China Megathread - Their navy can be taken seriously or taken littorally

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > China Megathread - Their navy can be taken seriously or taken littorally

Cefte: Sep 18, 2004; tranquil consciousness

Does't noes take an e?

What's your read on the Wang Li-Jun embassy business?

How's real-name registration going to work for foreigners and their Sina weaboos?

# ¿ Feb 14, 2012 20:14

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# ¿ Apr 30, 2024 09:39

Cefte: Sep 18, 2004; tranquil consciousness

sbaldrick posted:

The most interesting thing about Confucianism I've recently found out is his decedents are still tracked in hereditary fashion, have been treated well by every ruler in Chinese history and are still involved in the government of the ROC

That's some crazy trivia there.

No discussion of the Kong family is complete without Kong Qing-Dong.

# ¿ Feb 15, 2012 22:56

Cefte: Sep 18, 2004; tranquil consciousness

french lies posted:

And who knows how Cai became romanized as Chua, as it is in the case of Cai Mei'er aka Amy Chua.

Because the family were probably south-east Asian Hokkien speakers. Fie on your prescriptivism, Professor 孔法谎!

# ¿ Feb 23, 2012 14:31

Cefte: Sep 18, 2004; tranquil consciousness

Barto posted:

Also, I am quite certain -quite certain- it's impossible to write an academic Chinese thesis/journal article as they are written now in pinyin. It would be such a huge mess, I don't even dare to think about it.

I can't help but bring to mind Uncleftish Beholding...

Wouldn't the effect be to demand a multiplication of particles for disambiguation in words? To be teleological about it, a kind of re-treading of what happened in Mandarin with the n++gram shift as finals were consolidated and homophones proliferated?

# ¿ Feb 23, 2012 17:25

Cefte: Sep 18, 2004; tranquil consciousness

french lies posted:

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.

This project makes the Index Librorum Prohibitorum look like a Compuserv CD. It's enthralling.

# ¿ Apr 6, 2012 13:59

Cefte: Sep 18, 2004; tranquil consciousness

Spiderfist Island posted:

As a person who was born a year after the Soviet Union collapsed, were they just taking Politburo's cooked books at face value or was it just blind jingoism?

This is probably the best essay on the parallel, and given that it was written in 1994, it's pretty loving prescient.

# ¿ Apr 9, 2012 05:13

Cefte: Sep 18, 2004; tranquil consciousness

I can't help but spend a few minutes thinking about Bo Guagua, stranded in the US with his patronage network in tatters. I'm sure he'd rather be there than some of the alternatives, but I can't imagine that the funding sources he was relying on (weren't his scholarships through Dalian Group?) will be anywhere close to steady. He'll have to cut back on the fast cars and champagne.

# ¿ Apr 11, 2012 15:37

Cefte: Sep 18, 2004; tranquil consciousness

Stim0r posted:

I suspect it's worse than that. I am willing to bet that the Bo family has some enemies that won't rest with simply ending Bo Xilai's political career, but want to see his family ground to dust.

I would think that under normal circumstances, a high level politician falling from grace would generate just enough official media coverage to tell it occurred, and then be hushed up as it could be embarrassing to the Party. With all the Officially Sanctioned news about Bo's fall in China, it really does feel like someone wants to twist the knife.

Either that or it was deemed necessary to be public about it.

Which means a whole lot of talking went into the cost/payoff analysis. On one hand, as French Lies points out, the degree to which the message machine has swerved on this one is unprecedented in recent years. So, not publicly nailing his coffin (and taking criminal proceedings against his wife) must have been deemed particularly risky. People talk about his existing base of support, so the delicious possibility might have been that if they hadn't been public about it, six months down the road he'd have wiggled out of his political death sentence and started to hop around as the new and improved 薄僵尸.

# ¿ Apr 11, 2012 16:03

Cefte: Sep 18, 2004; tranquil consciousness

GuestBob posted:

It sounds like he is trying to pad his credentials to make it seem more likely that he got a scholarship. There is no loving way he got a scholarship of any kind whilst also being rusticated. All of the University fees came from his mother.

He said he got a scholarship, not that it was a University scholarship. I don't doubt some Dalian magnate funded the rigorously tested Not-At-All-Specific-To-Bo-GuaGua Prize and opened it to all applicants. And he did get an upper second with zero teaching support, so at least he can find his way to the library when he has to.

Personally, I'm warm hearted towards the guy, if only because he evoked the only good thing I've ever heard associated with Andrew Graham:

quote:

Dr Andrew Graham, the master of Balliol College, received a visit from three diplomats as tutors made Bo Guagua, 24, who was studying PPE, sit additional �penal� exams after failing to work.

Friends say the student got a reputation for throwing champagne and shisha parties in college rooms.

A well-placed source said one of the men who arrived to talk to the college master was the Chinese ambassador.

�He turned up with a couple of men in suits,� the source said. �They said it was very embarrassing because education was highly valued in China, and it was embarrassing to his father and grandfather.

�His tutors replied if that was the case they should get him to work harder.�

Cefte fucked around with this message at 12:50 on Apr 27, 2012

# ¿ Apr 27, 2012 12:48

Cefte: Sep 18, 2004; tranquil consciousness

Pro-PRC Laowai posted:

It's pot, no one was smoking shisha with that hookah

It's more likely shisha, there's a passable student shisha culture in Cowley Road.

# ¿ Apr 27, 2012 22:48

Cefte: Sep 18, 2004; tranquil consciousness

Throatwarbler posted:

The joke is that it doesn't work, and you're hosed unless you take to the streets.

There's a great bit in Giles' memoirs about a 'mass incident'. I'll see if I can find it.

Here we go, Lecture III

# ¿ May 5, 2012 11:55

Cefte: Sep 18, 2004; tranquil consciousness

enigma74 posted:

This seems hard to believe. Would the Chinese government really go to extraordinary lengths just to make you put rice in your mouth?

For instance, what if you just said you ate food during the day, but you really didn't. How would the know if you were lying?

When you say 'the Chinese government' like that, it sounds stupid, because you don't think of world leaders thinking up ways to stuff rice in the mouths of Hui. But (as I think has been raised already in this thread), that's not how this works.

National leaders say something along the lines of 'Steadfastly increase patriotic integration and combat cultism'. On the level they operate, that's rational.

Provincial level authorities create grading scores that measure success in 'integration and cultism combatance' as part of the battery of assessments for their county-level subordinates. On the level they operate, that's rational.

County-level administrators are desperate to advance through the party and really start to make some kuai, so they lean pretty heavily on their township subordinates to produce evidence that they've integrated and combated cultism better than the guys in the next county that they're competing with. Empirical evidence is hard, but a policy is the next best thing, even if it's a bit stupid. That's a bit sleazy, but it's certainly rational self-motivation.

Township-level guys come out with ideas like this:

quote:

A statement from Zonglang township in Xinjiang's Kashgar district said that "the county committee has issued comprehensive policies on maintaining social stability during the Ramadan period.

Which is going to sound great on the circular they send to the guys at the county office.

When you get down to the towns, then you get goons throwing rice at Hui. Which is dumb as gently caress, but a function of a stratified administrative system with weak oversight, highly abstracted inter-level instruction, close to zero attention to human rights or national rule of law and upwardly-mobile local officials.

Cefte fucked around with this message at 21:34 on Aug 2, 2012

# ¿ Aug 2, 2012 21:10

Cefte: Sep 18, 2004; tranquil consciousness

Arglebargle III posted:

Well there's some news from the little countries thread that I thought was worth a repost here. Thanks to ReindeerF for finding this originally.

Fake honey has been a well-known problem here in China for a long time but I'm surprised to see it moving out into the U.S. You tend to think of the U.S. having decent food safety standards. I suppose we can assume that something will be done about it in the U.S. (no doubt spearheaded by domestic honey manufacturers) while in China nothing will happen.

Does domestically manufactured American honey proclaim loudly on its label that it's been ultra-filtered? Because that's a pretty strong piece of evidence that it's been adulterated, since adulteration shifts the pollen count within the liquid, which can't be measured after filtration.

# ¿ Apr 30, 2013 22:38

Cefte: Sep 18, 2004; tranquil consciousness

Charlz Guybon posted:

https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/1334795593286373377

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UROPgnjfdB0

# ¿ Dec 6, 2020 03:50

Cefte: Sep 18, 2004; tranquil consciousness

Cpt_Obvious posted:

What is a "non-medical purpose" abortion? Sex-selection?

My first reaction was this could have been a 'medical versus surgical' misread, but looking at Ronya's text, that wasn't the case. That said, 'improve contraception access and efficacy to reduce abortion rates' is an entirely banal plank in reproductive healthcare policy shared across most of the developed world, e.g. here.

# ¿ Sep 27, 2021 18:01

Cefte: Sep 18, 2004; tranquil consciousness

Discendo Vox posted:

I am struck by the parallels to Russian governance in the lack of specific top-down administrative instruction or rulemaking.

The Tsar loves the peasants, but is poorly advised.

Daduzi posted:

Reminder at this point that Han Feizi was writing about the impossibility of managing China through fiat over 2,000 years ago, and the place has got exponentially more complex since then.

He just didn't have enough different types of fiat. RIP my main man, Wang Mang.

Cefte fucked around with this message at 01:25 on Apr 22, 2022

# ¿ Apr 22, 2022 01:23

Cefte: Sep 18, 2004; tranquil consciousness

WAR CRIME GIGOLO posted:

I've heard as a slightly racist phrase that Chinese people are far more virulently racist than most people.

My qualitative impression has been that, controlled for relative social class, your average Chinese is not any more racist than your average, say, Japanese, they're just more vocal about it in public. Of course, controlling for social class serves to delete a couple hundred million nongs, so it's not particularly useful.

Slow News Day posted:

I didn't realize it until she casually used the phrase "jungle Asian" in passing to refer to some non-Chinese Asians, I forget which.

Ali Wong doing a redo of Dave Chapelle's 'why are the racists laughing at my standup'.

# ¿ Apr 22, 2022 14:13

Cefte: Sep 18, 2004; tranquil consciousness

Bill Bishop quoted this interview with Joerg Wuttke recently.

quote:

So given the choice between pandemic control and the economy, the economy gets the short end of the stick?

Yes. The political signalling ist clear. The mayors, the regional politicians, they all have only one metric right now: Zero Covid. Imagine you're a mayor of a medium-sized city and a truck comes with supplies for a local factory with parts from the Shanghai area. Do you let the truck pass and run the risk that the driver will bring Omicron and you will have local contagions? You won�t get kicked out of your job if the economy in your area is doing poorly on average � but you will lose your job if you have Covid in your city. The system�s focus on Zero Covid leads to many decision makers being in a kind of self-destruction mode. They don�t care about the economy in the short term. In current politics, the business people hardly get through anymore. The fear is too great, and time and again you get confirmation from above: If you have Covid in your city, you have a problem.

There's probably space for a non-trivial discussion around the influence of business-related metrics on local and national political structures in China, Russia and the US right now.

# ¿ Apr 28, 2022 14:49

Cefte: Sep 18, 2004; tranquil consciousness

Slow News Day posted:

This is from a month ago, and things have gotten far worse since. Is there something more recent?

An interview dated 28.04.2022 where the interviewee states "freight traffic volumes in the Shanghai metropolitan area plunged by 81% year-on-year in the first three weeks of April" is from a month ago?

# ¿ Apr 28, 2022 21:19

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# ¿ Apr 30, 2024 09:39

Cefte: Sep 18, 2004; tranquil consciousness

How are u posted:

The Guardian posted:
Among the complaints are accusations over the government�s insistence on supplying households with millions of doses of Lianhua Qingwen � a traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) being used as a Covid-19 treatment.

Wikipedia posted:

Lianhua Qingwen was developed by Shijiazhuang Yiling Pharmaceutical in 2003 as a treatment for severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) following the outbreak of the disease in 2002 and was listed by the National Health Commission of China in 2004 as a treatment for influenza and other respiratory disease.[2] Its formulation includes 13 herbs which is said to have been used for medical purposes as early as the Han dynasty.[3] Sources of its formulation reportedly include apricot kernel, isatis root, weeping forsythia, Japanese honeysuckle flowers and ephedra. The medicine is in capsule and granular form.[2][4]

quote:

forsythia

All that was old is new again.

# ¿ Apr 28, 2022 22:44

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > China Megathread - Their navy can be taken seriously or taken littorally