REFLECTIONS IN A CHINESE EYE : September 2011

September 2011

09/29/2011

Why China’s richest man is joining the communists

Chinese businessman Liang Wengen, CEO of Sany Group, is tapped to become a member of China's Communitst Party's Central Committee.

JOHN MACDOUGALL/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

China’s richest person is tapped to become the first private entrepreneur to join the top ranks of China’s Communist Party, according to state media reports.

Wengen Liang, chairman of machinery-maker Sany Heavy Industry, could be elected as a member of the party’s powerful Central Committee at a meeting of its National Congress next fall, 2012. The congress meets once every five years, and speculation around possible party members is ramping up as it approaches.

Nearly 400 of China’s most senior party members make up the committee.

The 54-year-old tycoon, whose net worth is estimated at $9.3 billion (U.S.), topped Forbes magazine’s annual list of China’s wealthiest people.

If chosen, Liang’s membership into China’s ruling elite would be a sign that the party is embracing private enterprise, experts say.

China Still Has Much To Learn From Japan

Essay: Much has been made of China moving past Japan as Asia’s leader. But a Beijing-based Japanese writer says Japan’s relative economic decline in the past 20 years hides the fact that it has built a model society for its citizens

By Daisuke Kondo*
经济观察报E.O./Worldcrunch

BEIJING - SMAP, a popular but aging Japanese boy band, recently preformed in Beijing, immersing their Chinese fans in days of ecstasy. SMAP is one of the most popular bands in Japan, and has been the guest group, for 18 straight years, on NHK Japan’s New Year Eve broadcast. The band has sold more than 20 million albums, and their best-selling single “The One and Only Flower in the World” has long been on the lips of young people all over Asia.

Early this year, Uichiro Niwa, Japan’s Ambassador to China, said that SMAP’s Beijing concert should be regarded as “the most important activity representing Japan”. Over the past six months, the Japanese Embassy fully mobilized its staff to prepare for the concert.

Today, recalling that passionate concert, I’m thinking “What remains of my motherland Japan?”

Since the beginning of 2011, talk of the “Japanese Decline” is everywhere. China’s GDP has bypassed Japan’s to become the world’s second largest. Not only has Japan lost its second position behind the US, but the gap between China and Japan is as much as $721.9 billion.

March’s devastating earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan, left more than 20,000 dead and missing. Japan’s northeastern coastal region collapsed economically.
Coupled with the Fukushima nuclear plant accident, the country, which used to be proud to be “the safest nation in the world” suddenly became the most dangerous.

In 2010, China’s foreign investment also surpassed Japan’s for the first time.

09/28/2011

The most hated woman in China becomes a manicurist in a Brooklyn salon... and she's still on the hunt for Mr Right

Still searching: Feng Luoyu, pictured in Brooklyn after her relocation, became a web sensation in China after her infamous hunt for a husband

Article-2042028-0E18C34500000578-729_468x265

Pin up girl: Feng Luoyu made billboards and TV ads to get the word out in China

New York is a Mecca for American stars of stage and screen, but rather than seeking attention at the city's hot spots, one Chinese internet sensation has been hiding out in a nail salon in Brooklyn because of the backlash she received in her own country.

Feng Luoyu, 27, who became a national laughingstock in China, now lives and works in Brooklyn as a manicurist.

She shot to fame two years ago when she handed out flyers in Shanghai with specific demands for potential suitors.

Sep 28, 2011 12:03:06 PM | Culture, Current Affairs

Yixuan, 1st Prince Chun

Prince Chun of the Blood 醇親王

Yixuan, 1st Prince Chun (simplified Chinese: 醇贤亲王; traditional Chinese: 醇賢親王; pinyin: Chún Xián Qīn Wáng; officially Prince of the First Rank Chun Xian) (16 October 1840 – 1 January 1891) was a prince of the Qing Dynasty, the last reigning dynasty of China. He was the father of the dynasty's penultimate emperor, the Guangxu Emperor, and the paternal grandfather of China's last emperor, Puyi.

Birth and early life

1st Prince Chun was born in the twentieth year of Emperor Daoguang's reign. He was the seventh son of the Daoguang Emperor. His mother was the Worthy Lady Lin (琳貴人). Four months after his birth, Yixuan's mother was elevated to the rank of Imperial Concubine Lin (琳嬪). In 1842, she was again elevated to the rank of Consort Lin (琳妃), and in 1846 was elevated once more to the rank of Noble Consort Lin (琳貴妃). She was posthumously honored as Imperial Noble Consort Zhuang Shun (莊順皇貴妃) by the Tongzhi Emperor. As the seventh son of the emperor, he was titled as the Seventh Prince (七王爺).

During the Xianfeng and Tongzhi Emperors' reigns

In February 1850, Yixuan's older half-brother Yizhu (奕詝) ascended the throne as the Xianfeng Emperor, and Yixuan was made Prince Chun of the Second Rank (醇郡王). Although 1st Prince Chun led a quiet and undistinguished life at court during the Xianfeng Emperor's 11-year reign, his fortune was made by his sister-in-law, Empress Dowager Cixi, following the Xianfeng Emperor's death.

In 1860, he was married by the Xiang Emperor's imperial decree to Empress Dowager Cixi's younger sister, Yehenara Wanzhen. The marriage created close ties between the house of 1st Prince Chun and the woman who was about to become regent and absolute ruler of China. Then, on 22 August 1861, the Xianfeng Emperor died, leaving his and Empress Dowager Cixi's five-year old son, the future Tongzhi Emperor, as his only heir. In the ensuing struggle over who would assume the regency, 1st Prince Chun sided with Empress Dowager Cixi's party. In November 1861, when Empress Dowager Cixi launched the Xinyou Coup (辛酉政變) with the help of the 1st Prince Chun's older half-brother, Yixin, Prince Gong, 1st Prince Chun carried out the order to arrest Sushun, the leader of the opposing party, and brought him back to Beijing where he was beheaded.

As a result of this event, the prince found himself elevated to the highest military and government positions at court. Throughout the following 14 years of the Tongzhi Emperor's reign, 1st Prince Chun led a military and government career. In 1872, he was officially elevated to the rank of Prince Chun of the First Rank (醇親王).

09/27/2011

Tibet monks self-immolate over China wanting to choose Dalai Lama

Beijing - Two Tibetan monks have set themselves on fire as a protest against the Chinese government's tight controls over Buddhist practices. The two monks have suffered slight burns and are in stable condition.

In the Sichuan province’s Aba prefecture, an ethnic Tibetan part of the province that consists of those who advocate self-rule, two 18-year-old Kirti monastery monks self-immolated Monday in protest of the Chinese government’s crackdown and controls over Buddhist customs and traditions.

London’s Free Tibet campaign emailed the Associated Press and said the monks called for religious freedom and shouted “long live the Dalai Lama” before they set themselves on fire. They suffered slight burns and are in stable condition.

Reporters immediately called the Kirti Monastery's Administration Committee. One individual answered a call and said that he was unaware of the incident and was not aware of any reports citing such information. He refused to provide his name.

Kanyag Tsering, a Tibetan monk that belongs to the Kirti monastery in the Indian town of Dharamsala, told Reuters India that he has received information from 10 sources within Aba and the monastery and eyewitnesses that Chinese military authorities removed the bodies of the two monks.

Xinhua reports that the suicide attempt is under investigation. Protests in the region have increased after the Chinese government said it will select the next Dalai Lama. Beijing views the Dalai Lama as a separatist and wants to choose someone who is more pro-China.

Sep 27, 2011 12:00:14 AM | Current Affairs, Politics, Religion

09/26/2011

Politburo meets to discuss cultural reforms

BEIJING, Sept. 26 (Xinhua) -- The Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee held a meeting here Monday to study a proposal on the country's cultural reforms, according to an official press release.

Hu Jintao, general secretary of the CPC Central Committee, presided over the meeting, which is a major gathering of Party leadership prior to the Sixth Plenary Session of the CPC's Seventeenth Central Committee scheduled to convene in the nation's capital on Oct. 15 to 18.

At the meeting, participants heard and discussed a report on a drafted resolution of the CPC Central Committee regarding cultural reforms. The resolution will be revised on the basis of the results of this meeting, and is expected to be handed over to the forthcoming plenary session.

Different Party organizations and departments throughout the country and representatives of the 17th Party Congress have contributed their ideas for improving the resolution, so as to make it a directive document on cultural reforms under the new situation, says the press release.

Currently, it says, the world is experiencing major developments, changes and readjustments. Meanwhile, China has entered both a critical period for building up an overall prosperous society as well as the final phase for deepening the ongoing Reform and Opening Up Drive and accelerating the country's economic development shift, it says.

Solyndra and the China Blame Game

By Yuliya Chernova

As we watch U.S. solar start-ups go up in flames, it’s easy to blame China. On Thursday, in light of the federal investigation into now-bankrupt Solyndra, Reps. Henry Waxman (D., CA) and Diana DeGette (D., CO) asked the House Committee to examine whether heavily subsidized Chinese solar companies are skewing the market, and making it impossible for U.S. manufacturers to compete.

: Reuters; Solyndra President and Chief Executive Brian Harrison (L) and Chief Financial Officer W.G. Stover are sworn in before a House investigation panel on Friday.

And in Congressional testimony a week earlier, Jonathan Silver, head of the loan guarantee program that approved a $535 million loan Solyndra, said that even as Solyndra’s sales floundered, four Chinese competitors benefited from $20 billion in government support and “flooded the market with inexpensive panels.”

But with more than $1 billion in venture capital, plus the $535 million loan, Solyndra wasn’t exactly lacking in the financing department. It’s clear that its business model was deeply flawed, no matter the competition. “The company’s investors believed it would win, and the loan guarantee program did its job in enabling the company to scale operations, and providing the opportunity for the company to prove its technology a competitive option; failure to do so was the fault of Solyndra alone,” wrote Lux Research Analyst Matt Feinstein in a new report.

Anna Burnside: The Commie consumers of China

As the Chinese economy booms, our reporter looks at the people's great leap towards bling.

• Chinese spending on fashion reached £8bn in 2010. Photo: AFP

THE People's Republic of China, a centrally governed communist state with 1.3 billion citizens is, as noted economist Jessie J would have it, all about the money. Since 1978, when leader Deng Xiaoping declared: "China has been poor for too long. To get rich is glorious," it has become the world's fastest-growing major economy, going from the bicycle to the BMW in one generation.

By hoovering up the top positions in state-run enterprises and taking advantage of the vast government contracts that come with rapid industrialisation, party officials and their children have thrived in the brave new communism-with-benefits world. Those who started their own companies, especially in construction, have done even better. The new Hurun Rich List, of Chinese individuals with a net worth of over 10 billion yuan (£1 billion), numbers 127.

For those who did not have the foresight, or resources, to get into earth movers at the start of the boom, things are not so cheery. The national average income is 50,000 yuan (£5,000), less than Angola and Albania. Only 24 million of the population's earnings are above the tax threshold. This vast gap between the ostentatiously spendthrift rich and the struggling poor has prompted a government rethink. Consumption, say the authorities, must become less conspicuous. Earlier this year, Beijing outlawed billboard advertisements that promoted "hedonism, lavishness and the worship of foreign things".

Will this work? Avery Booker of the analytical website Jing Daily suggests that stealth wealth will become the new cha-ching: "While there will always be a market for garish, tank-like Russian SUVs, chunky diamond-studded watches and logo-festooned bags, the country's ultra-wealthy, becoming ever more cautious about consumption, will likely gravitate towards boutique labels, private clubs and discreet concierge services." None of which are exactly cheap.
In the meantime, what are the commie consumers spending their cash on?

Lyric’s ‘Turandot’ looked to modern China for costume designs

Mary Traylor designed the costumes for the principal roles in “Turandot,” including that of the title character, shown here in one of Traylor’s renderings. The principal costumes were made in Kansas City. The rest were made in China.

Lyric’s ‘Turandot’ is opera on a grand scale

You’re mounting an enormous production about China back in the misty distance of “legendary times,” so the logical source of costumes would be … China?

That was the choice made by veteran costume designer Mary Traylor for the Lyric Opera production of Giacomo Puccini’s “Turandot,” which next weekend opens the company’s inaugural season at the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts. She went online, identified a company known by multiple names in Xian, the capital of the Shaanxi province, and decided to give it a shot.

“I ordered a sample costume from them a year ago to see if it was even a possibility, to see the workmanship,” Traylor said. “It was lovely and we proceeded to open the lines of communication.”

And so emails began flying through cyberspace between Kansas City and Xian, as Traylor tried to explain the opera company’s needs and the color palette she wanted. To this day, Traylor isn’t sure whether she was communicating with a man or a woman.

“The thought of me being able to communicate with them in Chinese was not even remotely possible, so we communicated in English,” Traylor said. “Their English was pretty good.”

“Turandot” is a big opera, a fable about an ice princess who extracts a heavy price from men foolish enough to woo her, and demands scale and scope.

Traylor said the show uses 178 costumes or more — she’s lost count — and the only way to supply them and stay within budget was by turning to the Chinese company.

Evan Luskin, the Lyric’s general director, said that initially the company intended to rent the costumes. The budget was $32,500. Then, for artistic reasons, a decision was made to have most of them sewn in China. The company is on budget, but Luskin said having them all made in Kansas City would have been “wildly expensive.”

Sep 26, 2011 2:08:44 AM

American students abroad pushed out of 'bubbles'

Educators are thrilled to see more American college students venturing abroad -- perhaps 300,000 this year alone.

Now if they can just get them to venture out of the "American bubbles" that can make the streets of study-abroad hot-spots like London, Barcelona and Florence, Italy almost feel like exclaves of Tuscaloosa or Ann Arbor.

They're trying. After decades of laissez-faire and faith that just breathing the air in foreign lands broadens horizons, American colleges and international programs are pressing students harder to get out of their comfort zones. It's happening in popular destinations as well as more exotic spots in Asia and Africa, where there are fewer Americans, but language and culture barriers make them even more tempted to stick together.

And it's happening online, where one study found Americans on study abroad spent more than four hours per night communicating back home via the likes of Skype, Google Chat and Facebook.

Their tools: less free time, mandatory local internships, signed promises students won't speak English, and even "Amazing Race"-style solo scavenger hunts -- like one where wide-eyed Nebraska students were dropped off their first morning in China in a distant corner of their new city with $5 and instructions to find their way back home alone.

"Unless something is set up that really forces them to get involved in that environment, they really don't," said William Finlay, a University of Georgia sociologist who became so frustrated with the bubble leading trips to Italy that he set up a new, intensive program that takes Georgia students to work in impoverished South African townships.

"We push them to do things that are uncomfortable," Finlay said. "Sometimes they get overwhelmed."

About 260,000 American college students studied abroad in 2008-2009, the years measured in the latest annual survey by the Institute of International Education. That was a small dip from the previous year, likely caused by the economy. Otherwise the numbers have been rising steadily for 25 years and that's expected to resume.

An influential 2005 report by the Abraham Lincoln Commission set a goal of reaching 1 million students a year by 2016-17 and making study abroad virtually as common and simple as enrolling in college.

In short, study abroad is following -- a few decades behind -- changes in higher education itself. Once reserved for a wealthy and adventuresome elite, it's now reaching a wider, more diverse population which often has less travel experience.

China Celebrates Its Status As World’s Number One Air Polluter

China revels in a UN report that found it has the highest smog levels in the world, a sure sign of China’s progress and prosperity.

More ar The Onion

Sep 26, 2011 1:17:45 AM | Current Affairs, Humor

Big money offered for human eggs for surrogate parents in China

The ads in a local Englishlanguage newspaper and the Internet are aimed at young women, and say:

You could get Bt1 million as a reward - if you are Caucasian or Chinese, aged below 30, your height is above 160 centimetres, and you have a high IQ. The words are an invitation to females interested in being paid egg donors.

"Do you have an IQ of over 140?" a woman with a Chinese accent asked in her first question to a potential client before continuing to give details about the human egg donation in a phone interview.

Female donors were required to undergo health checks and send a report to the interviewer for consideration before getting an answer if they were qualified for consideration for the Bt1 million fee, she said.

" We will take care of and send your eggs to an in vitro fertilisation lab in China for a Chinese man who wants kids," the same woman said before finishing the conversation.

The advertisements for female egg donations for money are now being spread across the Internet. Most human eggs are wanted for in vitro fertilisation and surrogate parenthood.

According to the Medical Council of Thailand regulation, female donation for in vitro fertilisation and surrogate parenting is not allowed for commercial purposes.

China detained journalist who exposed sex slaves in basement

The journalist who exposed the shocking story of six sex slaves kept in a Lyoyang basement in China's Henan Province, was detained by police. Authorities did not want the story, which included two murders, tarnishing the towns image.

When journalist Ji Xuguang penned the account of a Chinese man holding sex slaves in his basement, he knew he had a shocking story on his hands. In the seedy world of Chinese porn and prostitution the actions of Li Hao were truly despicable. The BBC reported over the course of two years he kidnapped women working in nightclubs and karaoke parlours, and imprisoned them in a dungeon he dug in the basement of a rental property, away from the home he shared with his wife and son.

The women, aged between 16 and 24, were repeatedly raped by Hao who deliberately kept them weak by only feeding them every other day. The women were tortured and forced to perform for porn shows which Hao uploaded onto the Internet for money. He forced them to prostitute themselves to other men, and on one such occasion one of the slaves escaped and went to the police.

Sep 26, 2011 12:53:14 AM | Current Affairs

Calm Returns After Riots in China

By BRIAN SPEGELE

BEIJING—A tense calm appeared to hold over the weekend in the southern Chinese city of Lufeng, following days of riots over alleged government land grabs—unrest that reflected growing resentment over ties between Communist Party officials and property developers.

Local officials met with residential leaders from the area where the riots had taken place, and promised to investigate their complaints, according to a report in the Southern Daily, an official newspaper in Guangdong province. The Saturday report, posted on the website of Shanwei—a city with jurisdictional responsibility over Lufeng—said the situation had "basically settled down."

The protests began Wednesday and continued Thursday, following complaints that land had been seized without compensation, a practice central authorities have struggled to stamp out in recent years. Land disputes have become one of the Communist Party's greatest sources of instability.

Local residents said more than 1,000 people took part in the protests, some of them smashing businesses and destroying police vehicles. More than 10 police were injured, as were several protesters, according to a government statement and local residents.

Paris could have been China

Believe it or not, but international celebrity and party-hopping socialite turned entrepreneur, Paris Hilton's best friend in the United States is called India.

And had the Hollywood socialite not been named Paris, she probably would have been called China. It may sound strange but it is true. ""No, no, I wasn't conceived in Paris,"" Paris laughed when someone asked her how she got the name. ""My parents had thought of names like China and Paris for me and finally they opted for Paris. In fact, my best friend is called India,"" said Paris, amidst loads of giggles and laughter in the audience.

Prodigal daughter of the Hilton family, Paris, who has been given titles like 'Billion Dollar Entrepreneur' and 'Fabulous Fashionista' by the magazines worldwide, is on a business visit to the commercial capital of the country - Mumbai. She has entered the Indian market with her signature collection of affordable luxury handbags and accessories with great aplomb.

Mind the gap! Wingsuit stuntman shoots through narrow slit in mountainside at 75mph

A wingsuit pilot has taken the sport of sky diving to new heights after hurtling through a narrow slit in a mountainside.

Jeb Corliss launched himself from a helicopter at 6,000ft today, zooming through the air at 75mph towards the imposing Tianmen mountain in Hunan Province, China.

The stuntman's wingsuit, which has thin membranes between the limbs and torso, allowed the 35-year-old to glide through the air while losing altitude gradually instead of plummeting directly towards Earth.

Sep 26, 2011 12:20:13 AM | Current Affairs

09/25/2011

Four Misperceptions about China in South China Sea Disputes - a Chinese Perspective

Written by
Zhang Zhexin
Visiting Fellow at The Henry L. Stimson Center

Tensions between China and some Southeast Asian states over territorial claims in the South China Sea (SCS) appear to have eased with the agreement reached in Bali on July 20 between China's Foreign Minister and his ASEAN counterparts. The ministers reiterated their countries' commitment to exercise self-restraint and agreed to guidelines for voluntarily implementing a non-binding Declaration on Conduct of Parties (DOC) in the SCS signed by China and ASEAN states in 2002.

Many observers see the agreement as a direct consequence of the US's strong diplomatic and quasi-military efforts that implicitly took sides with Vietnam and the Philippines to deter China's otherwise more hardline actions-another successful example of the US role as an "off-shore balancer." However, such engagment should not be regarded as a model for the US's long-term strategy in the region, because it is rooted in four long-held misperceptions of China's objectives and approaches concerning the SCS disputes.

The first misperception is that China alone should be held responsible for recent tensions on the SCS for its violation of the DOC. Yes, Beijing has sent more patrol boats and fighter jets to waters around disputed islands or reefs in recent years. However, this was only because some Southeast Asian states have been unilaterally accelerating their surveying and exploitation of natural resources in disputed waters, and expanding military and civilian facilities on disputed islands currently under their occupation-both violate the guiding spirit of the DOC. Thus, the image of a rising Titan bullying its small neighbors comes more from a natural sympathy for the weaker parties than from a balanced appreciation of the situation.

09/24/2011

China Bans Ancient Dog-Eating Festival Amid Online Outcry

A truck carrying dogs travels along a road on the outskirts of Beijing in June 2011

For the first time in 600 years, residents of Qianxi Township, China, will be banned from holding an ancient dog-eating festival after the public voiced their discontent on the Internet.

The three-day event, which usually takes place in October, commemorates a historic 14th century military victory of the Ming Dynasty. According to legend, the army of Zhu Yuanzhang secretly invaded Qinaxi and killed all the dogs so that the animals wouldn't bark and give away the troops' position pre-battle. When the city was secured, the army celebrated by feasting on the meat of the slaughtered dogs. Thus the tradition was born.

While animal advocates around the world may shutter at this thought, in China, and other parts of Asia, it's not uncommon for humans to eat dogs. In ancient times, dog meat was considered to have medicinal purposes, while today, it is still socially acceptable for the Chinese to purchase dogs and cats at local markets for the sole purpose of sustenance.

Sep 24, 2011 11:48:50 PM | Animals, Current Affairs

Fried scholar's

Last Sunday, Rebecca Fu went to a Cantonese restaurant called Xǐ yùn lái dà jiǔdiàn 喜運來大酒店 (Happy Fortune Arrives Grand Hotel — actually a modest establisment) in Manhattan's Chinatown. When she saw the following entry on the menu, she had no idea what it was: xiāngjiān shìde 香煎士的. The xiāngjiān 香煎 was not a problem; it means simply "fried" or "pan fried". But, even though she's a graduate of Peking University, Rebecca drew a complete blank on shìde 士的. The characters seem to mean "scholar's", but "fried scholar's" just doesn't make sense. It was only when Rebecca asked the waiter how to pronounce 士的 in Cantonese — whereupon he said "si6 dik1″– that she understood what 士的 meant.

The usual way to say "steak" in Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM) is niúpái 牛排, and that expression is also used in Cantonese, where it is pronounced ngau4 paai4. But si6 dik1 士的 ("steak") is also used very commonly in speech and even, as on restaurant menus, in writing. This is a good example of how a parallel vocabulary develops in Cantonese and other Sinitic languages: one based on indigenous morphemes, and one on loanwords.

Cantonese has been especially prolific in borrowing words from other languages, and many of these words (I'll mention a few of them below) have entered the standard MSM lexicon. Shanghainese has also borrowed many foreign words directly via their sounds ("clamp," "captain," "last car," etc.), and these too have often passed into the MSM lexicon. The same is true of other topolects that are not normally written (or are not wholly writable) in Chinese characters. In contrast, MSM is more apt to create loan translations for new terms and ideas that enter the language from abroad through calquing or through recycling (by redefinition) of old words (e.g., the MSM words for "philosophy", "religion", "economics", "literature", and so forth). When the latter (recycled and redefined words) pass through Japan (China –> Japan [where the redefinition takes place] –> China), we may refer to such loans as "round-trip words".

BILINGUAL NET NEWSPAPER.

John Emerson, frequent commenter and proprietor of the one and only Idiocentrism (investigating the historical nooks and crannies no one else dares enter), sent me a link to this story at ChinaSmack, pointing out that:

This newspaper is not only interesting in itself, but every story and every letter to the editor is there in English and Chinese. Just hover your mouse arrow and the Chinese will pop up. The translations are idiomatic and very carefully done, as far as I can tell, and are a convenient way to build vocabulary, including slang in the letters. (E.g., 装 B "being a pretentious cunt").

What a great idea! I hope this sort of thing catches on (though, being a lot of work for little obvious profit, it probably won't). Posted by languagehat at August 31, 2011 08:44 PM

Comments

Presumably the B is being used because a lot of PRC software will literally not let you write the word for cunt (which I believe is 傻屄 - shabi in pinyin). Grass mud horse, and all that.

Posted by: afinetheorem at September 1, 2011 12:05 AM

傻屄 is 'stupid cunt'.

There are other kinds of cunt. I once heard a woman cursing someone as 笑屄 xiào bī 'laughing cunt', presumably because they were laughing. But it was a long time ago and I could have got it wrong.

屄样 bī-yàng is one I'm not sure how to translate, but it means something like 'cuntishness'. It's a curse on someone for their attitude or actions. Maybe a native speaker could explain these things better. There's a fine art to all this.

Posted by: Bathrobe at September 1, 2011 05:52 AM

Well, the ChinaSmack site says:

装B = 装屄 [zhuāng bī / zhuang1 bi1] verb. To show off, be a poser, or to act self-righteous, self-important, egotistical. To be a “pretentious cunt”. A popular version on the Shanghainese KDS BBS discussion forum is “IB” or “install B” because “zhuang” means “install” as well as “pretend.” The “B” could be any Chinese character with the “bi” sound like 逼 or 比. It can also be 13 which looks like a capital “B”. In fact, 屄 is the true character but almost never used.

On Steve Jobs, there's:

To this day, three apples have changed the world: One seduced Eve, one awakened Newton, the third one is in the hands of Steve Jobs. These three applies represent three stages: Lust, knowledge, and being a pretentious cunt, steps in mankind’s progress. We have already entered the highest state of inflated desire! Now that Jobs is gone, will you still buy the iPhone5?

Language Hat

Sep 24, 2011 5:10:16 AM | Entertainment, Language

On Google Translate, again

In a couple of postings last winter (see here and here), I already discussed Google's machine translation tool, Google Translate (GT) and expressed my skepticism about it. Today, another article on GT by David Bellos from The Independent has crossed my desktop. Three points made in that article are worth discussing.

Point number one: as I showed experimentally with my little "gay goose" investigation, and as the article confirms, GT does not really translate from any one of its 58 languages to any one of the 58 languages directly. Only a few pairs are subject to direct translation. So in fact GT does not really provide 3,306 separate translation services, as advertised. Rather, it uses the so-called "pivots", or intermediary languages. For example, if you ask GT to translate a bit of text from Farsi into Icelandic (or vice versa), the translation will be mediated by English (which is indeed the most common intermediary language, for obvious reasons).

The reason that GT uses intermediary languages is because GT does not really "translate". Instead, it searches an enormous database of translations already made by human translators for a good match. Believe it or not, a big chunk of that database is mystery novels (I just knew it that mystery novels are good for something!!!). Thus, as the author of the article puts it, "John Grisham makes a bigger contribution to the quality of GT's Icelandic-Farsi translation device than Rumi or Halldór Laxness ever will". As any human translator would know, using intermediary languages doesn't improve the quality of the translation. Many anecdotal stories about such "mediated" translations are out there and you might have heard some. If you still don't believe it, read what happened to the "happy geese" in my mediated translation exercise.

Point number two: although the author of the article David Bellos admits that GT "may also produce nonsense", he claims that

"the kind of nonsense a translation machine produces is usually less dangerous than human-sourced bloopers. You can usually see instantly when GT has failed to get it right, because the output makes no sense, and so you disregard it. (This is why you should never use GT to translate into a language you do not know very well. Use it only to translate into a language in which you are sure you can recognise nonsense.)"

Read more at Languages of The World

Sep 24, 2011 5:00:07 AM | Language

How Google Translate works

The web giant's translation service might serve up the odd batch of nonsense, but it's still one of the smartest communication tools of all time, as David Bellos explains

Find the right words: human translators behave in a similar way to Google Translate

enlarge

Using software originally developed in the 1980s by researchers at IBM, Google has created an automatic translation tool that is unlike all others. It is not based on the intellectual presuppositions of early machine translation efforts – it isn't an algorithm designed only to extract the meaning of an expression from its syntax and vocabulary.

In fact, at bottom, it doesn't deal with meaning at all. Instead of taking a linguistic expression as something that requires decoding, Google Translate (GT) takes it as something that has probably been said before.

It uses vast computing power to scour the internet in the blink of an eye, looking for the expression in some text that exists alongside its paired translation.

The corpus it can scan includes all the paper put out since 1957 by the EU in two dozen languages, everything the UN and its agencies have ever done in writing in six official languages, and huge amounts of other material, from the records of international tribunals to company reports and all the articles and books in bilingual form that have been put up on the web by individuals, libraries, booksellers, authors and academic departments.

Drawing on the already established patterns of matches between these millions of paired documents, Google Translate uses statistical methods to pick out the most probable acceptable version of what's been submitted to it.

Much of the time, it works. It's quite stunning. And it is largely responsible for the new mood of optimism about the prospects for "fully automated high-quality machine translation".

Google Translate could not work without a very large pre-existing corpus of translations. It is built upon the millions of hours of labour of human translators who produced the texts that GT scours.

THE MOST CHINESE CHARACTER.

Victor Mair has a fascinating post at the Log about the Chinese character 和 hé ("harmony, peace"). It starts from the relatively uninteresting fact that it has been chosen "The Most 'Chinese' Chinese Character," as the title of Josh Chin's Wall Street Journal story has it, but Mair goes on to point out that it is used to write at least five other words or morphemes beyond the one in question, and that the Concise Dictionary of Spoken Chinese by Yuen Ren Chao and Lien Sheng Yang and the Gwoyeu Tsyrdean (Guoyu Cidian) give different sets of six pronunciations:

It is interesting that, on the Mainland, the language authorities have declared that the pronunciation hàn ("with, and") no longer exists, and we cannot find it in even such unabridged dictionaries of record as Hanyu Da Zidian... and Hanyu Da Cidian.... Thus, on the Mainland, people do not understand me when I say the name of one of my favorite series in Taiwan, Shū hàn Rén 書和人 (Books and People), a set of books that I avidly devoured in Taiwan four decades ago, and can still today buy new volumes under the same title and with the same pronunciation.

Then he goes on to discuss the history of the character:

Even its graphic form is complicated by the fact that 和 is actually an early (probably more than a couple of thousand years old) simplified character. The original form — going all the way back to the oracle bone inscriptions 3,200 years ago — was 龢, with 22 strokes. On the left is a musical instrument, now called yuè, which depicts a mouth blowing over a row of windpipes — this is the semantophore, which conveys the notion of "harmony" or, perhaps more accurately, something like "consonance" (not of the verbal sort, but of the musical type), or just "having to do with a pleasant sound." On the right was the phonophore, hé 禾 ("cereal crop, millet"), which functioned as the sound-bearing element. Later, people surely must have grown weary of writing all those strokes for the row of musical pipes and their openings at the top, and decided to dispense with them, leaving just the mouth that blew into the openings of the pipes. This (the mouth), somewhat surprisingly, got shifted to the right side of the character, hence the character was transformed from the cumbersome 龢 to the streamlined, but less explicit, 和. I say that the move of the mouth from the left to the right is rather unexpected, because usually characters with mouth radicals — of which there are roughly two thousand — have the mouth on the left side, where it began (top left) in the old form of 龢.

Read more at languagehat

Sep 24, 2011 4:39:53 AM | Language

The Most ‘Chinese’ Chinese Character?

If, as Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, you can infer a nation’s spirit from its language, then what to make of modern Chinese?

: Associated Press; Pupils write the Chinese character “He” — recently named the most Chinese of Chinese characters — with brushes during a ceremony to celebrate Confucius’ birthday at the Confucius Temple in Qufu, his birthplace, east China’s Shandong Province.

In a revealing exercise, China Heritage—a National Geographic-like monthly with a glossy interest in the roots of Chineseness—recently organized an effort to identify the 100 Chinese characters that “carry the most meaning for Chinese culture.”

The results are fascinating, alternately rife with political irony and revealing of a Chinese reality not always apparent to outsiders.

Culled from an initial pool of 374 characters suggested by an unidentified committee of historians and linguists, the most Chinese of Chinese ideograms was identified as 和 (pronounced ‘huh’ and typically Romanized as ‘he’)—the character for an indistinct concept often (though clumsily) translated as “peace” or “togetherness.”

The selection won’t come as a surprise to China watchers. He is the first character in both “harmonious society” (和谐社会; hexie shehui) and “peaceful rise” (和平崛起; heping jueqi) —terms the Chinese Communist Party has recently coined to explain its domestic and foreign policies, respectively, and which are therefore printed ad nauseam in newspapers and on propaganda banners throughout the country. (As a Xinhua report about the list notes, the words “harmony” and “peace” featured heavily in the Zhang Yimou-directed opening ceremonies at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.)

etymology of an insult

So this morning an American friend and I were negotiating with my friend's ayi to come and clean for us once a week, and worked out a figure of about 250 kuai a month as fair (about 25 quid). I offered that and she laughed and said that was fine, but could it be 260, because 250 was a swearword. And both my friend and I were "Huh?" Which wouldn't be strange if it was just me, but said friend has really, really good Chinese.

Anyway, I asked a couple of people and they confirmed that yes, 250 was either "crazy" or "stupid." So I assumed that it must sound like a similar phrase, but couldn't think of it, and my Chinese friends said, nope, 250 just meant stupid and they had no idea why. My friend Baidu'd it up, and -

Apparently it comes from the custom of stringing copper cash into strings called diao in ancient china.And one diao had 1000 cash on it.So there evolved a humble term "ban diaozi,“ ”half a diao," that literary types would use self-deprecatingly.That's not considered an insult now. But then the insult "250" emerged, because it's half a half a diao, i.e., a guy who really is stupid.

That is one hell of a complex insult. But I can see "sanba" (3.8/bitch) sticking around for the same reasons - that one was invented fairly recently, because March 8 is Woman's Day.

BLOOD & TREASURE

Sep 24, 2011 4:22:40 AM | Language