Weekly Review: The big event this week was obviously the 20th anniversary of the bloody June 4, 1989 Tiananmen Square incident. As expected, there was an avalanche of material from both the mainstream/traditional media and many of the China blogs about it, ranging from the usual ideological chest-beating to the solemnly poignant. As expected and regretably, there was more of the former than the latter. Either way, there were far too many good (and really bad) pieces to highlight here, so we’re just going to ignore the June 4th pieces altogether.
Here are five interesting blog posts from the past week that will help you join Chinese netizens in despising the 90后, understand serial vs. parallel, identify dangerous idiocy, appreciate China’s human rights situation, and pimp that cute old lady/dude down the street online.
Profiling China’s Post-90s Generation Youth…and Emo-Punk-Goths
From Adam J. Schokora’s fifty 5 blog comes “friday 5 | china’s post-90 generation & the internet ::“, a by-product of his work for Edelman Digital, the PR firm, and part of his weekly Friday 5 series of posts. This piece was published last Sunday, three days late, and thus makes it into this week’s CNR Weekly Review. As with every one of Adam’s Friday 5 pieces, the topic is broken down into 5 detailed parts, this time, explaining the characteristics and trends of China’s infamous “post-90s generation”. An excerpt:
:: like China’s “Post-80s Generation” before it, the “Post-90s Generation” is a shorthand for a vaguely-defined demographic group of Chinese people born roughly in the same decade. On the Chinese Internet, however, “Post-90s” has connotations of a young, affluent, urban, alternative aesthetic, and includes among its ranks people born in the mid to late 80s as well — see the reader age poll on FZL8.com which has choices for ages 16-21; 30% of respondents are under 16, and 15-20% were born in the 80s.
In hopes of helping everyone better understand this sometimes odd and detached demographic, the five categories below provide a rough outline of the image and characteristics conjured up in the minds of today’s Chinese netizens by the term “Post-90s.”
Why This Should Matter To You:
- You’re old and moldy, but want to know what them darn (Chinese) kids are up to these days online.
James Fallows on Speculation vs. Analysis
James Fallows of The Atlantic, a favorite amongst many China expats, uses Newsweek’s John Pomfret to pick a fight Anne Applebaum of Slate. He quite plainly explains how Pomfret’s actually offered analysis on how China looks at its relationship with North Korea, whereas Applebaum is just indulging in “speculation — really, paranoid hysteria”. Applebaum declares that “there must be a reason” (obviously insidious) why the “puppeteer” China doesn’t put a stop to the “farce” of its “puppet”, North Korea. Fallows says, “no, you’re an idiot.” Well, not in those words, but in words like these:
I’m not generally looking for fights with people, so why bother to mention this? The minor reason is that since the topic is the same and both writers are necessarily working with imperfect information about North Korea, it’s a particularly stark illustration of the difference between informed analysis, explaining its steps of logic, and simply spinning out a snappy “hey, this could be interesting!” idea with minimal effort to reality-check.
The major reason is that this is dangerous. This is the kind of cocksure, half-informed assumption of the most threatening and moralistic interpretation of world events that has led to grief in our recent history.
Why This Should Matter To You:
- You do NOT want to be Anne Applebaum.
- You run into a lot of Anne Applebaums, and need to be reaffirmed that such modes of thinking are indeed grievious insults to intelligence and human dignity.
China Is The Silicon Valley On Steroids
Or not. After a bit of controversy during her visit to China, TechCrunch’s Sarah Lacy returns home to the US to explain “Why China Isn’t The Next Silicon Valley“. Her observations and points go beyond China’s tech scene and apply quite well to the overall business environment and pace in China. Here’s a sample:
What makes China so staggering is that everything that happened to corporate America over decades—think the television and media studios build out of the 1950s, the greed of the 1980s, the dot com bubble, the build out of physical and IT infrastructure, current Web 2.0 and CleanTech innovation—is all happening to China at once.
Imagine: At the same time eCommerce is getting sea legs, TV Home Shopping is also getting hot. Online ads are growing not because people are TiVoing through commercials—both TV and online ads are growth markets at the same time. Ditto for entertainment and piracy: While Hollywood sees the Internet as a threat to its cozy legacy business, China’s entertainment industry is just now building amid a world where piracy is already rampant. No one assumes anyone will buy a CD, so they just look for other ways to make money. The wonder of China right now isn’t just the size of the market. It’s the rate at which dozens of “old” and “new” economies are all maturing amid one another, and the hyper-network effects that such economic progress is having throughout the country.
Why This Should Matter To You:
- You’re interested in doing business in or with China.
China, Egypt, or Saudi Arabia: Where Would You Rather Be?
Dan over at award-winning China Law Blog rants against Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama, begging them to “get a damn clue on human rights,” to stop “embarrassing” the United States, to stop being “hypocrites”, and to stop using human rights to advance their popularity at home. Why? In part because Clinton blasted China for “human rights violations that mostly happened 20 years ago” on the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square incident. Dan cites America political treatment of Saudi Arabia and Egypt, both countries also with serious human rights issues, and asks rhetorically:
If you are female, where would you rather be, Egypt/Saudi Arabia or China?
If you are a homosexual, where would you rather be, Egypt/Saudi Arabia or China?
If you are practice a religion other than Islam, where would you rather be, Egypt/Saudi Arabia or China?
If you are against the government in power, where would you rather be, Egypt/Saudi Arabia or China?
If you are going to be charged with a crime, where would you rather be, Egypt/Saudi Arabia or China?
If you are a journalist, where would you rather be, Egypt/Saudi Arabia or China?We all know China is the answer to every single question set out above.
Lots of comments, both in agreement and disagreement, are attached to this post. My advice: Be sure you read Dan’s post very carefully several times before you decide what you want to disagree with.
Why This Should Matter To You:
- It might temper or at least give further perspective on the human rights issue/problem you see in China.
Old People Need Lovin’ Too…
Also from Adam J. Schokora’s fifty 5 blog comes this week’s (on-time) Friday 5 post on China’s elderly, mostly on how the geriatric crowd relates to this newfangled thingamajig called the internet! Just imagine that line in Chinese. Excerpt:
China’s Internet population may be dominated by young people, but Chinese seniors have a space of their own online as well. In fact, Baidu.com, China’s leading local search engine, recently launched a special senior-oriented search option that features large text, links to handy reference information like weather and stocks, and a categorized directory of major online destinations that oldsters might find useful. As nice as it is, it’s still a wrapper around a normal browsing experience, and to find individual Web sites specifically targeted at the elderly demographic requires a bit more effort. To that end, I thought it fitting to dig around and take a closer look at the Senior 2.0 scene in China.
Why This Should Matter To You:
- You’re old and moldy, and you want to know what your Chinese counterparts are up to these days online.
That’s it for this week. Have a link to a blog post that shouldn’t be missed? Be sure to share it with everyone in the comments, and don’t forget to tell us why you recommend it!
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CNR’s Weekly Review highlights some of the most interesting and can’t miss blog posts from the English China blogosphere. This week: June 7-13, 2009.
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CNR’s Weekly Review highlights some of the most interesting and can’t miss blog posts from the English China blogosphere. This week: June 21-27, 2009.
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CNR’s Weekly Review highlights some of the most interesting and can’t miss blog posts from the English China blogosphere. This week: June 14-20, 2009.
Green Dam, Anti-Hui Prejudice, Chinese Politics, & Barbarism! 
Beggars, Expat Habits, Netizen Revolution, Jackson, & Parkour 
The Good, Bad, & Ugly Of Trains, Youth, Politics, Dissidents & CCTV 
OK, I guess we are both officially Adam Schokora fanboys. All great posts, even the Sarah Lacy one, I must reluctantly admit. :)
I love it when people give me too much credit. I am too literal to ask rhetorical questions. I meant each of those questions to be answered and I find it interesting that nobody really did, beyond a few people saying, of course China is much better than Suadi Arabia and Egypt.
But hey, thanks for the shout out.
I don’t think Egypt or Saudi Arabia are much of an alternate choice. Why not India (another hugely populated developing country) or Indonesia (another Muslim country)?
My estimation of Dan and his China Law Blog to which I have often commented has been diminished to zero. He poses a series of patently rhetorical questions, immediately answered by himself with the preface “(W)e all know…”, and now in a different forum “find(s) it interesting” that his readers did not answer those same questions.
Well, Dan, most of us obviously gave you the benefit of rhetorical license, not understanding you were so anal.
I’ll not again comment on Dan’s blog, and perhaps he should bitch about his readers on his own blog space, yeah?
I wonder the same thing as Mike above, and I wonder if the number of people commenting about China are as familiar with Islam and the Mideast as they are with China. I strongly doubt it.
Dan’s point about American hypocrisy is a solid one that I agree with, but included there was a knee-jerk, Fox News-ish swipe at the Middle East, as if all the countries of that region were not just worse than China in the all areas he picked, but uniformly so. I would say that in making a valid point, he posted used some ignorant analogies to back it up. For starters, Libya and Iran don’t bear comparison, because for all it’s faults, Iran isn’t ruled by a strong man, and in fact Iran’s leader is in an election he might lose to an opponent who has brought up his aggression towards Israel. Elections don’t happen in “thugacracies”. Syria, which he apparently equates with countries that repress or disallow Christianity, has a small but very active Christian community, and in fact the Pope once visited there. Christians in Syria enjoy – under the constitution – all the same rights as Muslims. Perhaps he is confusing Syria’s political climate with it’s religious climate?
I could easily continue, but what’s the point? China Law Blog is willing to trade a stupid condemnation of China for an offhand one of the Mideast to prove a point, and few of the commenters called him on it.
I’ve been reading his blog for years; he does have a lot of excellent and insightful information available about China, but then again, he also had a post a few months back stating that he couldn’t even figure out how to add money to his Chinese sim card, and is a China Law expert who doesn’t speak or read Chinese, and by law cannot practice law in China, he just sort of acts as a middleman for Chinese lawyers; what American lawyers can do in China is actually very limited, as he well admits. Here is a post where he didn’t do his due diligence.
However, I see that your listing of his article is somewhat biased, given the picture you chose to put up near it. I suppose we are to assume that those men are in Egypt or Saudi Arabia, and if so, that the same sort of photo couldn’t be taken of a Chinese jail? Why not just pass the link and the commentary you added along, why the leading photo? That reminds of when, in the run-up to the Olympics, many news organizations used pictures of soldiers from another Asian country in their dissing of China.
As far as religious repression, well, there is the matter of the CCP choosing an alternate Dali Lama to be foisted – at the tip of a bayonet- onto Tibetans, and the fact that China has set up an alternate structure of Bishops, etc to rival those of the Vatican. Then there are the FLG – wait, thats not a religion! If we call it a “cult” then we don’t have to respect it… hmmmm… convenient. Do any of these things need to be the damning factor in people’s consideration of China? Nope! But they are food for thought.
And terms like “standard Mideast thugacracy” is similar to the same sort of talk that got that CNN anchor into trouble.
What do you think?
Mistake in my post above, per the Syrian constitution, only a Muslim can be President in Syria. However, i stand by the liberties and freedom of practice Christians have in Syria.
Stick to responding directly to his arguments/points and not poisoning the well. Aren’t we trying to avoid the Fox news-ish swipes?
Uh, because I try to include a photo as eye candy for each entry. It’s a blogging thing. I just searched for “egypt human rights” and that was a photo of suitable quality. Dan’s post, after all, does refer to human rights in Egypt, so I felt it was topically relevant. It was between this and an image of chained hands.
As for “bias”, I think you’re reading too much into it, not dissimilar to the Chinese fenqing frothing that spawned from the infamous CNN Tibet riots cropping debacle. I’m not sure how this reminds you of Western media incorrectly captioning images of, for example, Nepali law enforcement/military as Chinese…but you’re welcome to elaborate on your accusation of the bias inherent in the use of a topically relevant stock photo that was not incorrectly captioned whatsoever. I would’ve been delighted to use a quality image of Dan bonking Clinton’s head, but there are limits to what Google Image Search can do.
I’m not sure how anyone is disagreeing with you on this.
I think you’re changing the subject.
Ah, more fans who liked Fallows’ article.
The other one I’ve read so far is the one over at China Law, which didn’t quite leave me with the exact same positive response. The point was made in good spirit, but felt it was clouded with unnecessary extras and broad generalizations, which of course brought out the crowds with pitchforks and torches. Unfortunate I think, because there’s a good point worth seriously discussing and taking to heart.
I’ll check out the others.
I don’t know who “Not Really” really is but I do know that what he says is simply not true. My law firm has two attorneys (one of whom spends 99.9% of his time in China and the other of whom spends about half his time in China/Taiwan and half in the US) and a paralegal who are completely fluent in both written and spoken Mandarin. We use those people for our day to day China work, with me supervising and assisting. I have been handling China legal matters for about fifteen years.
As for my not knowing how to buy a SIM card in China, I do not recall admitting to that, particularly since I have never once had need even to purchase a SIM card in China because I have always just used my US based cell phones there without a problem. Are you sure you are not referring to my comment about not knowing that it is now possible to purchase compatible SIM cards in South Korea? Certainly though if I ever face a problem in buying a SIM card in China, I will contact “Not Really” for assistance, though I will not contact him as a character reference because most of what he says about my post is simply not true.
I usually make it a point not to have a flame war on someone else’s blog, but I felt it important to state the truth regarding the above.