into and regulated properly. This is one nice step towards that goal... holding people responsible for the crap they spew online and when it's something legit, hopefully they will back up their claims with things like evidence. Hearsay is so strongly ingrained here that it's not even funny. I have had neighbors go to court on rather legit claims, only to lose their cases because they have no documentation to back up a drat thing they claim apart from "this and that happened.. no, i dont have pictures, but everyone knows about it... no, i can't name anyone specific". I have also personally consulted several other residents pursuing the same exact claims... they won outright. The reason? Strong documentation and evidence. Legally, of course, poo poo ain't perfect, but it's not as bad as some people seem to think it is. Want to talk about crazy poo poo? document document document, then come forward with it publicly and it's a lot harder for anyone to deny it. Give me a cultural shift that has that mentality and then we can talk about loosening restrictions.
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Mar 4, 2012 14:52
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Pro-PRC Laowai posted:It really wouldn't get rid of it all. The only difference in the end is who is censoring what and for what purpose. It's something that needs to be eased into and regulated properly. This is one nice step towards that goal... holding people responsible for the crap they spew online and when it's something legit, hopefully they will back up their claims with things like evidence. Rumor-spreading, distrust of official announcements, reliance on hearsay, have all come about more or less directly because of the government's (especially local government's) insistence on censoring everything that is damaging to their interests. The consequences of this information suppression can be deadly to the common man, as they were in the case of the 2008 tainted milk scandal, or the 2003 SARS outbreak. This again gives ordinary citizens a powerful incentive to ignore official announcements (which, as you touched on, are often quite reasonable), and in turn give credence to extreme rumors. As is typical, the party here is itself the cause of the problems that it says makes changes impossible. Ironically, removing or loosening the party-state's control over the media would actually go a long way to remedy these problems. Re-instating the rule of law and proper legal proceedings would go a long way in fostering a culture where people are less likely to believe any absurd claim as fact. The problem is that since all of these things are detrimental to CCP rule, they are not likely to ever come about.
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Mar 4, 2012 17:01
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Sorry for the double-post, but I just wanted to make another plug for the Sinica podcast that was recommended a few pages back. I've been listening to it during work-outs over the past few weeks and it's such a fantastic resource for understanding current affairs in China. I'm not exaggerating when I say it's probably the best China-related thing I've discovered in years.
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Mar 4, 2012 17:14
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Farecoal posted:Oh. And why would they use that instead of just using traditional characters? Because the Chinese language is awful to learn and everyone knows it even the Chinese. It's so awful they designed a system in which words in Chinese are now represented by letters in a foreign alphabet system. This foreign alphabet system is used to teach Chinese kids their own language and to interface with keyboards and thus use the Internet.
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Mar 4, 2012 17:46
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The Chinese government lacks legitimacy and consent, therefore any attempt by them to control the flow of information is assumed to be nefarious. David Cameron was also talking about controlling information flows in the aftermath of the London riots, he can do that because as a democratically elected leader he has the legitimacy to speak about it and if Britain somehow made real name registration for Twitter mandatory(or something) it would be no big deal, since it would just be another "cultural norm" of British society.
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Mar 4, 2012 21:20
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Pro-PRC Laowai posted:It really wouldn't get rid of it all. The only difference in the end is who is censoring what and for what purpose. It's something that needs to be eased into and regulated properly. This is one nice step towards that goal... holding people responsible for the crap they spew online and when it's something legit, hopefully they will back up their claims with things like evidence. Do you really not understand the chilling effect it will have on all other speech if there is no anonymity? And here you go again with your unsupported assertions! "No" is the totality of your response to french lies' point about censorship. Can you maybe mention why you think that increased legitimacy of official news outlets would not reduce the power of rumors? Good job using anonymous personal anecdotes to explain how damaging hearsay is to public discussion btw.
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Mar 5, 2012 04:20
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Has anyone else read Wild Swans? I had to read it for an Asian politics course I took a few years back, and I'm finally reading it, and wanted to know how it stacks up compared to other books about modern Chinese history.
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Mar 14, 2012 01:58
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