Chinese at Harvard celebrate the PRC’s 60th anniversary
I just returned from a still in-progress celebration and parade-watching party at the Harvard Kennedy School for the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China on October 1. This followed a presentation earlier in the day by the marketing director of Tsingdao Beer, who outlined some of that company’s strategies that have helped it grow quite a bit in the Chinese and international markets.
I have little to say, since I’ve headed home to get to work this evening. But it was an interesting event, including the flags and decorations in the Kennedy School Forum, the PRC national anthem, speeches by PRC government dignitaries, and of course at this time of year, moon cakes:
Chinese classmates of mine expressed surprise at the number of Chinese people attending from the various Harvard schools and others in the area. I guess I wasn’t surprised there were so many, but had never seen such a large gathering of Chinese in the United States. It felt like the inverse of some U.S. embassy or political parties I attended while in Beijing. This time, I was the one out of place in my country of birth.
Another non-Chinese in our midst, HKS Professor Tony Saich, drew applause and laughter by beginning his remarks in Chinese, and peppered his talk with phrases better said in the original. One such phrase was 六十而耳顺, part of a Confucian saying on the phases of life. One translation has it as “at sixty, I obeyed.”* This is not a translation without controversy. A friend puts it in on-the-spot translation as “at sixty, all that I heard was to my liking.” Still another version, the Wenlin dictionary, suggests “at sixty, I achieved understanding.”
The last is closest to what Saich intended. At least from this Confucian perspective in Saich’s interpretation, a sixtieth birthday signals a time in life when one can see the lay of the land, understand previous successes and mistakes, and take stock of one’s self. That, he said, is a pretty good way to look at the PRC today.
* from Analects 2:4 in William Theodore de Bary and Irene Bloom’s Sources of Chinese Tradition, 2nd Ed., Vol. 1, New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. pp. 46–47.
Language skills lacking in the U.S. foreign service?
Josh Rogin at Foreign Policy reports that government auditors found language skills among foreign service officers to be far more rare than they would hope. On China, he quotes from the unreleased Government Accountability Office report:
In China, officials told us that the officers in China with insufficient language skills get only half the story on issues of interest, as they receive only the official party line and are unable to communicate with researchers and academics, many of whom do not speak English.
The deficiencies are large in war zones, and the article notes serious shortfalls in Iraq and Afghanistan. The only specific data in this article on Chinese posts groups Chinese with Arabic as important languages:
“Deficiencies in what GAO calls ‘supercritical’ languages, such as Arabic and Chinese, were 39 percent.”
The officers I have met in China seem to be in the 61 percent, but the quote above indicates that someone at least in the embassy thinks the 39 percent blocks the staff from doing the best job possible. From me, one vote for more language study (yes, I need it too), and a dream for leaps forward in machine translation.
The other quote from the report on China, which I leave without comment:
In Shenyang, a Chinese city close to the border with North Korea, the consul general told us that reporting about issues along the border had suffered because of language shortfalls.
Two things China and the U.S. can celebrate
Economic prosperity and basketball. Those are two things neither the United States nor China could seem to live without these days. This by way of mentioning the White House Flickr feed, which is pretty cool. Here, “Chinese Vice Premier Wang Qishan, center, holds the autographed basketball given to him by President Barack Obama following their Oval Office meeting Tuesday, July 28, 2009, to discuss the outcomes of the first U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue. Looking on at left is Chinese State Councilor Dai Bingguo.”
California apologizes to Chinese Americans; U.S. Congress next?
Chinese migrants in California faced discrimination, violence, and forced expulsion from their homes on many occasions beginning in the mid-19th century. One historian’s account found almost 200 “roundups,” in which Chinese were pushed out of jobs, homes, and cities by those who resented the competition for jobs or mining spoils, or simply didn’t like Chinese people.* A lot of people are not around to hear the state of California apologize.
From Ling Woo Liu in Time Magazine:
On July 17, the California legislature quietly approved a landmark bill to apologize to the state’s Chinese-American community for racist laws enacted as far back as the mid–19th century Gold Rush, which attracted about 25,000 Chinese from 1849 to 1852. The laws, some of which were not repealed until the 1940s, barred Chinese from owning land or property, marrying whites, working in the public sector and testifying against whites in court. The new bill also recognizes the contributions Chinese immigrants have made to the state, particularly their work on the Transcontinental Railroad.
The website of Assemblymember Paul Fong (D-Cupertino), who sponsored the measure, reports that Gov. Schwarzenegger approved the apology measure on July 20. And Fong’s efforts are not to stop in California. Liu writes that Fong will seek a U.S. Congressional resolution apologizing for the Chinese Exclusion Act.
Full text of the resolution available here.
* Pfaelzer, Jean. Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans. New York: Random House, 2007. p. xxv.
Research ethics, journalism, and paid participation
I am new to academia’s conventions on research involving human subjects—so new, in fact, that I’m just now completing my basic certification. The standards are not without resonance for me, however, given the emphasis placed by journalism educators on the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics.
Principles of “beneficience” seem to run parallel to the journalists’ narrower exhortation to “seek truth and report it.” SPJ’s “minimize harm” section is similar in many ways to the Belmont Report‘s “respect for persons” and “justice.”
One short passage from the training I’m undergoing, however, would seem to raise serious questions about some of the research advertised on and near many campuses. Describing the “voluntariness” element of informed consent, my training states:
“Compensation and ‘inducements’ (financial, material, or otherwise) should not be so compelling that they play a major factor in a prospective subject’s decision about participation.”
I am certainly not the first person to notice that many people participate in studies only because of financial inducements. I’m thinking specifically about people I’ve talked to who said they participate in psychological studies and other medical trials exclusively for cash. I wonder what the practical consequence of language like “a major factor in a prospective subject’s decision” turns out to be. Without some inducements, subjects are unlikely to give their time, but when inducements are larger than what a prospective subject’s time would have yielded otherwise, the effect is different. Perhaps the risk of harm is sufficiently small that the problem of inducements is ethically irrelevant. (The consequences for the data may be more significant.)
A student at my level of understanding is in no position to criticize, but it’s interesting that the SPJ code has something to say about this too: “Be wary of sources offering information for favors or money; avoid bidding for news.” My instructors in journalism school and editors at most publications would go further: “Never pay sources.” I’ll be interested to learn more about how these fine lines are walked.
How do you say mobile phone in Chinese?
Why is a mobile phone in China known as a shouji (手机, roughly, “handset”)? At least in the 1990s, some people knew the rare machine as a dageda (大哥大). I’ve been reading Jack Linchuan Qiu’s new book, Working-Class Network Society: Communication Technology and the Information Have-Less in Urban China
The term shouji was popularized by a blockbuster movie a few years ago about how the mobile phone influences upper-class Chinese families, especially in extramarital affairs (53–54).
Qiu’s aim is to understand the ways working-class people use information and communication technologies, but first he remembers his first encounter with a mobile phone in 1996. He and his friends called it dageda.
Gangster movies from Hong Kong played a major role in popularizing the device as dageda, meaning literally “Big-Brother-Big,” which was the default nickname for a mobile phone in the 1990s. Socially, dageda was very different from shouji, although the underlying technology was roughly the same. One has to be a Big Brother (dage, i.e., a powerful man) to enjoy dageda connectivity. The assumption is gendered, excluding gang outsiders, and very much about power hierarchy. In movies, dageda is usually used by the Big Brother of some group to negotiate drug deals or send out fateful commands such as assassination orders or the release of a hostage. Sometimes it is also an assault weapon because it is thick and heavy (54).
There you have it. The next time I have something very important or illegal to do, I’ll call my phone something else. Qiu writes that the move to the more widespread distribution of mobile phone use and the attending massive price drop makes the shouji concept more current and less exclusive, but I hope that doesn’t make us all prone to extramarital affairs.
Mapping China’s international internet business
At Mobinode, Piet Walraven has published the results of some research into Chinese internet companies forming partnerships with overseas entities, and there’s a map.
Walraven describes the map:
It is a summary of all overseas operations organized in two categories: ‘partnerships, licensing, and co-production’ and ‘self operated or wholly owned overseas initiatives’. Through these two distinctions we can see that the dashed lines that each represent an action in the ‘self operated foreign initiatives’ category, have a relatively low representation which indicates that not many Chinese Internet companies are enrolled in true wholly-owned international operations yet.
The results represent a first round of work, and give an interesting view of a geography of business collaboration.
Admiring the Periodic Table of Typefaces
I’m not sure where I came across this, but as someone who loves type and can never remember the names of the ones I like, I’ve found this very helpful. Not to mention attractive. Check out the hi-res version. Now if only someone could do this with Chinese and Japanese faces, I would be ecstatic.
Published by Cam under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives license.
Proposing Association for Asian Studies ’09 hashtag: #aas09
As a student of Asia and the Internet, it occurred to me I’ll want to see what others are experiencing during this year’s Association for Asian Studies meeting in Chicago this month. Having just booked my ticket, I propose #aas09 as a hashtag on Twitter, Flickr, and others for this event.
At first I was heading for just plain old AAS, but that seems to be populated by astronomers and users of other languages. I think #aas09 will work quite well. I know it’s early, but Google revealed no other tags that I could find. I’m sure AAS won’t be as twittery as political and technological events, but let’s see what social media can do.
I encourage people to repost this with plans for attending, etc.! I for one will be in Chicago from March 23–29.
