Hiding in Words

The Olympic opening ceremony took place on August 8, in Beijing. That huge event was considered a splendor by many spectators.

This opening ceremony could be such an amazing show not only because Beijing has spent a really large amount of cash, but also something was faked in it and, fortunately, not many people paid attention on those frauds. Besides, money wasn’t the only sacrifice paid for this national show-off.

Liu Yan (刘岩) used to be a well-known dancer in China, but not now. “Due to a mishandling of supporting platform, which caused early exit of the equipment than expected, dancer Liu Yan fell from the height of nearly 3 meters, resulting in serious injury of the actress. Liu Yan has paid irreversible price …”, thus said the official statement of situation. [Source]

The truth is, a successful award-winning female dancer was nearly killed in the rehearsal of opening ceremony due to bad organization and man-made fault. With half of her body paralyzed, she is no longer able to do what she loves so much. She’s even not able to walk. Even if the officials have recognized her great sacrifice for the honor of the nation and Olympics, this is too expensive a price to pay.

On the Olympic opening show, a cute little girl in red had given an terrific reverie to all Chinese people who have gone through the days of red patriotism by singing an Ode to the Motherland(歌唱祖国). The moment was really perfect when Lin Miaoke (林妙可) sang with an impressive big smile on her face.

And again, that is not true. Truth is, Lin didn’t sing at all, the sweet voice wasn’t hers and belongs to another equally lovely little girl — Yang Peiyi (杨沛宜). Yang wasn’t chosen for the camera, because she doesn’t look as pretty (really?). And “Yang hadn’t been chosen out of the consideration of international image (of the government), (such arrangement or fraud) is in the interest of the State.” [Source] Holy crap, this is the most stupid excuse I ever heard. And such fake singing, according to a 2005 State Council regulation, shall be subject to severe administrative punishment.

Meanwhile, the foot-shaped fireworks weren’t real either. On the screen, you could see 29 feet exploding over Beijing, and truth is, only the last one was really shot and broadcasted on TV, all other 28 images were created by computer. And the fake-up took almost one year to make the images look perfectly “real” on screen. Wasting most of the preparation efforts made by the fireworks crew. [Source]

P.S. This is another questionable detail, how can you play a piano and make the music heard like this? Was Lang Lang really playing or not? (I don’t know much about piano, so, please correct me if I’m wrong.) (Merci, Véro!)

P.P.S. A came across a meaningful argument [:)]: If someone doesn’t look good enough should not appear on the screen for the sake of State interest, former president Jiang and his plain-looking wife should be kept away from the camera.

I am somewhat inclined to mess up all the stuff by forgetting it. When there are too many things to do, this inclination is likely to give me huge collateral damage. So I came to own several notebooks to write down all the tasks on hand. And the new problem is, I always forget on which notebook I wrote something important.

You might be familiar with similar situation, at least second-handedly. As a joke goes, Little Jackie always forget what he has planned to do. So he writes everything down on a notebook. So, last night little Jackie wrote on his notebook, “remember the milk”. And this afternoon, he utterly had no idea what to buy when he entered the near-by store. He did get nervous, because he believed the notebook was with him. And the notebook was not there.

To remind yourself about the milk and other more import stuff, try ,,Remember the Milk” instead of a notebook.

There are many to-do-list tools available on the web, and RTM is not the best one. But it is the most convenient and it adds up new features all the time. Another excellent online task manager is Mangbar, a Chinese website, and English version is also available.

Mangbar does have strong functionality, and is especially suitable for teamworking. You can have “projects” hosted on Mangbar, and projects are further divided as “tasks”, which consists of “steps”. For each project, you can upload pics, docs, notes and share all that stuff with your collegues online. This is really magnificent and all too great, useful and complicated for remembering daily tasks. Remember the Milk is just great enough, quite lite-weight and utterly easy to use. More importantly, RTM provides a lot of considerate features allowing you to sync with your mobile phone and keep all the important things on mind.

The most useful stuff for me, is the service for Gmail (actually it is a Firefox addon, so you need to use Gmail and Firefox.). When you open Gmail, RTM will be loaded on the right side of the interface of Gmail. Now, I can see all the tasks I need to do while I read emails. Keeping everything on mind, and remember the milk. Now I can always stay organized, (or at least pretend to be organized.)

This is how it looks like when RTM for Gmail add-on is installed in Firefox

On the website of the Government of Sichuan Province, where a ruthless great earthquake happened on May 12, there used to be a piece of news saying that a local government of Ngawa Prefecture (阿坝州, near the epicenter of this big quake) successfully tracked and stopped the rumor in Barkam County (马尔康县) that “There would be an earthquake in the coming days.”

After the earthquake, heated debate aroused around the early signs and predictions of the earthquake. And this news, was quietly removed from the government website.

I wrote a posting on my Chinese blog quoting the tracking of “rumors”, and was ordered to be deleted by the Web police.

There has been signs of “uncensored” reporting and more space of free speech right after the earthquake happened. And the modern communication technologies such as the Internet and text messages helped a lot in the enhancement of the space of free speech. And the government and government-backed “mouthpieces” were really swift in responding to the catastrophe.

And quickly, the Propaganda Section of “the” Party followed in to restrict the media the second day. A friend of mine works at a renowned newspaper in Southern China, and he said, he “saw the photocopy of the document ordering to stop independent reportage and to quote ‘the truth’.”

Now, on China’s TV, you can only see a lot of information. But the highlight is on high-officials like Wen speaking slowly on getting “complete success in the relief effort” (and Hu talks even slower than Mr. Wen, the Premier), despite the innumerable deaths lying quietly in the debris. Like the government media have done in every natural and man-made disaster, every effort and every success are interpreted as the result of sticking to the party-line.

There are three exhibitions right now in the nearing Today Art Museum. The museum is quite near, I can walk there in minutes. The exhibitions are Hei Feng: Pay Honour to the Past and Future, “Love You” by Jan Peter van Opheusden and the Interrelated Horizon.

Pay Honour to the Past and Future

Hei Feng was born in the western province of Gansu of China in 1965. He studied Chinese drawing at university and went to America where he kept his art career as a painter.

There are paintings as well as sculptures in this show. And the most eye-catching is this bull. This dog and the flying men (angels?) over head are also very common. This is the head of the bull:

And, this is the other side:

Look into the anus, you can see communities, cars and walking people inside.

These two following paintings shows the once sensational news stories: the nail house, when the house owner opposed government-backed re-construction movement; and paper baozi, when bad restaurant owners fill waste paper in baozi, a popular steamed food :

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In China, there are 56 (this number is disputed by some) officially recognized ethnic groups, or nationalities in the government vocabulary. You can hardly state the country is a “nation state”. However the majority of the population is Han people; and many of them are totally unaware of the existence of other ethnic groups.

In the Chinese language (which is actually the language of Han people, the ethnic majority), the language is known as 汉语 (language of Han people) or 中文 (language of China). 中文 is the more preferred word in most cases, and 汉语 is generally used when then other ethnic groups in China are mentioned in the context. In this sense, the language of the ethnic majority is understood to be the language of the whole country, and naturally, the existence of other languages and cultures on the same territory are forgotten. In Japanese and Korean languages, similar unawareness also exists. The language of Han Chinese is called 中國語 (language of China), suggesting this language is the one and only language that is spoken in China. The good news is the media are more aware about the cultural diversity in China after recent Tibetan protest (in some cases violence), although this is largely due to the ethnical conflict nature of the series of protests. For example, in the coverage of CNN and French magazine Le Point, ethnicities of Han, Hui and Tibetan are especially noted.

A friend of mine is of Mongolian origins. She had some difficulty in introducing herself to foreigners: apparently she looks Chinese. Being raised in the city, she is quite modernized and she largely thinks, lives and does everything the same way other people do (most of them Han Chinese). Most Mongolian people who grow up in the city don’t speak Mongolian any more. I believe other ethnic minorities would have similar sad language transition as well.

The government policy to keep everyone equal is setting up autonomous regions. The government and many other people think this is a good idea to preserve cultural diversity and protect ethnic minorities. Ironically, Indian reservations in the United States are interpreted as restriction over the freedom of Native Americans by Chinese government. In the five autonomous regions and many other autonomous cities and towns in China, languages of the ethnic groups other than Han are used equally in government agencies and courts. Education for minority ethnic groups is given in their languages. In the street, signs and shop advertising are made bilingual. But this equality between cultures is only made available in those autonomous regions (mostly poor and underdeveloped) and not in other area in China.

To make a real equality between ethnic groups, it would be ideal that all the attempts of ethnic equality are made in all places in China. When a Tibetan or Mongolian needs public service in a mostly-Han area, he or she should be given language service and be treated equally, and vice versa. The “vice versa” thing is really not kidding. I know in many minor crimes, ethnic minorities would be less punished than Han Chinese.

The biggest problem is that the Chinese government is cocky about the GDP it achieved by raising land price and totally indifference about equality of ethnic groups, respecting different religions and freedom of the Chinese people (including ethnic minorities and Han Chinese).