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I really recommend Evan Osnos' recent piece on Macau. It's quite long but it has a great hook (random dude that won zillions by playing Baccarat) and some really spectacular writing by Osnos. He covers Macau's sordid history in detail and how it has shaped and been shaped by the Chinese and international players. Seriously, it's a massive pro-click. The God of Gamblers: Why Las Vegas is Moving to Macau
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Apr 4, 2012 21:27
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TheBuilder posted:If Macau is a money laundering haven and a way to exit Chinese funny or hot money out of the country, why doesn't the central government do more to lock it down? It would seem any real effort to fight corruption would be to shut Macau down and make it harder to remove this cash from the country. I ask this assuming that the upper levels of the central government are serious about corruption fighting. quote:For all the hullabaloo surrounding the perennial anti-graft campaigns, the risk of going to jail remains small even for officials caught with their hands in the till. Since 1982, about 80 per cent of the 130,000 to 190,000 officials disciplined annually for malfeasance by the Party received only a warning. Only 6 per cent were criminally prosecuted, and of them, only 3 per cent went to jail. In other news, The Economist (which I usually hate) had a pretty decent long article on China's military build-up and what it means for the region and the world at large. China's Military Rise: The Dragon's New Teeth I'll be the first to admit I don't know the first thing about military hardware, but what I read from the article pretty much confirmed my notion that the anxiety over China as a military power is overstated. The PLA hasn't seen real combat for thirty years and much of their technology is still out of date. The article writer also makes the point that even though China will get some aircraft carriers soon, it will still take them many years to learn how to use them well. This is probably applicable to other sections of the army as well: The hardware is catching up, but the combined expertise and human capital of the PLA is still ways behind.
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Apr 5, 2012 19:50
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Ardennes posted:Granted, as China is finding out, their not the only ones who can bear the brunt of economic warfare nor are they immune from financial pressure. The cyber-warfare/espionage thing is also a two way street, they just have more to gain from it at this point in the technical arena. From Reuters: quote:A hacker has posted thousands of internal documents he says he obtained by breaking into the network of a Chinese company with defense contracts, an unusual extension of the phenomenon of activist hacking into the world's most populous country. The Anonymous attack was earlier this week, and by the looks of it, they forgot to do their homework. From PCMag: quote:A new, China-focused group of Anonymous hacktivists took down several hundred of Chinese websites this week to "revolt the Chinese system."  Even still, I'm glad someone is making life difficult for the Chinese authorities in some way. It'll be interesting to see what kind of repercussions (if any) that the fenqing and patriotic hackers will think of.
french lies fucked around with this message at 11:55 on Apr 6, 2012 |
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Apr 6, 2012 11:53
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Throatwarbler posted:Imgur has blocked anon image uploading from China. My pic threads
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Apr 6, 2012 12:31
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Throatwarbler posted:Spam, probably. There's a couple of other websites (blogs with active comment sections) unrelated to China that require a captcha if you connect from a Chinese IP. Btw, if you want some fascinating reading you should check out Blocked on Weibo. The guy who runs it updates frequently with lists and individual posts of blocked terms on Weibo. Some of it is within what you would expect (dissidents, 8964, FLG et.c.), but other things seem completely inexplicable. For example, "verification number" in traditional characters is blocked, but the same word in simplified characters is not. The English word "evolution" is blocked; e.g. tons of weird little quirks like these. Great stuff, really recommended.
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Apr 6, 2012 13:19
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At this point this thread seems to have devolved into me just posting links, but I really felt I had to share this after seeing it. It's a long (three hours!) and excellent Frontline documentary about the Tian'anmen protests made in the late nineties. I thought it captured perfectly that moment in history, the arrogance of both sides and the pure but often naive idealism of the protesters. You really feel how things turn to poo poo as they fight among themselves and eventually get helplessly crushed by the machinery of the state. The entire thing was an extremely moving experience for me, not the least because I personally know people who participated in the protests. Whatever the protesters may or may not have achieved, there's still this powerful sense of higher aspiration to what they did that I feel China is missing completely these days. When I'm in Mainland China I sometimes question whether it's still there, bubbling beneath the surface, or if people have really thrown up their hands and decided to grab whatever resources they can in the current corrupt sham of a system. Anyway, this is a pro-click and you should all take the time to watch it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVvwA_34WB8 Note: I personally watched the Chinese version, which has the full three hours. To the best of my efforts, I couldn't find an equivalent English version so I'm sorry about that. french lies fucked around with this message at 20:31 on Apr 6, 2012 |
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Apr 6, 2012 20:25
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Readman posted:I'd written up about half a post on Chinese law, like promised, but I couldn't figure out how to make it entertaining or interesting to a general audience. I'll have another go at it next week... Seeing as the Hoekstra ad is all but forgotten by now, I thought I would solicit some suggestions for a new thread name. Any takers? My best attempts so far have just been lame puns like "Xi's got to have it" and "Hu let the dogs out" so I hope you guys come up with something better.
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Apr 7, 2012 08:56
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Jesus Christ, you guys are really making me regret posting that article. As BrotherAdso said, the alarmist tone subsides over the course of the piece, but yes, the Economist do love their bogeymen and orientalist scaremongering. Over to something completely different: Can you guess what this is?  You'd be forgiven for thinking it was some kind of paper shearing device, but no, this is a Chinese typewriter! Yes, it's real, and not just the punchline of a zillion jokes, an MC Hammer dance or the name of a badass (?) Tom Selleck TV series.  I don't have the slightest idea what's going on here.  In operation... Chinese typists often developed a hunched-over posture like this. How the gently caress does this poo poo work? As you would imagine, it's a fair bit more complex than the typewriters we are used to. A Chinese typewriter essentially consists of two parts: A traybed containing around two thousand five hundred characters worth of loose type, and a magnetic mechanism to pick up these characters and then ink and punch them onto the paper, one-by-one.  That's the traybed in front. Each one contained everywhere from 2000-2500 characters. Rather than me blathering on for pages, here's a video showing how it's used. It's quite fascinating. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6iu9Nie4Oc The narrator explains that the characters were ordered by category, so that all characters that related to water, for example, were put in the "water" section of the traybed. Since 2500 characters didn't cover much beyond the essentials, the typist would frequently need to add new characters or rearrange the traybed as needed. New characters were looked up in a catalog and then added to the traybed from supplementary trays.  New characters were added from supplementary trays like these. So how fast could you type with this thing? Estimates vary, but a good typist in the 40s could average 20-30 characters a minute. For comparison, using a modern Pinyin IME an average Chinese computer user can easily input somewhere around double that. And a trained Wubi typist can even get up to triple that: 150 characters a minute! I mean, that blows pretty much even the fastest QWERTY typist out of the water.  As you can imagine, working with the Chinese typewriter was a slow and laborious process. Various improvements were made to the design over the years, but it couldn't change the basic arithmetic of how the machine worked. Adding to the frustration was the fact that the physical weight of each character would vary with the number of strokes. The typist would therefore have to adjust the punching power of the typing mechanism according to the stroke count, to avoid an uneven imprint or simply punching through the paper.  Only Chinese people had the stamina and bitterness-eating prowess to effectively use a Chinese typewriter. Pictured is a danchun imperialist dog longing for the simplicity of his native alphabetic system. Perhaps the biggest, and also most interesting changes to the typewriter, were made to the traybed itself. In the earliest stages of Chinese typing, the characters were arranged according to their radicals. These are not the beret-wearing, flag-burning kind of radicals, but rather a selection of frequently occurring components in Chinese characters. Radicals are often used to sort and index characters, most notably in dictionaries.  As if the typist's life wasn't difficult enough, the characters on the tray were upside down and mirrored. Typists had to have very good eyesight. This was a very poor and inefficient way of organizing the traybed. In this system, the characters were sorted not by their usage frequency, but by their stroke count and the stroke count of their indexing radical, going from lowest to highest. In practice, this meant that the typist would have to jump back and forth across the traybed to type even the simplest of phrases. Later designs would take usage frequency into account and group the most frequently used characters in the middle and the less frequently used to the sides. This improved the situation somewhat, but typists would still have to move the typing mechanism around an awful lot to render even the most common of phrases.  The Simpsons' depiction of a Chinese typewriter. I could sperg for hours over everything's that wrong with this. That all changed in the 50s, with a typesetter named Zhang Jiying. He came up with a way of arranging the characters that is weirdly reminiscent of what we call "predictive text". He would look at which characters he used most frequently, and more importantly, which characters they were most often combined with. Take Mao (as in Mao Zedong), for instance, that character can mean a lot of things but for an average typist in those days you could make a fair bet "Zedong" or "Chairman" (zhuxi in Chinese) came afterwards. So using his method, you would simply put ze, dong, zhu and xi next to the Mao and easily quadruple your speed setting these very frequent combinations of type.  An early traybed layout. In this layout, frequently used characters are in the middle, more infrequently used characters to the far left and right. "Special characters", numbers and the cyrillic/roman alphabet are on the immediate sides of the middle. Typists eventually adopted to using this system as well. Using Zhang's system, every typist would have a customized traybed tailored to his or her specific needs. A company secretary, for example, might have the names and titles of her boss and other upper-level managers clustered together, whereas a PRC typist would group words like "imperialism" and "socialism" around the affix "zhuyi", which is used for almost all "isms" in Chinese. This technique increased typing efficiency by a considerable degree, even if the sheer speed didn't come anywhere near what can be done on a computer today. The legacy of Zhang Jiying can be seen in popular IMEs like Sogou, which use different forms of predictive algorithms to speed up typing.  Look at number 4 in the upper right example. The IME correctly suggests xinnian kuaile (Happy New Years) based on the input of the four initial consonants "xnkl". At the end I'd just like to note that Western pro-Pinyin activists like Victor Mair were originally predicting that the rise of computing would spell the demise of Chinese characters. In fact, the very opposite has occurred: It seems the more advanced computing gets, the easier and more convenient the input of Chinese characters becomes. In a sense, computing may actually have saved Chinese characters from extinction somewhere down the line. The CCP did have plans for further simplifications of characters, which were later discarded. If this didn't satisfy your curiosity, you should check out the website of Thomas Mullaney, a Stanford professor who specializes on this very subject. I sourced most of this post from his Google talk, which is freely available (and very pro-click).
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Apr 9, 2012 11:04
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To add to the PLA discussion we had earlier: A Chinese general recently did a very aggressive column in the Global Times, essentially threatening the Philippines with military action if it does not concede its claims to the contested territories in the South China Sea. You can read it here. Among other things, he accuses the Philippines of coveting the oil resources in the SCS and acting as a "cat's paw" for the United States. It's also full of stock nationalist tropes like "China's had enough" and "we will use force if needed".  The WSJ did an okay summary of it here if you don't read Chinese. quote:Chinese General: Philippines Faces ‘Last Chance’ I noticed, for example, that he uses the phrases "national sovereignty" (国家主权) and "territorial integrity" (领土完整) to refer to the contested territories in the SCS. These terms are usually filed under what's called China's "core interests" (核心利益). This came into wide use after the signing of the Sino-American joint statement in 2009, and refers to matters in which the Chinese government will not negotiate or compromise. Basically, a core interest is something which China will go to extreme lengths, if not all-out war, to maintain. "National sovereignty and territorial integrity" in the central government's nomenclature, refer explicitly to Taiwan and Tibet. The Spratlys and other contested territories are not considered a core interest. So my wild guess would be that internally, the PLA operates with a very different definition of what China's "core interests" are, and may actually be pushing for an expansion of the term. If that really happens there is precious little that the other players in the SCS can do about their territorial disputes with China. I guess this goes back to what we were saying earlier: China's arms build-up isn't a threat to the West, as the US right would have you think, but it does carry significant implications for its neighbors. I'd be interested to see how far the US is willing to go to protect the Philippines if it does come down to a military confrontation over the Spratlys.
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Apr 10, 2012 11:23
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hitension posted:Rumor has it Gu Kailai and Heywood had a thing. Neil Heywood may have been banging Bo Xilai's wife: some guy
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Apr 11, 2012 07:04
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quote:Out of curiosity, one thing I don't know about all this is the genesis and the veracity of who holds what. Is this stuff in total limbo, or do the various pieces of dirt in question actually (probably) belong to one side or the other? The Chinese internet is kind of blowing up now and there is so much commentary on the Bo Xilai incident it sort of makes my head spin. I thought Jeremiah Jenne had a good take on recent events, and how bald-facedly hypocritical the government has been its handling of them. What Xinhua is now reporting as fact was squashed by government censors for being "malicious rumors" only two weeks ago. After something like that, how the gently caress is anyone supposed to trust the state media? While I think it's too early to say anything for certain, I wouldn't discount Jenne's assertion that this may be a watershed moment in relations between the Party and the Chinese people, the same way the Lin Biao incident was. I also noticed that some commentators (like Hong Huang, "China's Oprah") are pointing out an element of classic Chinese misogyny to all of this. The media is for all intents and purposes blaming Bo Xilai's downfall on Gu Kailai, which is in turn reminiscent of how Jiang Qing was blamed for Mao's evils, the vilification of Empress Dowager Cixi, and even Yang Guifei and Bao Si if you go all the way back in Chinese history. How are things on the ground in China right now? I don't think I've been this absorbed by China news since the Olympics, and I really regret that I couldn't be there myself. I can just imagine the atmosphere and the discussions people are having.
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Apr 11, 2012 14:56
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Arakan posted:Anyone know anything about the protests going on in Chongqing the past couple days? http://www.molihua.org/2012/04/30_11.html is all I've really seen so far.  Don't know how credible this guy is.
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Apr 11, 2012 16:26
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It is an unrelated protest, apparently over the merging of the Wansheng and Qijiang districts in Chongqing. But my guess is current tensions are likely feeding into it as well. Wansheng district, Qijiang district, and the protesters' slogan "We want to eat" (我们要吃饭) have all been blocked on Weibo, suggesting it is true.
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Apr 11, 2012 17:17
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Edit: Nevermind.
french lies fucked around with this message at 07:00 on Apr 12, 2012 |
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Apr 12, 2012 06:48
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Just finished reading this excellent essay/book review by Fang Lizhi, the famous dissident who died earlier this week. I have to confess I don't know all that much about him, but reading this has sparked my interest. The book he reviews is the recent Deng Xiaoping biography by Ezra Vogel. He tears both him and the book a new one in the most elegant, understated way possible. It's a fascinating deconstruction of the narrative that the CCP promotes and Western observers like Vogel and Martin Jacques are unwittingly propagating. I especially found his final two paragraphs quite poignant: quote:A virtue of Vogel’s book is that it collects and organizes a huge amount of material on the struggles within the elite power circles in China over several decades. In these accounts we learn how Deng tried to protect his allies and how he sought to undermine his enemies; he fell, rose, fell again, then rose again to the pinnacle position in the second generation of the Communist dynasty. Vogel’s materials will be very useful to students of elite power struggles in China.
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Apr 14, 2012 12:46
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Hong XiuQuan posted:I didn't found that as convincing as you. I haven't yet finished the book but about 80% through and I've found that while it does have a top-heavy focus, it's to be expected - it's ultimately more a biography focused on the 60s-90s rather than a book about socio-political change in China. As for the bit about the CMC, I'm too far removed from the material to really comment, but I do think you're right about Fang having an axe to grind with Deng and that he uses the book as a stepping stone to do that. Even if he messes up some of the details, wouldn't you say that the larger point he's making, i.e that Deng isn't necessarily someone worth admiring, has some truth to it?
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Apr 17, 2012 08:36
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whatever7 posted:I haven't heard anything about him getting money from foreign bodies. Oh and btw, if you guys are wondering where PPL got those numbers and factoids from, they all seem to be from an unsourced forum post. Nothing I personally would trot out as evidence anywhere, but maybe the fifty cents operate with different standards.
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May 3, 2012 09:11
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Ronald Spiers posted:Sounds like unfounded rumors that might unbalance the harmonious society! I think we need to imprison PPL and Saob for spreading unfounded rumors and re-educate them! The most heart-wrenching for me is Ni Yulan. Local police officers beat and tortured her within an inch of her life, and essentially paralyzed her from the waist down. Her crime? Taking up the cases of families being forcibly evicted. For this heinous act she and her husband have had to live as vagrants, subsisting on donations from supporters and people they have helped. They even resorted to living in a park at some point. You can see this in the documentary Emergency Shelter. I'd love for someone to watch this and say "yeah well, maybe she should have been smarter about her work then duh  ". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fegpAIBowk She was sentenced to jail last month for "financial fraud" and "occupying" a hotel room that local police had placed her in to begin with. Starting to see a trend yet?
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May 3, 2012 09:50
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BrotherAdso posted:Why are you seriously comparing a physically abused anti-corruption advocate, defender of the rights of women to choose their own reproductive fate, and demanding voice for accountability and responsibility in the nasty lower levels of the Chinese government to Bernie Madoff or a blind hippie? It's pretty gauche. It's a clever and very cynical way of taking down figures like these. Money is base, dirty, not at all congruous with our image of idealists fighting for the rights of the weak and downtrodden. Get some allegations of petty corruption or white-collar crime out there, and you can probably be quite successful in killing domestic, if not international support for someone like Chen. Just look at how readily PPL believed in a totally bogus forum post saying that Chen had received millions in foreign aid from the Brits.
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May 4, 2012 03:57
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whatever7 posted:The second thing is after 2008 financial crysis. Wen Jiabao pull 5000 billion RMB out of his rear end to rejuvenile market,(and I assume to keep the RMB low to keep the export business competitive.) Alot of this money has flew to the real estate market. I am pretty sure about this 5000 billion figure however I am unable to find an English source. You can still find Chinese articles for it. Pro-PRC Laowai posted:*longpost*
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May 20, 2012 09:59
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Not to disturb the interesting discussion about property ownership and whatnot, but I just wanted to know what everyone's take was on the Yang Rui debacle and recent assorted xenophobia. If you don't know what I'm referring to, it's a recent incident where a high-profile anchor from the English CCTV channel had a xenophobic outburst on his Weibo. A translation by Josh Chin has been making the rounds in the Sinosphere, I personally don't think the translation is all that good or accurate but here it is for good measure. It gets the point across. Yang Rui posted:
Reading Fallows' post about it, I largely agree with him that incidents like these carry significant implications for China's soft-power initiatives. The CCP spends and has spent a lot of money on these (I'm ashamed to say I've taken my fair share of it), but our natural distrust of authoritarian systems and China in particular means that whatever support this money builds overseas is incredibly fragile. All it takes is a CGC or a SCS standoff and the West suddenly comes to its collective senses and remembers why it disliked China in the first place. I thought Bill Bishop made a good comparison when he said that CGC plastered over the Drudge Report by itself amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars wasted on soft power initiatives by the CCP. I guess the worst-case scenario is that this represents a wider acceptance for anti-foreign sentiments and fenqingish nationalism. This is a strong undercurrent in Chinese society and a very unpleasant one that the CCP has tried its best to sweep under the rug when the foreign guests come to dinner. When someone whose job it is to be a smiling face to the outside world posts something like that, it either means A) He fell and somehow broke his brain or B) That opinions like these are not considered a faux pas at all in his social circle. If it's B, then God help us.
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May 20, 2012 11:09
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Pro-PRC Laowai posted:If anything it's a sign of a push towards stricter visa regulations which are long overdue. But maybe you're right and poor old Yang Rui just wanted China to 'say no' and keep the foreign trash from compiling GPS data and stealing Chinese women.
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May 20, 2012 12:14
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Electro-Boogie Jack posted:*Tibet megapost*  In other news, the new Sinica is now out and it happens to be about one of the most interesting China-related topics: Moral decay in Chinese society. There's a lot to say about this, but at a basic level I agree with Jeremy Goldkorn's assessment. It's ridiculous to expect Chinese people to act as shining beacons of altruism when the values incarnated by the most powerful and successful people in the country - the ruling class and other elites in its orbit - are those of selfishness and looking out for your own. Ascension in the Chinese political system is decided almost purely by party and faction loyalty, while success in business hinges upon personal guanxi or otherwise cordial relations with the state. The CCP is pretty bald-facedly hypocritical in expecting the people they govern to act any differently.
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Jun 11, 2012 09:54
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whatever7 posted:There was a giant global nationalist independence movement in early 20th century. You can't compare it to current political climate. If you want to compare current China to an older period, the middle Qing dynasty is a proper point you can compare it to.
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Jun 14, 2012 07:51
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Throatwarbler posted:So there are some more details about the tallest skyscraper in the world being built in 6 months.
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Jun 15, 2012 09:46
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shrike82 posted:Could someone explain to me what's up with the Zhang Ziyi and Bo Xilai thing? As for the rest of the media, they either forgot to do their due diligence or just didn't give a poo poo. This is like the holy grail of Chinese gossip stories so who can blame them?
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Jun 16, 2012 21:43
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Modus Operandi posted:I wouldn't be so quick to call it b.s. either there have been rumors about Zhang Ziyi in the Taiwanese and HK press that go way back to the start of her career. She was rumored to have slept her way to the top and there are more than a few stories about this. It's clear that she has a penchant for chasing uber wealthy men too. Boxun really has an awful track record. To call it awful might be an understatement, even. You may recall their reporting a few months back when they stated that Zhou Yongkang had been planning a coup with Bo and would be ousted from the Politburo "soon". Lo and behold, we're now in June and Zhou is still sitting pretty. I don't see why this latest concoction of theirs should be any more credible, even if she's a slut like you say.
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Jun 17, 2012 10:10
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Electro-Boogie Jack posted:Alright, getting ready to put some more effort into the Tibet post and flesh it out a bit. Anyone have questions that have been bothering them about Tibet for a while? Let me know and I'll try to address it, or run it past colleagues who can give a good answer.
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Jun 18, 2012 04:29
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menino posted:In one of the recent Sinica's one of the guests mentioned Sino Platonic Papers, which is a collection of older academic works about China. From what I can tell, it has a pretty heavy linguistics/language/literature bent, but lots of other good resources as well. First, most interesting thing I got by skimming the list was a paper by David Moser entitled Covert Sexism in Mandarin Chinese. Anyone care to challenge/defend the conclusions that are in there? Some of them seem kind of far-fetched or incidental to me.
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Jun 21, 2012 09:25
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shrike82 posted:Did you actually read the paper? 
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Jun 21, 2012 09:41
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shrike82 posted:Yeah, and his ren example stinks of BS either.
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Jun 21, 2012 09:49
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Fangz posted:There's a distinct wording for male person (nan ren) and a corresponding wording for female person (niu ren). Contrast the man/woman construction in English. Edit: Looking back a few pages, we had a discussion previously on why female politicians always have a 女 (nü, female) after their names in lists. Moser is identifying the same problem, but applying it to the language as a whole: Women are relegated to their own linguistic compartment, away from the default which is male. french lies fucked around with this message at 10:21 on Jun 21, 2012 |
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Jun 21, 2012 10:05
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This American Life has an episode up about Americans in China. I'm not American myself but I can identify with a lot of the conundrums and situations described in the piece, from the incessant request for TV appearances to the cultural "chasm" that you inevitably run into between you and the Chinese. Other than that, there's some fairly interesting BTS on Kaiser Kuo, Sinica and the lives of elite China commentators like Osnos and Jeremy Goldkorn.
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Jun 26, 2012 09:21
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Arglebargle III posted:"... create a harmonious and happy family. Build national..." and then there's a guy in the way and the angle makes it illegible. I just came back from a vacation to China including a long trip to Beijing, and I noticed that since I was there last the municipal govt has started putting up posters exalting the "Beijing Spirit", which apparently consists of patriotism, innovation, inclusiveness and virtue. What's that all about?
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Aug 13, 2012 01:12
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Funny and sort of relevant to the article we've been discussing over the last few pages. Why I'm Leaving China quote:I can’t really say for sure what the final straw was. Probably it was a combination of things. Maybe the pollution; the constant food scandals; the oppression of the Tibetan and Uighur minorities; the inexcusable decision to delay Dark Knight Rises in cinemas until August 27. I mean, seriously, what the gently caress? I need to see that movie, now.
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Aug 21, 2012 08:30
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whatever7 posted:I suggest you send a voice mail to Kaiser Guo of Sinica Podcast. I look forward to him answering that question on the show.
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Jan 27, 2013 18:14
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Those Eye-Q commercials were all over the subway last time we visited HK. We were wondering what the happy kid exclaiming "啤啤熊!" was all about, but now we know it's because his mother bought him this awesome IQ-boosting baby formula. Thanks, Bloodnose. I'm looking into reworking the OP, and maybe adding a few new resources or books. At this stage I'm looking at VOA Chinese and maybe a Taiwan-specific magazine or newspaper. Any other suggestions?
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Jan 29, 2013 09:15
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Imperialist Dog posted:Not sure if this should be posted here or the "crazy political discussion" thread, but I got into an interesting argument last night on Twitter The latest update on that front is Yan Xuetong's suggestion that Norway take China's side in the Diaoyu island dispute to "make amends". That is, for our war crime of allowing a private foundation to issue a prize. Good luck with that. I find it sort of telling that the CCP has never, to my knowledge, issued an official apology of any sort for the Great Leap Forward, or for the Cultural Revolution, or for any of the other numerous crimes it has committed against its own citizens. Apologies, to the CCP, imply loss of face and legitimacy. Which means their apology-extracting overtures amount to nothing more than a sort of fratboy hazing, meant to humiliate lesser nations without the leverage to stand up to them. Edit: I guess I'm conflating ordinary citizens with the government here, so sorry about that. french lies fucked around with this message at 09:55 on Jan 30, 2013 |
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Jan 30, 2013 08:46
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Welp, time to get this thread back on track:Shanghaiist posted:Outrage at mainland mother who let son poop at Taiwan airport
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Jan 30, 2013 10:11
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China Megathread: Street-making GBS threads and baby formula discussion zone When I worked at the Shanghai EXPO, I had several encounters with visitors that attempted to make their kids poo poo in the trash-cans inside the pavilion. When I pointed out that the toilet was literally just outside our pavilion, a lot of them were all like "well he/she's gotta go so bad!!" ("他太急了!"), like they could see nothing indecent about the whole thing. I'll freely admit I was spouting the standard classist bullshit about suzhi and the countryside unironically for about a year after that.
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Jan 30, 2013 12:25
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