Archive
December 8, 2004
I linked to some related information in my link blog, but now China Digital News links to a well-researched LA Times article confirming it: "China Fears a Baby Bust".
Having only one child is now widely accepted, especially among urban residents. In Shanghai, China's largest city, a recent government survey of about 20,000 young people found that more than 80% preferred to have just one child. Another 5% said they wanted no children at all.
My only beef with this article is that it probably should have been titled "Shanghai Fears a Baby Bust", as reporter Don Lee clearly did all of his research in Shanghai. It's really not honest to generalize to "China" fearing a baby bust, or to "urban residents" being especially reluctant to birth children. See here:
Guo, 33, comes from the southern province of Guangdong, where people tend to have larger families. But her husband is a native of Shanghai, and he's dead set against that. Part of it is social pressure, she said.
If you followed the link to related information, you'd see that the natural rate of growth in the registered population of Shanghai in 2004 was -3.24%, due to a high death rate and low birth rate. Of course, the city is still growing like mad due to domestic immigration.
[ Archived ]
December 14, 2004
Peter N-H of the Oriental List quotes a thread—that I can't find—on the Lonely Planet Thorn Tree about a new scam recently spotted on a bus to Anxi
:
Afterwards, and after a bit more shouting, the dodgy looking bloke pulls out a further wad of this foreign currency - which he apparently snaffled from the wallet - and everyone goes berserk, people are handing over RMB left right and centre, and we hear the word 'Singapore' mentioned several times, and one guy even sold his mobile phone in exchange for this foreign currency.
It turns out later that most of the people eagerly buying the worthless foreign currency are in cahoots with the seller, and a few unlucky stiffs end up handing over their RMB for Brasilian reales. Several times in China (lately just north of the Xinzhuang metro station, and also once in Mexico City) I've seen a dude playing the shell game—which cup is the pea under?—surrounded by obvious co-horts excitedly shoving money left and right in hopes of enticing a by-stander to throw in his own money. Every time, I wonder how naive one would have to be to be blind to the clear teamwork at play in that situation. But then, given my past history of being taken in on various occasions, I'm not one to talk.
[ Archived ]
December 19, 2004
Hey China web surfers! Remember back in the day when you could use the Google cache to get at web pages that may have been taken down, or to view the HTML versions of PDF files and Microsoft Word documents? And then, the authorities at the Great Fire Wall decided to block Google's cache service because it was being used to access blocked material? Well, thanks to a link I found in Isaac Mao's del.icio.us links, I think I've found a way to get this functionality back.
The very cool Harvard-Toronto-Cambridge OpenNet Initiative has published a bulletin revealing their finding that the Great Fire Wall blocks the Google cache by killing connections that request any URL containing the following string:
search?q=cache
Knowing this, and knowing a little bit about the way URLs work, it should be easy to formulate a URL that requests a page from the Google cache without using the aforementioned string.
The way I did this was to replace one of the characters in the string with its hex equivalent preceded by a percent sign. For example, q
has the hex value of 71, so that q=cache
can be replaced by %71=cache
. For example, I take the address of the cached copy of Google's own homepage:
http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:zhool8dxBV4J:www.google.com/+google
and change it to:
http://64.233.167.104/search?%71=cache:zhool8dxBV4J:www.google.com/+google
Readers in China, try it out: Google cache of the Google homepage.
[ Archived ]
December 22, 2004
I heard about this new book through the China Urban Planning Network mailing list:
Laurence J. C. Ma and Fulong Wu, eds. 2005. Restructuring the Chinese city: Changing society, economy and space. London and New York: Routledge. xv and 283 pp. Figures, tables and photos. Index. Hardbound, $132; 75 British pounds.
* Laurence J. C. Ma and Fulong Wu, Restructuring the Chinese city: Diverse processes and reconstituted spaces
* Carolyn Cartier, City-space: Scale relations and China's spatial administrative hierarchy
* Jianfa Shen, Space, scale and the state: Reorganizing urban space in China
* Anthony Gar-On Yeh, Dual land market and internal spatial structure of Chinese cities
* Alan Smart and Wing-Shing Tang, Irregular trajectories: Illegal building in mainland China and Hong Kong
* Piper Gaubatz, Globalization and the development of new central business districts in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou
* Tianshu Pan, Historical memory, community-building and place-making in neighborhood Shanghai
* Tingwei Zhang, Uneven development among Shanghai's three urban districts
* Huaiting Yin, Xiaoping Shen and Zhe Zhao, Industrial restructuring and urban spatial transformation in Xi'an
* Si-ming Li, Residential mobility and urban change in China: What have we learned so far?
* Youqin Huang, From work-unit compounds to gated communities: Housing inequality and residential segregation in transitional Beijing
* Weiping Wu, Migrant residential distribution and metropolitan spatial development in Shanghai
* Li Zhang, Migrant enclaves and impacts of redevelopment policy in Chinese cities
* Fulong Wu and Laurence J. C. Ma, The Chinese city in transition: Towards theorizing China's urban restructuring
Sounds intriguing.
Here Comes the Bus
I really liked the Liuzhou Laowai's latest post because it deals with a topic lose to my heart: public transportation!
Now I come to a little known fact about the Chinese language. Chinese has no word for 'full'. Actually, that is completely untrue, but the concept of fullness does not apply to buses. Bus drivers have 'fullness' surgically removed from their consciousnesses and traces of the word 'full' erased.
That is pretty descriptive of my bus ride home from work today (and most every day). I was able to hold my backpack in one hand and cellphone in the other hand on a lurching bus, because the crowd kept me standing up.
Researchers invented a machine for autistic people that presses them between two boards. The physical stimulation is soothing to them. Am I autistic for preferring the bus?
Hemlock Feed
A few weeks ago I put together an RSS feed for the Hong Kong weblog published by a writer pen-named "Hemlock". I don't believe I publicized it at all, so it's interesting to see that it already has two other Bloglines subscribers (and my Angry Asian Man feed has 3 other subscribers! All feeds I create are in the Wubi feed directory).
Potential subscribers keep in mind that this feed is scraped from a very messy page of HTML, so sometimes the entry-separating algorithm chokes and Bloglines records an entry twice. In other words, it's not a perfect feed, but it works!
[ Archived ]
December 23, 2004
Your snowboarding vacations to Mammoth are being paid for through sheer geographical accident by the sweat, blood and suffering of these people.
(I link to these because this time EastSouthWestNorth at least attributes the photographs, if vaguely; they have been whirling around the Chinese BBS's
.)
[ Archived ]
December 25, 2004
It seems like people are reacting positively to EastSouthWestNorth's series of photos that he calls "Humanizing China". The series has three parts so far, titled Survival, Relationships and Desires.
Turning into my grumpy old man mode, if there's anything I think there is too much of in this world, it's positivity. So let me give an alternative and perhaps more cynical interpretation of this series in the context of its publication to a non-Chinese audience.
The first series of photos, which even I reiewed positively, I would re-title as "Work". I think this series of photos was the most striking and humanizing of the three. Why? Because the people in the photographs are working, taking on a challenge in order to survive. And this is the most universal human experience, struggling to survive. People from any country should be able to appreciate these photographs, and draw common connections between themselves and the subjects.
The second series of photos is ineffective because the photos do not keep close enough to the theme of relationships.
The third series of photos is largely disappointing because I feel it does the least for "humanizing" the subjects. For the most part, the photographs are of people doing distinctly culturally Chinese activities; so sure, there may be a lot of emotion communicated to a Chinese audience, but it does nothing to humanize the subjects when viewed by weblog readers coming from other cultural backgrounds. For them, the subject of the pictures will be foreign and distant because of their own ignorance of the cultural context for the photos.
Finally, why do I enclose in quotes the word "humanizing" in the previous paragraph? Because I find that idea to be a little insulting: why do Chinese people need humanizing? It seems like some more thought could have been put into the title. Something like "drawing connections" or "the billion faces of China".
[ Archived ]