Via Danwei I just found this blog by a Beijing dialect-obsessed part time language student who calls himself syz. He makes recordings of interesting snippets of conversation and is very honest about the process of learning Mandarin in Beijing.

As a student of the language myself, I’ll definitely be keeping my eye on this site.  I’m including here a piece of his transcribed conversation with some people who keep birds. Check the post for audio. Keep up with the blog here.

Friend:
zhèi zhǒng — shìbushì zhǐshì zhèizhǒng niǎo — háiyǒu biéde niǎo [unclear]
这种–是不是只是这种鸟–还有别的鸟
This kind — is it only this kind of bird — are there other birds

Trainer:
hǎo duō zhǒng dōu néng wánr
好多种都能玩儿
Lots of kinds of birds can play this

jiǎn chēng jiù shì là zuǐ
简称就是蜡嘴
The abbreviated name is là zuǐ            (là zuǐ lit. means “candle beak” — not sure what this is in English).

Friend:
ā jiǎn chēng là zuǐ, jiǎn chēng là zuǐ.
啊, 简称蜡嘴, 简称蜡嘴
Oh, the abbreviated name is là zuǐ, the abbreviated name is là zuǐ.

That’s Beijing’s design and lifestyle companion known until now as tbjhome became urbane with the January 2008 issue. It also contains my first story for the publication: a look at French architect Jean-Michel Wilmotte’s rework of a 1950s weapons factory for the new Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing’s 798 Art District. Urbane’s website does not have text online yet, but those interested can read from the photographs below.

James Fallows notes, but does not really respond to, a criticism of his persistent posts on bad air quality days in China. A reader recounts the thoughts of a Chinese friend, who “pointed out that the focus on pollution before the Olympics is a phenomenon of the typical inability of the Western press to focus on more than one idea at a time, when they’re thinking of China (if at all).” Where are the stories about Beijing’s efforts to replace coal heat with electric installations?

Let me start by pointing out what Fallows didn’t bring up: It’s simply not an accurate representation of “Western” news coverage to say they only focus on the environment. Thousands of stories come up in Google News searches on China and human rights, or China and Darfur. The U.S. press is preoccupied much of the time with a possible economic and military threat from China. The way I see it, at least the English-language news world focuses on several major story-lines with China, and the environment is one. It may be more prominent because the environment (thankfully) is a major story overall, and China plays an important role in the global environment.

That said, it is not unreasonable to criticize a large number of North American and European press reports for a failure to put China’s present environmental problems in perspective, especially when it comes to air quality in the cities. I happened to have a brief conversation yesterday with a man who was at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar in the late ’60s. He remembered burning coal for heat—the stoves glowing red in some cases because of the high burning temperature of coal. And he remembered façades blackened from centuries of coal smoke.

In Beijing, I told him, some neighborhoods have seen their streets dug up repeatedly over the last weeks in preparation for heating season as the city installed brand new electric heating systems to replace coal-powered radiators. This year, the hutong apartment I live in is heated by electricity for the first time (aside from space-heaters), and coal is no longer the primary source of heat here. Before the systems turned on this week, some neighbors were burning coal to keep warm on cold nights. No more.

The new heaters have timers. Mine is programmed to come on at 10 p.m. and stay on until 6 a.m. My landlord tells me we’re doing this because electricity is cheaper at night. But the key here is that I can turn mine off when I leave town. I can also turn it off if I’m warm enough under a good blanket and don’t need the leftover heat in the morning. (Now to better seal my windows before the deep freeze…)

The English-language press is not devoid of stories recognizing the efforts by Chinese authorities to improve the environment. It’s also not terribly rare to read an article that notes London’s blackened history. People in the United States need only to visit steel country and take a good look at the University of Pittsburgh’s iconic tower to see some old U.S. industrial gunk. (They might have cleaned it up, but you could see it when I was there for a wedding a few years ago.)

When Chinese state media stories argue that developed countries who have already gotten rich at a cost to the environment should be responsible for tightening their belts more than those still developing, it’s hard to argue. But just try to get that sort of thinking through the U.S. Congress, and notice how far the Kyoto Protocol got with that ethic partially enshrined.

A sense of responsibility for past emissions needs to accompany pressures on emerging emitters. Richer countries with cleaner environments should work with poorer countries in the process of development to slow environmental degradation. The air in Beijing is indeed quite striking when you come from the United States—especially for me, from a background in the Colorado Rocky Mountains. But as the same Rhodes Scholar told me when I mentioned that I balked at jogging in Beijing air, “get over it.” Whether or not it’s the only focus of the “Western” press, and even though I don’t believe Fallows intends to be demeaning or contribute to a paternalistic narrative, putting across the message that “holy moly these people have dirty cities” does not create the understanding we’ll need to put together real solutions in the future. And dirty or not, we all keep going through life here.

If you read Xinhua’s English story on the removal of Beijing University message boards, you may have noticed a few instances of nonsense. The headline contains a non-word, “trimcampus,” and the lead unnecessarily pluralizes “informations.” As Chris O’Brien reports, this is not because Xinhua’s English language polishers are incompetent. Or maybe it is.

O’Brien is a polisher and was tasked with cleaning up this article about the demolition of message boards on the Beijing University campus. (I linked to AFP’s take here.) The forum in question was used by students to post political materials in 1989. That’s the only reason the story is worth reporting in the first place, really, but evidently writing anything about 1989, whether explicit or implicit, leads to recasting by censors or editors with a minimal grasp of English.

We came up with this lead paragraph:

Peking University officials have sparked controversy by removing public notice boards from the center of the university campus that were formerly used by students to express their political, cultural and academic opinions.

Personally, I thought this was fair enough. Clearly, after nearly two years at Xinhua, I am still drowning in naiviety. The published version:

Peking University officials have sparked controversy by removing public notice boards from the center of the university campus that were formerly used by students to get various informations and express opinions.

And that’s the risk you take. Push the political limits and the lead paragraph ends up being clumsy and grammatically incorrect.

Check out O’Brien’s full recounting of his handling of this sensitive story here.

The Chinese government this week raised the price of gasoline almost 10 percent as shortages spread across the country. Higher gas prices may be just what Earth’s doctor ordered.

Given the recent rise in the cost of crude, the Financial Times reports, Chinese policymakers face challenges. To pay for expensive crude, retail fuel prices would naturally go up. But the government is concerned about inflation. And according to “analysts” in the FT article, concerns over public unrest would stop prices from rising more than about 10 percent further before the Olympics.

But some amount of public unrest over fuel prices may be what’s necessary to slow the rapid growth of automobile ownership and related pollution in Chinese cities. If it’s more expensive to drive, more people may choose public transport.

Making public transit cheaper has already had a partial effect. Last month, the number of public transit commuters surpassed car commuters for the first time since records were first kept in 2001. That landmark is largely due to the opening of the new Line 5 and a drop in ticket prices in early October. Since those changes, daily average ridership has reached 2.48 million, a 58 percent increase over the previous nine months.* Bus ridership also spiked after an earlier price drop.

The People’s Daily Online reports that 34.5 percent of Beijing commuters use public transit, versus 32 percent who use private vehicles. That leaves a third of commuters who use the most environmentally friendly methods: walk, bike, run, but don’t use a vehicle. Beijing wants to raise the proportion of public transit riders to 50 percent by 2012, but to do that, it will need to sufficiently discourage more people from joining the car-owning throngs. Perhaps more expensive fuel will do the trick.

Some environmentalists have encouraged the United States to levy heavy taxes on gasoline to encourage people to use alternative transportation and buy fuel-efficient cars. Others point out that this method puts the burden on commuters with lower incomes rather than on the individuals profiting from high emissions. At least in Beijing, however, this would not seem to be the case. Few if any low-income workers here own cars. Higher gas prices, if they can serve as an incentive not to pollute, will impact the people who have the luxury of choice. And with some luck, the city’s massive subway expansion projects will provide the capacity necessary to make that choice attractive.

* That statistic may be misleading. The previous nine months are warmer months, and the coming three will be cold. Some amount of this “increase” may be natural seasonal shift as people opt for a bus over a bike. At this time I only have this information from the People’s Daily Online article.

AFP headline: “Demolition of Peking University message boards sparks outrage.” It says something that my first thought here was that the online message board was shut down rather than the physical gathering space. I’m generally sympathetic to students who are seeing part of their campus tradition destroyed in the name of a “clean up.” But at first glance, the administration’s reasoning seems somewhat reasonable:

“These notice boards had not served as places for the exchange of thoughts and ideas since the late 1990s, and were instead filled with commercial advertisements for apartments and training courses,” Xinhua quoted a university spokesman as saying. “More and more students are using the Internet to spread information and opinions, so there is no need to keep them,” he said.

The problem with this argument is that the online boards are easy to monitor, while the physical ones may be more open and easier to access anonymously.

Oof. I’ll be back alive soon with much to come. Meantime, I’ve been doing some local tourist stuff in Beijing, and the pictures are showing up on my Flickr account. If you’re in China, use Firefox and this extension to view the images. This photo is from the summer palace (颐和园) where a man may have just realized he has to walk up those stairs.

I’ve been busy recently in Beijing and watching a lot of good stories go right by. You’ll forgive a Colorado native for using a baseball analogy: It’s time to make sure I don’t strike out looking. Here’s a quick summary of transpacific pitches I wish I’d had time to swing at.

Greener Beijing?
• Will Beijing’s air be ready for the Olympics? The Worldwatch Institute has a good summary of what’s being done, who’s doing it, and what the challenges are, from Yongfeng Feng, a journalist for China Guangming Daily.
• Alex Pasternack picks up on a Christian Science Monitor story on the emergence of short-term bike rental service in Beijing. Perhaps the most interesting thing I learned here is that folding bikes, trendy here despite being a pain to ride, have been banned on the subway recently to prevent overcrowding. Razor scooter, anyone?

Internet Filtering and Reactions
• Blogspot is blocked, again. It came back online along with Flickr, which I have just noticed is also blocked. Firefox users in the P.R.C. can use “Access Flickr!” to get those photo feeds back working.
• The U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs voted the Global Online Freedom Act (H.R. 275) out of committee. The law, according to Forbes.com, would “penalize U.S. companies up to $2 million if they cooperate with the technological surveillance of political dissidents or share technology and information used for ‘Internet-restricting’ purposes.”
• Rebecca MacKinnon has smart commentary as usual on this issue. Go read what she writes, but here’s her bottom line:
  

  GOFA’s intentions are honorable in many ways. I think many of the people who support it certainly have honorable intentions. I know and respect many of them, despite having had some pretty heated arguments with some members of the human rights groups who say they support it for strategic reasons. But from where I sit in Hong Kong, this proposed legislation comes off as something that my Chinese friends who hate censorship and surveillance would find arrogant, patronizing, and interventionist, with the likely result that it would kill U.S. tech companies’ ability to do business in China in the first place - a result which by the way they don’t think would enhance their freedom.

• Also from the House Foreign Affairs Committee, I haven’t mentioned yet that Chairman Tom Lantos is calling Yahoo’s Jerry Yang back to Congress under suspicion of misleading Congress in previous testimony. Go check with MacKinnon on this, too. She’s been on the story since a civil society group published a document that contradicted Yahoo’s statement that they did not know the nature of the investigation when they turned over information on reporter Shi Tao to Chinese authorities.
• At Wired, a writer with firsthand experience being monitored on a reporting trip in China declares that the “Great Firewall” is futile. Maybe, but I had to enable Tor to get the full article to load. The article is a good read though for those interested in Oliver August’s experiences talking to Chinese dissidents.
• Wikipedia’s Chinese-language service was crippled by the mainland’s block, reports Eva Woo at BusinessWeek.com.

In other news…
• From the Tokyo Auto Show, Michael J. Dunne who works on China for J.D. Power and Associates, writing in the Detroit News, notes that the talk is about China, not Japan. My favorite is the writer’s casual contextual note about when his cohort got interested in China: “Fascination with the China market started when the Middle Kingdom first challenged Japan for sales leadership. Two years ago, Chinese bought 5.3 million vehicles, just shy of the 5.7 million cars and trucks sold in Japan.”
• U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab said she sees protectionism in both countries as a threat to U.S.–China trade.
• Relatedly, Andy Scott at China Briefing Blog ventures a coinage for China’s WTO practices: “Compliance With Chinese Characteristics.”
• It’s not just the United States hosting the Dalai Lama. Japan’s doing it too.
• The questionably hyphenated Trans-Pacific Express will for the first time link the China and the United States with an undersea telecommunications cable.

As promised here is a video clip of experimental saxophonist Li Tieqiao (李铁桥) from his show with Xiao He (小河) at D-22 this week. Here, he plays the mouthpiece without the horn. Later, he played the horn without the mouthpiece, apparently creating sound trumpet-style directly into the neck.