xiaoqiu, good to hear from you again… hope you’re well. I’m still working in Shanghai. As for your question, I only use Celsius and meters. Because I’m not American, I don’t understand miles and Fahrenheit either!

Chinese see things that way: Celsius is Chinese, Fahrenheit is foreign. It’s plainly wrong and even makes no sense at all, but that’s how Chinese think. Actually the way many Chinese think, especially “lingdao”, regarding what is outside of China, makes truly no sense at all.

For Chinese, English is the official language of “America” (that’s how they call the US in English, I guess they learnt that from Americans themselves), and probably of some other countries, which do not matter much, even if these countries are the UK or Australia or Canada.

Believe it or not, the very first days they even put Fahrenheit in the French version. I can challenge anyone on this planet to find a French-speaking person (including Africa and wherever French is spoken) for whom Fahrenheit measurements will make any sense at all. Myself I have no idea what it means when I see these funky 74F thingies, how much that makes in normal human measurements. Much had to be said until it was changed, and believe me or not, this shit on this website is manual and has to be changed manually every morning. Huh. You’d expect they make some applet to get that from somewhere, and big cloud without rain changes by itself to the big cloud with rain and back to the big cloud without rain the following day, but huh, no, all this shit is MANUAL. Every morning the editor has to change the weather to the official source, which is :
http://www.cma.gov.cn/cma_new/tqyb/

There was somewhat a debate raised after the French version change, in which these questions were asked:
“What about that bunch of English-speaking countries, what measurements does it use?” [This dialogue was in Chinese, English-speaking countries is plural in English, in the original version they talked about ‘yingyu guojia’]
“Well, it [America] uses Fahrenheit.”
“Put it in Fahrenheit then.”

Plurality? What, wait, no, this is China.
About the emails, given that xuanchuan@beijing2008.cn and webmaster@beijing2008.cn are actually received by the Propaganda department in BOCOG (”Media and Communication”), they often forget to transfer, or do not understand messages in English (seriously), or do not even read them (very certainly the case here), anyway this never gets into the end of the website editorial department. More interesting is that the email of this website editorial department is an internal mail that should not be divulgated as they shall not receive directly information from the outside (go figure why).
My advice? You wrote a long nice mail, send it again and again to xuanchuan@ and webmaster@. I’ll report that international@ doesn’t work and see if anything is done (I doubt).
If you can have someone help you to translate it into Chinese, please do, that will be helpful. Some do understand English, but all are challenged by mails that are as long as yours. Or make it shorter.