The Chinese sense of humor is pretty interesting. Other than lots of potty jokes just like in English, another common source of humor are puns and jokes that use homophones (two words that sound the same but are written differently); they only work in Chinese and are hard for Chinese beginners like me to follow. These kinds of jokes are often performed by two people doing "cross-talk" where one uses plays on words and homophones to say funny or offensive things and the other person plays dumb and makes a fool of himself by interpreting everything literally.
Someone pulled off a similar cross-talk joke on the internet through a video about "grass-mud horses." This time the person who's being duped is the government internet censor(s).
When I sounded out the words "grass" and "mud" ("cao ni") I figured out it's the same pronunciation as the words "f•ck" and "you." I had a good laugh and was pleased that I understood the joke. Why the vulgar name for a fictional animal in a Chinese web cartoon? It appears that someone simply wanted to make a point about the absurdity of censoring dirty or controversial topics and tell a story with some subliminal messages.
The grass-mud horses' habitat is invaded by pestilent river crabs. River and crab ("he" and "xie") sounds the same as the word for harmony "hexie," which is a dig at the governments goal of creating a "harmonious society" which entails scrubbing the internet clean.
Monday, March 16, 2009
Monday, March 09, 2009
A tough job market
Last week, the U.S. Labor Department released the latest numbers the nation’s unemployment rate, and at 8.1% it is the highest ever in my lifetime.
Many talent recruiters in Silicon Valley, who only recently were flooded with work, now find themselves doing the resume polishing and job searching that they used to do for others.
Shanghai’s Korea town, a cool neighborhood on the far west side where I spent a Saturday last spring with my Korean students, has been decimated in recent months as Korean companies layoff Chinese workers and Korean pull their staff out of China.
In response to a sharp fall in exports, Japanese companies have been forced to cut costs by eliminating jobs, lowering wages, and replacing much of their work force with temporary workers who have no job security and fewer benefits. Nontraditional workers now make up more than a third of Japan’s labor force. It’s causing a generational shift in attitudes towards employment, consumption, and savings.
A lot of comparisons are being made between the current situation in the United States and that of Japan in the 1990s. The government response in both countries differs – and hopefully has a different outcome – but it does seem that Americans are beginning to gradually shift towards Japan’s frugality and higher savings.
In just the last several months in China, 2,400 factories in the Guangzhou area, the manufacturing heart of southern China, have closed and over 20 million migrants workers have lost their jobs (some commentator pointed out that that number is roughly equivalent to the population of Australia). The bulk of layoffs coincided with the Chinese New Year, so many who returned home for the holiday will simply stay and resume farming or take up lower paying jobs in inland areas and not go back to the coastal cities.
Another notable region that has hit a particularly rough patch is Eastern Europe, including some parts which experienced a real estate boom and others that are now are constrained by the euro and no longer have central banks capable of lowering interest rates.
Finally, one of my favorite economics writer, Michael Lewis, chronicled Iceland’s dramatic boom and bust. It’s a bizarre story of a small, sparsely populated (just over 300,000 people), very homogenous (99% urban, 84% Lutheran) country that went overboard in building a financial industry that was way out of proportion with it’s size, while a real estate and asset bubble made it one of the wealthiest countries in the world. When its currency and asset prices crashed, it brought down the government, caused public debt to skyrocket (to 850 percent of the GDP!) and bankrupted several of its largest banks. Far and away the country with the hardest fall in the current financial crisis.
Many talent recruiters in Silicon Valley, who only recently were flooded with work, now find themselves doing the resume polishing and job searching that they used to do for others.
Shanghai’s Korea town, a cool neighborhood on the far west side where I spent a Saturday last spring with my Korean students, has been decimated in recent months as Korean companies layoff Chinese workers and Korean pull their staff out of China.
In response to a sharp fall in exports, Japanese companies have been forced to cut costs by eliminating jobs, lowering wages, and replacing much of their work force with temporary workers who have no job security and fewer benefits. Nontraditional workers now make up more than a third of Japan’s labor force. It’s causing a generational shift in attitudes towards employment, consumption, and savings.
“Younger people are feeling the brunt of that shift. Some 48 percent of workers age 24 or younger are temps. These workers, who came of age during a tough job market, tend to shun conspicuous consumption….
Economists blame this slow spending on widespread distrust of Japan’s pension system, which is buckling under the weight of one of the world’s most rapidly aging societies. That could serve as a warning for the United States, where workers’ 401(k)’s have been ravaged by declining stocks, pensions are disappearing, and the long-term solvency of the Social Security system is in question.”
A lot of comparisons are being made between the current situation in the United States and that of Japan in the 1990s. The government response in both countries differs – and hopefully has a different outcome – but it does seem that Americans are beginning to gradually shift towards Japan’s frugality and higher savings.
In just the last several months in China, 2,400 factories in the Guangzhou area, the manufacturing heart of southern China, have closed and over 20 million migrants workers have lost their jobs (some commentator pointed out that that number is roughly equivalent to the population of Australia). The bulk of layoffs coincided with the Chinese New Year, so many who returned home for the holiday will simply stay and resume farming or take up lower paying jobs in inland areas and not go back to the coastal cities.
Another notable region that has hit a particularly rough patch is Eastern Europe, including some parts which experienced a real estate boom and others that are now are constrained by the euro and no longer have central banks capable of lowering interest rates.
Finally, one of my favorite economics writer, Michael Lewis, chronicled Iceland’s dramatic boom and bust. It’s a bizarre story of a small, sparsely populated (just over 300,000 people), very homogenous (99% urban, 84% Lutheran) country that went overboard in building a financial industry that was way out of proportion with it’s size, while a real estate and asset bubble made it one of the wealthiest countries in the world. When its currency and asset prices crashed, it brought down the government, caused public debt to skyrocket (to 850 percent of the GDP!) and bankrupted several of its largest banks. Far and away the country with the hardest fall in the current financial crisis.
Saturday, March 07, 2009
Chinese characters
If you want to learn more about how the written Chinese language works, online I found an interesting attempt at doing just that by imagining what English would be like with a character based writing system.
It shows how there is more or less an organized system to the thousands of Chinese characters. Very few characters are pictographs that actually look like the word they represent. Instead, the vast majority of characters consist of several parts, including a radical that places it in a semantic category. Another part in most characters provides phonetic information that tells you how it’s pronounced, although pronunciation has changed over thousands of years so sometimes it’s similar and sometimes it’s way off.
For example, characters for many geographical words have the radical for mountain 山。And additional characters are made using mountain as a radical, so they are all found in a dictionary (the kinds of dictionaries organized by radicals) under the 山 “shan” section, which is in the section of radicals with three strokes (山 is written with three strokes I + L + I). Some examples of characters with radical and phonetic parts are 峰 : 山 “shan” + 丰 “feng” = 峰 “feng” which means a peak or summit and can also be used to represent an apex or a camel’s hump. 夹 “jia”, which means wedged or placed in between, together with the mountain radical becomes 峡 “xia”, which means a gorge. The semantic meaning makes sense from the two parts and 夹 “jia” also serves as a phoneme (it’s similar to “xia”, an example of how its often close but not exactly the same).
Other characters put two together to make a logical new word. For example, a bird 鸟 “niao” on top of a mountain 山 becomes 岛 “dao”, which means island and is similar in pronunciation to “niao”. The meaning makes sense as islands are small mountains with birds flying overhead. 山 can also be used as a phonetic part in other characters, as in the character 仙, which is the radical for person 人 with 山 to become 仙 “xian” (some characters like 人 are altered slightly when they are written as a radical). 仙 means immortal and is similar to “shan” in pronunciation (close again, but not perfect).
There are plenty of more examples at online dictionaries such as http://www.zhongwen.com/ (click on radical under the dictionary section) and don’t miss this site about Chinese characters found on tattoos and in western advertisements, often with unintended mistakes and mistranslations.
Learning to read and write is a lot of work at first because you have to start from scratch and learn many symbols that are more complicated than the letters in the English alphabet. But once you know a few hundred, which really isn’t too difficult, you begin to see many connections between them, while many new words are simply combinations of two or three characters, e.g. vehicle is 车, car is 汽车(steam + vehicle), train is 火车 (fire + vehicle), bicycle is 自行车 (self + travel + vehicle), garage is 车库 (vehicle + warehouse), etc. Notice how the English spellings of those words have no connection whatsoever. Each character is a unit that can have several meanings and often many more when used in compound words. At that point, your grasp of the written language really accelerates and it becomes a lot more interesting and rewarding to study.
It shows how there is more or less an organized system to the thousands of Chinese characters. Very few characters are pictographs that actually look like the word they represent. Instead, the vast majority of characters consist of several parts, including a radical that places it in a semantic category. Another part in most characters provides phonetic information that tells you how it’s pronounced, although pronunciation has changed over thousands of years so sometimes it’s similar and sometimes it’s way off.
For example, characters for many geographical words have the radical for mountain 山。And additional characters are made using mountain as a radical, so they are all found in a dictionary (the kinds of dictionaries organized by radicals) under the 山 “shan” section, which is in the section of radicals with three strokes (山 is written with three strokes I + L + I). Some examples of characters with radical and phonetic parts are 峰 : 山 “shan” + 丰 “feng” = 峰 “feng” which means a peak or summit and can also be used to represent an apex or a camel’s hump. 夹 “jia”, which means wedged or placed in between, together with the mountain radical becomes 峡 “xia”, which means a gorge. The semantic meaning makes sense from the two parts and 夹 “jia” also serves as a phoneme (it’s similar to “xia”, an example of how its often close but not exactly the same).
Other characters put two together to make a logical new word. For example, a bird 鸟 “niao” on top of a mountain 山 becomes 岛 “dao”, which means island and is similar in pronunciation to “niao”. The meaning makes sense as islands are small mountains with birds flying overhead. 山 can also be used as a phonetic part in other characters, as in the character 仙, which is the radical for person 人 with 山 to become 仙 “xian” (some characters like 人 are altered slightly when they are written as a radical). 仙 means immortal and is similar to “shan” in pronunciation (close again, but not perfect).
There are plenty of more examples at online dictionaries such as http://www.zhongwen.com/ (click on radical under the dictionary section) and don’t miss this site about Chinese characters found on tattoos and in western advertisements, often with unintended mistakes and mistranslations.
Learning to read and write is a lot of work at first because you have to start from scratch and learn many symbols that are more complicated than the letters in the English alphabet. But once you know a few hundred, which really isn’t too difficult, you begin to see many connections between them, while many new words are simply combinations of two or three characters, e.g. vehicle is 车, car is 汽车(steam + vehicle), train is 火车 (fire + vehicle), bicycle is 自行车 (self + travel + vehicle), garage is 车库 (vehicle + warehouse), etc. Notice how the English spellings of those words have no connection whatsoever. Each character is a unit that can have several meanings and often many more when used in compound words. At that point, your grasp of the written language really accelerates and it becomes a lot more interesting and rewarding to study.
Monday, March 02, 2009
Google and the web
Lately I’ve been reading the book The Google Story by David Vise. Meanwhile, I came across several news stories about the company, and they show how out-of-date the book, which was published in 2005, has already become.
The book is an entertaining and fast-paced read that traces the company from it’s humble roots in 1998, when two young computer science grad students took the fall semester off to work on improving their search engine, google.stanford.edu, driven by a complex algorithm that ranked websites based on dozens of factors. They rented a house for $1,700 a month and wired together servers from used computers in their garage, hired their first employee, and finally got around to incorporating Google only because they needed to cash a $100,000 check that they had received from an angel investor.
Now people worry that with 63 percent of all web searches, and over 70 of the US market share in search, they are too dominant. Others worry about threats to privacy when Google now possesses so much data on searches, email, and other web apps, and can use that data to customize advertisements to closely match whatever subjects users are searching or emailing about.
According to the book, in 2000, when Google was celebrating the signing of a major deal with Yahoo to provide Yahoo’s site with Google-generated search results, they also announced that they had surpassed one billion web pages in their index of websites to become the largest search engine in the world.
“Now you can search the equivalent of a stack of paper more than 70 million miles high in less than half a second. We think that’s pretty cool,” co-founder Sergey Brin said at the time.
But by 2008, according to a recent New York Times article, their website archive had already surpassed the next large rounded number. “One day last summer, Google’s search engine trundled quietly past a milestone. It added the one trillionth address to the list of Web pages it knows about. But as impossibly big as that number may seem, it represents only a fraction of the entire Web.”
So it’s time to modify Brin’s statement, “Now you can search the equivalent of a stack of paper more than 70 billion miles high in less than half a second.”
The rapidly expanding number websites, the growth in the non-English parts of the internet, the creation of digital libraries, and the large pools of data discussed in the above article found in databases that are now accessible on the internet show that there is a lot more to come. It’s hard to imagine what we’ll be able to do on the internet ten years from now. And the rapid growth and new functions of the internet provide a lot of new opportunities for Google and other web companies.
“The great thing about search is that we are not going to solve it anytime soon. There are so many problems and failings,” co-founder Larry Page said in 2000. “I see no end to what we need to do.”
The book is an entertaining and fast-paced read that traces the company from it’s humble roots in 1998, when two young computer science grad students took the fall semester off to work on improving their search engine, google.stanford.edu, driven by a complex algorithm that ranked websites based on dozens of factors. They rented a house for $1,700 a month and wired together servers from used computers in their garage, hired their first employee, and finally got around to incorporating Google only because they needed to cash a $100,000 check that they had received from an angel investor.
Now people worry that with 63 percent of all web searches, and over 70 of the US market share in search, they are too dominant. Others worry about threats to privacy when Google now possesses so much data on searches, email, and other web apps, and can use that data to customize advertisements to closely match whatever subjects users are searching or emailing about.
According to the book, in 2000, when Google was celebrating the signing of a major deal with Yahoo to provide Yahoo’s site with Google-generated search results, they also announced that they had surpassed one billion web pages in their index of websites to become the largest search engine in the world.
“Now you can search the equivalent of a stack of paper more than 70 million miles high in less than half a second. We think that’s pretty cool,” co-founder Sergey Brin said at the time.
But by 2008, according to a recent New York Times article, their website archive had already surpassed the next large rounded number. “One day last summer, Google’s search engine trundled quietly past a milestone. It added the one trillionth address to the list of Web pages it knows about. But as impossibly big as that number may seem, it represents only a fraction of the entire Web.”
So it’s time to modify Brin’s statement, “Now you can search the equivalent of a stack of paper more than 70 billion miles high in less than half a second.”
The rapidly expanding number websites, the growth in the non-English parts of the internet, the creation of digital libraries, and the large pools of data discussed in the above article found in databases that are now accessible on the internet show that there is a lot more to come. It’s hard to imagine what we’ll be able to do on the internet ten years from now. And the rapid growth and new functions of the internet provide a lot of new opportunities for Google and other web companies.
“The great thing about search is that we are not going to solve it anytime soon. There are so many problems and failings,” co-founder Larry Page said in 2000. “I see no end to what we need to do.”
Sunday, March 01, 2009
Commerce Secretary nominee
Gary Locke, the first Chinese American governor, was recently nominated for the cabinet post of Commerce Secretary. If nominated, he would join Steven Chu, the Secretary of Energy, who is also of Chinese descent.
Saturday, February 28, 2009
A semester in Nanjing
I’m now in Nanjing, living in a dormitory room on the Nanjing Normal University campus. Earlier this week I registered, took a placement test, and walked around to find the essentials like cheap street food, wireless internet, and the nearest Wal-Mart and Carrefour. I also showed a couple students with limited Chinese who just stepped off the plane around and helped them pick up all kinds of stuff.
I thought the placement test was pretty easy. Each section – grammar, vocabulary, and reading – got progressively more difficult but I was pretty confident of my answers on even the most difficult questions. And I skipped ahead to do the last section, an essay, first to make sure I had time to write a lot.
I was shocked to learn the next day that I was placed into a class at the low end of year three; in other words, a fifth semester course for students who have taken two years of Chinese. I was pretty surprised because I have only spent three semesters teaching in China while studying on my own (studying only year one level books). I took a Chinese class last year for all of one and a half months.
It turns out the placement test isn’t very good at measuring anything beyond the very beginner level and somehow my exam was interpreted as that of a third year student. I’m pretty good at taking language exams now and I prepared and tried as hard as I could. As soon as I bought the books for that level (advanced writing, ancient Chinese, modern literature) I realized it was way beyond my level and I switched to year two. The course involves eight classes a week of speaking, five classes of listening, and three classes of writing, all at the intermediate level. There’s also four classes of newspaper reading, two classes of business Chinese, and three classes of Chinese for tourism each week. The level of the textbooks and the coursework still seem pretty challenging, but doable. Certainly a better fit than fifth semester ancient Chinese.
I thought the placement test was pretty easy. Each section – grammar, vocabulary, and reading – got progressively more difficult but I was pretty confident of my answers on even the most difficult questions. And I skipped ahead to do the last section, an essay, first to make sure I had time to write a lot.
I was shocked to learn the next day that I was placed into a class at the low end of year three; in other words, a fifth semester course for students who have taken two years of Chinese. I was pretty surprised because I have only spent three semesters teaching in China while studying on my own (studying only year one level books). I took a Chinese class last year for all of one and a half months.
It turns out the placement test isn’t very good at measuring anything beyond the very beginner level and somehow my exam was interpreted as that of a third year student. I’m pretty good at taking language exams now and I prepared and tried as hard as I could. As soon as I bought the books for that level (advanced writing, ancient Chinese, modern literature) I realized it was way beyond my level and I switched to year two. The course involves eight classes a week of speaking, five classes of listening, and three classes of writing, all at the intermediate level. There’s also four classes of newspaper reading, two classes of business Chinese, and three classes of Chinese for tourism each week. The level of the textbooks and the coursework still seem pretty challenging, but doable. Certainly a better fit than fifth semester ancient Chinese.
Saturday, February 14, 2009
Charity in China
“In the United States, [charitable] giving represents about 2.1 percent of gross domestic product; in China, it's closer to 0.35 percent.”
The movie star Jet Li, among others, is trying to expand philanthropy in China, where civil society is much smaller and less active than in western countries. Charitable giving was one of the silver linings in the Sichuan earthquake last May. The natural disaster triggered a flood of donations from people around the country. For the wealthy urban residents and corporations who contributed large sums of money, it was a significant development because private philanthropy had been almost non-existent before then.
The movie star Jet Li, among others, is trying to expand philanthropy in China, where civil society is much smaller and less active than in western countries. Charitable giving was one of the silver linings in the Sichuan earthquake last May. The natural disaster triggered a flood of donations from people around the country. For the wealthy urban residents and corporations who contributed large sums of money, it was a significant development because private philanthropy had been almost non-existent before then.
Saturday, February 07, 2009
Chinese New Year pictures
These pictures from the Boston Globe are much better than my pictures of the Chinese New Year. Some of the celebrations, including fireworks, incense, red lanterns and feasts with family, are shown in these pictures from across China and in Chinese communities around the world.
Wednesday, February 04, 2009
Freedom of information
The satellite box in my house, which was out of service for about half a year, was fixed the other day. We now have some good English channels that are broadcast in many Asian and European countries, such as CNN International, the BBC, and Sky Sports, and some American stations like ESPN, HBO, Discovery, and National Geographic. Satellite TV outside of hotels and other specially designated places is illegal in China, but anyone can easily get set up with satellite service from the Philippines, so we get several Filipino channels also. It’s way better than Chinese TV, which is a lot of unwatcheable Chinese programs and news (soap operas, old war movies, and 10 minute cycles of news on endless repeat), and one English channel (cooking shows and cheery news clips on repeat), and some of the movies are highly censored for sex and violence and worse, some of the news is censored for anything that is anti-China.
So it’s not hard for a Chinese person to get free access to movies and news on television but its mostly in English, in addition to a few channels in other Asian languages, and one each in French and German. It’s the same for the internet; a good number of Chinese websites are blocked, but it seems that 99% of English websites are accessible, so I rarely have a problem surfing online.
The social networking tools on Facebook are facilitating a youth political movement in Egypt. The U.S. State Department is following social networking sites and learning how they can play a role in democratization.
I thought how young people are using Facebook and the internet to organize and create a political movement in Egypt was pretty cool. Facebook played a role in last year’s elections in the U.S. as every candidate had a profile in addition to online fundraising and organization. Obama’s website, myBarack.com, was a full featured social networking site and certainly helped get his younger supporters more involved and organized.
Facebook is catching on among young people here, and there is a Chinese site, xiaonei.com, for high school and university students, and it is almost exactly like Facebook. I don’t know how much political organizing or discussion happens on social networking sites like Facebook in China, but blogs and chat rooms have been used for free expression for years and are probably more effective because they're anonymous, unlike social networking sites where the point is to explicitly identify yourself in your profile. Social networking sites are not only less private but also less fluid than blogs, forums, and chatrooms, which are easy to recreate or relocate if blocked, whereas networking sites are a fixed website and only are useful if they have a critical number of users.
It seems that a lot of good things will come out of the growing access to communication tools like cell phones and the internet in the struggles to expand wealth, knowledge, and democratic and transparent governance.
So it’s not hard for a Chinese person to get free access to movies and news on television but its mostly in English, in addition to a few channels in other Asian languages, and one each in French and German. It’s the same for the internet; a good number of Chinese websites are blocked, but it seems that 99% of English websites are accessible, so I rarely have a problem surfing online.
The social networking tools on Facebook are facilitating a youth political movement in Egypt. The U.S. State Department is following social networking sites and learning how they can play a role in democratization.
I thought how young people are using Facebook and the internet to organize and create a political movement in Egypt was pretty cool. Facebook played a role in last year’s elections in the U.S. as every candidate had a profile in addition to online fundraising and organization. Obama’s website, myBarack.com, was a full featured social networking site and certainly helped get his younger supporters more involved and organized.
Facebook is catching on among young people here, and there is a Chinese site, xiaonei.com, for high school and university students, and it is almost exactly like Facebook. I don’t know how much political organizing or discussion happens on social networking sites like Facebook in China, but blogs and chat rooms have been used for free expression for years and are probably more effective because they're anonymous, unlike social networking sites where the point is to explicitly identify yourself in your profile. Social networking sites are not only less private but also less fluid than blogs, forums, and chatrooms, which are easy to recreate or relocate if blocked, whereas networking sites are a fixed website and only are useful if they have a critical number of users.
It seems that a lot of good things will come out of the growing access to communication tools like cell phones and the internet in the struggles to expand wealth, knowledge, and democratic and transparent governance.
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