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10 Oct 08
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I, for one, welcome all Kent Brockman allusions I am touched (sincerely) that a number of people have written in to explain that the headline I mentioned liking yesterday -- "I, For One, Welcome Our Chinese Banker Overlords" -- was based on a famous riff by Anchorman Kent Brockman on The... |
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09 Oct 08
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I will always find this topic interesting (language dept.) Air China night flight, Beijing to Seoul. Air crew is Chinese; passengers, mostly Korean. And the language I hear around me, as the flight attendants yell "You must sit down! Our airplane is taking off!" or ask "Do you want rice, or noodles?" ?Often those... |
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07 Oct 08
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Non-politics: Yellow Sheep River in Chinese As previously mentioned here and here, the Atlantic's October issue has an article I put a lot of effort and heart into. It was about an idealistic attempt to improve the prospects for children living in China's remote, scenic, and very poor far western... |
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29 Sep 08
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Something you don't see every day (Chinese leadership dept) It's not posted at the CNN archives site yet, but in a day or two look for and watch Fareed Zakaria's TV interview today with China's premier, or #2 leader, Wen Jiabao. (In the meantime, printed transcript is here.) Interview appearances by Wen or... |
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21 Sep 08
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Back to the future: Beijing after Sept. 20 I'm temporarily out of China, but like all other Beijing residents I am acutely aware that today is the day when all the Olympic/Paralympic "blue sky" rules come to an end. No more even/odd license plate restrictions on how many cars can drive each day.... |
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12 Sep 08
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The Palin interview It is embarrassing to have to spell this out, but for the record let me explain why Gov. Palin's answer to the "Bush Doctrine" question -- the only part of the recent interview I have yet seen over here in China -- implies a disqualifying lack of... |
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12 Sep 08
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Paradise Beijing I have a slight modification to propose to the International Olympic Charter. I suggest that the Olympics, and the Paralympics, be run back-to-back, nonstop, month after month and year after year -- and always in Beijing. It could be tough on the... |
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10 Sep 08
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Yellow Sheep River The new issue of the Atlantic is in subscribers' hands and up on the web. It includes my story on a touching and quixotic effort by two businessmen / idealists to bring the good parts of modern technology to a remote village in Gansu Province called... |
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09 Sep 08
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In which I reveal myself as Marie Antoinette (VPN dept) Through the past year-plus I've discussed several times the value of Virtual Private Networks, VPNs, for avoiding the hassles created by China's internet-control system generally known as the Great Firewall. I won't give one more plug for the for-pay... |
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25 Aug 08
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A farewell to 加油 It's the first day of the rest of Beijing's life. I have no further thoughts to offer about the Games and their aftermath, so I bid them adieu with these few notebook items. I also take leave of blog-land for the next week, because of (happy) family... |
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23 Aug 08
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Catching up on two Olympics points 1) Nationalistic coverage. Background: previous comments about the quite impressive Sino-centrism of what China Central TV chooses to broadcast.Right now as I type, some of the marquee events of track and field, on the last night of competition, are... |
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22 Aug 08
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Blue skies For the last week, Beijing's skies have been, mostly, glorious. I went for a long run this afternoon, and got sunburned while doing so, a risk I had not previously feared.Out the window todaySame window two weeks ago (and much of the preceding six... |
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21 Aug 08
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Media note Late Thursday night, Beijing time, I did an interview about the Olympics for the Lehrer News Hour show that I think will be shown early Thursday night US time. This was foreign-correspondentry from Ye Olden Days: hearing a question over the telephone,... |
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20 Aug 08
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Sincerest sign of gratitude for Beijing's new air For the first two days of the Olympics, things looked bad on the air front. Then after two big thunderstorms and the passage of a cold front, things have been nice! Confirming my oft-expressed optimism that it would all work out just in time.And after 25... |
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20 Aug 08
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On the ages of the female Chinese gymnasts I haven't watched any gymnastics, live or on TV; don't follow the sport; and have no opinion on how old members of various teams look and how much that matters.But this new post, from the Stryde Hax blog, does an impressive technical job of finding... |
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19 Aug 08
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Take me out to the ball game (Beijing version) Monday night fun, watching Team USA take on Team China at the Beijing Wukesong Olympic baseball field. The Olympic basketball stadium, which stands next door, is destined as a lasting addition to Beijing's sporting patrimony. The baseball field, like the... |
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18 Aug 08
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Saying something nice about CCTV As I've harped-on before, in posts to numerous to link to, China's state-run network CCTV has been unashamedly nationalistic in choosing which Olympic events to show. OK: most people watching are Chinese.But the play by play expert commentators seem... |
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18 Aug 08
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Biggest news of the Olympics for China: Liu Xiang is out Incredible. During the entirety of our past two years in China, Liu Xiang has been the face of the upcoming Olympic games. He is China's greatest-ever track and field athlete, defending Olympic gold medalist in the 110m hurdles, the man whose smile... |
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17 Aug 08
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Halfway through: #4 (and last for now) 4) The imposed order and absence of protests is creepy, to say the least. Before the Olympics, I had thought that the most likely way the whole event could go wrong would be this: Someone, somehow, was sure to mount a protest about Tibet, human rights, or... |
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17 Aug 08
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Halfway through the Olympics: #1 in a rapid-fire series 1) Never to be forgotten: It's good for the Chinese people and good for everyone else that the Olympics have overall gone as smoothly as they have -- air quality improving, no deal-breaking logistics problems -- and that so many Chinese athletes have done... |
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17 Aug 08
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Halfway through: #2 2) Medal counts, as discussed earlier. Both the "Chinese system" and the "US system" of national medal-ranking have obvious flaws. Chinese system = only gold medals matter. US system = all medals count the same. Obviously some "weighting" system would be... |
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17 Aug 08
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McCain and Pastor Rick Warren I didn't see Barack Obama's session with Rick Warren. Hey, I'm in China. Just now I saw that McCain session with Obama is being shown.McCain looks comfortable and is doing well. How do I square saying this with my argument in this recent article that he... |
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15 Aug 08
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The Olympics will have to take care of themselves for a while now... ... as actual work impends. Back home at 1:30am from the "afternoon" events. Tales of logistics nightmares, of a phenomenally clear, crisp, and beautiful Beijing day, of the true meaning of medal counts, and other such topics later on. The event... |
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14 Aug 08
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Am I the last person to know this? (Fuwa dept) We all know and love the Beijing Olympic mascots, the five Fuwa, right?
And I've known they had names. Bei-Bei for one, I think. Maybe Pan-Da for the black and white Fuwa? I haven't been quite sure...It turns out, thanks to my wife the linguist, that... |
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13 Aug 08
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More on Chengdu and collectivism A friend recently sent on quite an amazing blog post. It is a systematic, but funny!, examination of the "science" behind NYT column I was objecting to recently: David Brooks' claim that economic competition between China and America should really... |
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13 Aug 08
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Wednesday evening Olympics, in two parts The real BeijingBefore the Olympics began, one hypothesis for their outcome was "Potemkin Beijing." All the preparations would have worked so perfectly -- migrant workers dispatched home, construction sites completely finished or else covered with bunting... |
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13 Aug 08
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Two very eloquent articles about the people behind China's gold-medal run This wonderful article by Rebecca Blumenstein in the Wall Street Journal, about Chen Yanqing, a female Chinese weightlifter who is now a repeat Olympic gold medalist and part of the dominant Chinese weight squad I've been following on TV. The article was... |
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12 Aug 08
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David Brooks from Chengdu: my lord Some of his pensees:If you show an American an image of a fish tank, the American will
usually describe the biggest fish in the tank and what it is doing. If
you ask a Chinese person to describe a fish tank, the Chinese will
usually describe the context... |
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12 Aug 08
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Tuesday Olympic Notes - cont (Following items 1 - 3 here.)4. The mysteries of the Great Firewall Immediately before the Olympics, there of course was a flurry about whether or not the Chinese government would allow foreign visitors and reporters... |
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12 Aug 08
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Tuesday Olympic Notes - I 1. 北京加油! 空气加油!It's a nice day in Beijing today! Blue visible in the sky, for the first time in one week. It's warm but not sweltering. It actually feels, dare I say it, good outside. View at 4pm August 12:The traffic- and factory- shutdown... |
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12 Aug 08
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My gift to Olympic visitors: great web-based PDF map of Beijing English-language maps of Beijing are not so plentiful, so comprehensible, or so reliable that the existence of a good one should go unmentioned. Illustration: when my wife and I inquired at an official Olympic Visitors Center booth on Jianguo Lu... |
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12 Aug 08
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Non-Olympics, non-China: check out Josh Green's memo haul In case you have not seen any of the (deserved) zillion other references to this at various Atlantic sites, it is very much worth reading my colleague Joshua Green's new story about what went wrong with Hillary Clinton's campaign, and the trove of memos... |
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11 Aug 08
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Fun with mistranslation, cont. This follows the earlier "Chinglish" discussion here and here.1) The previous posts explored the puzzle of why Chinese organizations so cavalierly put English words on banners, menus, placards, annual reports, etc, without the slightest effort to find out... |
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11 Aug 08
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Your Olympic weather station Sunday morning, Beijing looked truly horrible -- here, courtesy of Isaac Kardon, is a screenshot of the CCTV Olympic commentators -- but this time the cause actually was "weather," that unmistakable pre-thunderstorm heaviness.
Around 5pm, the... |
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09 Aug 08
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Got Olympic Lane? A little while ago a visiting VIP remarked that traveling around Beijing had been surprisingly quick and easy, despite all the warnings he'd heard."By chance, were you in an official Olympic car?" my wife asked innocently.... As it happens, he... |
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07 Aug 08
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I don't get a chance to say this very often, so.... (compliment to GWBush) ... good speech by America's 43rd president in Thailand, before his arrival just now in China. Official text, opening jocularities and all, is here on WhiteHouse.gov.What made it good was that he emphasized the big picture -- that China, the U.S., and the... |
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07 Aug 08
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About those U.S. cyclists with gas masks I don't mean to judge them as people. They did the right thing in apologizing. But in wearing protective masks inside the Beijing airport they were acting like jerks.Photo by AFPI grant: these are athletes at the peak of their conditioning. But they can't... |
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07 Aug 08
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End of an era: last pre-Olympic snapshot Opening ceremonies tomorrow, August 8. This is the view as of 10am, August 7, from our same old window in the Guomao area of Beijing. I suspect that a lot of this actually is "mist," very high humidity, etc. That is, it can't be that much more polluted... |
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06 Aug 08
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Uncle! Or let's make that, 叔叔! In response to widespread popular demand, I will admit: screwed-up translations of Chinese into English can be very funny! The G-rated classic version is this one:
(That picture has been widely circulated; I found it here.) The R- and X- rated... |
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06 Aug 08
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Good to know (Olympic air dept). This is certainly a relief! Jacques Rogge et al set our minds at ease.
Full text of the story (from the state-controlled English-language official outlet) is here. It begins:Beijing's air does not pose any health risk for athletes, officials... |
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05 Aug 08
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Much nicer day today In contrast to yesterday's heart-sinking blear, today, August 5, three days before the opening ceremonies in Beijing, ended up very nicely! Jianwai Soho towers, from under the Guomao bridge, Beijing central business district, 6:30pm, August 5 2008:
As... |
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05 Aug 08
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I don't think "funny" translations are all that funny... ... my theory being, I am allowed to make fun of someone's translation of Chinese into English only when I'm ready to have a Chinese person make fun of my translation of English into Chinese. And I will never be ready to do that.On the other hand: If I... |
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04 Aug 08
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Unfortunate NYT lapse in Beijing Adam Minter, of the ShanghaiScrap blog (and an Atlantic author), has noticed a heartbreaking and consequential bit of sloppiness in a NYT report today out of Beijing. The Times quoted a Beijing resident on what is, given the attack on police in the... |
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04 Aug 08
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Four days to go Just back to Beijing after seven days in parts of China where the concerns are far more elemental than hosting a successful and "harmonious" Olympic event. (Eg, villages being inundated by new dams -- more another time.) Headed out right away for a... |
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30 Jul 08
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Chinese fender-bender, in five scenes After several days in the sticks, we drive through a county seat in western Sichuan province. Pass a scene we've come across many many times before -- huge throng of people crowding the street around what appears to be a traffic accident.
Scene 1: the... |
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28 Jul 08
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Why we want the Olympics to succeed After the jump, a message from a reader who makes very vividly a point that I've been trying to convey for quite a while. Namely, that it is in no one's interest for the Beijing Olympics to be jinxed, troubled, or in any other way "unsuccessful."I know... |
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27 Jul 08
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Newbie Kindle reactions (cont) 1) Whole different way of thinking about buying books:Sitting on the airplane at Newark airport Friday afternoon, getting ready for the 13-hour flight to Beijing. People are still trudging aboard, still OK to talk on the phone, chatting with a friend who... |
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27 Jul 08
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Sunday morning Beijing 8 am, July 27, 2008, looking south, twelve days until the opening ceremonies, one week into the big shutdown of factories in nearby provinces and traffic in Beijing.
I'm not sure how much of this is "mist," how much is simple moisture, how much is... |
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26 Jul 08
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Thirteen days to go Airport in Beijing: great! Arrive on international flight at Terminal Two (not the spectacular and imposing new Terminal Three) mid-day Saturday afternoon. No wait at passport station -- very short lines, no one seeming to have unusual delays or trouble... |
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25 Jul 08
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The report with two weeks to go I'll know for myself when I get off the airplane I'm about to get on, but Friday's reports from Beijing, where the Olympic Games begin two weeks from now, are ... challenging. The air is apparently not getting better, despite the big... |
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