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iShowU - HD

2009-02-15T16:35:45Z

Our favorite Mac screen-capture-to-movie utilities now with more power. iShowU HD Pro makes capturing your Mac onscreen actions a breeze. Save your captures as QuickTime movies using one of many presets, as does iShow U (regular) but with fewer features. Both powerful, easy to use. iShowU allows you to capture and record anything you can see on your screen, along with audio from any compatible source. 9WR - iShowU: Screen recorder, many preset options, easy setup, instant recording.

An Olympic Evaluation

2008-09-03T15:00:00Z

By Eric Setzekorn

With the Olympics already more than a week in the past, life in Beijing is slowly returning to normal. The Chinese government appears to have achieved what it wanted, producing an overwhelming show to awe foreign and domestic audiences and a clutch of gold medal winners to gloat over. The results for two of the more hidden goals of the games look mixed: promoting athletics for personal health along with national pride and using the Olympics to educate a new generation of urban Chinese as confident global citizens. And a negative legacy from 2008 looks to be the expansion of governmental authority in cases of government-proclaimed necessity.

An important legacy of the Olympics was supposed to be its promotion of athletics in Chinese life, but an unintended consequence of China’s growing sports mania is the increasing individualism of sports stars. Promotion of sports and physical activity as a way to regenerate the vitality and health of the Chinese people has been a popular idea for over a century and was heavily promoted during the Maoist period. The need to promote sustainable interest in sports as part of the average lifestyle has become more urgent as a newly affluent urban class is changes their diets to include less healthy food as their wealth increases. Soaring obesity rates among children in coastal regions are not only due to diet but also lifestyle factors such as widespread on-line gaming and near universal access to television, which also inhibits development of peer relationships.

While China’s gold medal count was high in 2008, the overwhelming number of China’s gold medals have come in solo events that emphasize technique and skill rather than strenuous cardiovascular exertion. Commercially viable sports such as soccer and basketball, which have huge numbers of Chinese fans and are available to the poor in a way platform diving or skeet shooting is not, performed extremely poorly in spite of having several world-class players. A generation of Chinese girls now dream of gymnastic glory when a more sustainable and positive habit would be the promotion of soccer, volleyball and basketball for exercise and socialization.

In the quarterfinal basketball game between China and Lithuania, the tiny Baltic country of four million people humiliated China on its home court by a score of 94 to 68. Lithuania defeated a nation over 300 times as populous by playing a solid, team-oriented strategy while China floundered due to a lack of coordination and teamwork among its world-famous NBA stars (a problem that has plagued past US teams as well). China’s most famous athlete, Yao Ming, the perennial NBA All-Star, China’s Olympic flag bearer, and idolized for his accomplishments as a pioneer of Chinese sports abroad, is representative of these new Chinese superstars. Over the past three years, as he has become more comfortable in his status as an elite player, he has become more outspoken, even openly criticizing the centralized sports system's heavy-handed management of the basketball team. In response, one of the older coaches implied Yao had been corrupted by his time in the U.S.

However, minor rebellions by star athletes will likely increase as their popularity and independent sources of income immunizes them from official consequences. In addition to increased independence, athletes are undertaking social action without direction from the central government. (For instance, after the recent earthquake in Sichuan, Yao established his own foundation to collect donations and provide assistance rather than simply donate money to existing government programs.) But Yao’s personal fame worked against China during the Olympics because his popularity means that fans expect him to play almost the entire game, and low status coaches acquiesce to this demand, so that by half-way through the third quarter in the Lithuania game he looked exhausted and hindered any attempt for a comeback.

There are still severe limits for many of China’s cloistered stars in less commercially lucrative sports such as diving and gymnastics. This was shown by the banning of Guo Jingjing’s former boyfriend, gold medal diver Tian Liang, after he challenged the Chinese diving team for greater personal control and freedom. As China becomes more integrated in global sports, athlete-driven pressure for de-centralization will grow.

For foreigners visiting Beijing, especially first-time visitors to China, the Olympic experience was an almost picture-perfect blend of idealized chinoiserie and ultra-modern convenience. Thousands of blue-shirted college volunteers facilitated the tourist hordes' need to navigate the transportation grid, enter sporting events, and even find good restaurants. The Olympics served as a way to groom thousands of volunteers to become comfortable dealing with foreigners in a confident and knowledgeable manner and become the point of the spear in business and government in the new “Chinese Century."

However, real progress in terms of language fluency and cross-cultural understanding was slight due to the controlled and directed nature of foreigner to volunteer interaction. Much of the problem stems from the draconian visa requirements that essentially restricted access to upper-class Europeans and Americans on package tours. With an average age in their forties, these visitors were understandably viewed as safer and more commercially lucrative than twenty-something backpackers.

The carefully screened and prepped volunteers who greeted them were selected by rigorous foreign language exams and forced to undergo weeks of full-time training, and so real interaction between visitors and volunteers was stunted by the seldom-deviated-from official guidelines. Any question regarding politics or international relations was either ignored or directed to one of the many volunteers who are party members, easily identified by the small red hammer-and-sickle pins on their shirts.

The few cases were it was possible to move past conversations centered around reciting the gold medal count, the volunteer’s worldviews were frequently a blend of jingoistic nationalism and conspiracy theories. After a long period of ingratiating small talk with one airport volunteer, after verifying by my ID that I was not French, he told me he was happy to greet people from every country but France and that he and his fellow students would never shop at Carrefour because “they want to split up China.” Another volunteer, a finance student, spoke glowingly of the best-selling book “Currency Wars”(huobi zhanzheng) which identifies the Federal Reserve, Jews and John Hinckley Jr., among others, as attempting to control the world economy and hinder developing countries like China. While the volunteer experience has certainly made life easier for the overwhelming majority of foreign visitors who don’t speak Chinese, the entire process was a controlled exercise which left most Olympic volunteers with a very shallow and un-realistic view of foreigners and likewise the foreign visitors views of the future leaders of China.

Perhaps the largest negative from the 2008 Olympic games has been the expansion in state oversight and control in urban spaces and private life. Like other massive projects such as the controversial Three Gorges Dam or Chinese resettlement in Xinjiang, the Beijing games required massive relocation, personal hardship for many citizens, and an unwanted intrusion into personal lives in pursuit of outside directed goals. Unlike those projects, Beijing is an urban area with an educated and relatively affluent population. The Olympics served as the pretext under which new offices such as the all-powerful city planning department or the ominously named “Civilization Department” rapidly grew in size and scope. Beijing will thus be left with a significant government organizational capacity with experience and the means to continue large-scale planning and development unhindered by oversight mechanisms.

Beijing’s Olympic construction projects have already been integrated into grandiose schemes for 2020 and 2030 which rival the hubris of Le Corbusier’s mid-century visions. The growth of government entities in areas of personal behavior will likely continue due to a political desire to create a vision of Chinese cities and Chinese people who are attractive to foreigners and deferential to authority. Already, Beijing subway posters are replacing the Fuwa with “Wen-Wen” and “Ming-Ming” shown as a small boy and girl reminding residents of acceptable behavior and personal standards of conduct. Many of the public campaigns against behavior deemed to be “un-civilized” and promoting top-down prestige driven development have already been copied by Shanghai as it prepares for the 2010 World Expo.

In 2001, I felt incredibly fortunate to be in Tiananmen Square when the announcement came that Beijing had won the Olympic games. However, that night my foreign friends and I all wore running shoes because we believed if Beijing did not win the games we should leave the Square as quickly and directly as possible to avoid trouble. At that time, I believed the Olympics would help Beijing become more open, cosmopolitan, cleaner, and a more enjoyable place for both foreigners and Chinese to live. While Beijing has changed incredibly since 2001, the earlier hope that the Beijing Games would have any sort of similar political effect to the 1988 Seoul games has long since evaporated. The events of this August have been exciting and entertaining, but the overall legacy of securit outside airports and surveillance microphones in taxis seem mixed and to this long-time resident of what is one of the world’s great cities, 2008 feels like a missed opportunity.

Sexy Beijing: Matchmaker, Matchmaker

2008-08-22T05:45:19Z

From Sexy Beijing: Are arranged marriages still popular in Beijing? Sufei finds out in this episode of Sexy Beijing. This episode is sponsored by TUI, click below to find out about traveling to Beijing with TUI

This article is from Danwei.org

The Great Convergence?*

2008-08-22T19:01:00Z

China and America, according to much U.S. Olympic commentary, currently offer a study in contrasts. Not surprisingly, we’ve been hearing repeated references of late to the stark differences between our young land and their old one when it comes to religious freedom and press censorship. And we’ve seen some novel variations on the familiar U.S.-China contrasts theme, like an August 18 Los Angeles Times piece by Mary McNamar that focused on style. Our every-day-can-be-casual-Friday approach, she claimed, clearly differentiated the look of “laid-back,” gum-chewing U.S. competitors, a sockless Matt Lauer, and a shirt-sleeved George W. in sports fan mode from the look of their Chinese counterparts.

There definitely are many basic U.S.-China differences, including not just how our presidents dress and act (it’s tough to imagine the buttoned-down Hu Jintao hanging out with beach volleyball players), but more importantly how they’re chosen. Still, Americans should realize that, to international audiences, recent events could be read as revealing how much, not little, China and the U.S. have in common.

For this is a year when we keep showing up side-by-side in global rankings. Medal counts prove we’re in a league of our own as Olympic sports powers. We’re also neck and neck at the top of the pack in percentage of global manufacturing output (U.S. 17%, China 16%). And we share the top (or bottom) greenhouse gas emissions spot: they’re ahead overall, but on a per capita basis, we’re leading.

Returning to the Games, the Opening inspired many only-in-a-country-like-China comments. These stressed the number of performers (China’s so big), the synchronized movements (China’s so conformist), the echoes of Berlin 1936 (China’s so authoritarian), and the fakery (China’s people accept being lied to).

The PRC is likely the only country that could and would spend so much money on this kind of state-run extravaganza just now, and while there were some disturbingly authoritarian aspects to it. But the spectacle sometimes brought to mind Hollywood—the place where the phrase “and a cast of thousands” was coined. The choreography was sometimes more Busby Berkeley than Leni Riefenstahl. And a friend told me seeing those 2008 drummers made him think of a 2002 Hollywood production, “Drumline,” which also featured young men furiously keeping the beat.

It is true that revelations of White children pretending to be Native American ones would have caused more of a flap here than revelations that Han children pretended to be Tibetan and Uighurs on 08/08/08 did there. But a country whose past includes minstrel shows and Charlie Chan movies without ethnically Chinese leads shouldn’t be too smug. When it comes to the lip synching scandal, as McNamar notes in her piece, Chinese efforts to ensure that a song that sounded just so seemed to come out of the mouth of a girl who looked just right resonate disturbingly with our fetish for simulated physical perfection via plastic surgery.

As for populations that accept lies, while it would be foolish to suggest any kind of complete moral equivalency, this is another case of people in glass houses being careful about throwing stones. International audiences remember well our collective gullibility concerning the Bush Administration’s proof-deficient claims concerning Saddam Hussein WMDs and Al Qaeda ties.

One common assertion in U.S. commentary is that the Chinese press is much more controlled than is ours. That’s definitely true. But the view from outside could still be that NBC and its Chinese counterpart have pursued similar agendas.

The coverage has produced what Olympic historian David Wallechinsky aptly calls “parallel” Games. Chinese audiences see more footage of some sports than Americans and vice versa. And different ways of showing medal counts (NBC has focused on total medals, a fairly unilateralist approach, while CCTV, like much of the rest of the world, has focused on number of gold ones) allows each national group to believe they’re ahead. The networks are on the same page, though, when it comes to two things. Striving to keep the main storyline of the Beijing Games positive, and structuring their programs to play to an intensely patriotic domestic fan base.

The contrast between China’s long past and America’s short one is not even absolute. The People’s Republic, founded in 1949, is less than a century old. It’s a rapidly developing country mounting a big show in a city with striking buildings. This event is meant to convince skeptical outsiders that the country has put a traumatic era behind it and deserves to be treated with respect, not just dismissed as a renegade land that makes cheap, dangerous goods.

Much the same was true of the U.S. after the Civil War. Writing in the Boston Globe (August 26, 2007) last year, historian Stephen Mihm pointed out that in the 1800s to many Europeans it was not China but America that was viewed as a “fast-growing nation [with] a reputation for sacrificing standards to its pursuit of profit.” And one strategy for overcoming this reputation was to put on big shows, like the ambitious, controversial, problem-plagued but ultimately very memorable 1893 Chicago World’s Fair—held in the city that had just invented skyscrapers.

Proving we could pull off that spectacle, back when World’s Fairs generated enormous amounts of attention, helped show Europeans that America was a force to be reckoned with. And convinced some people across the Atlantic they had more in common with us than they’d realized.

A similar realization of commonality could be one useful after-effect of these Games, since big issues like global warming are best approached by people who can focus on what they have in common. It will only have that result, though, if we’re willing to discard the comfortable but often misleading notion that we’ll only see contrasts when gazing across the Pacific.

* This piece is being published simultaneously, under a different title, on the Huffington Post's Olympic page, which has previously run several pieces that I co-wrote with China Beat editor Kate Merkel-Hess and which continues to feature commentaries by other "China Beatniks" like Susan Brownell and friends of this blog like Monroe Price, co-editor of Owning the Olympics: Narratives of the New China.

Default settings and modern lifestyles

2008-08-25T06:37:02Z

Shared by china pasticcio
Interesting essay by Yu Aiqun, a CCTV journalist, on how a modern lifestyle has changed society.

Have we lost the pleasure that beautiful homemade things used to bring us? Do we rely too much on new and disposable items? Yu Aiqun muses on simpler and happier times.

“Default settings” – in information-technology terminology -- refers to the basic way a computer system is set up until you decide to make any specific changes. One could say that in our lives, running water, flush toilets, electric lighting, gas stoves and telephones are all part of our own default settings.

As a Chinese woman of a certain age, I have experienced life without these defaults. When I was my daughter’s age, running water was only provided for four hours a day – two hours in the morning and two hours in the evening. Households had to store water in buckets. My mother used to get up early every morning when water was available and wash the whole family’s clothes. The only electrical appliances owned by our family of four were two 25-watt lights, two 15-watt lights, and a radio.

I was 16 before we had a telephone. As for the stove, I have seen the family go from coal briquettes, to liquid petroleum gas, to natural gas. My live-in nanny Xiaohan is from the countryside, and even today her family still burns firewood for cooking and heating. Their water comes from a well, and they have no flush toilet.

Over the years, the following have all been added to the default settings of my own life: television, refrigerator, washing machine, air conditioning, computer, extractor fan, water cooler, electric fan, rice cooker and microwave oven. My eight-year-old daughter has grown up with these things. She takes it for granted that every family has them, and that they are utterly essential. She cannot imagine being without them.

This is domestic modernisation. It seems that only once we have these things can we lead a respectable, dignified life.

But such appliances all need electricity. In China, 70% of electricity is generated by burning coal. This means carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, and CO2 pollution.

I once read a story, in which a philosopher who has spent his life absorbed in study goes to a market one day. He is shocked, and says: “There are so many things here which I have no use for.”

For a long time I was confused – why would the philosopher be so shocked? But now I understand that his shock came from realising the huge gap between his own default settings and those of mainstream society.

Take showering as an example. Thirty years ago, my father – a doctor – went to Tibet for two years as part of the campaign to “aid Tibet”. In these two years, he washed only twice. The first was when he arrived, and the second was when he left. He said that people in the north of Tibet only wash twice in their whole lives – once when they get married, and once just before they die.

The writer Sanmao also described how some people living in the Sahara desert only wash once a year, and this cleansing is regarded as a solemn ceremony. In Xiaohan’s village in the north-east of China, they used to wash only when the season changed. Now they go each month to the bath house in the nearest town. The Dai peoples of Yunnan, in contrast, spend their lives by the water, and rely on it for an income. To them, showering is completely ordinary.

These different peoples wash according to the climate in which they live. How they wash, where they wash and how often they wash is all decided by the local environment, and has become part of their culture over thousands of years.

In modern urban life, washing has become totally separate from the local environment. It has become one of the ceremonies and symbols of modern life. Until I graduated from university, I only washed once a week, but now I have gradually got used to washing every day, and see this as a necessity.

Living in our modern societies, we calmly enjoy the various conveniences of modern life and have come to take them completely for granted; they have become our defaults. We very rarely stop to think do I really need a fridge? Do I really need air conditioning? Do I really need a car? Do I really need to shower every day? Do I really need a new change of clothes every day?

Every time modern technology presents us with a new possibility, we quickly learn to see it as a necessity, and it becomes a default. The process is becoming shorter and shorter. Consumption has become something that we see as only right and proper.

But is it really right and proper? I still have a few vague memories of the details of my childhood. Back then, people would cut up used drinks cans and use the base as an ash tray or vase. The string used for tying up parcels could be collected and sewn together to make bags – the bag I used to take to the market was made in this way. People also would sew together old calendars and cigarette boxes and turn them into curtains. No one looked down on these objects just because they were made cheaply. On the contrary, many of them were very well made, and could be seen as little works of art.

Now things like this are vanishing from our lives. There are now more and more beautiful new products available, and more and more disposable items. This has aroused in us a desire to buy, but it also means we have lost the pleasure that those beautiful homemade things used to bring us. Once, in an arts-and-crafts shop, I saw a curtain that was made to look like the old-style homemade curtains. The materials were not re-used objects, and the effect was not so good. Sometimes I think of all the old coloured paper that we throw away and think that it would be ideal material for this kind of thing. However, it seems that no one thinks about re-use any more.

This is modern society – a lifestyle revolving around consumption and with material satisfaction as the highest aim. The problem is that when new technology becomes a default in our lives, it can no longer bring us happiness or a sense of fulfillment. On the contrary, an absence of these defaults can make us unhappy. This kind of lifestyle leads to higher and higher default levels, and an ever-greater desire to consume.

When the resources that support this consumption have all but disappeared, and the environment can no longer take the strain, it will be too late to cancel these default settings. It is much easier to go from simplicity to extravagance, than to go from extravagance to simplicity. It has always been this way.

Yu Aiqun is a CCTV journalist

Homepage photo by kevsunblush

Too Old and Frail to Re-educate? Not in China

2008-08-21T12:20:50Z

Two elderly women were sentenced to a year of labor after seeking to demonstrate in an official Olympic protest area.

BOCOG: “I Do Not Think There Was Any Wrongdoing”

2008-08-18T21:41:02Z

Beijing-based legal scholar Xu Zhiyong (许志永) writes on his blog, translated by CDT:

Seven-year-old Yang Peiyi sang a lovely song for the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games. However, audiences all over the world thought that the song was sung by another girl, Lin Miaoke, whose picture was published on the New York Times and who became a household name after the ceremony. Lin replaced Yang to appear on stage because she was better-looking. Nobody knew that the lovely voice actually was Yang’s until a music director revealed the truth accidentally. Many Chinese people became outraged at the lie. Why did they cheat? How could the appearance of a seven year old affect China’s national interest?

However, Wang Wei, Executive Vice President of Beijing Olympic Organizing Committee said, “This is a collective decision. It was done to achieve the best dramatic effect. I do not think there was any wrongdoing.”

They covered up this typical cheating behavior as “cooperation,” and thought that it was quite normal! If it was cooperation between Yang and Lin, why didn’t they announce that the voice was Yang’s? Intellectual property rights have been emphasized a lot for the Olympics, how come they forgot about it? In fact, such a cover-up didn’t make much sense, because we know that they were lying. It’s such a great pity that they have never learned how shameful it is to lie in the civilized world.

Fireworks were forged at Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, and Pavarotti’s singing was actually a recorded audio. However, those who cheated then were not as unscrupulous as officials of the Beijing Olympic Organizing Committee. They admitted that the fireworks shown on TV were to create a festive atmosphere, and Pavarotti didn’t sing because he was suffering from cancer. They asked for forgiveness. However, the Beijing Olympic Organizing Committee just said “Oh, it’s nothing.”

BOCOG may feel wronged, or even feel that anti-China media are again making trouble out of the blue. Actually the media’s reaction was quite normal. Reporters are normal people, and all normal people would be angry if they knew the truth after they cheered for Lin. The world was acting in a normal way. It’s the BOCOG bureaucrats who were abnormal. Although they’ve tried very hard, they still are not used to an open and civilized modern society, and they are not used to public criticism, which an official in a democratic society often encounters…

Also, they made a grand announcement of opening three parks for demonstrations, which I had thought to be a sign of openness. However, several petitioners who I am familiar with have disappeared after they applied for demonstrations. It has become a trap. The whole world knows what has happened, but the BOCOG still says that all applications for demonstrations have been “properly handled.” They might think that all mankind are idiots.

China’s image is being ruined by these people who tell lies shamelessly to the world. They should just admit when they do something wrong. What can be lost if they sincerely make an apology? If they take a little bit of responsibility for China’s international image, they should have realized that it’s better to boost China’s image through telling fewer lies than staging an extravagant opening ceremony.

China: The Pessoptimist Nation

2008-08-15T15:00:00Z

By William A. Callahan

China is the most optimistic nation in the world. 86 percent think that their country is headed in the right direction, up from 48 percent in 2002 according to the latest Pew Global Attitudes survey.

There are good reasons to be hopeful. 2008 is important not only because Beijing is hosting the Olympics. This year Chinese people are also celebrating thirty years of Deng Xiaoping’s economic reform policy, whose double digit economic growth has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, and created a new middle class that is larger than most European countries.

But China’s nationalistic pride takes pessimistic forms too. Recent bumps in the road of China’s rise have produced fierce reactions from Chinese people. Rather than wondering why Tibetan people would protest Chinese rule, Han Chinese rallied against the "bias" of Westerners who criticized their country. Last year when Western companies recalled unsafe Chinese-made toys, opinion-makers in China called for apologies not just from toy companies, but also from Western media for staining China’s national image.

Chinese public opinion not only targets foreigners, but increasingly attacks other Chinese.

Grace Wang was physically threatened when she tried to mediate between Chinese and Tibetans at Duke University in the U.S. Her family back home in China was forced into hiding.

Wheelchair-bound Jin Jing became a hero in China when she resisted protestors during the Olympic Torch Relay in Paris. But she was vilified a few weeks later when she refused to support a popular boycott against the French hypermarket Carrefour.

By going against China’s raging internet opinion, these two women were both denounced as traitors. As the Olympic celebration has approached, violence against foreign critics and Chinese "traitors" has increased, moving from denunciations on the web to bullying on the streets.

How can we understand these radical shifts between celebration and protest? Rather than simply being "a land of contradictions," I think it is necessary to see how China’s sense of pride and sense of humiliation actually are joined at the hip.

While opinion in Western countries typically is polarized between left and right, in China it is usually the same people who are wildly optimistic one day, and deeply pessimistic the next. China’s "angry youth" who flare against foreign and domestic critics are also the most prosperous segment of Chinese society.

To put it simply, China is a pessoptimist nation.

These mixed feelings come from the party-state’s official patriotic education campaign that looks to both positive and negative stories. On the one hand, Chinese textbooks are not strange: they point to the glories of ancient civilization and recent economic success.

But patriotic education also includes a heavy dose of "national humiliation education" that narrates China’s modern history as a series of shameful defeats since the Opium War in 1840. Textbooks explain that a combination of "foreign aggression" and "corrupt traitors" are to blame for China’s troubled modern history. As recent events have shown, this dynamic of internal and external enemies continues to frame the common sense understanding of international politics in China.

The pessoptimist patriotic education campaign is not limited to textbooks or classrooms. National humiliation is a popular topic in feature films, museum exhibits, romance novels, pop songs, patriotic poems, specialist dictionaries, pictorials and commemorative stamps. Since 2001, China has even had an official National Humiliation Day, which it celebrates each September. A popular historical atlas is entitled "Maps of the Century of National Humiliation of Modern China."

The Chinese Communist Party’s Propaganda Department thus has honed patriotic education into a multimedia campaign that ties patriotism very firmly to the party-state.

But it would be a mistake to conclude that pessoptimism is just propaganda used by the party elite to manipulate the people. These mixed feelings also grow out of a popular sense that China is coming into its own after over a century of being left out--and left behind. Rather than a rise and fall, Chinese people think that their country is--at last--experiencing a rise after a fall, a rejuvenation after a century of national humiliation.

Because Chinese people feel that their country is resuming its rightful place as a superpower at the center of the world, any criticism is seen as an obstacle to the PRC’s "inevitable rise." Although China’s leaders sound silly whenever they state that foreign critics have "hurt the feelings of the Chinese people," there is a grain of truth in this complaint. This mix of entitlement and righteous anger is very strong in China.

Pessoptimistic nationalism is thus continually produced and consumed in China in a circular process that knits together urban elites and rural peasants, northerners and southerners, government officials and the new middle class.

Yet this aggressive nationalism it is not the only way of understanding China’s past, present and future. Actually, "national humiliation" only became a key education and propaganda theme in the 1990s as a way to make rebellious students feel more patriotic after the June 4th massacre. Unfortunately, this tactical method of dealing with the communist party’s legitimacy crisis has become China’s most successful propaganda campaign.

The party-state’s policy thus both feeds into and grows out of pessoptimist feelings among ordinary Chinese. Patriotic education and popular opinion are interwoven, just as pride and humiliation are intertwined. China’s domestic politics are inseparable from its foreign relations in a way that intimately binds together national security with nationalist insecurities.

Here China is certainly not alone. The line between domestic and international politics is blurring in most places. Other countries also use national humiliation themes to understand national history and foreign relations: Serbia, South Korea and occasionally Russia.

The rise of pessoptimism in China is important not because China is unique, but because it is big--and getting bigger all the time economically, politically and culturally.

It is crucial to understand that China’s pessoptimism is fundamentally unstable, producing shifting feelings, which at any time could spill over into mass movements that target domestic critics, foreigners and even the party-state itself.

While it is necessary to welcome China into the international community and encourage more moderate voices in Beijing, the most important thing to recognize is that China’s pessoptimist nationalism is out of anyone’s control. Even mundane economic twists can provoke extreme reactions: when the value of China’s investment in the Blackstone Group tanked last summer, an influential Chinese blogger sensationally blamed greedy Westerners for looting China much as their ancestors had during the Opium War.

As the Olympics are showing, China’s leaders are able to control many aspects of Chinese society--even the weather. But beyond long-term education and media reform (neither of which is forthcoming), China’s leaders can’t control popular feelings.

During the Olympics we are certainly seeing much genuine happiness and gracious hospitality from Chinese people. But since China also has a huge chip on its shoulder, we need to be prepared for a harsh popular reaction whenever China hits a bump on its rocky road of political and economic change.

Perhaps American satirist Stephen Colbert said it best when he described China as a 'frenemy"--at least that’s how pessoptimistic Chinese see the rest of the world.

William A. Callahan teaches Chinese politics at the University of Manchester (UK). For those in southern California, Callahan will be giving a presentation at USC's US-China Institute on September 4, 2008.

Not the Best Day for the Big Red Machine...

2008-08-16T10:07:43Z

For all the Gold Chinese athletes have won so far in these games, yesterday had to hurt. First, in women’s gymnastics (or should that be, in China’s case, children’s gymnastics…?) the United States won Gold (Nastia Liukin) and Silver (Shawn Johnson) in the all around, making up for their humiliating loss in the team competition to China’s Pee Wee team the day before. But last night was even worse for the Big Red Machine. Traditionally, women’s volleyball has been one of the country’s strengths, and part of the reason for that strong tradition is a woman name Lang Ping, one of the best women volleyball players ever. Known as the “Iron Hammer” during her playing days, she led China to the gold medal in the LA Olympics 24 years ago, where they defeated the United States in the finals. Now, Lang Ping (known in the US as “Jenny” Lang Ping) is the coach of the US women, and last night, in an extraordinarily dramatic match, she led them to a five set victory over….China. This was a huge upset. The US women’s team hasn’t been in the top tier internationally in the last few years. And for the home team, the stakes were huge. China was one of the favorites, and they in particular did not want to lose to a US team coached by their former super star. How big was this match for China? Hu Jintao was there to watch. The US came from two sets to one down, on China's home court, to win. Amazing. Afterwards, Lang told a press conference that, “It doesn’t matter if we play China, if we play Cuba, if we play Russia. ``Every match is the same. I try to be concentrated on the game, not the emotions.” (The operative word there is “try”....) On the Chinese side, one player, Liu Yanan, said: “Lang Ping is the role model for every Chinese female volleyball player. However, we don’t have special feeling when we play against the United States. She’s now coaching the U.S. team and she has helped them improve and change their style. Still, we played without any special feelings.” And if you believe that, I’ve got a Forbidden City in the middle of Beijing that I can sell you for a really good price…

Gold for Gold: How China Rewards Athletes

2008-08-15T03:02:51Z

Honor used to be the primary drive for athletes in China. Of course there were material benefits such as housing and slightly higher salaries. But glorifying the motherland was the key motivation for sports professionals.

How things have changed. Now, Chinese Olympic gold medalists are rewarded gold, literally. A gold medalist will receive at least RMB3 million RMB (about USD 430,000) in monetary and housing benefits excluding the even more lucrative advertising gigs. If you are Liu Xiang, who wins a gold medal in an event that no Chinese has ever won, the official reward is RMB 1 million.

How does the reward work? Firstly, with multiple bureaucratic layers come with multiple rewards, from the central sports adminisatrion to the local government and local sports administration to even the neighborhood council. Property developer also jump at the chance to giftwrap free housing to athletes both as a reward and advertisement. The most quirky reward though is from a Hongkong tycoon whose fundation gives gold medalists 1 KG of gold and USD 50,000.

Of course, the pride and glory are still there. They just have a golden finish now.

Op-Ed Columnist: Where’s the Trauma and the Grief?

2008-08-15T16:17:02Z

There was no disguising the emotional resilience of the people in a village in China’s Sichuan Province, an area hit hard by the earthquake.

I’m Singin’ in Beijing

2008-08-15T00:12:54Z

The idea that appearance is valued more than performance is one of those painful facts of life that people always hate to be reminded of.

Learning English, Learning Chinese

2008-08-14T22:46:00Z

By David Porter

"We are very proud to be Chinese!"

"We welcome everyone to come to China!"

Judging from recent interviews on Beijing streets that have been broadcast in recent days by American TV and radio journalists, these two phrases and others like them have topped the list of essential greetings in the city-wide cram courses in Olympics English that have proven so popular over the past year or so. A bit hackneyed, perhaps, but telling in the striking combination of hospitality and nationalism that has characterized Chinese self-presentation from the opening ceremonies to the China-US men's basketball match-up.

The current craze for English in China, where seven-year olds study the language daily and charismatic English teachers, as reported in the New Yorker, achieve the status of rock stars, reflects both these impulses. To speak a foreigner's language, even if it is only a few phrases, is to show due respect to a friend come from afar. But it's also a sign of increasing confidence and worldliness of outlook, a reflection not so much of China's opening to the world (speaking of hackneyed phrases) as of the world, at long last, opening to China.

A Chinese journalist covering the Summer Olympics in Atlanta in 1996 would have had a considerably harder time turning up a local resident who could offer so much as a cliche of cosmopolitan hospitality in the journalist's native Chinese. There seems little doubt that America's declining stature on the world stage has more than a little to do with its schools' systematic failure to engage the language acquisition neurons of young students through sustained exposure to any non-English language, let alone Chinese.

There have, however, been some signs of change. In a country where Chinese is now the second most widely used foreign language after Spanish, 200,000 students are learning Chinese at 1000 colleges, 300 elementary and secondary schools, and 600 Chinese language schools across the United States. These numbers have been rising rapidly: from 1998 to 2002 (the most recent year for which the statistic is available), the number of college students electing Chinese as a foreign language rose by 20 percent; more recently, the number of K-12 students studying the language increased eight-fold between 2000 and 2007 to approximately 40,000.

In some regions, the rate of increase has been even more dramatic: the number of Connecticut public school students enrolled in Chinese language courses recently jumped from 300 to 3000 in three years. When the first College Board AP exam was administered in 2006, 3260 high school seniors sat for the exam nationwide. With increasing frequency, local and national papers carry stories of proud (non-Asian) parents showing off their children's Chinese language skills, acquired courtesy of private tutors or, increasingly, enlightened public school districts.

This growth has been supported by the US federal government, which has designated Chinese as a "critical language," and has awarded 90 percent of foreign language development grants under the National Security Language Initiative to Chinese language programs. Senator Joseph Lieberman recently proposed an additional $1.3 billion allocation to improve the instruction of Chinese language and culture in American schools. States have begun to jump on the bandwagon as well: a recent law passed in Utah stipulates that all public middle schools in the state require Chinese language instruction beginning in 2007.

Current enrollment numbers, while increasing, are still miniscule compared to the numbers of Chinese learning English, or indeed to the number of people learning Chinese across the world, which China's Ministry of Education currently places at 30 million, with a projected increase to 100 million by 2010. Since the HSK Chinese Proficiency Test began to be administered by the Chinese government in 1990, 350,000 students have taken the test, and the number of participants is growing at 30 percent per year.

These students have clearly taken to heart the kinds of greetings we're now hearing from the streets of Beijing, and they are, much to their credit, determined to respond in kind.

Beijing's Buildings Reflect Hierarchy Of Power

2008-08-07T14:28:00Z

The city's most recent additions remain controversial. To some, they are tributes to rising national power, glittering wealth and soaring ambition. To others, they are monstrous monuments to mindless vanity.

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Harmony and the Dream

2008-08-12T05:10:21Z

China’s rise is an example of how the ideal of a harmonious collective may turn out to be as attractive as the ideal of the American Dream.

From the Erotic Domain, an Aerobic Trend in China

2008-07-25T08:46:43Z

A growing number of Chinese women are experimenting with the country’s newest, and most controversial, fitness activity: pole dancing.

13 o’clock

2008-07-22T14:50:19Z

Those of us that learn Mandarin according to the Beijing standard typically learn the expression 二百五 pretty early. While it seems to be the innocent number “250,” it actually has a slang meaning: “stupid” or “idiot.”

Zhao Wei: 十三点

Those of us spending time in China’s south eventually come to a realization: you don’t hear 二百五 that much around here. What you do hear, especially in Shanghai, is 十三点 (”13 o’clock”). While it means basically the same thing as the north’s 二百五, it’s milder, often approaching something more like “silly” or “dopey” (in Chinese, 傻得可爱, or “cutely silly”).

Interestingly, Baidu Zhidao even gives us a poster child for the 十三点 look: a character once played by actress Zhao Wei (赵薇).

Baidu tells us that when it’s used between two people of the opposite sex, it’s often used in flirting (and most often comes out of the girl’s mouth).

As for origins of the expression, Baidu Zhidao gives us two main theories:

It’s a reference to an illegal move in a gambling game (6 and 7 can’t be played at the same time, and they add up to 13)
It’s a reference to an hour that traditional clocks do not strike (no military time back then!)

13 o’clock: the shirt!

I thought 十三点 might be a fun thing to put on a shirt (more fun than “250″ anyway), so I made this new one. I think it’s the kind of thing that laowai would enjoy wearing to see what kind of reaction it gets out of the Chinese, whereas the Chinese can’t fathom why a foreigner would possibly want to wear a shirt with that on it. (Good times all around!)

The Sinosplice shop has other conversation-starting Chinese-themed t-shirts.