David Moser, of the University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies, has written a wonderful article entitled “Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard”. A short excerpt on learning classical Chinese:

“Whereas modern Mandarin is merely perversely hard, classical Chinese is deliberately impossible. Here’s a secret that sinologists won’t tell you: A passage in classical Chinese can be understood only if you already know what the passage says in the first place. This is because classical Chinese really consists of several centuries of esoteric anecdotes and in-jokes written in a kind of terse, miserly code for dissemination among a small, elite group of intellectually-inbred bookworms who already knew the whole literature backwards and forwards, anyway. An uninitiated westerner can no more be expected to understand such writing than Confucius himself, if transported to the present, could understand the entries in the “personal” section of the classified ads.”

Moser does a great job of communicating the frustrations of studying Chinese (it takes a “kind of mindless doggedness and lack of sensible overall perspective”), and wins bonus points for describing the guilty, if intensely satisfying, pleasure of seeing a Chinese person unable to remember a character for a common word.

Click to read the rest.

A short, silly essay.

什么是苹果？按照词典，苹果的定义是：“落叶乔木，叶子椭圆形，花白色带有红晕。果实圆形，味甜或略酸，是普通水果”。我平时对《现代汉语词典》的定义没有什么不同意的，但在这种情况下，我必须表示我不满的感觉。词典的编者哪儿有权利把这么美妙的水果称为“普通”水果？大概是因为编者没有意识到这个小水果跟我们“普通人类”有多么长的历史，多么强的关系。

什么是苹果？当然是词典所说的，但除此之外它也是人类最古老的同伴之一。据西方的传说，第一个人吃的苹果给他怎么分别好和坏的知识，但也是人类从人间乐园放逐的原因。这样一来，苹果给我们带来了辛苦的生活，但也使我们凌驾于真正的“普通”动物之上。知识是苹果赋予我们的大负担和大赠礼。

什么是苹果？是使我们健康的一种食品。苹果不但是世界最流行的水果之一，而且是富于营养的食品。苹果有几百个种类，有甜的，有酸的，一个人无论有什么偏激，都能找到适合他口味的苹果。由于苹果的普遍性，苹果平时不是特别贵的，每个人都买得起苹果。可以说苹果是“大众之食”。

什么是苹果？实际上，我也不敢妄下评论。但我的感觉是苹果既然赋予我们那么多利益，我们都应该以更理解它重要性的角度回报它所给予人类的。什么是苹果？苹果就是人类的老朋友。

From Talk Talk China comes a brilliant new concept: the Cycle of Funk.

For those interested in bikes, China, and the human side of global business, this travelogue of a trip to Beijing is a fun read. The traveller is the designer of the Stokemonkey, a tremendously nifty electric assist gadget.

Imagethief today links to a PBS documentary, “The Tank Man,” which makes for interesting watching. I’d like to respond, for those of you who might be reading.

The China that I see every day is worlds away from the China shown in the film. You could put this down to my living the sheltered life of a foreign student, but in my day-to-day experience, Beijingers are overwhelmingly positive about what is going on in the city and country as a whole. Naturally, the taxi drivers complain about the traffic, but I can only recall one driver who voiced full-on complaints about government priorities: in his view, the Olympics are a vast waste of money that would be better invested in the needs of the laobaixing, or common people. It is worth noting that he didn’t have a problem with the government itself, merely with some of its policies — when I do hear complaints, this is a common theme.

The documentary asserts that the general contentment I see is the result of a ‘deal with the devil’ made by the Chinese people, giving up their political voice in exchange for economic gains. My experience makes me think that the reality is, as in most circumstances, tinged with shades of grey. Certainly, to suggest that the Chinese people somehow ‘gave up’ their political rights in 1989 is simply laughable. I would be very interested to see proof that Chinese people between 1949 and 1989 somehow enjoyed more ‘freedom’ than Chinese people in 2006.

Internet censorship and lack of freedom of the Chinese press have made headlines in the Western mainstream media. These are problems, but the Chinese people have a proud history of finding their way around restrictions of all kinds. Banned books are openly for sale on the street in a way that Soviet samizdat could never have been. On the internet, authorities trying to clamp down have to deal with a language rich in puns and word associations. Yes, there are more than 30,000 ‘internet cops’ employed by the Chinese government and using the latest censorship technology. But there are also more than 110 million internet users in China, and that number is growing every day. I see no way that the government can prevent political discussion if people want it to happen.

And yes, I think that people will want this discussion to happen. As a society, the Chinese have a legendary passion for education. The documentary notes that most of China’s migrant workers choose to spend what little money they make on schooling for their children. As the developing economy gives people more money to invest in education, I think it is inevitable that debate will flourish. Economic development will lead to political involvement, not because people with their basic needs fulfilled will be able to participate, but because they, as educated citizens, will want to.

At the risk of being painted a Pinko Apologist — or worse, a Pinko Apologist with Chinese Characteristics — I will make two sweeping generalisations: Firstly, that since 1989, the Chinese government has done its people more good than harm; and secondly, that increasingly what is good for the Communist Party is good for the Chinese people.

As with any sweeping generalisation, these statements will not be true in every case. However, in defence of the first point, I stand by my assertion that Chinese people today have more freedom than they did before 1989. As for the second point, for many of China’s largest problems the goals of the Party and everyday people seem to be miraculously aligned (motivations are beside the point). A stable, prosperous, and clean countryside would be welcomed by Party and peasants alike. Wen Jiabao’s recent speech at the National People’s Congress suggests that for the time being, and 17 years after the Chinese ‘gave away their freedom’, the government is showing reluctant signs of listening to the voices of its people.

Update: The documentary claims that an internet user in China doing a Google image search for ‘Tiananmen Square’ will find no pictures of the Tank Man. This statement is misleading. If the search is done (in English) from the main Google.com page, many Tank Man pictures will turn up. It is only if the search is done on Google’s recently launched hosted-in-China service, Google.cn, that these pictures are not returned in the results. What is included, however, is this sentence: “据当地法律法规和政策，部分搜索结果未予显示” — ‘In accordance with local laws regulations and policies, some search results are not shown’. Searching in Chinese for “天安门” (Tiananmen) on both Google.com and Google.cn gives results equivalent to an English search, though with fewer Tank Man pictures. This is less a symptom of Chinese censorship than of the stronger association made outside of China between the words ‘Tiananmen Square’ and the 1989 massacre.

Update 2: It seems that I painted too rosy a picture of a Google.com image search for 天安门, since the results I got were apparently some kind of fluke. Several subsequent tests on several different computers have thrown up lots of image-not-found icons in place of Tank Man.

An early morning ride to the Summer Palace was marred by the remnants of the worst sandstorm I’ve seen in a year and half. I felt particular sympathy for the men engaged in the largely futile task of sweeping sand off the streets with large brooms. Their work succeeded in liberating the sand for a few seconds, creating magnificent clouds — which then settled back down onto the streets.

As of the early afternoon, most things remain a shade of orange-brown.

I passed by the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Party School on the way, which looked all the more unfortunate in the morning light for having had the trees that line its entrance brutally pruned since my last visit.

Before	After

I’ve seen photos of bicycle commutes from around the world, and felt that it was time to make my contribution. My commute is a short one — 15 minutes each way on a normal day. The pollution today was terrible, so I decided to take it very slowly. That had the advantage of making it easier to take photos. The commute is hardly as impressive or beautiful as others I’ve seen, but I hope it’s interesting in its own way. I decided to start taking pictures 5 minutes in, which meant I didn’t get photos of my neighbourhood on the way out. The photos at the end, taken on the way back, fill in these missing bits.

Here we go…

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As seen yesterday morning under “Current Conditions” on Weather Underground’s Beijing forecast:

As of this posting, the Light Rain has left us, but the Smoke remains.

If second-tier Asian tourist attractions are sometimes creepy and forlorn, China’s contributions excel in creating a mood of melancholy creakiness. I think I first became aware of this when visiting the original site of the Harbin Ice Festival, a small park in the city centre. The bulk of the festival has moved across the river and turned into a gloriously gaudy mini-Disneyland-of-ice that really has to be seen to be believed — but the original location is still home to a nearly deserted and rather shoddy display of ice-animals, aircraft carriers, and submarines.

I noticed this phenomenon again on a much larger scale at the Chinese National Aviation Museum, located on a particularly dusty strip of land outside of Beijing’s North Sixth Ring Road. The complex is huge, looking rather like a derelict James Bond set, and housing more F-6 fighters (Chinese-made MiG-19s) than anyone is likely ever to want to see. It is also home to a massive display hangar built into the side of a mountain, and a giant aviation graveyard containing crashed and/or rusting old trainers, bombers, fighters, transports and helicopters, Liberation jeeps, mobile radar stations, missiles, and the private aircraft of Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. All of this is nicely complemented by a deserted children’s merry-go-round near the museum’s entrance. The visit took place a few weeks ago, just before the spring weather started moving in.

If you’re reading this on the main page, you can see more photos by clicking the “read the rest” link.

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I was delighted to read on Imagethief today that China is imposing a 5% consumption tax on disposable chopsticks and other products. This delight stems from several factors, not the least of which is that other people read the China Daily so I don’t have to. I wholeheartedly support the Chinese government’s new taxes, which will hopefully remove the scourge of low-grade splintery chopsticks from local eateries and fingers. Thankfully, living in landlocked Beijing, I am safely insulated from the new taxes on luxury yachts.

It was explained to me last year that disposable chopsticks are a relatively recent addition to the Chinese restaurant scene, with the Japanese to thank for their introduction. Now we are safe from Japanese influences, but are at the mercy of the dishwashers at 成都小吃, the ubiquitous and grungy Sichuan fast food joint.

Update: As Imagethief helpfully points out, the solution to the now-inevitable dishwashing problems — and disposable chopsticks in general — is to BYO. A great post at Bingfeng Teahouse has more.