rolling china thread 2011

they couldnt get jim fallows to read it over or anything??

If anything, WalMart demonstrates that command economies can work, provided a surplus of labor / producers and ample computing power for inventory / distribution management.

~~supply chaaaaain~~

started reading peter hessler's country driving today. hessler's 3 china books are probably the best most unassuming writing on contemporary china. not just because the competition is orville schell. love how he can do adventure story (driving his jeep down dry creekbeds in gansu, dodging the local public security bureau), reportage (on world bank desertification projects + corruption at this part in the book), and the character sketches he's always been good at, where he drags a character out of the background and takes apart their life in this really sympathetic beautiful way that illuminates them and the world they live in. funny, too.

every day I'm hesslin'

will check out (if I have time)

http://the-diplomat.com/china-power/2011/11/11/property-bubble-bursting/

happy singles day, everybody

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singles_Day

Speaking of hessler, i just finished river town--it was great--gonna track down oracle bones next

I just read "River Town" too. I second the admiration for his ability to sketch a character in a way that doesn't seem superficial.

Thought this was kind of interesting:

Lipton tea faces safety scandal in China

I recently bought some very nice Chinese oolong tea, btw.

yeah

The Anglo-Dutch consumer group Unilever, which sells the aptly named “Iron Buddha” oolong tea under its Lipton label, said in a statement that the rare earth metals had come from the soil where the tea was grown and could not have been added in the production process.

the ground is polluted. the soil, the fields, the earth. farmers know their crops are polluted, they take them to towns far away to sell where those townspeople don't know about the pollution. it's a giant game of hot potato.

wastewater and heavy metal runoff is poisoning the fields. the US (superfunds) went through this too, so did Japan (minimata), but that was 30-80 years ago.

Yeah, the pollution and food safety issues seem out of control, and the government is not helping:

The ruling Communist party is extremely wary of any organisation not under its own control and has blocked attempts to set up independent consumer advocacy groups, even going as far as to jail some people who attempt to form such groups.

http://www.businessinsider.com/paul-kane-sellout-taiwan-2011-11

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uNWzzt-n3s

http://seeingredinchina.com/2011/11/12/who-is-chen-guangcheng%E2%80%94-a-celebration-of-life-on-his-40th-birthday/

great profile on chen guangcheng

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/12/world/asia/picking-brand-names-in-china-is-a-business-itself.html?pagewanted=all

great article

Marriott, Wan hao, or “10,000 wealthy elites.

lol

Precisely why some Chinese words are so freighted with emotion is anyone’s guess.

Each character is a collection of drawings that can carry meanings all their own.

The Chinese are famously inscrutable and modern Orientalists have long speculated on whether or not the mysteries of their language will ever be fully explained.

One is reminded of the story of Pepsi's introduction into Latin-American markets, where the name literally translates as 'grey, flaccid penis'-- which certainly did not appeal to the machismo of Latin men!

Apple's Chinese moniker, Ping Guo ("apple") is a rather direct translation. But it has a second possible reading: Flat Pot. One wonders if the ad wizards at Apple were smoking a bit of flat pot themselves when they came up with the Chinese transliteration!

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/11/opinion/to-save-our-economy-ditch-taiwan.html

idgi

flat pot or ditching taiwan to save the american economy?

no I mean your post before that one

um i dunno, i guess i found it a bit silly to say things like "each character is a collection of drawings that can carry meanings all their own" or say that we can't know why some characters have certain connotations. i'm a bit skeptical that anyone whose native language is chinese is treating these brand names as anything but transliterations. i mean, they're reading 宝马 not as the chinese characters TREASURE HORSE but mostly just as a sound... it's a transliteration.... the characters have connotations but i think they're also common characters when transliterating foreign words. just like nobody is reading 奥巴马 as "secret tail horse."

if 耐克 NIKE means something in chinese, why does 希尔顿 hilton "mean nothing"? they both MEAN something but neither really mean anything. like 家乐福 carrefour is three common characters with distinct meanings or whatever but in everyday use they're serving a phonetic purpose and just work as a transliteration. they don't become a chinese word because they're written with chinese characters that have a meaning-- they use those ones because they're common characters for transliterations and will announce that the name is a transliteration of a foreign word. i guess it's different when it comes to shampoo names or whatever.......

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brand_blunder#Urban_legends

idk as someone who is nearly a native speaker I do think that they have to choose the transliteration carefully. I haven't talked abou this topic specifically with any chinese people but it's crazy to think that companies choose their names willy nilly out of a hat.

and carrefour, 家乐福, well I think that's pretty good! "home happy fortune" - right, they sell housewares, they're a big box department store, makes sense. much better than 假了负, for example.

and I'm pretty sure obama had no hand in choosing his transliteration - a corporation on the other hand, would definitely want to invest money in choosing a good name!

this is a culture that worships the number 8 because it sounds like prosperity, and hates the number 4 because it sounds like death - homophones are at the root of a lot of chinese jokes!

right right but i also think part of 家乐福 is that it reads like a transliteration, not a chinese word. i guess it was just kind of overstating things, i guess. i just wanted to riff on it too. sorry.

http://data.007gzs.com/upload_files/3/G/GD/gdDTq31.jpg

maybe kfc would be less successful if they had gone with this earlier transliteration

lol

yeah, I mean 家乐福 is definitely a transliteration but the characters were chosen pretty carefully I think. I do think that chinese choose names differently than amurricans - to name a thing is to exert power over it etc. etc. but the underlying principles are kind of different?

like I knew a lot of women in HK who were have like 宝 and 贵 and 玉 and 珍 in their names - you know, characters denoting fortune, treasure, jade. precious metals. and a guy is probably more likely to have other kinds of characters in his name, like 国 or 正 or something. or if you have clever parents they might name you after a 成语. like thought goes into what the names mean, too, whereas in amurrica you might just say "jada sounds cool" or "quincy is cool name" idk.

so yeah, I think it is interesting to see how foreign companies choose their chinese names - some of them go for the pure transliteration like hilton, some of them go for a transliteration w/ meaning in chinese, some of them go for a completely chinese one. I'd have to ask some more of my chinese friends if they notice things like this or if they pay attention to it.

and yeah those introductory explanations from the nyt article do sound like they come from a "teach yourself chinese in 5 minutes!" book but they are still kind of true! traditional chinese characters oftentimes are easier to remember than their simplified counterparts because you can make stories about the radicals. you still can, with a lot of simplified characters. like 捉, makes sense cause you can catch something by binding its feet and hands. my favorite is 噩, for a while I couldn't even stand to look at it - so evil. four mouths around the emperor - eunuchs whispering lies.

sometimes the radical is just a sound-loan, but a lot of times the radicals do contribute meanings.

I'm probably just really sensitive to this kind of stuff since I'm picking up the written language as a newbie, it's probably not ob

but yeah, a native chinese learner is probably not as sensitive to the little 'stories' a character can sometimes tell. just like how an english speaker may not realize breakfast comes from breaking a fast, or disintegrate is literally dis-integrate, or coincidence comes from co-incident!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uNWzzt-n3s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uNWzzt-n3s&feature=player_embedded

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uNWzzt-n3s

i've been in hong kong the last week and yesterday we crossed the border at lo wu into shenzhen. it was so incredible how in one 10 minute train journey the atmosphere and the people change so much. we only got to spend a few hours so we wandered around being pestered by "sale's managers" from the nearby shopping center. kinda annoyed i didn't get to see more.

http://quod.lib.umich.edu/c/ccs1ic?med=1;sort=ccs1ic_id;type=boolean;view=thumbnail;rgn1=ic_all;q1=ccs1ic

yeh it is literally, literally, night and day, the passage between hk and shenzhen

whenever I made that crossing it always felt like 'coming home' and 'civilization' idk weird feeling to have about a place you've lived in for only a few years

i never know how appropriate it is to ask these sorts of questions in the middle of threads or whatever and when i should just email but

yo dayo, are you still in hong kong?

no I came back to the states this past summer

but if you need any pointers lmk also there is at least one ilxor still in hk

one of the coolest ilxors ever btw

okay!

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/07/world/asia/murong-xuecun-pushes-censorship-limits-in-china.html?_r=2

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/11/china-gigantic/

AWESOME

"If you look at China, they don't have food stamps. They don't have the modern welfare state, and China's growing. And so what I would do is look at the programs that LBJ gave us with the Great Society and they'd be gone," - Michele Bachmann

"If you look at China, they don't have food stamps. They don't have the modern welfare state, and China's building enormous patterns in remote mountain plateaux. And so what I would do is look at the programs that LBJ gave us with the Great Society and they'd be gone," - Michele Bachmann

pronounced "plat-ooks"

for once the folx at slashdot provide some cool/helpful stuff

http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2525304&cid=38054096

First comment suggests a relation between the desert project and a map of Washington, D.C....

http://gizmodo.com/5859081/why-is-china-building-these-gigantic-structures-in-the-middle-of-the-desert

And then all the other comments suggest it's a wind farm...

lol uh that is truther stuff right there xp