# Την ίδια ώρα, στην Κίνα...



## Costas (Feb 4, 2009)

Στις αρχές Δεκεμβρίου 2008 κυκλοφορεί στην Κίνα η Χάρτα 08, πρωτοφανής για τα εκεί πράγματα έκκληση για κατάργηση του μονοκομματικού κράτους. "Χάρτα 08", κατά τη "Χάρτα 77" των Τσεχοσλοβάκων.
Δύο μήνες μετά, το έγγραφο έχει κυκλοφορήσει ευρύτερα και έχει υπογραφεί και από ανθρώπους έξω από τον γνωστό κύκλο των αγωνιστών για τα ανθρώπινα δικαιώματα. Άρθρο της Washington Post.

Θα ακολουθήσουν σίγουρα πολλά ακόμα επεισόδια.


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## Costas (Mar 21, 2009)

Κάποιοι άνθρωποι έχουν πολύ κουράγιο. 20 χρόνια μετά την αιματηρή καταστολή του φοιτητικού κινήματος στο Πεκίνο, ένας 40άρης που ήταν τότε στρατιώτης στέλνει μέσω ίντερνετ ανοιχτή επιστολή στον πρόεδρο της Κίνας Χου Τζιν-Τάο, και... υφίσταται τις συνέπειες.


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## Costas (Apr 14, 2009)

75χρονος ανακοινώνει στο ίντερνετ ότι θα πάει να φροντίσει τον τάφο τού Τζάο Ζιγιάνγκ και ξυλοκοπείται ανηλεώς από μπράβους του καθεστώτος μέσα στο νεκροταφείο (τον πέταξαν μέσα σ' ένα χαντάκι. Πώς δεν τον έθαψαν ζωντανό κιόλας!). Από τη New York Times.


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## Costas (Jun 6, 2009)

Αντιδρώντας στο όργιο λογοκρισίας της κινεζικής κυβέρνησης ενόψει της 20ής επετείου της βίαιης καταστολής του φοιτητικού κινήματος στην πλατεία Τιανανμέν του Πεκίνου στις 4 Ιουνίου 1989, ορισμένοι κινεζικοί ιστότοποι, για να διαμαρτυρηθούν πλαγίως, έκλεισαν "οικειοθελώς" επί 3 ημέρες, π.χ. από 3-5/6, κηρύσσοντας "Ημέρα Συντήρησης Κινεζικού Διαδικτύου" ! Ένα παράδειγμα, από το wordku.com. (Μετά το σημείο όπου δίνεται η περίοδος 6/3-6/5, ακολουθεί σε εισαγωγικά το "Ημέρα Συντήρησης....")

Ταυτόχρονα, καλά (ή μάλλον: καλύτερα, πια) κρατεί, απ' ό,τι φαίνεται, και μέχρις αποδείξεως του εναντίου, και μεταξύ της φοιτητικής νεολαίας η άποψη που διατυπώθηκε από πολλούς από την πρώτη στιγμή, ότι δηλαδή η ευόδωση του φοιτητικού κινήματος του 1989 θα έφερνε στην Κίνα χάος και μια κατάρρευση τύπου Σοβιετικής Ένωσης, με συνακόλουθη ακύρωση της οικονομικής της ανέλιξης, και ότι η επιδίωξη της πολιτικής ελευθερίας εξυπηρετούσε σε τελευταία ανάλυση τις ΗΠΑ και τη Δύση, ενώ η καταστολή του δημοκρατικού φοιτητικού κινήματος επέτρεψε στην Κίνα να ακολουθήσει ανεμπόδιστη, στα πλαίσια ενός "πολιτικού προστατευτισμού", το δρόμο προς την οικονομική της ανόρθωση. Ρεπορτάζ της Asia Times.


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## Costas (Jun 8, 2009)

Το παρακάτω βέβαια δεν αποτελεί είδηση, αλλά αποτελεί αναμφισβήτητα μια σπαρταριστή έκφραση αθέλητου αυταρχικού χιούμορ. Το θέμα είναι ο τρόπος εκλογής του επόμενου Δαλάι Λάμα (τα έντονα δικά μου):

China has already positioned itself in other ways, including enacting a law in 2007 that says *all reincarnations of senior lamas must be approved by the government*.

Από άρθρο της New York Times.

Σημ.: Δεν πιστεύω στη μετενσάρκωση.


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## Costas (Jun 20, 2009)

Άρθρο της Guardian για μια εργαζόμενη σε μπαρ καραόκε που μαχαίρωσε θανάσιμα κομματικό στέλεχος που προσπάθησε να τη βιάσει. Αθωώθηκε από το δικαστήριο.


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## Costas (Jun 24, 2009)

Επίσημη αναγγελία τής (εδώ και μήνες συντελεσμένης) σύλληψης του Λίου Ξιαομπό, βασικού συντάκτη της Χάρτας 08 (βλ. προγενέστερη ανάρτηση στο παρόν νήμα), από τις κινεζικές αρχές. Κατηγορίες: πρόθεση ανατροπής του σοσιαλιστικού κράτους κττ. Ο δικηγόρος του δεν τον έχει δει ακόμα.


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## drsiebenmal (Jul 7, 2009)

Καλημέρα Κώστα!

Τι παίζει εκεί με τους Ουιγούρους;


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## Rogerios (Jul 7, 2009)

drsiebenmal said:


> Καλημέρα Κώστα!
> 
> Τι παίζει εκεί με τους Ουιγούρους;



Επισημαίνω απλώς ότι το άρθρο στο οποίο παραπέμπει ο δρ έχει ένα "λαθάκι", δεδομένου ότι αναφέρει το Xinjiang σαν πόλη, ενώ πρόκειται για αυτόνομη περιφέρεια (που περιλαμβάνει τα εδάφη που ιστορικά ονομάζονταν Ανατολικό ή Κινεζικό Τουρκεστάν), πρωτεύουσα της οποίας είναι το Ürümqi ή, για τους Ουιγούρους, Ürümçi (όπου και έχουν ξεσπάσει οι ταραχές). 

Δεν νομίζω ότι η παρούσα αναταραχή αποτελεί έκπληξη (αν θυμάστε άλλωστε και πριν από τους Ολυμπιακούς του Πεκίνου οι κινεζικές αρχές ανέφεραν ως υπ' αριθ. 1 κίνδυνο για "τρομοκρατικές επιθέσεις" τους Ουιγούρους αυτονομιστές, είχαν μάλιστα προβεί και σε συλλήψεις). Το αυτονομιστικό κίνημα των Ουιγούρουν φαίνεται σαν φυσική αντίδραση ενός λαού που βρίσκεται στη συγκεκριμένη περιοχή εδώ και 1200 τουλάχιστον χρόνια και ο οποίος αισθάνεται ότι καταπιέζεται και κινδυνεύει να καταλήξει μειονότητα στην ίδια του την πατρίδα (η δημογραφία του Xinjiang ή Σινκιανγκ, όπως το ξέραμε παλιότερα, έχει μεταβληθεί δραματικά τα τελευταία 50 χρόνια: στην πρωτεύουσα Ürümqi ο πληθυσμός είναι κατά το 75% Κινέζοι Χαν, και το υπόλοιπο ποσοστό μοιράζεται μεταξύ Ουιγούρων, Χούι (δηλ. κινέζων μουσουλμάνων) και Καζάχων (http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ürümqi.).


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## Costas (Jul 8, 2009)

Καλησπέρα. Να επισημάνω ότι το άρθρο που λίνκαρες, Δόκτωρ,αποδίδει ως *Τουρκογενής* το turkic, υποθέτω, που μας είχε απασχολήσει παλιότερα.


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## Costas (Jul 8, 2009)

Εν τω μεταξύ, οι Χαν αντεπιτίθενται. Άρθρο της Guardian με πολύ εύγλωττο βίντεο.

But witnesses described vicious and apparently indiscriminate attacks on Han
Chinese people, although substantial numbers of Uighurs and other ethnic
minorities were also injured.

Crowd members today told the Guardian that they believed Uighurs were coming
back to attack them.

A respectable-looking middle-class woman carried a plank with a nail
sticking out of it; a young woman in a colourful, patterned top and white
diamante mules clutched a piece of metal pipe. A father held his young son
in one hand and a length of wood in the other.

Αυτή δε τη φορά, είχαμε όχι το νεαρό απέναντι στο τανκς του 1989 αλλά τη γυναίκα με την πατερίτσα απέναντι στο τεθωρακισμένο. Χαμός. Συγκρούσεις μεταξύ εθνοτήτων. Ό,τι χειρότερο γενικώς, και, απ' ό,τι λέει το άρθρο, οι χειρότερες διεθνοτικές συγκρούσεις από καταβολής ΛΔΚ.


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## Costas (Jul 14, 2009)

Ό,τι καλύτερο έχω διαβάσει αυτές τις μέρες για τα εθνοτικά προβλήματα της σύγχρονης Κίνας γενικά, και για τη δήθεν μονολιθική πλειοψηφία των Χαν, με αφορμή τα οχλοκρατικά γεγονότα στο Ουρουμτσί. Εξαιρετικό άρθρο του Dru C. Gladney στη Wall Street Journal.

Να και ένας διαδραστικός χάρτης της NYT για τις εθνικότητες (στον οποίον οι Χαν αντιμετωπίζονται ως ενιαίο σύνολο).


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## Costas (Jul 24, 2009)

Και ό,τι προσωπικότερο έχω διαβάσει για την 4η Ιουνίου. Δεκαεννιά Ημέρες.


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## Costas (Jul 28, 2009)

*Τα φυσικά όρια του κυνισμού*

Εργάτες σκοτώνουν το γενικό διευθυντή ιδιωτικής εταιρείας της Κίνας, όταν αυτός τους ανακοίνωσε ότι θα απολύονταν 25000 από τους 30000 εργαζομένους στο εργοστάσιο (χαλυβουργεία). Άρθρο της Guardian.


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## Costas (Nov 3, 2009)

Με αφορμή μια συζήτηση για τα επίπεδα του ρατσισμού στις διάφορες χώρες, ορίστε από Κίνα (άρθρο της Guardian):

China's black pop idol exposes her nation's racism
Contestant on Shanghai TV talent show draws barrage of internet abuse because of her skin colour


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## Costas (Nov 11, 2009)

Κι άλλος θάνατος από υπερβολική κατανάλωση αλκοόλ στην Κίνα, όχι κάποιου μπεκρή αλλά ενός επισήμου, καθότι το βαρύ πιοτό και οι "άσπροι πάτοι" στη διάρκεια επαγγελματικών γευμάτων είναι must εκεί. Από την Guardian:

Third Chinese official dies from excessive drinking
Deaths highlight ritualised role alcohol plays in business and government circles in China


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## Costas (Nov 25, 2009)

Άλλος ένας από τους συνυπογράψαντες τη Χάρτα 08 (βλ. αναρτήσεις #1 και #7), ο Φενγκ Τζενγκχού, υφίσταται τις συνέπειες: δικηγόρος και ακτιβιστής, τον έπιασαν στο τράνζιτ του αεροδρομίου της Σαγκάης, όπου είχε φτάσει από τις ΗΠΑ, και, μετά από πολύωρη πάλη, κατάφεραν να τον επιβιβάσουν με το ζόρι σε πτήση με κατεύθυνση την Ιαπωνία. Έκτοτε ζει στο τράνζιτ του αεροδρομίου της Ναρίτας, σε ιαπωνικό έδαφος, τρώγοντας ρύζι, καθότι οι Γιαπωνέζοι αρμόδιοι του αεροδρομίου δεν του παρέχουν τροφή. Παραιτήθηκε από τη χρήση της βίζας που διέθετε για την Ιαπωνία, αρνείται να δηλώσει πολιτικός πρόσφυγας και διεκδικεί το νόστο του. Νέου τύπου ανιθαγένεια...


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## Costas (Nov 26, 2009)

*Νεκρολογία ενός μεταφραστή*

Του πιο θρυλικού. Από την Guardian.

*Yang Xianyi obituary*
Distinguished translator of Chinese classics jailed during the Cultural Revolution

When they came during the Cultural Revolution to take away Yang Xianyi, China's distinguished translator who has died aged 94, he had one regret – that he was hauled off to prison, accused of being a British spy, in his old slippers. "My only thought at that time," he would recall, "was 'why didn't I change into proper shoes?'" Slippers were not the best footwear for four years (1968-72) in jail. It was typical of Yang not to make too much of his ordeal. He belonged to a generation of Chinese intellectuals who had chosen to support Mao Zedong's New China only to suffer for it in the extremism of the chairman's last years. Rather than rage against fate, those who survived would take refuge in humour and self-deprecation. Yang did so with a characteristic charm that concealed personal tragedy: his son became mentally disturbed after being sent to a factory during the Cultural Revolution and later committed suicide.

Yang came from a typical scholar-gentry family of the late Manchu dynasty: his father was head of the Bank of China in the city of Tianjin, 80 miles south-east of Beijing, where he was born. He was educated at home by a tutor in the Chinese classics before attending a missionary school in one of Tianjin's foreign concessions. Yang devoured English literature from Joseph Addison to Oscar Wilde: while still at school he turned John Milton into classical Chinese verse. Also enjoying Athenian drama in translation, Yang resolved to go abroad to study ancient Greek and was taken to London by an English teacher at his school.

Admitted to Merton College, Oxford, he studied classics for two years and then shifted to English literature with the poet Edmund Blunden, whose tutorials with him usually finished in the pub. More significantly, he met Gladys Tayler, the daughter of missionaries in China, at the Oxford China Society.

With Gladys's help, he translated the lyrical poem Li Sao by Qu Yuan (4th century BC) into English heroic couplets in the style of John Dryden. The couple returned to China in 1940 and married in the wartime capital of Chongqing, working as teachers and translators in the Chinese Nationalist area. After the defeat of Japan they moved to Nanjing.

Horrified by the violence of the Chiang Kai-shek regime, Yang joined the underground, passing on information gleaned from foreign diplomats. Ironically it was because of this pro-communist activity that, 20 years later in the Cultural Revolution, he would be labelled an anti-communist "foreign spy" . Though Yang and Gladys were offered seats on a plane to Taiwan when Chiang's government fled in 1949, it never occurred to them to leave. By 1952 they had joined the Foreign Languages Press in Beijing, in charge of an ambitious project to translate all the most important works of Chinese literature into English. The Yangs' approach was faithful to the originals but always expressed in readable language. Their output over the years amounted to more than 60 titles: tens of thousands of foreign students of Chinese, from then till today, have relied on their work.

The best-known titles include The Courtesan's Jewel Box (vernacular tales from the 10th to 17th centuries), the Qing dynasty novel The Scholars, and Selected Stories by the modern writer Lu Xun. Yang also translated many foreign classics into Chinese – including Homer's Odyssey and Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion – but the Chinese authorities regarded this dismissively as his "private enterprise".

After being released from detention, in 1972 the Yangs were allowed to complete their translation of the most famous novel of all, the 18th-century Dream of the Red Chamber, but still lived under a political cloud.

I first met Gladys and Yang in April 1976, during the last turbulent months of Mao's life, in their dark apartment which could be reached only by clambering around piles of coal and cabbages. Loudly, Yang denounced "that woman" — Madam Mao, who was then staging a final bid for power. Gladys gestured towards the probably bugged telephone, crying out: "Do shut up, old man, or we'll go back to jail!"

But after Mao's death it was his wife and her associates in the Gang of Four who were jailed, while the authorities apologised to the Yangs for their "unwarranted arrest" 10 years earlier. Yang now became chief editor of the monthly Chinese Literature magazine and launched a new series of translations under the Panda imprint – modelled on Penguin paperbacks.

During the 1980s, their apartment became an informal salon where a new generation of Chinese writers and western journalists could meet, usually over a bottle of scotch. Encouraged by the new mood of political reform, Yang even joined the Communist party. In 1987 the party old guard hit back, sacking the reform-minded leader Hu Yaobang, and paving the way for the bloody events around Tiananmen Square two years later. When the crisis came, Yang decided he could no longer shrug politics aside. "I could at least speak through the foreign TV and newspaper correspondents to the people outside China and tell them the true situation," he recalled in his autobiography White Tiger (2000).

His message was that what had happened was "a fascist coup engineered by a few diehards against political reform". In a BBC interview after the massacre during the night of 3-4 June, Yang declared that the party leaders were even worse than past Chinese warlords or Japanese invaders. The authorities, probably deterred by Yang's age and reputation abroad, left him at liberty, and after a vain attempt to persuade him to recant they merely expelled him from the party.

In 1994, Yang and Gladys moved into the Beijing Friendship hotel, where they remained in quiet retirement till Gladys's death in 1999: Yang then lived peacefully with his daughter Yang Zhi and her husband David, in their courtyard house north of the Forbidden City.

In 1993 Yang had been awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Hong Kong, where he was praised as a "master translator". His worldwide reputation was never quite matched at home, but in September this year he received a lifetime award from the Translators' Association of China. When he retired, Yang penned a short punning couplet to sum up his life: "The bright youngster may not become a genius: muddle-headed in middle age, he is shameless – or toothless – when old" (the two adjectives in Chinese have the same sound). "Chinese intellectuals over the past century," Yang added in a wry footnote, "have been mostly like this ... it is just the way things are".

Though there was historical truth in Yang's judgment, it was too hard on him personally. Committed to revolutionary China for all its faults, he and Gladys made a huge intellectual contribution and, when it really counted, he did speak out. He is survived by two daughters and four grandchildren.

• Yang Xianyi (or Hsien-yi), translator, born 10 January 1915; died November 23 2009


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## nickel (Nov 26, 2009)

Συναρπαστικό, ευχ! Μήπως έχεις διαβάσει την αυτοβιογραφία του; Μπαίνω σ' έναν πειρασμό.


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## Costas (Nov 26, 2009)

Όχι, άλλωστε δεν τον γνώριζα καν.

Να και μια δεύτερη νεκρολογία, με πρόσθετες βιογραφικές λεπτομέρειες, όπου μαθαίνουμε, ας πούμε, πως είχε δύο "μητέρες", πως από το Κομουνιστικό Κόμμα Κίνας δεν μπορείς να αποχωρήσεις αλλά μόνο να διαγραφείς..., και επίσης πώς να αποχαιρετάς τη νεκρή σου γυναίκα μ' ένα Χαίρε Ποτέ γραμμένο σε αρχαία γλώσσα εν έτει 2000.

Από την Independent:

*Yang Xianyi: Translator who fell foul of authority during the Cultural Revolution*

Yang Xianyi, who has died in Beijing aged 93, was a distinguished literary translator remarkable for the range of his work. He was also a principled and patriotic intellectual who managed to retain wit, integrity and a sense of fun, even in the most difficult days of the Maoist period.

In the West he is best known for translations of Chinese literature into English. With his wife, Gladys Yang (see the Independent obituary of 1 December 1999), he published English versions of a great range of Chinese literature from the past two millennia. Among the most memorable of these are Records of a Historian, a selection from the historian Sima Qian, who died around 85AD; The Courtesan's Jewel Box: Chinese Stories from the Xth to the XVIIth Centuries, a collection of lively stories from the Ming Dynasty; and the great Qing dynasty novels, Dream of Red Mansions and The Scholars. Their Selected Works of Lu Xun made the greatest writer of China's early 20th-century literary renaissance available in English.

Yang Xianyi also worked to make western classics available to Chinese readers, producing translations of Homer's Iliad, Aristophanes' Birds and La Chanson de Roland as well as plays by Synge and Shaw. The Yangs contributed directly and indirectly to the development of Chinese studies in the West as generations of China scholars benefited from their scholarship and their generous hospitality.

Yang was born to a wealthy banking family in the westernised port city of Tianjin. As his father died when he was five, two formidable women, his father's principal wife and a younger concubine who had given birth to him, brought him up. He addressed both as mother. As the only boy in the family, he was indulged and protected. He received a largely traditional education from private tutors until he was 12, when his birth mother finally managed to persuade the senior wife that he should be allowed to attend school. A missionary foundation, the Tianjin Anglo-Chinese College, was selected. On the advice of his teachers there, he went on to higher education at Oxford University, where he became engaged to Gladys Tayler, the university's first graduate in Chinese.

Yang returned to China with Gladys in 1940 and spent the war years teaching in the interior of China where many intellectuals had fled from the Japanese occupation. Life was not easy for them. Their left-wing sympathies sometimes got them into trouble; Yang's family had lost its money and academic salaries were low. After the war, they made the journey down the Yangzi to Nanjing on an overcrowded wooden junk. Their possessions were lost when the baggage junk sank but they arrived safely with their two young children.

After the establishment of the People's Republic in 1949, Yang Xianyi was at first treated by the new government as an honoured intellectual. However, his many foreign contacts and his tendency to speak too frankly made him vulnerable in an increasingly conformist climate. By the mid-1950s he had been demoted. He and Gladys had had great hopes of the new communist regime and they continued generally to speak in its favour while sometimes voicing reservations. Like other cadres of the new state they worked an eight-hour day, six days a week, a fact that perhaps partly explains their extraordinary productivity.

As salaried workers for the Foreign Languages Press, the Yangs sometimes lacked control over what they translated. In addition to their translations of the classics and of many of the best-known modern Chinese writers, they also had to waste their talents on propaganda literature of little merit. In his spare time, Yang wrote many introductory articles about western literature for newspapers and journals that now needed cultural and educational material to meet new policies, penned satirical verse for his friends, and also produced his translations of western classics. They also continued with extraordinary courage to read, think and discuss freely, faithful to the liberal intellectual tradition they had both embraced.

The Cultural Revolution brought catastrophe. Criticised and ostracised by his colleagues, Yang Xianyi suffered a breakdown and began to hear voices. This, he was later to insist, had been his worst time. In 1968, he and Gladys were arrested and held without news of each other or the outside world for four years. Apparently, he felt less pressure in this period, resigning himself calmly to his fate and living from day to day. Later, he described episodes in his prison life such as the races he and his cell-mates organised between the bedbugs with which their sleeping platform was infested.

On their release, the Yangs took up the threads of their old lives again. Once again they were generous hosts to the many friends, Chinese and foreign, who ate, drank, and talked at their house every evening. Paid back-dated salary for their years in prison, they were able to acquire their first fridge and to help writers and artists who could not sell books or pictures in the still repressive cultural climate. In 1979, they were deeply grieved by the suicide of their son, who had become mentally ill during the Cultural Revolution, but they took pride and pleasure in the achievements of their daughters and grandchildren. They enjoyed the more lively and critical writing that began to emerge in China after the death of Mao and they helped and encouraged many young writers. As editor of the journal Chinese Literature, Yang published translations of the more lively and critical writing that began to emerge in China after the death of Mao. He also established an English language paperback series, Panda Books.

He was able to go abroad again for the first time since 1940 and the couple were invited to universities in Europe, Japan and India. They became hopeful once more about the future for China and in this spirit of optimism Yang applied for and was granted membership of the Communist Party in 1985.

In the spring of 1989, Yang voiced his support for the peaceful student demonstrations in interviews with foreign journalists. A few months later he was enraged and horrified by the Tiananmen massacre. Having denounced the suppression in telephone interviews with foreign broadcasting stations on 4 June, he went into hiding for a couple of weeks. Later that year, when things had settled down a little, he attempted to leave the Communist Party. He was amused to be told that resignation was not permitted but that he would be expelled. His refusal to recant won him great respect among younger intellectuals.

From the early 1990s, Gladys's health gradually deteriorated. Yang cared for her until her death in 1999. Yang Xianyi lived out his last years surrounded by loving family in his daughter's house. His enormous gift for friendship survived and when he could talk of things that interested in him his vitality revived. But he missed Gladys. His fine poem of farewell to her, written in classical Chinese, "I thought that you and I would fly away together but you have gone before..." expressed his own readiness to die. He is survived by two daughters and four grandchildren.

Delia Davin

Yang Xianyi, literary translator and writer; born Beijing 10 January 1915; married Gladys Tayler (died 1999; one son deceased, two daughters); died Beijing 23 November 2009.

Κάτι που δεν μπορώ να μην παρατηρήσω είναι πώς ο Δυτικός Τύπος προβάλλει συστηματικά στους τίτλους, όταν βιογραφεί, τις διώξεις στην περίοδο της ψευδώνυμης Πολιτιστικής Επανάστασης και γενικά την πολιτική διαφωνία. Ωστόσο, ειδικά στην Πολιτιστική Επανάσταση κυνηγήθηκαν πάμπολλοι άνθρωποι, πολλοί από τους οποίους ήταν στυλοβάτες του καθεστώτος ή απλώς νομοταγή όργανά του. Οι διώξεις είχαν τον αυθαίρετο χαρακτήρα των σταλινικών διώξεων της περιόδου 1936-37 στη Σοβιετική Ένωση. Επομένως δεν αποτελεί κανέναν τίτλο τιμής να έχεις διωχθεί τότε, απλώς προσωπική τραγωδία. Πολύ πιο σημαντικό στοιχείο, πολιτικά, είναι η πολιτεία κάποιου σε πιο νορμάλ περιόδους, μεταξύ των οποίων και το 1989 και τα γύρω από αυτό. Μια άλλη περίοδος, ας πούμε, που θα ήταν πολύ πιο σημαδιακή για το πολιτικό στίγμα ενός ανθρώπου σαν τον Γιανγκ, και που θα άξιζε να ερευνηθεί το πώς φέρθηκε τότε, είναι η περίοδος των Εκατό Λουλουδιών και οι μετά από αυτήν διώξεις εναντίον όσων διανοουμένων γελάστηκαν από τις προτροπές του καθεστώτος και άνοιξαν το στόμα τους κι άρχισαν να διατυπώνουν κριτικές, για να κατηγορηθούν αμέσως μετά ως "δεξιοί", με αποτέλεσμα να υποστούν διώξεις για τις οποίες, αντίθετα απ' ό,τι για τις κατά μια δεκαετία μεταγενέστερες διώξεις επί Πολιτιστικής Επανάστασης, δεν έχουν αποκατασταθεί έως τώρα, παρά τις εκκλήσεις τους. Από τη σιωπή των δύο νεκρολογιών συνάγεται ότι τότε ο Γιανγκ δεν διατύπωσε κριτικές, οι οποίες κριτικές μάλιστα τότε γίνονταν με πνεύμα όχι αντικαθεστωτικό αλλά εποικοδομητικής κριτικής προς το καθεστώς, στα πλαίσια μιας ψυχολογίας ανάλογης, υποθέτω, με την προσχώρηση του Γιανγκ στο ΚΚΚ το 1985.
Και όμως, οι πηχυαίοι τίτλοι και των δύο νεκρολογιών αφορούν τις αυθαίρετες, τυφλές διώξεις της Πολιτιστικής Επανάστασης.
Γενικότερα, και όχι αναγκαστικά στις συγκεκριμένες νεκρολογίες, είναι χαρακτηριστικό το πόσο η πολιτική διάσταση δεσπόζει στον τρόπο που τα Μέσα (και ο κόσμος που επηρεάζεται από αυτά ή τα χρησιμοποιεί για να δικαιώσει τις δικές του προκαταλήψεις) ζωγραφίζουν τις προσωπικότητες που ζουν σε μη φιλελεύθερες χώρες, και κυρίως εκτός Δύσης. Οι σχέσεις πλήθους Δυτικών διανοουμένων, καλλιτεχνών κλπ. με τις δυτικές εκδοχές του ολοκληρωτισμού (φασισμός, ναζισμός, κομουνισμός, σαχισμός) θεωρούνται "γνωστές" και τελικά θίγονται λιγότερο απ' ό,τι το τι έκανε (κάνει) ή είπε (λέει) ο τάδε καλλιτέχνης ή η δείνα διανοούμενη στην Κίνα ή στη Ρωσία. Ο Τζανγκ Γιμόου είχε πει κάποια στιγμή ότι για να πάρει Κινέζος σκηνοθέτης βραβείο σε Δυτικό φεστιβάλ πρέπει η ταινία του να έχει οπωσδήποτε αντικαθεστωτικές νύξεις, πραγματικές ή κατά φαντασίαν· αλλιώς, όσο καλή κι αν είναι η ταινία, αποκλείεται. Το ποιες είναι οι πολιτικές πεποιθήσεις και πράξεις ενός Δυτικού καλλιτέχνη, αντιθέτως, ελάχιστα απασχολεί τον Τύπο, εκτός κι αν εκείνος/η αποφασίσει να τις κάνει γνωστές, η δε πειθήνια λειτουργία ενός ατόμου με βάση τις επιταγές της αγοράς δεν θεωρείται πολιτική δήλωση.


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## nickel (Nov 26, 2009)

Ναι, ξέρουμε ότι τα αυταρχικά καθεστώτα διώκουν καμιά φορά τα καλύτερα παιδιά τους. Συμφωνώ με την πρώτη μεγάλη ενότητα, και θα είναι ένα συναρπαστικό στοιχείο της αυτοβιογραφίας αν μπαίνει σε λεπτομέρειες. (Τα δεύτερο που με θέλγει είναι, βέβαια, η σχέση με τις γλώσσες.) Στη ράχη του βιβλίου αναφέρεται στις «surreal experiences» που είχε στη διάρκεια της Πολιτιστικής Επανάστασης.

Δεν συμφωνώ ωστόσο με τη δεύτερη μεγάλη ενότητα, αν και δεν θα ήταν σωστό να αναπτύξουμε αυτό το θέμα στο ίδιο νήμα. Δεν έχουμε αυτό το φαινόμενο στη Δύση όταν δεν έχουμε αντικαθεστωτικούς. Ωστόσο, αντικαθεστωτικό ανεβοκατεβάζανε τον Χάβελ, αντικαθεστωτικοί είναι κατά κάποιον τρόπο ο Μάικλ Μουρ ή ο Όλιβερ Στόουν.


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## Costas (Nov 26, 2009)

Συμφωνώ να μην το αναπτύξουμε. Με δυο λόγια, αυτό που θέλω να πω είναι ότι, όταν κάποιος, ιδίως "διανοούμενος", ζει σ' ένα πολιτικά αυταρχικό καθεστώς, αναρωτιόμαστε πιο συχνά (ανοιχτά ή από μέσα μας): "τι έκανες εσύ όταν αυτά κι αυτά συνέβαιναν γύρω σου;". Όταν, αντιθέτως, ζει σ' ένα πολιτικά πιο φιλελεύθερο καθεστώς, δεν τον ρωτάμε το ίδιο συχνά (ανοιχτά ή από μέσα μας) το ίδιο πράγμα, παρά μόνο αν αυτός/ή αποφασίσει να θέσει το ζήτημα. Αν πάλι είναι π.χ. ηλεκτρολόγος-μηχανολόγος, θέτουμε πιο σπάνια το ίδιο ερώτημα. Αυτά όμως είναι εν πολλοίς δύο μέτρα και δύο σταθμά. (Over)

Υ.Γ. Και μόλις τώρα πήγα στη Γουικιπήντια και είδα πως He narrowly escaped being labeled a "rightist" in 1957-58 for his frank speaking.


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## Costas (Dec 1, 2009)

*35 νεκροί, 58 λαδωμένοι*

Δηλαδή, σε κάθε 1 νεκρό αντιστοιχούν 1,65 λαδωμένοι για το κουκούλωμα: τοπικοί άρχοντες, επιθεώρηση εργασίας, αστυνομία, δημοσιογράφοι. Μιλάμε για διαφθορά! Ποια Ελλάδα;...

Από τη New York Times.

Μια ταινία που εξέταζε αυτό το ζήτημα από μιαν άλλη σκοπιά (αρκετά μακιαβελική) ήταν το 盲井 (Máng jǐng, Μανγκ τζινγκ, Τυφλή γαλαρία, Blind shaft, 2003), του αξιόλογου σκηνοθέτη 李扬 Lǐ Yáng, Λι Γιανγκ.


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## Costas (Dec 7, 2009)

*M. Butterfly γιοκ στη Σαγκάη*

Από την Telegraph.


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## Costas (Dec 7, 2009)

Το ανεξάρτητο κινέζικο σινεμά έχει τώρα σπίτι: Dgenerate Films (incl. ψηφιακό κατέβασμα επί χρήμασι).


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## Costas (Dec 7, 2009)

Τοπικές εκλογές στην Ταϊβάν: το (φιλοανεξαρτησιακό) Δημοκρατικό Προοδευτικό Κόμμα (DPP) ξαναπαίρνει τα πάνω του. Από την Taiwan News.


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## Costas (Dec 10, 2009)

O Liu Xiaobo (βλ. #7) θα προσαχθεί σε δίκη για τη Χάρτα 08 (βλ. #1, #7 και #17). Από τη New York Times.


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## Costas (Dec 14, 2009)

Υπεράσπιση της πολιτικής του ενός παιδιού ανά γυναίκα της Κίνας, από νεοσυντηρητικούς, με μαλθουσιανά επιχειρήματα, με την ευκαιρία της συνόδου της Κοπεγχάγης (η συντάκτρια προτείνει υιοθέτηση του μέτρου απ' όλα τα κράτη του κόσμου).


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## Costas (Dec 23, 2009)

Δικάστηκε μέσα σε μια μέρα (ψεκάστε, σκουπίστε, τελειώσατε) ο συγγραφέας, αγωνιστής των ανθρώπινων δικαιωμάτων, συντάκτης της Χάρτας 08 και όμηρος του κινεζικού κράτους Liu Xiaobo (βλ. αναρτήσεις #1, #7, #17, #27). Στη γυναίκα του δεν επιτράπηκε να παραστεί στη δίκη (έχει να τον δει από την Πρωτοχρονιά του 2009). Μάξιμουμ προβλεπόμενη ποινή: 15 χρόνια. Είναι 55 χρονώ.


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## Costas (Dec 25, 2009)

Καταδικάστηκε ο Liu Xiaobo σε 11 χρόνια. Δύο άρθρα από τη New York Times, ένα πριν από την έκδοση της απόφασης [1] και ένα μετά [2].
Ο συνδυασμός του πιο μακρόβιου ασιατικού δεσποτισμού με την ιδεολογία του μονοκομματικού κράτους που δώρισε στην οικουμένη ο κ. Ουλιάνοφ είναι, προς το παρόν, αχτύπητος. Ο κόσμος χρωστάει πάντως ένα άγαλμα στον Μιχαήλ Γκορμπατσόφ.


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## panadeli (Dec 29, 2009)

Costas said:


> Υπεράσπιση της πολιτικής του ενός παιδιού ανά γυναίκα της Κίνας, από νεοσυντηρητικούς, με μαλθουσιανά επιχειρήματα, με την ευκαιρία της συνόδου της Κοπεγχάγης (η συντάκτρια προτείνει υιοθέτηση του μέτρου απ' όλα τα κράτη του κόσμου).



Έχει κάποιες αδυναμίες το συγκεκριμένο άρθρο, αλλά η βασική ιδέα είναι αναμφίβολα σωστή. Το πιο φλέγον ζήτημα της εποχής μας είναι ο υπερπληθυσμός και η απουσία του από την ατζέντα της Κοπεγχάγης είναι κραυγαλέα. Και δεν βοηθάει καθόλου να βαπτίζουμε "νεοσυντηρητικούς" όσους στρέφουν την προσοχή στον μεγάλο ροζ ελέφαντα που όλοι οι υπόλοιποι δεν θέλουμε να βλέπουμε.

Η τρέχουσα αύξηση του ανθρώπινου πληθυσμού σε παγκόσμιο επίπεδο δεν μπορεί να συνεχιστεί για πολύ ακόμα. Με τους τρέχοντες ρυθμούς ο πληθυσμός διπλασιάζεται κάθε 35-40 χρόνια περίπου. Με άλλα λόγια, αν ο τρέχων ρυθμός διατηρηθεί, το 2050 ο πληθυσμός της Γης θα φτάνει τα 10-12 δισεκατομμύρια, το 2100 θα ξεπερνά τα 20, και το 2200 θα ξεπερνά τα 100. Αυτό πολύ απλά δεν μπορεί να συμβεί, οπότε η αύξηση του πληθυσμού θα μηδενιστεί, κατά πάσα πιθανότητα μέσα στον αιώνα που διανύουμε. 

Το μοναδικό θέμα είναι _πώς_ θα μηδενιστεί. Με μείωση του ρυθμού γεννήσεων (δηλ. με "τεχνητούς" τρόπους όπως ο έλεγχος γεννήσεων που εφαρμόζει η Κίνα); Ή με αύξηση του ρυθμού θανάτων (δηλ. με "φυσικούς" τρόπους όπως οι θάνατοι από πείνα, ασθένειες και πολέμους);

Για όσους δεν αποδέχονται την πολύ απλή μαθηματική αλήθεια που κρύβεται πίσω από όλα αυτά, προτείνω μια διάσημη διάλεξη του Albert A. Bartlett




Η διάλεξη είναι κομμένη σε 8 μέρη στο youtube. Για τη συνέχεια ανατρέξτε εκεί.


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## Costas (Dec 29, 2009)

Αμέλησα να βάλω και τον αντίλογο ή, αν θες, την αρνητική όψη της κινεζικής λύσης, δηλ. τα φοβερά προβλήματα που έχει δημιουργήσει η πολιτική αυτή στην ίδια τη χώρα, με πρώτο-πρώτο έναν εφιαλτικό υπερπληθυσμό των αντρών σε σχέση με τις γυναίκες. Ιδού ένα άρθρο (με ανακρίβειες, πάντως, bon pour les Etats-Unis), από το Far Eastern Economic Review:

China's family planning goes awry

Υ.Γ. Μήπως η λύση θα έρθει με τη φυσική μείωση των γεννήσεων δια του εκσυγχρονισμού; "Βλέπετε περισσότερη τηλεόραση / περνάτε περισσότερες ώρες στο κομπιούτερ";  Ή μήπως με τη μαζική μετανάστευση σε άλλα ουράνια σώματα;


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## panadeli (Dec 29, 2009)




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## panadeli (Dec 29, 2009)




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## panadeli (Dec 29, 2009)

Costas said:


> Υ.Γ. Μήπως η λύση θα έρθει με τη φυσική μείωση των γεννήσεων δια του εκσυγχρονισμού; "Βλέπετε περισσότερη τηλεόραση / περνάτε περισσότερες ώρες στο κομπιούτερ";  Ή μήπως με τη μαζική μετανάστευση σε άλλα ουράνια σώματα;



Το πρώτο εφαρμόζεται ήδη. Για το δεύτερο δεν βλέπω να προλαβαίνουμε.

Η λύση της Κίνας έχει τις (σοβαρές) δυσκολίες της, αλλά τουλάχιστον είναι μια χώρα που έχει σταματήσει πια να αγνοεί το πρόβλημα. Εδώ εξαντλούνται και όσα καλά έχω να πω για το κινέζικο καθεστώς.

Ως λύση, ο έλεγχος των γεννήσεων δημιουργεί προφανή βραχυπρόθεσμα προβλήματα, όπως η μείωση του εργατικού δυναμικού και η επακόλουθη ανάγκη τροποποίησης των ορίων συνταξιοδότησης, που τόσο συζητείται στις μέρες μας. Αν θεωρούμε όμως αυτά τα προβλήματα τόσο σοβαρά, τότε τι άποψη έχουμε για τις εναλλακτικές επιλογές της πείνας, της λειψυδρίας, των ασθενειών και των πολέμων;


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## drsiebenmal (Dec 30, 2009)

...σε κάποιο παράλληλο σύμπαν, εγκαινιάστηκε η ταχύτερη σιδηροδρομική σύνδεση στον κόσμο...


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## Costas (Jan 19, 2010)

*Ο Gao Zhisheng νεκρός;*

Ο αυτοδίδακτος δικηγόρος Gao Zhisheng (Γκάο Τζ-Σενγκ), 44 χρονών, άλλοτε κατά την κινεζική κυβέρνηση "ένας από τους 10 καλύτερους δικηγόρους της χώρας", που είχε απαχθεί από την κινεζική ασφάλεια στις αρχές του 2009 και που ως το Σεπτέμβρη ήταν ζωντανός, ενδέχεται να είναι πια νεκρός.

ChinaAid
Economist
Independent

Βιογραφία του, από τη Wikipedia.


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## Costas (Feb 12, 2010)

Η έφεση του Liu Xiaobo (βλ. παραπάνω αναρτήσεις #1, 7, 17, 27, 29, 30) απορρίφθηκε και το δικαστήριο διατήρησε την πρωτόδικη ποινή (11 χρόνια). Άρθρο της New York Times.


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## Costas (Feb 13, 2010)

Η δήλωση του Liu Xiaobo στην πρώτη του δίκη, και ταυτόχρονα μήνυμα αγάπης προς την απούσα από την αίθουσα γυναίκα του. Από την Guardian.


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## Costas (Mar 1, 2010)

Συνέντευξη με τη γυναίκα του εγκάθειρκτου Liu Xiaobo, ποιήτρια Liu Xia, από την Guardian.

"I'm not so interested in politics and I don't have much hope of changing society… I seldom read what he writes. But when you live with such a person, even if you don't care about politics, politics will care about you."

"After so many years of reading, I had already experienced other lives – more extreme experiences, such as that of the Jews [in the Holocaust]. I have come across disappearance, worries and pain in other lives. So when it happened, I simply considered it another book to read."

_Despite her fears, she chose to say nothing when he became more involved [with Charter 08]_. "Later I thought, people have only one chance at their life. That's what he chose, so let him live by his choice,"_ she says._

_Others, including former dissident and Czech president Vaclav Havel – a principal drafter of Charter 77, which inspired Liu Xiaobo — have supported his nomination for the Nobel peace prize.

"China has no 'dissidents'," said foreign ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu when asked about the case. "There is only the difference between criminals and those who are not criminals."_
[Σ.Σ.: Όπως το Ιράν δεν έχει ομοφυλόφιλους, κατά τον πρόεδρο Αχμαντινετζάντ...]


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## LostVerse (Mar 28, 2010)

Κινέζικη εταιρεία εξαγοράζει ευρωπαϊκή. Να και κάτι που δεν το βλέπουμε κάθε μέρα... Σημεία των καιρών; 



> Σε Κινέζους η Volvo
> ΔΗΜΟΣΙΕΥΘΗΚΕ: Κυριακή 28 Μαρτίου 2010
> Τελευταία ενημέρωση: 28/03/2010 18:24
> 
> Στην μεγαλύτερη κινεζική ιδιωτική εταιρία κατασκευής οχημάτων Zhejiang, Geely Holding Group, πουλήθηκε η Volvo από τη Ford αντί του 1,8 δισεκατομ.δολαρίων. Η πώληση της Volvo στην κινεζική εταιρία σηματοδοτεί την άφιξη της Κίνας ως άλλης μεγάλης ισχύος στον τομέα της βιομηχανίας αυτοκινήτου διεθνώς.



Συνέχεια: http://www.tanea.gr/default.asp?pid=2&ct=2&artId=4567294


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## Costas (Mar 29, 2010)

Και διαβάζω γι' αυτήν στη Wikipedia ότι είναι αμιγώς ιδιωτική εταιρεία, σε αντίθεση με τη Lenovo, π.χ.


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## Costas (Mar 29, 2010)

Ο δικηγόρος Gao Zhisheng (Γκάο Τζ-Σενγκ) (#37) εθεάθη (ή μάλλον ηκούσθη) πάλι. Από την NYT.


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## Costas (Mar 31, 2010)

Μεγάλη ιντερνετική αντίδραση προκάλεσε η ανακοίνωση σχεδίων της κυβέρνησης να αλλάξει (απλουστευτεί) η γραφή 44 χαρακτήρων, από τους 3500 βασικούς που έχει η γλώσσα. Άρθρο από τη France 24.


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## Costas (Apr 9, 2010)

Το τσίρκο της λογοκρισίας του διαδικτύου στη ΛΔΚ. Άρθρο της ΝΥΤ
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/08/world/asia/08censor.html

Δείγμα:
Jiaozuo, a city southwest of Beijing, deployed 35 Internet commentators and 120 police officers to defuse online attacks on the local police after a traffic dispute. By flooding chat
rooms with pro-police comments, the team turned the tone of online comment from negative to positive in just 20 minutes.


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## Costas (May 23, 2010)

*Swingers sent to jail in China for orgies and wifeswapping parties*

Πανεπιστημιακός ο εγκέφαλος, παρακαλώ. Από την Guardian.

(...)
Sexologist Xue Fulin, deputy chairman of the China Sexology Association, told the newspaper an overhaul of sex laws was needed.
His team had turned to Marx and Engels for guidance, collecting 152 relevant quotes. "As the theoretical basis of the Communist party of China, Marxism is able to guide us through everything. Sexology is no exception," he added.


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## nickel (May 23, 2010)

Costas said:


> His team had turned to Marx and Engels for guidance, collecting 152 relevant quotes. "As the theoretical basis of the Communist party of China, Marxism is able to guide us through everything. Sexology is no exception," he added.


Πολύ θα 'θελα να τα έβλεπα αυτά τα τσιτάτα. Το πρώτο είναι το «Προλετάριοι, ενωθείτε»;


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## Costas (May 23, 2010)

Να ένα, γλυκύ βραστό:

Der gesellschaftliche Fortschritt lässt sich exakt messen an der gesellschaftlichen Stellung des schönen Geschlechts (die Hässlichen eingeschlossen). - Ο Marx στον Ludwig Kugelmann, 12 Δεκέμβρη 1868

Κι άλλο ένα, πολλά βαρύ και όχι:

Ich küsse Dich von Kopf bis Fuß, nicht Liebe für das Proletariat sondern die Liebe für Dich macht einen Mann wieder zum Mann. (Ο Marx στη γυναίκα του Jenny von Westfalen)


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## Costas (May 28, 2010)

*Δεσμεύομαι ότι δεν θα αυτοκτονήσω*

Σύμφωνα με πληροφορίες, η διεύθυνση της εταιρείας [Foxconn Technology] έλαβε ήδη μέτρα: ζήτησε από τους υπαλλήλους της να δεσμευτούν γραπτώς ότι δεν θα αυτοκτονήσουν και ότι θα δεχθούν ψυχιατρική θεραπεία «αν η κατάσταση της σωματικής ή διανοητικής τους υγείας δεν είναι φυσιολογική».

Ταυτόχρονα δίχτυα ασφαλείας απλώθηκαν γύρω από κτίρια για την αποτροπή αλμάτων στο κενό.

Από το in.gr.

Υπάρχει βεβαίως και η περίπτωση των αυτοκτονιών της France Telecom, για να μην ξεχνιόμαστε.


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## Costas (May 29, 2010)

*Απεργία στην Honda Κίνας*

Η καρδιά του βιομηχανικού προλεταριάτου χτυπάει στην Κίνα (ό,τι κι αν σημαίνει αυτό):

Honda has an annual capacity of 650,000 cars and minivans in China, like Jazz subcompacts for export to Europe and Accord sedans for the Chinese market. Because Honda’s prices in China are similar to what it charges in the United States, the cars tend to be far out of reach financially for most of the workers who make them.

Από τη ΝYT.


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## Costas (Jun 2, 2010)

Απονομιμοποίηση ομολογιών που αποσπώνται με βασανιστήρια. Από τη NYT.


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## Costas (Jun 3, 2010)

Η απεργία στη Honda, στο Foshan, συνεχίζεται. Από τη NYT.

Besides complaining about their pay, Honda¹s striking workers complain about
a wage gap: the company¹s Japanese employees in China are paid about 50
times what local Chinese workers receive.


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## drsiebenmal (Jun 4, 2010)

:) Ε, συγχαρητήρια στον νηματανοίξαντα! Μιλιούνια καραβάνια να κρέμονται από το στόμα σου...


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## Costas (Jun 5, 2010)

Μερσί μεσιέ! :)


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## nickel (Jun 5, 2010)

Θέλουμε και ηχητικό ντοκουμέντο σε πρώτη ευκαιρία!


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## Costas (Jun 5, 2010)

Εντάξει, Θεού θέλοντος!


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## Costas (Jun 14, 2010)

Πορτρέτο του εργάτη που άρχισε την απεργία στο εργοστάσιο της Honda στο Foshan, άρθρο για την απεργία στο εργοστάσιο κλειδαριών της Honda στο Τζονγκ-σαν, και 5 γνώμες πανεπιστημιακών και συγγραφέων για τα εργατικά στη σημερινή Κίνα.
Και τα τρία από τη NYT, πολύ ενδιαφέροντα.


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## Costas (Jun 16, 2010)

Οι μισθολογικές διεκδικήσεις στο Ηonda Lock συνεχίζονται (ΝΥΤ).


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## Costas (Jun 18, 2010)

Πέρα από τις made in China βουβουζέλες, και επειδή παίζει στις οθόνες μας αυτές τις μέρες (από Global Times):

Alongside many traditional World Cup partners and sponsors such as Visa, Coca Cola and McDonald's, Chinese solar company Yingli Green Energy, based in Baoding, Hebei Province, has tapped into the soccer spectacle to raise its brand's profile.

The company also built the first carbon-neutral commercial display in the World Cup at the Soccer City stadium in Johannesburg, introducing its products and brand to fans and the public.

"The World Cup offers an international platform to publicize our corporation," said Liu Yaocheng, vice president of Yingli Green Energy. "Letting more international companies and consumers become familiar with our brand is our goal."

As the first green-energy company to sponsor the FIFA World Cup, the amount of Yingli's endorsement of the event is unknown, but "tier one" sponsorship is reportedly above $100 million. And the newcomer's appetite is not only for this year's World Cup.

"We will keep on sponsoring various international sporting events, not only the World Cup, to promote our brand awareness," Liu said, revealing that after the World Cup the company will estimate the brand awareness and recognition worldwide in order to evaluate the effects of the sponsorship.

Though the return on its investment is yet to be known, Liu believes the advertisements attract "all foreign audiences' eyes, even when only the Chinese characters for the firm's name, "中国英利" appear on the football field."

Το 中国英利 λοιπόν αυτό, όσοι παρακολουθούν Μουντιάλ θα το 'χουν δει.


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## Costas (Jun 22, 2010)

*Φτάνει πια καρχαριόσουπα*

Ελπίδα για τους καρχαρίες στο βάθος του τούνελ; Η σούπα από πτερύγια καρχαρία, πιάτο εκ των ων ουκ άνευ στα κινέζικα γαμήλια γεύματα, αρχίζει, λέει, δειλά-δειλά να γίνεται out στο Χονγκ-Κονγκ. Το δε Χονγκ-Κονγκ είναι ο φάρος της Κίνας σε θέματα λαϊφστάιλ. Εν τω μεταξύ, ο πληθυσμός κάποιων ειδών καρχαρία υπολογίζεται πως έχει μειωθεί κατά 90%. Από τη ΝΥΤ.


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## Costas (Jul 17, 2010)

Πρωτότυπη περφόρμανς. Έχει ενδιαφέρον ότι τον επαναφέρει "στην τάξη" η δημοτική αστυνομία, την ίδια στιγμή που πίσω, στο βάθος της φωτογραφίας, στέκει ανενόχλητη μια διαφημιστική γιγαντοαφίσα, μια περφόρμανς του εμπορεύματος.


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## Costas (Jul 21, 2010)

Από το Registration Agreement δημόσιου φορέα (www.chinesetesting.cn):

The user must:
1. Have the following equipment: one set of personal computer, one modem and necessary devices for accessing to the Internet;
2. Have access to the Internet and pay the telephone charges related to such service.
(...)

IX. User Administration

The user shall be independently responsible for the information he/she published. The use of services by the user must conform to provisions of national laws, local regulations and international law standards applicable to the services. The user undertakes:

(1) He/she will conform to relevant laws and regulations in China (see the appendix on some regulations) when publishing information on web pages of the website or using services provided by Chinese Testing International; and he/she will not produce, reproduce, publicize or disseminate the following information on web pages of the website or by using services provided by Chinese Testing International:
(a) Information violating the basic principles determined in the constitution;
(b) Information endangering national security, disclosing national secrets, subverting national regime, or undermining national unity;
(c) Information damaging national honors and benefits;
(d) Information instigating ethnic hatred and ethnic discrimination, or undermining ethnic unity;
(e) Information violating the state's religious policies, or advocating heathenism and feudal superstition;
(f) Information dispersing rumors, disturbing social order, or undermining social stability;
(g) Information spreading obscenity, eroticism, gambling, violence and terrorism, or abetting crimes;
(h) Information insulting or slandering others, infringing upon legal rights and interests of others;
(i) Information instigating illegal gathering, organization, march and demonstration, or gathering a crowd to disturb the social order;
(j) Information about illegally carrying out activities in the name of nongovernmental organization;
(k) Information covering other contents banned by laws and administrative regulations.

:)


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## Costas (Jul 26, 2010)

Για τους κοινωνικούς ανθρωπολόγους μας:

Professional Mourners in Chongqing and Chengdu (από το danwei.org)


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## Costas (Jul 27, 2010)

*Οι Κινέζοι ψάχνουν τους Καλάς τους*

Chinese archaeologists' African quest for sunken ship of Ming admiral
Search for remains of armada which came to grief on a pioneering voyage to Kenya 600 years ago

Από την Γκάρντιαν


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## Costas (Jul 31, 2010)

Μισές αλήθειες και σοφιστείες της υπουργού Εξωτερικών της Κίνας Fu Ying σε συνέντευξή της με τη γερμ. εφημερίδα Die Zeit, στις 7 Ιουλίου, που πάντως έχουν τη σχετική αξία τους:

Fu Ying: That's an irony. The western world acknowledges the economic progress in China, and appreciates China's contribution to the efforts against the financial crisis. But there is such a determined omission of the political progress in China. You do not seem to follow a straight logic with China. It's like saying that China has achieved all these without a government, without the Party, without policies, maybe in total anarchy, so to speak.

Die Zeit: I wonder if you are so successful, why don't you open up a bit more, or even more?

Fu Ying: I wasn't quite finished with my answer just now. My second point is, if you think your model is the best, I mean, your political system, your way of dealing with the media, your governmental structure and your party system, and you use them as the ultimate measure of China, you'll find China does not fit in. Yet, look around at countries that have adopted your system, how successful they are? Which one is doing as well as you are? Have they approached your per capita GDP? You want to share your political system, your values with a lot of countries, but you are not sharing your wealth, your living standard, which is the foundation of your political system.

Ολόκληρη η συνέντευξη στο σάιτ του Κινεζικού Υπουργείου Εξωτερικών.


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## Costas (Aug 1, 2010)

Προ καιρού είχα αναφερθεί σ' ετούτο το νήμα στην κινεζική ταινία Blind Shaft, που περιέγραφε φόνους σε παράνομα ανθρακωρυχεία, με σκοπό τον εκβιασμό των ιδιοχτητών και την απόσπαση χρημάτων. Ιδού τώρα ένα άρθρο για μια πραγματική τέτοια περίπτωση, με ολόκληρη συμμορία δολοφόνων: Dark Secrets of Death in China's Mine Shafts


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## ilena (Aug 2, 2010)

Είναι τελείως απαίσιο να χαίρονται κάποιοι το _σούπερ_ τεχνολογικό επίτευγμα i - pad που τους κόστισε πολλά χρήματα, χωρίς να ξέρουν ποιοι το δημιούργησαν και γιατί αυτοί αυτοκτόνησαν και που πήγαν τα χρήματά τους. Ο καπιταλισμός είναι τέρας.


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## Costas (Aug 6, 2010)

Will Linguistic Centralization Work? Protesters Demonstrate against Restrictions on Cantonese (China Brief, The Jamestown Foundation)


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## Costas (Sep 24, 2010)

Όχι για πολιτικά ειδικώς ζώα: πρόσφατες φωτογραφίες από την Κίνα, από το boston.com - The Big Picture.


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## Costas (Oct 1, 2010)

Τα δίχτυα της Foxconn, για τα οποία έγινε λόγος στο #49. [Από την Boston Globe]


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## Costas (Oct 1, 2010)

Ο Λίου Ξιαομπό, φυλακισμένος ως συντάκτης της Χάρτας 08 (αναρτήσεις #1, #7, #17, #27, #29, #30, #38, #39, #40), έχει προταθεί από τον Βάτσλαβ Χάβελ και άλλους για το φετινό βραβείο Νόμπελ για την Ειρήνη. Η κινεζική κυβέρνηση απειλεί ότι μια τέτοια βράβευση θα έχει αρνητικές συνέπειες για τις σχέσεις Νορβηγίας-Κίνας. Από την Guardian.


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## Costas (Oct 9, 2010)

Το φετινό βραβείο Νόμπελ για την ειρήνη απονεμήθηκε τελικά πράγματι στον Λίου Ξιαομπό, όπως αναμενόταν. Η είδηση είναι παντού (πλην Κίνας), αλλά βάζω το άρθρο της New York Times.


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## Costas (Oct 9, 2010)

Συνέντευξη με τον Eric Abrahamsen, του μπλοκ Paper Republic, που ασχολείται με τη μετάφραση σύγχρονης κινεζικής λογοτεχνίας. Από το μπλογκ Artspace China, του Ινστιτούτου Κομφούκιου του Πανεπιστημίου του Σίδνεϋ της Αυστραλίας.


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## Costas (Oct 11, 2010)

Η ελληνική κυβέρνηση αναζητεί τον Κάπταιν Ουέι και οι Κινέζοι αναζητούν τον...χιονάνθρωπο των Ιμαλαΐων.


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## Costas (Oct 11, 2010)

Για να μεταδώσουν την εξαφανισμένη από τα ευπειθή κινέζικα μέσα ενημέρωσης είδηση της απονομής του Νόμπελ Ειρήνης στον Κινέζο φυλακισμένο αντιφρονούντα* Λίου Ξιαομπό** χωρίς να προσκρούσουν στο Πρόγραμμα 'Χρυσή Ασπίδα', τα μη ευπειθή ιντερνετικά μέσα χρησιμοποίησαν διάφορες μεταγραφές-'περιφράσεις' του ονόματός του, που έχουν το ενδιαφέρον τους (από το Language Log):

*Hanyu 汉语/Chinese:*
Middle Sinitic 中古汉语：Lieu Hëux-pua
Wu 吴语：Leu Shiau-pu
Cantonese 粤语：Lau Hiu-bo
Minnan 闽南语：Lâu Hiáu-po
Hainan 海南话：Lao Rao-bo
Dalian 大连话：Liu Xiao-ber
Chongqing 重庆话：Liew Ciaor-bo
National Romanization 国语罗马字：Lyou Sheaubuo
Wade-Giles 威妥玛式：Liu Hsiao-Po

*印欧语/Indo European:*
English 英语：MINI BALL LIU or DAWN WAVE LIU
German 德语：Liu Schaubo
French 法语：Lïu Chopo
Spanish 西班牙语：Liu Giaobo
Italian 意大利语：Liu Sciopo
Romanian 罗马尼亚语：Liu Şeapo
Russian 俄语：Лю Сяобо
Czech 捷克语：Liou Siaopo

*闪含语 Semitic:*
Arabic 阿拉伯语：ليو قزايبو
Hebrew 希伯来语：ליו_שיאבו

*汉字文化圈 other East Asian languages:*
Japanese 日语：りゅう しょうは/ リュウ シャオボー
Korean 韩语：류 샤오보
Vietnamese 越南语：Lưu Hiểu Ba

Esperanto 世界语：Ljoŭ Ŝjaŭ-Bŭo

Anything to avoid writing "Liu Xiaobo," "刘晓波" (simplified), "劉曉波" (traditional), Liú Xiǎobō (Pinyin), because these would immediately be picked up by the cyber police.

Δυστυχώς, την ελληνική μεταγραφή δεν τη χρησιμοποίησαν.  κλαψ

Αλλά και η γυναίκα του Νομπελίστα τέθηκε σε κατ' οίκον περιορισμό (για νιοστή φορά) μετά την επίσκεψη στον άντρα της στη φυλακή, σύμφωνα με μια οργάνωση υπεράσπισης των δικαιωμάτων του ανθρώπου (από τη NYT).

Όπως έγραψε σωστά κάποιος:
Chinese communists started out as a group of individuals who stood up against what they viewed as an oppressive regime. They acted on their belief but were hunted down, arrested and (some) executed for their political beliefs. It is such a disheartening irony that now as a powerful ruling party with a membership of 77 millions, the communist party cannot tolerate the dissenting voice of one peaceful protester and political dissident, one who did not advocate violent overthrow of the government. If the anti-rightist movement of 1957 was an over-reaction to political crisis in East Europe when former Soviet Union had to roll out tanks to put down protest in the Czech [σ.σ.: διάβαζε Ηungarian] Republic, what is the excuse today when China has enjoyed nearly three decades of sustained economic growth and prosperity? It would be a sad day for China if someone like Liu Xiaobo should be allowed to rot in jail for simply speaking out critically about the government. I may not agree with his views but I identify with his character as a teacher who tries to speak the truth as he understands it.
Hope that he lives to actually receive the peace prize and that he is the last to be jailed in China for exercising his constitutional right to speak freely.

Στην Ελλάδα, μια ομαδική πίεση προς την κυβέρνηση να ζητήσει την αποφυλάκιση του Νομπελίστα φυλακισμένου (11 χρόνια για τη συγγραφή ενός κειμένου) θα έφερνε σε πολύ δύσκολη θέση τον πρόεδρο της Σοσιαλιστικής Διεθνούς. Από ποιον όμως; Από το κεφάλαιο, αποκλείεται. Από την 'πρωτοπορία της εργατικής τάξης';

Κάλυψη από το Ριζοσπάστη (Σάββατο 9 Οχτώβρη 2010, σελ. 22, Διεθνή):
ΟΣΛΟ - ΠΕΚΙΝΟ.-- Τη διατάραξη των σινο-νορβηγικών σχέσεων προκάλεσε η απόφαση της νορβηγικής ακαδημίας να τιμήσει με το φετινό Νόμπελ Ειρήνης τον 54χρονο Κινέζο Λιου Σιαομπό που εκτίει πολυετή ποινή κάθειρξης για «παραβίαση του νόμου» όπως είναι η επίσημη εκδοχή της κινεζικής κυβέρνησης. Η Κίνα κάλεσε χτες τον Νορβηγό πρεσβευτή στο Πεκίνο και διαμαρτυρήθηκε, ενώ εκπρόσωπος του νορβηγικού υπουργείου Εξωτερικών απάντησε πως η απόφαση ήταν πράξη μιας «ανεξάρτητης» επιτροπής και πως πρέπει να συνεχιστούν οι καλές διμερείς σχέσεις.
(βλ. Πάστερνακ, Ζάχαροφ) Βαθιά ενημέρωση στους αναγνώστες! Άραγε ποια είναι η 'μη επίσημη, αγωνιστική' εκδοχή του τιμημένου και γνήσια-κοινωνικά δημοκρατικού ΚΚΕ για την πολυετή ποινή κάθειρξης του ανδρός; Ότι κατούρησε έξω από τη λεκάνη ή μήπως ότι ζήτησε γραπτά και δημόσια την κατάργηση της μονοκομματικής δικτατορίας; Μπροστά σε τέτοιες αποκοτιές, οι παλιές διαφορές ΕΣΣΔ-Κίνας είναι παρανυχίδα, και ως κι οι μεταμαοϊκοί κομουνιστές είναι εντέλει σύντροφοι... Α, και στην ίδια αυτή σελίδα το κύριο θέμα είναι "ΕΡΝΕΣΤΟ ΤΣΕ ΓΚΕΒΑΡΑ. Συνεχίζει να εμπνέει το παράδειγμά του", με τη γνωστή εις τύπον Ιησού Χριστού φωτογραφία.

Η Αυγή, αντίθετα, καλύπτει την είδηση κανονικά, και μάλιστα με μεγάλη φωτογραφία.

*Και μια καλή είδηση: το 'αντιφρονούντας' (ονομαστ. ενικού) δίνει 9.000 γουγλαποτελέσματα.

**Στο ελληνικό διαδίκτυο κυριαρχεί η μεταγραφή Λίου Σιαομπό, που από άποψη προφοράς είναι πιο ακριβής από το Ξιαομπό. Αντίστοιχα, ο Ντεγκ Ξιαοπίνγκ θα πρέπει τότε, για όσους προτιμούν το Σ, να γράφεται κι αυτός Σιαοπίνγκ κοκ. Παρ' όλα αυτά, η μεταγραφή του ξένου X ως Σ μόνο ανυπέρβλητες παρεξηγήσεις θα προκαλέσει σε άλλες περιπτώσεις (Si/Xi, Su/Xu), γι' αυτό συνιστώ το X -> Ξ, έστω και αν ως προφορά είναι λάθος.


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## Costas (Oct 12, 2010)

*Global Anti-China Campaign*

The global anti-China campaign serves many agendas; some that do in fact have to do with China’s unfair trade and monetary policies, most designed as pretext to the current weakness, which could become a permanent decline, of the West.

Όλο εδώ (World Association of International Studies [WAIS], Stanford University).


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## Costas (Oct 15, 2010)

Κείμενο ανοιχτής επιστολής πρώην αξιωματούχων του κόμματος-κράτους για ελευθερία του λόγου, και σχετικό άρθρο στη ΝΥΤ, όπου και αποσπάσματα συνέντευξης με τη γυναίκα του Λίου Ξιαομπό.

Άρθρο σχετικό με μια δήλωση αντιφρονούντων και υπερασπιστών δικαιωμάτων του ανθρώπου που χαιρετίζει την απονομή του Νόμπελ Ειρήνης στον Λίου Ξιαομπό και ζητά μεταρρυθμίσεις. (Wall Street Journal)


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## Costas (Oct 18, 2010)

Δύο από τις πάμπολλες 'άλλες απόψεις' περί Λίου Ξιαομπό και της απονομής του Νόμπελ Ειρήνης σ' αυτόν.
Nobel's Military Agenda and the Future World Order
A Nobel Peace Prize for Cultural Self-Hatred


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## Costas (Oct 18, 2010)

Σχετικό όχι μόνο με τη διαμάχη για το φετινό Νόμπελ Ειρήνης αλλά και με τη γενικότερη επικαιρότητα: 
Amartya Sen, "Human Rights and Asian Values," The New Republic, July 14-July 21, 1997 (βέβαια, κι αυτός νομπελίστας είναι  )


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## Costas (Oct 20, 2010)

*Σε σκοτεινό πλανέθηκα ντιβάνι*

Ενθουσιασμός για τον Φρόυντ στην Κίνα, αλλά υπάρχουν και προβλήματα:

The language barrier has proved troublesome as well. Because of the gender-neutral pronouns in Chinese, for example, the students often use "he" and "she" interchangeably - a frustratingly important distinction in Freudian theory.

Πράγματι, προφορικά δεν ξεχωρίζει το 'αυτός' από το 'αυτή', αν και είναι απολύτως αναγκαία στη σύνταξη. Είναι και τα δύο 'ta' (γραπτή απόδοση 'τα', προφ. 'τχάά').

Το άρθρο έχει ένα λεπτό, ελαφρώς συγκαταβατικό χιούμορ. Σπαρταριστή η κατάληξη με την ύπνωση. Όλο εδώ (από την Washington Post).


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## Costas (Oct 22, 2010)

Μαθητικές πορείες διαμαρτυρίας στην επαρχία Qinghai (Τσινγκχάι) για την απάλειψη της θιβετιανής γλώσσας απ' όλα τα μαθήματα εκτός από το μάθημα της ίδιας της γλώσσας. Από την South China Morning Post (κολοβή πρόσβαση) [1][2].


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## Costas (Oct 26, 2010)

Προσεχώς απαγόρευση της σκυλοφαγίας; (New York Times)


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## Costas (Oct 31, 2010)

Τα συμμετρικά βυζιά μοριοδοτούνται στο Δημόσιο... (Guardian)
Κινέζικος ο ταχύτερος υπερυπολογιστής (New York Times)


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## Costas (Nov 3, 2010)

Πώς αντιδρά το περιβάλλον (η παρέα, οι γονείς) ενός Κινέζου φοιτητή που σπουδάζει στην Αμερική στο θέμα συζήτησης "Λίου Ξιαομπό", "Νόμπελ Ειρήνης", "4 Ιουνίου (1989)". Γραμμένο από τον ίδιο το φοιτητή (από το Daily Illini.com)


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## Costas (Nov 5, 2010)

China urges Europeans to snub Nobel Ceremony (NYT)

Beijing also urged governments not to issue the statements of support and congratulation that are customary for Nobel laureates, they said.

The unusual request was delivered to European embassies in Oslo, the site of the award ceremony in December, in a written démarche, or diplomatic note, the highest level of communication between diplomatic outposts. How many embassies received the note was unclear.
(...)
Whether by Beijing’s design or otherwise, the Nobel award is emerging as an early test of China’s newfound diplomatic clout, the product of its emergence as a global economic power.

China is investing heavily in Europe, buying debt and assets depressed by the global financial crisis and becoming a significant partner for hard-hit nations like Spain and Greece. Britain is sending its largest-ever ministerial delegation, including Prime Minister David Cameron, to Beijing next week in search of business deals. President Hu Jintao of China visited France on Thursday, apparently to purchase 110 Airbus passenger jets for Chinese airlines.

Since the October announcement of the Nobel award, the United States and other governments have urged China to free Mr. Liu, while some governments, including some Western democracies, have pointedly limited their statements to congratulations without calling for his release.


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## Costas (Nov 8, 2010)

Οι αφίσες της Πολιτιστικής Επανάστασης εμπνέουν ακόμα κάποιους στην Ελλάδα: "Φωτιά στο Γενικό Επιτελείο!" Αλλά δεν καταλαβαίνω ποιος είναι το Γενικό Επιτελείο: η κυβέρνηση και η Τρόικα; η αντικομματική κλίκα, δηλ. ο Τσίπρας; η πρώην αντικομματική κλίκα, δηλ. η Ανανεωτική Πτέρυγα του Συνασπισμού, και απλά ξέχασαν να το απαλείψουν μετά την αποχώρησή της; δεν φαντάζομαι πάντως να είναι το καμένο μετά από εμπρησμό Καράβι του κεντρικού εκλογικού τους κέντρου· αυτό θα ήταν πολύ προχωρημένη αυτοειρωνεία.


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## Costas (Nov 8, 2010)

Ένα απλό, μεστό, καλογραμμένο ρεπορτάζ για την αναγέννηση του ταοϊσμού στη σημερινή Κίνα, προσωποποιημένο σ' έναν χορηγό και σε μια ηγουμένη. (ΝΥΤ)


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## Costas (Nov 13, 2010)

Άρθρο του προέδρου της Επιτροπής για τα Βραβεία Νόμπελ Ειρήνης, για το φετινό βραβείο:
Why we gave Liu Xiaobo a Nobel
Απάντηση του κοσμήτορα του Πανεπιστημίου της Σιγκαπούρης Kishore Mahbubani:
An Ignoble Nobel


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## Costas (Nov 13, 2010)

According to a recent news report in Guangdong’s official Nanfang Daily newspaper, a 22 year-old woman went in for a surgical abortion at a clinic in Shenzhen’s Bao’an District and had been fully prepped for surgery, her legs immobilized by epidural anesthesia, when her surgeon said suddenly that he intended to perform two additional surgeries (at additional cost, of course). The woman refused and was kept on the surgical table for three hours. She was released only after her boyfriend notified police. In this cartoon, posted by the Kunming-based studio Yuan Jiao Man’s Space (圆觉漫时空) to QQ.com, a young woman is trapped and immobilized on the operating table as her surgeon turns willfully away, refusing to release her until she has agreed to additional surgeries. On the sheet between the woman’s legs is emblazoned a large red Yuan symbol [￥]​, signifying the act of gross extortion.







(Από CMP = China Media Project)


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## Costas (Nov 19, 2010)

*Chinese Woman Imprisoned for Twitter Message*

Τι έλεγε το μήνυμα; "Ανατρέψτε το καθεστώς", μήπως; Όχι, όχι, άλλο έλεγε... (ΝΥΤ)


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## Costas (Nov 22, 2010)

*Nations That Debate Coal Use Export It to Feed China’s Need*

Από NYT. Κατά τα άλλα, πράσινη ανάπτυξη. Να και μια γελοιογραφία:






Λεζάντα:
Οι εκπομπές σας σε άνθρακα είναι υπερβολικά μεγάλες!


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## Costas (Dec 8, 2010)

Πλησιάζει η τελετή της απονομής των Βραβείων Νόμπελ. Οι φίλοι, οι συγγενείς και οι ομοϊδέατες ή απλώς συμπαθούντες του φυλακισμένου νομπελίστα ειρήνης Λίου Ξιαομπό τούς έχει απαγορευτεί η έξοδος από την Κίνα για να παραστούν στην τελετή. Παρέμβαση του Βάτσλαβ Χάβελ και του Ντέσμοντ Τούτου για την άμεση αποφυλάκισή του (South China Morning Post):

*China risks its credibility by detaining Liu Xiaobo
*Vaclav Havel and Desmond Tutu
Dec 07, 2010

We no longer live in a unipolar world. Western nations do not enjoy a monopoly on economic and political power. This is an encouraging shift and one that is bringing greater equality and prosperity to the world. With this progress, developing countries are increasingly influential and, in this regard, China reigns supreme.

While China's progress over the past three decades is cause for celebration, its support for abusive regimes and the force with which it crushes dissent demonstrates that substantial reform is needed if China is to be viewed as a true leader within the international community.

In short, the world must strenuously object to the Chinese model for development which decouples economic and political reform by unapologetically asserting that anything, including domestic and international oppression, can be justified if it is viewed to enable economic growth.

International scrutiny of the Chinese government's widespread violation of fundamental rights at home and abroad is not meddling in its "internal affairs"; it flows from its legal commitments to respect the inherent dignity and equality of every person.

Though he is just one of 1.3 billion, the story of this year's Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Liu Xiaobo , is sadly emblematic of the Chinese government's intolerance to individual expression. Liu, a former literature professor, first found himself on the sharp end of the government's policies after negotiating the peaceful retreat of student protesters from Tiananmen Square in 1989. One year ago, the government sentenced him to 11 years in prison for co-authoring Charter 08, a call for peaceful political reform in China.

On October 8, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded Liu its Peace Prize in recognition of his "long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China". Like its response to Charter 08, Beijing's reaction to the committee's announcement demonstrates its extreme sensitivity to criticism and the lengths it is prepared to go to prevent it, both inside China and out.

Most alarming, the government has detained Liu's wife, Liu Xia, in her Beijing home since an hour after the announcement of the prize. Others throughout the country who have associated with Liu, or who are suspected of sharing his vision for China, are harassed, interrogated and detained.

The Chinese government is also flexing its muscles internationally. It called the award a "blasphemy" and threatened relations with Norway. Now, as the award ceremony approaches, it has warned other nations to boycott the events or ominously "face the consequences".

China doesn't just violate the human rights of its citizens, it coddles and supports brutal dictatorships around the world, including the authoritarian regimes in Burma, Sudan and North Korea.

The Chinese government's willingness to assert itself internationally shows its increasing confidence on the world stage; but its extreme sensitivity to criticism demonstrates its lack of confidence domestically. This lack of confidence ultimately only serves to further undermine the credibility of the government with its people.

China now has the unique opportunity to chart a new course, one that appropriately claims the mantle of being a world leader in every respect. But such an approach must begin by China respecting its obligations under its constitution and international agreements. The first step must be the unconditional release of Liu Xiaobo and his wife, Liu Xia, before the Nobel Peace Prize award ceremony on Friday.

_Vaclav Havel is a former president of the Czech Republic. Desmond Tutu is archbishop emeritus of Cape Town. They are honorary co-chairs of Freedom Now, which represents Liu Xiaobo as his international legal counsel_


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## Costas (Dec 8, 2010)

*Nobel Peace Prize faces boycotts over Liu Xiaobo*
(BBC)
China and 18 other countries have said they will not attend Friday's Nobel Peace Prize ceremony for Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has said.

Russia, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iraq and Iran are among those that will be absent, while 44 countries will attend.

A Chinese official said a "vast majority" of countries would stay away.

China would not change because of "interference by a few clowns", said Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu.

The committee describes Mr Liu as "the foremost symbol" of the human rights struggle in China.

It said in a statement that the envoys of Russia, Kazakhstan, Colombia, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Serbia, Iraq, Iran, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Venezuela, the Philippines, Egypt, Sudan, Ukraine, Cuba and Morocco would miss the event "for various reasons".

"Some have obviously been influenced by China, for others this has nothing to do with China," the committee's secretary, Geir Lundestad, told the BBC.

The committee said that two more countries, Sri Lanka and Algeria, had not replied, and 44 would attend.

_The United Nations' most senior human rights official, Navi Pillay, has been criticised for saying she will not attend._ (τα πλάγια δικά μου)

By way of comparison, the statement said that 10 embassies were absent from the 2008 ceremony for former Finnish President and UN special envoy Martti Ahtisaari.

Mr Lundestad said "important" countries such as India, South Africa, Brazil and Indonesia would attend, adding that this was "highly appreciated".

'Long struggle'

Meanwhile Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said that more than 100 countries supported Beijing.

"Those at the Nobel Committee are orchestrating an anti-China fuss by themselves," Ms Jiang said.

"We are against anybody making an issue out of Liu Xiaobo and interfering in China's judicial affairs," she said. "We will not change because of interference by a few clowns."

(...)


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## daeman (Dec 8, 2010)

That government would gladly ban all "clowns", and slaughter some of them, too.




The lion tamer's whip still cracks as before, 
but dragons will fight and tigers will roar,
the trainer of insects is crouched on his knees
and frantically looking for runaway fleas...


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## Costas (Dec 8, 2010)

Τα γεγονότα τρέχουν:

China to award prize to rival Nobel

By TINI TRAN, Associated Press Tini Tran, Associated Press – Wed Dec 8, 12:22 am ET

BEIJING – Only three weeks after the idea was first publicly floated, China has cobbled together its own peace prize and plans to award it Thursday — the day before the Nobel Committee honors an imprisoned Chinese dissident in a move that has enraged Beijing.

Since Liu Xiaobo's selection, China has vilified the 54-year-old democracy advocate, called the choice an effort by the West to contain its rise, disparaged his supporters as "clowns," and launched a campaign to persuade countries not to attend Friday's ceremony in Oslo. The government is also preventing Liu — who is serving an 11-year sentence for co-authoring a bold appeal for political reforms in the Communist country — and his family members from attending.

Amid the flurry of action came a commentary published on Nov. 17 in a Communist Party-approved tabloid that suggested China create its own award — the "Confucius Peace Prize" — to counter the choice of Liu.

Three weeks later, The Associated Press has learned, China is doing just that.

Named after the famed philosopher, the new prize was created to "interpret the viewpoints of peace of (the) Chinese (people)," the awards committee said in a statement it released to the AP on Tuesday.

Awards committee chairman Tan Changliu said his group was not an official government body, but acknowledged that it worked closely with the Ministry of Culture. He declined to give specifics about the committee, when it was created and how the five judges were chosen, saying it would be disclosed later.

The first honoree is Lien Chan, Taiwan's former vice president and the honorary chairman of its Nationalist Party, for having "built a bridge of peace between the mainland and Taiwan." A staffer in his Taipei office said she could not comment Tuesday because she knew nothing about the prize.

Lien was chosen from among eight nominees — some of whom are regularly mentioned for, or have already won, that other peace prize: including billionaire Bill Gates, former South African President Nelson Mandela, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas and the Panchen Lama, the second-highest figure in Tibetan Buddhism.

While China regularly disparages the Dalai Lama, the religion's spiritual leader, the current Panchen Lama is a 20-year-old who was hand-picked by Beijing. The original boy named by the Dalai Lama has disappeared.

"We should not compete, we should not confront the Nobel Prize, but we should try to set up another standard," said Liu Zhiqin, the Beijing businessman who suggested the prize in The Global Times. "The Nobel prize is not a holy thing that we cannot doubt or question. Everyone has a right to dispute whether it's right or wrong." Liu said in the phone interview that he was not involved in setting up the new awards.

Tan, who leads the awards committee, acknowledged that the new prize, which comes with a purse of 100,000 yuan ($15,000), doesn't have international recognition: "It needs to grow gradually, and we hope people will believe the award is of global significance."

China is not the first nation to be rankled by a Nobel Peace Prize. During Nazi Germany era, Adolf Hitler created the German National Prize for Art and Science in 1937 as a replacement for the Nobel. He had forbidden German pacifist Carl von Ossietzky from accepting his Nobel awarded in 1935.

(...)


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## Palavra (Dec 8, 2010)

Θα μπορούσε να είναι αστείο, εάν δεν ήταν τόσο τραγικό.


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## Costas (Dec 10, 2010)

Από το MobyLives (όπου και τα ενεργά λινκ):

*Graywolf Press to publish Liu Xiaobo*
10 December 2010

Liu Xiaobo, Nobel Peace Prize Winner

Today Liu Xiaobo, the Chinese poet and dissident, formerly receives the Nobel Peace Prize. While he will be enjoying the honor from his jail cell, hopefully word has gotten to him about his latest stroke of luck.

In a move that all but guarantees that this will go down as the “year of the literary longshot,” Graywolf Press announced yesterday that they will publish the first English translation of Xiaobo’s work. The PBS Newshour’s “Arts Beat” blog reported that the collection titled “June Fourth Elegies” will come out in 2012.

The bilingual edition, whose title refers to the brutal crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators at Tiananmen Square in 1989, has not been published in China. Indeed, as his translator Jeffrey Yang told PBS, most of his work has been destroyed. “The circumstances of trying to read him are difficult, pretty much impossible in China, because he hasn’t been able to publish there” since he was imprisoned for co-writing “Charter 08,” a document that advocated greater freedom of expression and political reforms.

Unfortunately, most Chinese will hardly know that the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded today. In anticipation of the ceremony, the Chinese government has imposed a media blackout for all major external news and media sources.


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## Costas (Dec 11, 2010)

*Απρόσεχτοι πειρατές*

Το παρόν νήμα, αν και βρίσκεται στα Ζώα Πολιτικά, αφορά all things Chinese:

*Firms err with erotic fairy tales*
By Agence France-Presse in Beijing (Μέσω Σάουθ Τσάινα Μόρνινγκ Πόουστ)

Chinese publishers have pulled a collection of Brothers Grimm fairy tales
from children's shelves in book stores after mistakenly translating a
Japanese pornographic reinterpretation of the tales.

China Friendship Publishing and China Media Time translated the erotic
retelling by the Japanese duo Kiryu-Misao without credit after mistaking
them for the originals, the Global Times newspaper reported.

"We couldn't find the original German edition of Grimm's Fairy Tales, so we
took Japanese editions as our references and translated those," a China
Media Time official was quoted as saying by the newspaper.

These included a version of the classic Snow White tale in which the heroine
has sexual relations with her father and the seven dwarves, the newspaper
said. After she dies, a necrophiliac prince falls in love with her body.

"The book was not supposed to be read by children, but it was put on the
children's literature shelf, so we asked to pull it," the official said,
adding that book stores were told to send back the edition on December 2.

The new Chinese translation listed only the Brothers Grimm as authors, and
the official said the process was "complicated" when asked to confirm which
version had been used, the report said.

Chinese authorities often cite pornography to justify strict controls on the
media and internet.


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## Costas (Dec 11, 2010)

*And the winner is...*

Τα της απονομής του Βραβείου Ειρήνης Κομφούκιος... (από NYT).






Best of
Tan Changliu, chairman of the committee, made every attempt to steer the conversation away from that subject [Σ.Σ.: Liu Xiaobo]. In a page seemingly taken from the Harry Potter books, he tried to avoid referring to Mr. Liu by name, instead calling him the man “with the three-character name.” (τα περισσότερα κινέζικα ονόματα είναι τέτοια)

When pressed on its relation to the Norwegian prize, he said that China had had a longer history with peace. He added, “Did the Nobel Peace Prize influence Confucius, or did Confucius influence the Nobel Peace Prize?” (δεν έχουμε μόνο εμείς ΑΗΠ)

Finally, after more than a half-hour of back-to-back questions about the dissident who must not be named, Mr. Tan relented. “If you really want to talk about Liu Xiaobo,” he said, “in 500 years you will see history is on our side.” 

Και μισή αλήθεια
Zhao Zhenjiang, one of the judges, went on a tirade against the United States and wondered aloud why President Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize last year when he is staging military exercises with South Korea in the Yellow Sea.


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## Costas (Dec 11, 2010)

Δήλωση της Αυστριακής νομπελίστριας συγγραφέως Ελφρίντε Γέλινεκ για τη βιογραφία του Λίου Ξιαομπό (γραμμένη από Κινέζο φίλο του) που κυκλοφόρησε σε γερμανική μετάφραση προ ημερών.


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## Costas (Dec 12, 2010)

Από το επίσημο σάιτ των βραβείων Νόμπελ η τελετή απονομής στον Λίου Ξ(Σ)ιαομπό (88 λεπτά). Αρχικά ο λόγος του Thorbjørn Jagland, όπου φυσικά ακούγονται διάφορα (το πιο συζητήσιμο: ότι οι δημοκρατίες δεν έχουν πολεμήσει ποτέ μεταξύ τους. Ωστόσο, η σύγκρουση του 1914-1918 τι ήταν; ). Πάντως ως λόγος έχει πολιτικό ενδιαφέρον. Το κρίσιμο πάντως είναι, όπως λέει, το τι αναφέρει το Σύνταγμα της ΛΔΚ:

Article 35
Citizens of the PRC enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration.
Article 41
Citizens have the right to criticize and make suggestions regarding any state organ or functionary.

Και συνεχίζει καπάκι ο Jagland:

Liu has only exercised his civil rights; he has not done anything wrong. He must be released.

Ο Λίου καταδικάστηκε σε 11 χρόνια φυλακή για απόπειρα ανατροπής του σοσιαλιστικού καθεστώτος και της 'δημοκρατικής δικτατορίας του λαού' (αυτής που ευαγγελίζεται το ΚΚΕ και τα παρασπόρια του. Άλλωστε τα ίδια δεν ανέφερε και το Σύνταγμα της ΕΣΣΔ, "το πιο φιλελεύθερο του κόσμου";...)

Μετά τη μουσική γέφυρα (Grieg), φτάνουμε στο 54', όπου η 72χρονη πια Λιβ Ούλμαν διαβάζει τη δήλωση του Λίου στο δικαστήριο από τις 23 Δεκεμβρίου του 2009, τη μοναδική, όπως λέει ο ίδιος, μαζί μ' εκείνην στο άλλο δικαστήριο, του 1991, που έχει μπορέσει να κάνει δημόσια τα τελευταία είκοσι χρόνια, καθώς του απαγορεύτηκε τότε και ως τώρα να δημοσιεύει, να διδάσκει, να περιοδεύει. Η εκφώνηση της Ούλμαν, που μοιάζει να πάσχει από τρέμουλο στα χέρια, είναι αργή, με συχνές παύσεις αμέσως μετά τα οριστικά και αόριστα άρθρα, με φωνή χωρίς σκαμπανεβάσματα· οι φίλοι του Μπέργιμαν (sic :)) θα την απολαύσουν. Ο λόγος του Λίου έχει πολύ ενδιαφέρον, κατά τη γνώμη μου, γιατί είναι πολύ...χριστιανοβουδιστικός, θα έλεγα, σε αντίθεση με κατά καιρούς δηλώσεις του υπέρ π.χ. του πολέμου στο Ιράκ κλπ. Είτε για να καλοπιάσει το δικαστήριο είτε γιατί έχει υιοθετήσει τέτοια γραμμή, δηλώνει αισιόδοξος και μιλά για την τεράστια βελτίωση που βίωσε ο ίδιος ως προς τις συνθήκες της προφυλάκισής του, σε σύγκριση με την προηγούμενή του, της δεκαετίας του '90. Τέλος πάντων, η δήλωσή του κορυφώνεται με την αποστροφή προς την αναγκαστικά απούσα από την αίθουσα του δικαστηρίου γυναίκα του, φωτογράφο Λίου Ξ(Σ)ιά, που είναι ένα γράμμα αγάπης με δυνατές ποιητικές εκφράσεις.

Το voice-over είναι γυναικείο, αλλά οι κάμερες είναι στα χέρια στρέιτ αντρών, όπως θα διαπιστώσουν όσοι/ες δουν το βίντεο...

Παράλληλα με τις άλλες εκδηλώσεις, υπάρχει στο Όσλο έκθεση με εποπτικό υλικό για τον νικητή του βραβείου.


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## Costas (Dec 16, 2010)

Κριτική από τις στήλες της Guardian στην Επιτροπή των Νόμπελ Ειρήνης για τις πολιτικές της σκοπιμότητες, μέσα από την παρουσίαση των φιλοπόλεμων και φιλοαμερικανικών θέσεων του Λίου Ξ(Σ)ιαομπό για τον πόλεμο του Βιετνάμ, της Κορέας, του Ιράκ, του Αφγανιστάν, για τον εκδυτικισμό και την αποικιοκρατία, και παραλληλισμός με τον άλλο Νομπελίστα, τον Σολζενίτσιν, και τις αντιδραστικές του ιδέες. (Διαφορά: ο Σολζενίτσιν ήταν αντιεβραίος, ενώ ο Λίου φιλοϊσραηλινός). Κριτική, επίσης, της Χάρτας '08 ως ιδεολογικού προπετάσματος καπνού πίσω από το οποίο κρύβεται η Αμερική και όσοι ονειρεύονται για την Κίνα ιδιωτικοποιήσεις τύπου μετασοβιετικής Ρωσίας.


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## Costas (Dec 20, 2010)

Αυτές τις μέρες είναι στην επικαιρότητα η συνθήκη New Start για τα πυρηνικά, μεταξύ ΗΠΑ και Ρωσίας. Ας δούμε όμως και τι γίνεται στην Κίτρινη Θάλασσα, με πρόσχημα τη Β. Κορέα:

China warns of escalating arms race in Asia ([url:"http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/8212643/China-warns-of-escalating-arms-race-in-Asia.html"]The Telegraph[/url])

Σχετικά, ίσως ενδιαφέρει η άποψη του Emmanuel Todd για το ρόλο των ΗΠΑ στο βιβλίο του [bold]Après l’empire - Essai sur la décomposition du système américain[/bold] (2002) (από γαλλ. Wikipedia).

les États-Unis étaient une source de paix et de stabilité, ils sont devenus un facteur de désordre (Afghanistan, Irak...). L’objet de l’ouvrage est de « proposer un modèle explicatif rigoureux du comportement international des États-Unis » (p. 14), donc de ce renversement récent. L’idée directrice du livre est que l’explication ne doit pas être cherchée dans la force, mais dans la faiblesse des États-Unis.
(...)
Le moyen de maintenir cette prise, et plus généralement de donner l’impression que les États-Unis sont indispensables à la planète par la protection qu’ils lui offrent, est de maintenir un certain niveau de désordre en livrant une guerre théâtrale contre des États mineurs présentés comme « l’Axe du Mal ».


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## Costas (Dec 26, 2010)

Την ίδια ώρα (που λέει και ο τίτλος του νήματος) που στην Ελλάδα συρρικνώνεται κι άλλο ο σιδηρόδρομος (ή το καχεκτικό φάντασμα που είχαν φροντίσει οι μεταπολεμικές κυβερνήσεις να διατηρούν), στην Κίνα ολοκληρώθηκε η σιδηροδρομική γραμμή Yiwan (Wikipedia):

The Yiwan Railway, featuring 288 kilometers of bridges or tunnels on a total length of 377 kilometers, opens for service between the cities of Yichang and Chongqing.


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## Costas (Dec 27, 2010)

*Authorities ban mixed English words in publications*

(Από την Ημερησία του Λαού)
(...)
Abuse of foreign languages, including arbitrary use of English words; acronym mixing in Mandarin and coined half-English, half-Chinese terms that are intelligible to nobody, are commonly seen.
(...)
The checking of foreign languages usage is required in daily censorship and annual inspection. Violations of norms shall be required to be corrected and will be punished according to law.

_coined half-English, half-Chinese terms that are intelligible to nobody_, π.χ.: "gelivable" (awesome), "niubility" (brilliance), "smilence" (soundless smile)


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## Costas (Dec 29, 2010)

Αλτέρνατιβ περιοδικό με τιράζ 1,5 εκατομμ. αντίτυπα  (που όμως πολτοποίησε το 2ο τεύχος του λόγω....)
(The Guardian, όπου και φωτογραφία του ανδρός)
Han Han, China's most popular blogger, shuts down new magazine
Party, a literary magazine for alternative thinkers, appears to have collapsed after one issue
By Jonathan Watts in Beijing

He may be China's most popular blogger, a champion rally driver, a banned novelist and arguably the coolest man in the country, but Han Han's attempt to launch a publication for alternative thinkers appears to have collapsed after one issue.

The hero of the chattering classes lost a vocal cord today with the closure of his literary magazine, Party, which has been locked in a struggle with the authorities since it was founded in early 2009.

In a blogpost, Han said the reasons were unclear and cautioned his followers not to assume that the propaganda department was responsible for the failure to reach a second edition.

"Maybe there were too many departments involved and too many people with the power to make a literature magazine into a relic," he wrote. "I don't know what was wrong. I don't know who I've displeased. I'm standing in the light while you are in the dark. If we ever met, I will not hold a grudge, but please could you tell me what happened?"

The original plan was to provide "a good art publication with more free and wild writing, but it seems the idea is too good to be true," Han was said to have written previously.

The fame of a man whose blog has attracted more than 300m hits should have guaranteed success, but his criticism of the government and championing of free expression made potential partners nervous, given the Communist party's tight controls on the media.

Han reportedly made almost a dozen approaches before finding a business partner, switched the magazine's name several times and had to change the classification of the periodical because it was deemed as operating in a grey zone.

According to the Southern Weekend newspaper, about 70% of the original content had to be scrapped to secure approval for the publication of the first edition.

Filled with 128 pages of freewheeling content from musicians, film directors and offbeat writers as well as extracts from Han's novel I Want to Talk to the World, the first edition was repeatedly delayed on the orders of the authorities. But when it was released, it was immensely popular, selling 1.5m copies.

A second edition proved even harder to print, prompting Han to close the operation and dismiss the staff. "The operation was halted several times and censored by provincial officials," he wrote."Party faced difficulties and was pulped even after it secured all the approval it needed." Han has blended racing success ­ his most recent rally victory was earlier this month ‹ with a sharp wit and criticism of corruption, injustice and incompetence.

"The government wants China to become a great cultural nation, but our leaders are so uncultured," he told The New York Times earlier this year. "If things continue like this, China will only be known for tea and pandas."
(...)


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## Costas (Dec 30, 2010)

Δύο άρθρα διάβασα σήμερα στη New York Times για σινικά πράγματα. Το πρώτο, για τα σχολεία της Σαγκάης, για τα καλά και τα κακά της κινέζικης εκπαιδευτικής φιλοσοφίας:

“These are two sides of the same coin: Chinese schools are very good at preparing their students for standardized tests,” Jiang Xueqin, a deputy principal at Peking University High School in Beijing, wrote in an opinion article published in The Wall Street Journal shortly after the test results were announced. “For that reason, they fail to prepare them for higher education and the knowledge economy.”

Γνωστό το θέμα, αλλά πάντοτε ενδιαφέρον:

Educators say this disciplined approach helps explain the announcement this month that 5,100 15-year-olds in Shanghai outperformed students from about 65 countries on an international standardized test that measured math, science and reading competency.

American students came in between 15th and 31st place in the three categories. France and Britain also fared poorly.
(...)
“Within a teacher’s salary package, 70 percent is basic salary,” said Xiong Bingqi, a professor of education at Shanghai Jiaotong University. “The other 30 percent is called performance salary.”

Κλπ. κλπ.

Το δεύτερο άρθρο καλεί τους Αμερικανούς ν' αφήσουν τα μανταρίνικα στη δεύτερη θέση και να προτάξουν τα ισπανικά. Τίτλος: Primero Hay Que Aprender Español. Ranhou Zai Xue Zhongwen.


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## Costas (Dec 30, 2010)

Μετά το Ισλάμ και το Χριστιανισμό, έχουμε τώρα και τον Κομφούκιο:
Church plan in hometown of Confucius draws protest (Asian Correspondent).

Άλλο, Οργουελικό (Global Times):
A statement posted on the personal blog of convicted milk activist Zhao Lianhai says he is undergoing treatment at a hospital and wants to enjoy life as an ordinary citizen.

Zhao, 38, whose three-year-old child was sickened by melamine-tainted milk powder, was sentenced to 30 months' imprisonment on November 10 for inciting social disorder. He decided not to appeal, and instead applied for medical parole. (...) "I hope the incident will go away. It will be beneficial to the country, society and my family," the statement said. "I agree with the criminal punishment imposed on me by judicial organizations. I hope other people can stop discussing the matter."

"I support and am grateful to the government. And I apologize for the radical comments made against the government in the past."

Τέλος, εξιστόρηση σε πρώτο πρόσωπο μιας νύχτας με τη Μωντ...εεεε....με την αστυνομία του Πεκίνου: "A Hole to Bury You". (The Wall Street Journal)

Αυτά, και εύχομαι λιγότερη φρίκη και φτώχεια σε όλη τη Γη του χρόνου.


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## Costas (Jan 7, 2011)

Ένα ενδιαφέρον αγγλόφωνο άρθρο του Spiegel για τη ζωή στις υπόγειες γκαρσονιέρες (και κάτι λιγότερο) του Πεκίνου, με μια ντουζίνα φωτογραφίες: Life in Beijing's Cellars.


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## Costas (Jan 11, 2011)

Ο ακτιβιστής δικηγόρος Γκάο Τζισένγκ έχει μνημονευτεί στα #37 και #43 αυτού του νήματος, τότε που είχε 'εξαφανιστεί', ώσπου επανεμφανίστηκε για λίγο. Έκτοτε, αγνοείται η τύχη του. Το άρθρο του σημερινού λινκ είναι καρπός πληροφοριών που είχε δώσει ο ίδιος σε δημοσιογράφο κατά τη σύντομη επανεμφάνισή του, με θέμα τις 'περιπέτειές' του στα χέρια του κατασταλτικού μηχανισμού, και με εντολή να δημοσιευτεί αν εξαφανιστεί και πάλι, όπως και συνέβη. (Associated Press, The Washington Post)

Gao in April said that police seemed intent on casting him into a limbo that kept him at their whim.
"Why don't you put me in prison?" Gao said he asked Beijing police at one point. "They said, 'You going to prison, that's a dream. You're not good enough for that. Whenever we want you to disappear, you will disappear.'" 

Οι Αμερικανοί έφτιαξαν τη δική τους παραλλαγή: στη φυλακή μεν αλλά επ' αόριστον και χωρίς δίκη...


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## Costas (Jan 13, 2011)

Chinese authorities raze an artist's studio (NYT) (του καλλιτέχνη 艾未未, Ai Weiwei, Άι Ουέι-ουέι, που είχε κοστίσει 1 εκ. δολάρια)


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## Costas (Jan 15, 2011)

Συχνά ξεσπαθώνουμε (δικαίως) με αηδία και αγανάχτηση ενάντια στον κιτρινισμό των ΜΜΕ, που την τρίχα την κάνουνε τριχιά και που ακόμα και αξιόλογα συμβάντα τα φθείρουν και τα ξεφτιλίζουν τελικά με το να τα υπερπροβάλλουν, ιδίως τα αρνητικά γεγονότα, πράγμα που οδηγεί και σε συλλογική κατάθλιψη, ωθώντας πολλούς τηλεθεατές μακριά από την ειδησεογραφία, απλά σαν καταφύγιο γαλήνης και ηθελημένης αποχαύνωσης, έτσι για εξισορρόπηση.

Ας δούμε όμως και την άλλη πλευρά, την πλευρά της συστηματικής λογοκρισίας και φιλτραρίσματος κάθε είδησης στο όνομα του αγώνα, υποτίθεται, ενάντια στον 'κιτρινισμό', ώστε να παραχθεί ένα 'ομογενοποιημένο' προϊόν, όπως αυτό έχει προδιαγραφεί στις Οδηγίες του Κεντρικού Γραφείου Προπαγάνδας προς τα κινέζικα ΜΜΕ για το χειρισμό των ειδήσεων για το 2011, στη λαμπρή παράδοση του σταλινισμού, ενόψει των '2 γιορτών και των 2 συνόδων' (βλ. άρθρο), Οδηγίες οι οποίες διέρρευσαν στο διαδίκτυο: σε ποιες δόσεις επιτρέπεται να μεταδίδεται μια είδηση, ώς πόσοι νεκροί σ' ένα 'τραγικό συμβάν' θεωρείται ότι δεν καθιστούν την είδηση αναμεταδοτέα και άρα απαγορεύεται η αναμετάδοσή της, πότε απαγορεύεται ένα εθνικής εμβέλειας μέσο να μεταδώσει μια είδηση --επιτρέπεται η αναφορά της μόνο στα τοπικά μέσα--, ποιες απελπισμένες ενέργειες (π.χ. αυτοκτονίες μπροστά στις κάμερες) ενάντια στις αναγκαστικές κατεδαφίσεις κτιρίων απαγορεύεται να μεταδίδονται, κλπ. Όλα αυτά για να αποφευχθεί η προαναφερθείσα 'κατάθλιψη-μαυρίλα' στις 'μάζες' (αντιθέτως, ο όρος "κοινωνία των πολιτών" απαγορεύτηκε προσφάτως) και να προωθηθεί, αντιθέτως, η ιδέα της 'αρμονικής' κοινωνίας.

Σχετικά με το τρέχον σλόγκαν της οικοδόμησης μιας 'αρμονικής κοινωνίας'· με το παλιότερο (της προηγούμενης ηγεσίας) περί Τριών Αντιπροσωπεύσεων· και με τη μάχη ενάντια στη 'χυδαιολογία' στο διαδίκτυο, συνιστώ θερμά και όλως ιδιαιτέρως το ξεφύλλισμα του Λεξικού του Χορτολασπερού Αλόγου που φιλοξενείται στην ιστοσελίδα της China Digital Times με το εντελώς ξεχωριστό --και σπαρταριστό-- γλωσσικό περιεχόμενο, που θα ενθουσιάσει κάθε ρέκτη των γλωσσικών ανατροπών και του πολιτικού χιούμορ. Οι ανεξάντλητοι λογοπαικτικοί πόροι της κινεζικής γλώσσας (οι αλλαγές των τόνων που αλλάζουν το νόημα των λέξεων) αποκαλύπτονται σε όλη τους τη δυναμική σ' αυτό το σπινθηροβόλο πανηγύρι.


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## nickel (Jan 15, 2011)

Ας φιλοξενήσουμε και το απαραίτητο γιουτιουμπάκι:


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## Costas (Jan 23, 2011)

Για όποιον θέλει μια πρώτη, μη δεσμευτική γνωριμία με τα μανταρίνικα (BBC).


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## Costas (Jan 28, 2011)

*Κλιπάκι*: How do China's youths view the rest of the world? (στην πραγματικότητα, κυρίως το πώς απαντάνε φοιτήτριες κι ένας φοιτητής του Πεκίνου στις κριτικές των Αμερικανών και των Δυτικών για το πολιτικό τους σύστημα και για την εικόνα της χώρας τους στο διεθνή στίβο) (wimp.com)


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## Costas (Jan 31, 2011)

Άρθρο στην NYT. Άνοδος των τιμών των κινεζικών εξαγωγικών προϊόντων, πρώτον λόγω αύξησης του εργατικού κόστους (που αυτό αυξάνεται αφενός για να καλυφθούν οι απώλειες από τον πληθωρισμό και αφετέρου επειδή δεν βρίσκεται πια τόσο φτηνό εργατικό δυναμικό, λόγω της δημογραφικής 'συρρίκνωσης' με την πολιτική του ενός παιδιού και λόγω της ανόδου του μορφωτικού επιπέδου εκατοντάδων εκατομμυρίων νέων που είναι πτυχιούχοι και δεν θέλουν να δουλέψουν εργάτες) και δεύτερον λόγω ενίσχυσης της ισοτιμίας του γιουάν. Συνεπώς, κάμψη των εξαγωγών και των ναύλων και αναζήτηση από τους Δυτικούς φτηνότερων εναλλακτικών στην Ινδία, στο Βιετνάμ, στην Ταϊλάνδη κλπ. Δυσκολίες αυτού του τελευταίου εγχειρήματος λόγω ανεπαρκούς παραγωγικής βάσης σε αυτές τις χώρες και πολύ μικρότερων δημογραφικών μεγεθών για πολλές από αυτές.

(Σε μια διάλεξή του που ένας Θεός ξέρει πού την έχω καταχωνιάσει και δεν τη βρίσκω, ο Imm. Wallerstein ανέπτυσσε αυτό το σενάριο, ότι ο καπιταλισμός μέσα στο πρώτο μισό του 21ου αιώνα θα φτάσει στα αντικειμενικά όριά του, όταν θα έχει εξαντλήσει τις μεγάλες δεξαμενές φτηνού εργατικού δυναμικού στην Κίνα, στην Ινδία και στην Ινδονησία).


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## Zazula (Jan 31, 2011)

Costas said:


> (Σε μια διάλεξή του που ένας Θεός ξέρει πού την έχω καταχωνιάσει και δεν τη βρίσκω, ο Imm. Wallerstein ανέπτυσσε αυτό το σενάριο, ότι ο καπιταλισμός μέσα στο πρώτο μισό του 21ου αιώνα θα φτάσει στα αντικειμενικά όριά του, όταν θα έχει εξαντλήσει τις μεγάλες δεξαμενές φτηνού εργατικού δυναμικού στην Κίνα, στην Ινδία και στην Ινδονησία).


Και, αλλάζοντας εστιακό σημείο, θα κάνει τότε τους εργαζομένους των ανεπτυγμένων χωρών να ρίξουν πάρα πολύ νερό στο κρασί τους, βάζοντας τις αποδοχές και τα κεκτημένα τους να κάνουν λίμπο όλο και χαμηλότερα... Στις δε χώρες τού πρώην φτηνού δυναμικού θα μπορεί πλέον να πουλά πολύ περισσότερα αγαθά, ενώ στις χώρες των πρώην "καλομαθημένων" θα κάνει ένα hard reset για να πάθουν σοκ και να δεχθούν οτιδήποτε — αρχίζοντας έτσι έναν νέο κύκλο καπιταλιστικής επιτυχίας.


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## drsiebenmal (Jan 31, 2011)

Zazula said:


> Και, αλλάζοντας εστιακό σημείο, θα κάνει τότε [...]


θα - κάνει - _τότε_;


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## Costas (Feb 2, 2011)

Από China Daily USA

*In black and white*

_Blue of China is Europe's only publishing house dedicated solely to Chinese books. Yang Guang reports.
_
Genevieve Imbot-Bichet's connection to China is readily apparent in her cheongsam-collared red blouse covered in peony and phoenix patterns. But the connection goes deeper than that. Since 1994, the slight 55-year-old French translator and publisher has been working to promote modern and contemporary Chinese literature in France. (...)

http://www.bleudechine.fr/


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## Costas (Feb 13, 2011)

*Classical Chinese is my hobby*

Από China Daily (αποσπάσματα)
SHANGHAI - Wang Yunfei, an 18-year-old student from Nantong, Jiangsu province, has won instant fame for an essay he wrote in this year's college entrance examination. His essay on the environment first stunned the examiners and then caught the attention of the entire nation, for it was written in the long-forgotten classical Chinese language that was used in the Han Dynasty (206 BC - AD 220). Wu Xinjiang, a scholar of classical literature, was summoned to examine and rate Wang's paper. After spending a whole day reading and re-reading Wang's essay, Wu declared that it was a perfect piece of Han Dynasty writing, in grammar as well as style. Wu was also surprised to find that in the prose there were over 40 Chinese words he had never heard before. Wu later told the media that Wang's writing skills were good enough for a postgraduate student of classical literature. "Classical Chinese is my hobby," said Wang, whose father is a truck driver and mother a farmer.
Wang said he has never had a computer in his home. And unlike his peers who spend most of their spare time surfing the Internet, he devoted his leisure time reading classical books. 
Wang has bought himself a lot of ancient literature books and plans to read all of them before college starts in September. And quite unlike many teens, who crave for fame, Wang is "upset" that his essay has become a talking point for the nation. He said the sudden fame has interrupted his peaceful life, as journalists from across the country are lining up to interview him. "The interviews have taken up the time I wanted to spend reading," he said, adding, "I don't want to be famous."


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## Costas (Feb 13, 2011)

Αιγύπτιος διαδηλωτής μοστράρει σύνθημα στα κινέζικα (προς παλαιά μέλη του φόρουμ: λέτε να πάψουν οι Αιγύπτιοι να μιλάνε αραβικά και να πιάσουν τα κινέζικα σε...τρία τέρμενα; ;) )






"Ο αιγυπτιακός λαός απαιτεί ο προέδρος Μουμπάρακ να παραιτηθεί" (σειρά των λέξεων όπως στο κινεζικό)

埃及人民要求总统穆巴拉克下台 (στο πλακάτ ο 6ος χαρακτήρας είναι ανορθόγραφος)

Ή μήπως θα προκύψει κινεζοαιγυπτιακή κρεολή; 






Edit:
Για όσους θέλουν περισσότερα: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2956


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## Costas (Feb 17, 2011)

Ας αφήσουμε για λίγο τα πορνίδια του Ιταλού "Ιππότη" και ας πάμε στις σύγχρονες παλλακίδες της Κίνας (ευρύτερα διαδεδομένο φαινόμενο εκεί απ' ό,τι εδώ):

Under a draft interpretation of China’s marriage law, expected to be issued in coming weeks, mistresses would not be allowed to sue their married lovers for reneging on promises of money, property or goods, said legal experts who have reviewed the language. Nor would wayward husbands be allowed to seek the courts’ help in retrieving money or goods that they bestowed upon mistresses. But wives could sue to recover money or property that ended up in the hands of a “little third,” the colloquial term for a mistress.

Όλο το άρθρο στη NYT.


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## Alexandra (Feb 17, 2011)

Costas said:


> a “little third,” the colloquial term for a mistress.


Τι τρυφερά που την αντιμετωπίζουν... Πολιτισμός, παιδί μου.


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## nickel (Feb 17, 2011)

Και πριν γίνουν κουλουβάχατα τα μαθηματικά μας, έχουν έκφραση για το «έτερον ήμισυ»;


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## Costas (Feb 17, 2011)

Δεν το ξέρω (ας μην ξεχνάμε βέβαια και "το μισό του ουρανού"), αλλά πάντως τις λένε και "δεύτερα βυζιά" (=δεύτερες συμβίες). Άλλωστε κάνουν και παιδιά μαζί τους, κλπ. Τέλος πάντων, ο διάχυτος σεξισμός έχει σαν αποτέλεσμα μια πετυχημένη επαγγελματικά γυναίκα να θεωρείται αυτομάτως "μικρή τρίτη" ή "δεύτερο βυζί [δεύτερη γυναίκα]", όπως μπορείτε να διαβάσετε εδώ.
Σχετικά με την αναφορά σ' αυτό το άρθρο στην αιμόπτυση λόγω υπερβολικής κατανάλωσης οινοπνεύματος σε επαγγελματικά δείπνα μπορείτε να διαβάσετε και στην ανάρτηση #16.


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## Zazula (Feb 17, 2011)

Τελικά, απ' όπου κι αν το δούμε, η Κίνα είναι το μέλλον.


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## Costas (Feb 19, 2011)

@123 
Άλλες χαλαρά συναφείς λέξεις:
外遇 wàiyù (εξωτερική συνάντηση =) εξωσυζυγική σχέση
填房 tiánfáng (γεμιζοσπίτω [ουσ.] =) δεύτερη γυναίκα (προκειμένου για χήρο)


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## Costas (Feb 21, 2011)

'Jasmine' protests in China fall flat (CNN)


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## Costas (Feb 23, 2011)

Σχετικά με το...non-event της προηγούμενης ανάρτησης (από το motherboard.tv):

Maybe the combination of social media and pseudoevents points a surreal way forward for public dissent in China in the web era: organizers needn’t actually gather people, as Falun Gong supporters quietly but visibly did in the late 1990s around the capital, at the movement’s eventual peril, and as occasionally happens today, in gatherings of petitioners and others that are often promptly shut down by scores of police.

Instead, they can simply spread word about a protest via one of China’s networking sites, then wait for the police – along with the journalists, and perhaps a few sympathizers with cameras – to show up and shut down something that isn’t even there. You don’t just get a “protest”; you get a display of fear by the government. Do it again, and the number of “protests” grows, along with the number of police. Repeat.


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## Costas (Feb 27, 2011)

Από Herald's Tribune:
Murong Xuecun, the pen name of Hao Qun, 37, is one of China¹s early Internet writers, best known for the novel "Leave Me Alone: A Novel of Chengdu." Recently, a nonfiction work, "The Missing Ingredient," about going underground to uncover a pyramid scheme, won him the 2010 People¹s Literature Prize, but he was unexpectedly barred from making an acceptance speech. He delivered it instead on Tuesday before the Foreign Correspondents Club in Hong Kong:

Και ακολουθεί μια σπαρταριστή περιγραφή της μονομαχίας του με τον επιμελητή-λογοκριτή του. (Time.com)

(...)
Unfortunately, I have dedicated great effort to the task of compiling this 'sensitive words glossary,' and I have mastered my filtering skills. I knew which words and sentences had to be cut, and I accepted the cutting as if that was the way it should be. In fact, I will often take it on myself to save time and cut a few words. I call this 'castrated writing' — I am a proactive eunuch, I have already castrated myself even before the surgeon raises his scalpel.
It is hardly news that in this world there are some things that can be written about and some that cannot; some things can be said yet other things can only be thought. Our mother tongue has been cut into two parts: one safe, and the other risky. Some words are revolutionary, and others are reactionary; some words we may use, and others belong to our enemies.
(...)


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## Costas (Mar 2, 2011)

Non-event's (#128 & #129) συνέχεια. (Danwei.org)


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## Costas (Mar 7, 2011)

Οι βασικοί στόχοι του νέου πεντάχρονου πλάνου της Κίνας. (NYT)


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## Costas (Mar 7, 2011)

Τοις ερημικοίς άπαυστος ο θείος πόθος εγγίνεται, κόσμου ούσι του ματαίου εκτός...


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## Costas (Mar 8, 2011)

*Μια σιδηροδρομική ιστορία*



drsiebenmal said:


> ...σε κάποιο παράλληλο σύμπαν, εγκαινιάστηκε η ταχύτερη σιδηροδρομική σύνδεση στον κόσμο...


Τα δύο σύμπαντα δεν είναι παράλληλα και ο εκσυγχρονισμός δεν αποκλείει τη βαρβαρότητα. Τα δύο σύμπαντα συναντήθηκαν μέσα σ' ένα τρένο. Σύνδεσμος προς το China Media Project:

The tragedy of Zhao Wei 

Όπως έλεγε στη Χάρτα 08 ο εγκάθειρκτος τώρα κύριος συντάκτης της, Λίου Ξ(Σ)ιαομπό, "ένας ‘εκσυγχρονισμός’ που αφήνει απέξω αυτές τις οικουμενικές αξίες και αυτό το θεμελιώδες πολιτικό πλαίσιο είναι μια ολέθρια διαδικασία απαλλοτρίωσης των δικαιωμάτων του ανθρώπου, διάβρωσης της ανθρωπιάς και καταπάτησης της αξιοπρέπειάς του. Ποιο δρόμο θα ακολουθήσει η Κίνα του 21ου αιώνα; θα συνεχίσει αυτού του είδους τον ‘εκσυγχρονισμό’ που καταπιέζει τα δικαιώματα; ή θα αναγνωρίσει τις οικουμενικές αξίες, θα σμίξει με το κύριο ρεύμα του πολιτισμού και θα εγκαθιδρύσει ένα δημοκρατικό πολίτευμα; Πρόκειται για μια επιλογή που δεν είναι εύκολο να την αποφύγει."


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## Costas (Mar 10, 2011)

Συνέχεια στην ανάρτηση #5 περί μετενσάρκωσης του Δαλάι Λάμα (από την Guardian):

Beijing insists it has the right to approve the reincarnations of the senior Tibetan monks and has said the next Dalai Lama will be born in China. But the Dalai Lama has suggested that since he is likely to die in exile, he will also be reincarnated there.


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## Zazula (Mar 10, 2011)

Τελικά ο βουδισμός είναι η πιο σουρεαλιστική θρησκεία!


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## Costas (Mar 26, 2011)

Οι βαριές ποινές για "αδικήματα" γνώμης συνεχίζουν να πέφτουν σαν το χαλάζι. Μετά από 2,5 χρόνια (1991-93) για συγγραφή αντικυβερνητικών αφισών και από άλλα 9 χρόνια (1999-2008) γιατί "τόλμησε" να ιδρύσει μη εγκεκριμένο από το Κόμμα κόμμα, ο αντιφρονών Λίου Ξ(Σ)ιανμπίν, που είχε συνυπογράψει τη Χάρτα 2008, έφαγε άλλα 10 χρόνια γιατί συνέγραψε άρθρα (δημοσιεύτηκαν στο εξωτερικό) που κατάγγελναν το ΚΚΚ (η Κου-Κλουξ-Κλαν είναι θηλυκού γένους, μην μπερδευόμαστε). Ωραία που περνάνε μερικοί άνθρωποι τη ζωή τους... (ΝΥΤ)


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## Costas (Apr 1, 2011)

Μετά το σύνθημα στα κινέζικα σε πανό στην Αίγυπτο, τώρα και στη Λιβύη, σε μια προσπάθεια των εξεγερμένων να πείσουν την Κίνα να πάψει να στηρίζει τον Καντάφι. Το κείμενο λέει: "ο Μουαμάρ Καντάφι είναι ένας ψεύτης".






Από το wenxuecity.com


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## Costas (Apr 1, 2011)

Ο πόλεμος του κοπιράιτ άναψε και στην Κίνα, με τους συγγραφείς να συνασπίζονται εναντίον του Baidu (του Γούγλη της Κίνας). Από το China Daily USA.


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## Costas (Apr 4, 2011)

Υπό κράτηση τέθηκε ο διεθνούς φήμης καλλιτέχνης Άι Ουέι-Ουέι, συνσχεδιαστής του Ολυμπιακού Σταδίου του Πεκίνου και επικριτής της κινεζικής κυβέρνησης (κυρίως από τότε που κατέρρευσαν τα σαθρά δημόσια σχολικά κτίρια, κυρίως αυτά και παρά τη μικρή τους ηλικία, στο μεγάλο σεισμό του Σιτσουάν, με τους χιλιάδες σκοτωμένους μαθητές). Από τη NYT. Η αστυνομική καταστολή συνεχίζεται και διευρύνεται όλα τα τελευταία χρόνια, όπου κυριαρχούν δύο συνθήματα: της 'αρμονικής κοινωνίας' και της 'διατήρησης της σταθερότητας', έχει δε περάσει στο κόκκινο τους τελευταίους μήνες με τα γεγονότα στον αραβικό κόσμο.


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## Costas (Apr 15, 2011)

Του προηγούμενου μήνα: αυτοπυρπόληση βουδιστή μοναχού στο Θιβέτ και, κυρίως, δήλωση του 75χρονου Δαλάι Λάμα ότι αποφάσισε να παραδώσει την [εξόριστη] εξουσία σε αιρετό πρωθυπουργό, βάζοντας τέλος στο θεσμό του μοναδικού πολιτικοθρησκευτικού ηγέτη, που κατά τη γνώμη του είναι πια αναχρονιστικός (καθιερώθηκε το 1642), και διότι δεν θέλει, λέει, να γίνει κι αυτός ένας Μουμπάρακ. Μια μερίδα της αντιπολίτευσης δεν συμφωνεί και φοβάται διάλυση του εξόριστου κινήματος αν υιοθετηθεί μια τόσο ριζική μεταρρύθμιση, υπό τις παρούσες συνθήκες. Για να εγκριθεί η απόφαση χρειάζεται πλειοψηφία δύο τρίτων στο εξόριστο κοινοβούλιο, κάτι που δεν είναι εξασφαλισμένο. Κοινώς, δεν τον αφήνουν να μη μετενσαρκωθεί, τον άνθρωπο! (ΝΥΤ)


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## Costas (Apr 15, 2011)

Ο συλληφθείς καλλιτέχνης Άι Ουέι-Ουέι [#140] είναι μπλακτζακαδόρος υψηλής κατηγορίας και έβγαζε το ψωμί του παίζοντας στα καζίνα της Αμερικής, οπότε οι Αμερικανοί συνάδελφοί του σκέφτονται να οργανώσουν τουρνουά προς τιμήν του και να πιέσουν την αμερικανική κυβέρνηση να επιβάλει εμπορικές κυρώσεις στην Κίνα, έως ότου ο συμπαίχτης τους αφεθεί ελεύθερος! (ΝΥΤ)


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## Costas (Apr 16, 2011)

New guidelines issued on March 31 by the State Administration of Radio Film and Television in China discourage plot lines that contain elements of "fantasy, time-travel, random compilations of mythical stories, bizarre plots, absurd techniques, even propagating feudal superstitions, fatalism and reincarnation, ambiguous moral lessons, and a lack of positive thinking."

“The government says … TV dramas shouldn’t have characters that travel back in time and rewrite history. They say this goes against Chinese heritage,” reports CNN’s Eunice Yoon. “They also say that myth, superstitions and reincarnation are all questionable.”

Από το CNN.


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## Zazula (Apr 16, 2011)

Costas said:


> New guidelines discourage plot lines that contain "a lack of positive thinking."


Αυτό ήταν: Κίνα και ΗΠΑ χέρι-χέρι! :)


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## Costas (Apr 24, 2011)

Το αμπεμπαμπλόμ των εμφανισοεξαφανίσεων ενός αγάλματος (του Κομφούκιου, στην πλατεία Τιανανμέν): (Ministry of Tofu και Global Times)


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## Costas (Apr 24, 2011)

Ιδού και η εκδοχή του Εθνικού Μουσείου για τη μετακίνηση (Economic Observer).


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## Costas (May 11, 2011)

Πολύ ενδιαφέρουσα μισάωρη ραδιοφωνική εκπομπή (France Culture) για τη δικαιοσύνη στην Κίνα (συνέντευξη με Γαλλίδα ειδικό που ζει στο Πεκίνο).


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## Costas (May 21, 2011)

Τα προβλήματα γύρω από το Φράγμα των Τριών Φαραγγιών (Three Gorges Dam, 三峡大坝 [San xia da ba]) είναι γνωστά και πολυσυζητημένα, και σιγά-σιγά τα αναγνωρίζουν και οι διαδοχικές κυβερνήσεις της Κίνας. Πιο πρόσφατα, βγήκε ανακοίνωση με την έγκριση του πρωθυπουργού Ουέν Τζιαμπάο, πράγμα που θα μπορούσε να σημαίνει αλλαγή πολιτικής. Όσο πιο γιγάντιο το έργο, τόσο πιο γιγάντια τα οφέλη αλλά και οι επιπτώσεις. (Guardian)


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## Costas (May 21, 2011)

Ο "πατέρας" τού Great Firewall of China (επίσημη ονομασία: Πρόγραμμα Χρυσή Ασπίδα) έφαγε αβγά και παπούτσια όταν πήγε να μιλήσει σε πανεπιστήμιο. (Want China Times).


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## drsiebenmal (May 22, 2011)

China and Taiwan 'first joint dictionary' (BBC)

[...]

But for Taiwan and China, the dictionary is aimed at bridging the language gap that has risen due to the two sides being ruled separately since the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949, and even as far back as 1895 when Japan colonised the island.

One of the biggest differences is that China, starting in the 1950s, has required its people to use simplified Chinese characters to raise literacy. Taiwan continues to use traditional characters, which have more strokes, insisting they best represent the culture behind the language.

[...]


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## nickel (May 22, 2011)

Εμείς χαιρόμαστε που γλιτώσαμε από τα πνεύματα και τις περισπωμένες, κι αυτοί ζωγραφίζουν μισή ώρα για να γράψουν Ταϊβάν!








Για όποιον δυσκολεύεται να το πιστέψει, ιδού και η σελίδα τους για την Ταϊβάν:
http://zh-classical.wikipedia.org/wiki/臺灣


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## Costas (May 22, 2011)

Ανάμεσα στις ανοησίες, περιπουλογίες και ουτιδανολογίες της κας που έγραψε το άρθρο του BBC που λινκάρισε ο Δόκτωρ, υπάρχει και η εξής:

For example, "armed forces" is made up of the words "stop" and "fighting" - as militaries were seen as tools to stop wars.

Όμως το 武 military (που το βλέπουμε στο ποστ του nickel κάτω-κάτω, το ίδιο δεξιά κι αριστερά· και πάντως δεν σημαίνει armed forces) αναλύεται βάσει ενός σχετικού λεξικού ως εξής: *Stop [止] invader's lances [戈] (altered)*. Άρα η ερμηνεία της στην μπλε φράση παραπάνω είναι κατά τη γνώμη μου επιεικώς παρατραβηγμένη. Το ότι ο στρατός σταματά τα δόρατα του εχθρού δεν σημαίνει ότι οι στρατοί νοούνταν ως εργαλεία για την παύση των πολέμων (στο τέλος θα τους προτείνει και για Νόμπελ Ειρήνης), αλλά το πολύ απλό ότι το επίθετο "στρατιωτικός" νοείται ως αμυντική δράση.


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## drsiebenmal (May 22, 2011)

Μα γι' αυτήν ακριβώς τη φράση λινκ.αρισα και περίμενα στημένος στο φιανκέτο... :)


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## Costas (May 22, 2011)

Εν τω μεταξύ στην Κέρκυρα τον Ιούνιο έχει φεστιβάλ σκακιού και θα καταφτάσουν και Κινέζοι μετρ του κινεζικού σκακιού (象棋, xiang qi), φιανκέτο-ξεφιανκέτο.


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## SBE (May 22, 2011)

nickel said:


> Εμείς χαιρόμαστε που γλιτώσαμε από τα πνεύματα και τις περισπωμένες, κι αυτοί ζωγραφίζουν μισή ώρα για να γράψουν Ταϊβάν!


 
Παρατηρώ ότι ο έρως δεν έχει απλοποιηθεί και τόσο, τα ζυμαρικά όμως απλοποιήθηκαν. Να λοιπόν οι προτεραιότητες.


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## Costas (May 22, 2011)

.
.
.
Ε, πώς, όπως λέει και το άρθρο του BBC, έχει φύγει από τη μέση η καρδιά, 心, και από 愛 έγινε 爱。


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## SBE (May 23, 2011)

Τι να πω πια...
Κάποιος που ήξερα μάθαινε κινέζικα και σε κάθε μάθημα τους έδιναν να μάθουν να γράφουν δυο λέξεις. Με αυτό το ρυθμό σε 100 χρόνια ίσως μπορούσε να διαβάζει βιβλία. 
Από την άλλη όλοι οι Κινέζοι που ξέρω, παιδιά μεταναστών, μόνο μιλάνε και το πολύ γράφουν το όνομά τους και άλλες δέκα λέξεις.


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## Costas (May 24, 2011)

Κοίτα, αν μαθαίνεις δύο χαρακτήρες (όχι λέξεις) την ημέρα, τότε έχεις μάθει 2500 χαρακτήρες σε 1250 μέρες, δηλ. σε χοντρικά 3 χρόνια. Οι 2500 χαρακτήρες σού φτάνουν για να μάθεις δεν ξέρω πόσες φορές περισσότερες δισύλλαβες λέξεις, συνδυάζοντάς τους, που σημαίνει ότι μπορείς να διαβάσεις άνετα ένα κανονικής δυσκολίας βιβλίο. Το ερώτημα είναι: θα μαθαίνεις όντως 2 χαρακτήρες την ημέρα; Εδώ ισχύει το αντίστροφο από το κοινώς λεγόμενο: οι πρώτοι 800 χαρακτήρες είναι *εύκολοι*, μετά το πράγμα δυσκολεύει, γιατί η RAM σου αρχίζει να φουλάρει. Παρ' όλα αυτά, είναι κυρίως θέμα εξοικείωσης και άσκησης. Εκατοντάδες χιλιάδες ξένοι μαθαίνουν αυτή τη στιγμή κινέζικα μόνο στην Κίνα, αν θυμάμαι καλά το άρθρο που λινκάρισε ο Δόκτωρ. Και επί χιλιετίες όλη η Άπω Ανατολή τράφηκε με αυτούς τους χαρακτήρες.


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## Costas (Jun 1, 2011)

Ταραχές στην Εσωτερική Μογγολία [Μουγγαλία-Μογγουλία ] [1][2][3]


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## Costas (Jun 5, 2011)

“China is becoming a surreal place” (NYT)


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## meidei (Jun 5, 2011)

nickel said:


> Εμείς χαιρόμαστε που γλιτώσαμε από τα πνεύματα και τις περισπωμένες, κι αυτοί ζωγραφίζουν μισή ώρα για να γράψουν Ταϊβάν!
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
Πέφτει πολλή απλοποίηση στο χειρόγραφο, και στους παραδοσιακούς χαρακτήρες.


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## Costas (Jun 6, 2011)

Μεγάλη ξηρασία στη νότια Κίνα, παρά το βομβαρδισμό των σύννεφων. (Guardian)


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## Costas (Jun 11, 2011)

A job post on a job-hunting website based in Xinyang, a city in southern Henan province, said, “West Jiuhua Mountain scenic spot is hiring full-time tea-leaf pickers. A prospective employee has to be a woman with no sexual experience, has a bra size of at least C, and has no scar or wound visible on her body with a uniform. (Ministry of Tofu)


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## Costas (Jun 11, 2011)

Κι αυτό ωραίο, για γαστρίμαργους: Boy's urine-soaked eggs listed as local specialty, intangible cultural heritage. (Ministry of Tofu)


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## Zazula (Jun 12, 2011)

Παλιό αλλά πάντα επίκαιρο:


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## Costas (Jun 17, 2011)

Ένα ωραίο αρθράκι για τις εισαγωγικές εξετάσεις στα πανεπιστήμια της Κίνας, περιλ. μαζική καταστροφή σχολικών βιβλίων. (Ministry of Tofu)


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## Costas (Jun 18, 2011)

Η τελετή του Νιπτήρος αλά κινεζικά, για την Ημέρα της Μητέρας, από τα παιδιά τους. Δείγμα όχι ταπεινοφροσύνης αλλά υιικής/θυγατρικής ευσέβειας.(Ministry of Tofu)


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## Costas (Jun 18, 2011)

Costas said:


> (...) τις λένε και "δεύτερα βυζιά" (=δεύτερες συμβίες). Άλλωστε κάνουν και παιδιά μαζί τους, κλπ. Τέλος πάντων, ο διάχυτος σεξισμός έχει σαν αποτέλεσμα μια πετυχημένη επαγγελματικά γυναίκα να θεωρείται αυτομάτως "μικρή τρίτη" ή "δεύτερο βυζί [δεύτερη γυναίκα]", όπως μπορείτε να διαβάσετε εδώ.


Οι 'μικρές τρίτες' έφτιαξαν φόρουμ και αντιδιαστέλλουν εαυτές από τα δεύτερα βυζιά [δεύτερες συμβίες], γιατί, λένε, οι ίδιες το κάνουν από αίσθημα, ενώ οι άλλες μόνο για τα λεφτά. (Ministry of Tofu)


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## Costas (Jun 18, 2011)

Πλούσιοι και διάσημοι νιόνυμφοι ηθοποιοί μοίρασαν "κόκκινα φακελάκια" στους δημοσιογράφους και στους κάμεραμαν στη δεξίωση του γάμου τους, σε αναγνώριση της σκληρής δουλειάς τους, αλλά δύο απ' αυτούς μαλλιοτραβήχτηκαν μπροστά σε όλο τον κόσμο για 500 γιουάν (75 δολάρια). (Ministry of Tofu)


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## Costas (Jun 21, 2011)

Για τους amateurs de curiosités, αυτό. Απόσπασμα (she είναι η χήρα αυτοκράτειρα Cixi, 69 χρονώ):

... I took in my hands her abnormally large clitoris, pressed it toward my lips and performed a low but steady friction which increased its size. She graciously unveiled the mysteries of her swelling vulva, even as that of Messalina, and I marvelled at the perennial youth which its abundance seemed to indicate.


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## drsiebenmal (Jun 22, 2011)

*Κίνα: Ελεύθερος με εγγύηση ο καλλιτέχνης Αϊ Γουέι Γουέι*

Ο Κινέζος καλλιτέχνης Αϊ Γουέι Γουέι αφέθηκε ελεύθερος με εγγύηση, μετέδωσε σήμερα το πρακτορείο Νέα Κίνα, αναφέροντας ότι αυτό συνέβη λόγω της «καλής συμπεριφοράς του, καθώς και μιας χρόνιας ασθένειας από την οποία πάσχει».

Ο Γουέι Γουέι συνελήφθη στις αρχές Απριλίου την ώρα που προσπάθησε να επιβιβαστεί σε αεροπλάνο για να εγκαταλείψει την Κίνα.

«Η αστυνομία του Πεκίνου ανακοίνωσε σήμερα ότι ο Αϊ Γουέι Γουέι αφέθηκε ελεύθερος με εγγύηση, λόγω της καλής συμπεριφοράς του επειδή ομολόγησε τα εγκλήματά του, αλλά και λόγω μιας χρόνιας ασθένειας από την οποία πάσχει» μετέδωσε το πρακτορείο.

«Η απόφαση αυτή δείχνει ότι ο Αϊ Γουέι Γουέι έχει πει επανειλημμένα ότι είναι έτοιμος να πληρώσουν τους φόρους που δεν έχει καταβάλει στις φορολογικές αρχές της Κίνας» πρόσθεσε το κινεζικό πρακτορείο.

Καθημερινή με πληροφορίες από ΑΠΕ-ΜΠΕ


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## Costas (Jul 6, 2011)

Silence of the Chinese dissidents (South China Morning Post)

"The hornet grabbed the little bird and began stinging it frenziedly. Unable to bear the hornet's stings and thinking there was no point suffering this ordeal, the bird realised that no one would gain anything and there was no way to change the hornet's ways. So the bird knelt down to the hornet and kowtowed in order to extricate itself.
"The hornet, knowing that the force of justice was on the rise in the animal world, didn't dare do anything rash to the bird and came up with a plan that would satisfy everyone. It agreed to release the little bird, but only if the bird promised: 1) not to speak of the past few months; 2) not to damage the hornet's reputation; and 3) not to urge other animals to stir up the hornet's nest. Finally, the bird was freed."


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## Costas (Jul 6, 2011)

Όπερα Huangmei σε 9 συνέχειες. (You Tube)


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## Costas (Jul 8, 2011)

Visualising China: China 1850-1950


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## Costas (Jul 8, 2011)

Ο συγγραφέας των Δεκαεννιά Ημερών Λιάο Γι-Ου (Liao Yiwu) εγκατέλειψε μυστικά την Κίνα (The New Yorker). (Το βιβλίο του The Corpse Walker, που αναφέρεται στο άρθρο, από αποσπάσματα που είχα διαβάσει, πρέπει να είναι διαμάντι).


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## Costas (Jul 25, 2011)

Το φίμωμα των αντιφρονούντων διανοουμένων συνεχίζεται. Εντάξει, δεν είναι είδηση, αλλά για να μην ξεχνιόμαστε. (ΝΥΤ)


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## Costas (Jul 29, 2011)

Ένα άρθρο της ΝΥΤ για τα κινέζικα δίκτυα micro-blogging (weibo), με αφορμή το πρόσφατο δυστύχημα με τα τρένα. Έχει και κάτι γλωσσικό:

In some ways, the Chinese weibos replicate their Western counterparts: they limit posts to 140 characters (though in Chinese, where many characters are words by themselves, much more can be said).

Σωστό είναι αυτό. Ωστόσο δεν ισχύει απολύτως αυτό που λέγεται συχνά, ότι "στα κινέζικα μια συλλαβή είναι μια λέξη". Οι περισσότερες λέξεις είναι δισύλλαβες, μόνο που τα μονοσύλλαβα συστατικά τους είναι σχεδόν πάντοτε ήδη φορείς _νοήματος_ από μόνα τους, κάτι που, ειρήσθω εν παρόδω, δίνει τη δυνατότητα σύνθεσης δισύλλαβων λέξεων σε τεράστια ποσότητα.


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## Costas (Aug 5, 2011)

Μια από τις σκοτεινές πτυχές του περιορισμού των γεννήσεων: οι απαγωγές παιδιών. (ΝΥΤ)


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## Costas (Aug 12, 2011)

Ένα κεφάτο αρθράκι για τις επισκέψεις Κινέζων τουριστών στην Ταϊβάν, και τις εντυπώσεις ένθεν και ένθεν. As Chinese visit Taiwan, the Cultural Influence is subdued (ΝΥΤ). Α προπό, πώς λέμε το marbled meat?


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## Costas (Aug 15, 2011)

Οι περιπέτειες και τα διλήμματα ενός ανεξάρτητου σινεματζή στην Κίνα, του Τζάο Λιάνγκ. (ΝΥΤ) (με δύο βιντεοκλιπάκια)


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## Costas (Aug 28, 2011)

Φιλικός αγώνας μπάσκετ στην Κίνα μεταξύ μιας κινεζικής ομάδας (του Στρατού) και μιας κολεγιακής αμερικανικής καταλήγει σε κουνγκ-φου. Σαν κάτι δικούς μας φιλικούς εδώ... (βίντεο live leak και άρθρο). Με την ευκαιρία της επίσκεψης του Αμερικανού αντιπροέδρου Τζο Μπάιντεν.


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## Costas (Aug 28, 2011)

Right to rewrite? Το γνωστό ερώτημα για το μεταφραστικό έργο, εδώ προκειμένου για τη σημερινή κινεζική πεζογραφία προς τις δυτικές γλώσσες. (China Daily)


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## Costas (Aug 29, 2011)

Hospital in China fends off angry mob (Los Angeles Times)
(...)
Last year, a doctor and nurse were stabbed to death in the eastern province of Shandong by the son of a man who had died 13 years earlier of liver cancer, while a pediatrician was badly injured jumping from a fifth-floor window to escape relatives of a baby who had died.
Medical personnel advocates complain that the more violent incidents are staged by hired thugs, paid by families of the deceased in hopes of winning compensation from the hospitals. Sometimes the protesters are from the same village or are semi-professionals in causing trouble. The Chinese have even coined a word for the paid protesters: yinao, meaning "medical disturbance."
"It has become a very sophisticated system for chasing profits. Whenever somebody dies in a hospital, the yinao will get in touch with the family and offer their services in exchange for 30% to 40%," said Liu Di, who is setting up a social network for medical professionals.
In Tuesday morning's incident in Nanchang, hospital staff members learned that a mob of about 100 people was heading their way with crude weapons and took it upon themselves to mount a defense. Photographs and video posted on a local website showed men in white coats, apparently doctors, and T-shirted security guards brandishing what looked like oversize baseball bats.
"I always tell my clients, if you start a big disturbance, you'll get a bigger compensation package. If you start a smaller disturbance, you'll get a smaller package. And if you don't do anything, you'll get nothing"


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## Costas (Sep 1, 2011)

Κατεδαφίσεις σχολείων για τα παιδιά εσωτερικών μεταναστών στο Πεκίνο. (ΝΥΤ)

Και το σχόλιο ενός δυτικού αναγνώστη: 
The bulldozing of migrant children's schools is absolutely disgraceful (and typical of the crude methods of the city leadership). Last year they began building walls around migrant villages on the outskirts of the city - to "cut crime" and "improve public order". Shades of the Czech mayors who build walls round Romany housing estates.
Neverthless there is something slightly fake about the hand-wringing of the NYT and other media, given that the West spends billions each year operating a worldwide hukou system to restrict migration of the world's poor to developed countries - or as any surviving Maoists might put it, from the world countryside to the world city.
The problems of migration within countries are essentially the same as those between countries. Despite the idiocy and vulgarity of the Beijing leadership, one should presumably recognize that there is a problem with unlimited migration to Beijing for all sorts of reasons - exhaustion of water resources to name just one.


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## Costas (Sep 1, 2011)

Μουσική από την Κίνα, στο είδος indie. Pangbian.com


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## Costas (Sep 3, 2011)

Propaganda bureau takes control of two Beijing newspapers - Officials announce move to reporters on Beijing Times and Beijing News, known for bold reporting, at meetings (The Guardian)

When censors clamped down on reporting, the Beijing News ran a front page article about a precious ceramic dish at the Forbidden City breaking into six pieces. Although it was a true story, it was widely read as an oblique reference to Wenzhou [bullet train crash], where six carriages were derailed.


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## Costas (Sep 6, 2011)

Κυβερνητικό φρένο στην παραγωγή αυτοκινήτων εντός Κίνας (αρχής γενομένης από την πόλη του Πεκίνου), με στόχο την ανάσχεση της υπερπαραγωγής και τη στροφή προς ποιοτικότερα, πιο οικονομικά και λιγότερο ρυπογόνα μοντέλα, και παράλληλα απαγόρευση εξαγωγών, ώσπου η ποιότητα του εμπορεύματος να γίνει υποφερτή, για να μη τους βγει το κακό όνομα στις μεγάλες αγορές της Δύσης. (NYT)


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## Costas (Sep 24, 2011)

Είναι δυνατόν ο Κέρβερος να χαμογελάσει; μπορεί μια καπιταλιστική κομουνιστική δικτατορία να ανακαλύψει μέσω της αγοράς τις ελεύθερες εκλογές, δηλ. ν' αφήσει αυτοβούλως να της πάρουν την εξουσία; Η προϊούσα οπισθοδρόμηση των ελευθεριών στην Κίνα μάλλον το αντίθετο δείχνει. Δύο άρθρα για τα προσκόμματα που βάζει το καθεστώς στους πάσης φύσεως ανεξάρτητους ακτιβιστές, ακόμα και μέλη του ΚΚ αν είναι, ώστε να μην μπορέσουν να κατέβουν υποψήφιοι στις θεωρητικά ανοιχτές σε όλους εκλογές για τα πρωτοβάθμια όργανα της χώρας. Τον κομουνισμό κι αν τον πλένεις, το σαπούνι σου χαλάς... [The Jamestown Foundation] [The Guardian] (εγώ διαλέγω το δεύτερο...)


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## Costas (Oct 1, 2011)

After online campaign, dog meat festival is canceled (NYT)


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## nickel (Oct 1, 2011)

Ηδονίζομαι να διαβάζω για τις τεράστιες και απότομες αλλαγές που φέρνουν οι διαδικτυακές κοινότητες.


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## Costas (Oct 2, 2011)

Ως προς την οργάνωση της αντίδρασης, ναι, σαφώς. Ως προς τις ανθρωπολογικές προϋποθέσεις της, ιδού το σχόλιο ενός ανθρωπολόγου:

This is all super-interesting especially from a China anthropologist's viewpoint -- and especially as I am just now teaching my course on taboo -- but, not just because of how it sheds light on the globalization of food manners which is now removing dogs from Chinese menus, but also for how, in many of these recent reports from China (about the newly found concern for dogs, etc.), there is such a striking near-total absence of any reference to the intensifying race to finish off the world's last rhinos, tigers, elephants and such animals, for their ivory and so-called medicine, for shipment to China -- this is striking even if these animals live far away and most consumers can't watch them die, as they evidently can with the dogs -- but many still must know about the ongoing bloodbath.

Compare:

Al Jazeera TV, "101 East", 12 July 2011.
"China's animal crusaders: In China, animal rights activism is flourishing with increasing numbers of people seeing animals as pets, not protein."

http://english.aljazeera.net/programmes/101east/2011/07/20117129224537494.html


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## Costas (Oct 3, 2011)

Ο Wang Li σε τρία κομμάτια του με γκιμπάρντα και κολοκυθοφλογέρα από το δίσκο του _Rêve de Sang_ (Buda Musique), από τη σελίδα του στο My Space.


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## Costas (Oct 4, 2011)

Σχετικά με το σκυλοκαβγά δύο αναρτήσεις παραπάνω, άλλο σχόλιο:

Many Westerners happily eat cow or pig, taboo in South or West Asia. Rather than the "globalization of food manners", isn't this just cultural imperialism? Aren't the fenqing going to stand up for Chinese civilization on this important issue?

Και ποιος τού είπε ότι η παγκοσμιοποίηση δεν είναι δυτικός ιμπεριαλισμός; Πέρα από αυτό όμως, ο σκύλος έχει γίνει φίλος του ανθρώπου (και στην Κίνα), κάτι που ούτε η γελάδα ούτε το γουρούνι έχουν πετύχει. Οπότε εις μάτην διαμαρτύρεται ο κύριος: ορισμένα δυτικά στοιχεία φαίνεται πως τείνουν να έχουν οικουμενική αξία, και πείθουν τον κόσμο και τα υιοθετεί (και τανάπαλιν, βεβαίως). Πάντως πριν από μερικά χρόνια είχαν παρατηρηθεί εξαφανίσεις γατών στην Αθήνα, και τελικά ήταν ένας Κινέζος εστιάτορας που έβγαινε παγανιά (se non è vero, è ben trovato).


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## Costas (Oct 9, 2011)

Από τον σκυλοκαβγά στον γρυλοκαβγά, αγαπημένο παίγνιο των Κινέζων. Ένα σχετικό βιντεάκι (CRI)


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## Costas (Oct 22, 2011)

Taking Big Risks to See a Chinese Dissident Under House Arrest (ΝΥΤ)
“Just because you feel hopeless doesn’t mean you should stay complacent” (ένας που σκοπεύει να πάει να τον δει, αν και δεν θα τα καταφέρει)

Ο όρος dissident σηκώνει συζήτηση, αλλά τέλος πάντων.


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## Costas (Oct 22, 2011)

Ένας ιστότοπος του Πανεπιστημίου του Χονγκ Κονγκ με άρθρα για τον κινεζικό πολιτισμό.


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## Costas (Nov 7, 2011)

Ένα άρθρο της NYT με οδήγησε εδώ:

_On 19 November 2010, in Beijing, Chinese novelist Murong Xuecun, whose works include_ *Leave Me Alone: A Novel of Chengdu*_, was awarded the 2010 People’s Literature Prize. Celebrated for his darkly funny novels of contemporary urban Chinese life, Murong had prepared to use the award ceremony to make a speech calling for a more relaxed approach to literary censorship. But just as he ascended the platform, he was abruptly barred from speaking. His speech on censorship had itself been censored. Here is the full text of the speech, translated by Martin Merz & Jane Pan_


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## Costas (Nov 14, 2011)

Σε συνέχεια του #171, ο Άι Γουέι Γουέι αποφάσισε να μην αποδεχτεί τις κατηγορίες περί φοροδιαφυγής του κινεζικού καθεστώτος, και ό,τι ήθελε προκύψει (εμείς εδώ πληρώνουμε...ΕΕΤΗΔΕ!) (ΝΥΤ)


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## Costas (Nov 14, 2011)

Ανάλεκτα του νομπελίστα ειρήνης Λίου Ξ(Σ)ιαομπό στα αγγλικά. (The Guardian). Άλλα έχουν κυκλοφορήσει στα γαλλικά.


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## Costas (Nov 16, 2011)

Ταχύτατη εξαφάνιση ιχνών (Daily Telegraph)


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## Costas (Nov 18, 2011)

Ο... Βλαδίμηρος Πούτιν νικητής του βραβείου Κομφούκιου ειρήνης για φέτος. (The Guardian)


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## Costas (Nov 19, 2011)

Ο Άι Ουέι-Ουέι, μετά την κατηγορία για φοροδιαφυγή, που συνεχίζεται, κατηγορείται τώρα για πορνογραφία, για την εξής φωτογραφία:



(Le Figaro)


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## Costas (Nov 22, 2011)

1.
Χαμός από γυμνές φωτογραφίες σε αλληλεγγύη προς τον Άι Ουέι-Ουέι (shanghaiist)

2.
Οδηγός αρχικά πάτησε πεζό χωρίς να το θέλει, και στη συνέχεια τον ξαναπάτησε για να τον αποτελειώσει, με το εξής σκεπτικό: "If she is dead, I may pay only about 20,000 yuan ($3,125). But if she is injured, it may cost me hundreds of thousands yuan." Δεν είναι μεμονωμένο. Βέβαια, νομίζω πως υπάρχει (ή θα έπρεπε να υπάρχει) τρύπα στο συλλογισμό: το πρώτο πάτημα είναι πρόκληση σωματικών βλαβών εξ αμελείας, ενώ το(α) επόμενο(α) φόνος εκ προμελέτης. Φτάνει βέβαια να σε πιάσουν.


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## Costas (Nov 27, 2011)

Κινέζοι και ρολόγια, νέα επεισόδια μιας παλιάς αγάπης. (Le Figaro)


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## Costas (Nov 29, 2011)

Στο έργο αυτό ο Γκούσταβ Μάλερ μελοποιεί-αναπτύσσει συμφωνικά 6 ποιήματα που αρχικά ήταν κινέζικα, από τα κινέζικα μεταφράστηκαν στα γαλλικά, από τα γαλλικά στα γερμανικά, από τα γερμανικά παραφράστηκαν πάλι στα γερμανικά, και μετά τα παρέλαβε ο Μάλερ, πρόσθεσε και λίγους δικούς του στίχους, κι έχουμε τελικά τους γερμανικούς στίχους που ακούμε στο μουσικό έργο. Βάζω εδώ τα δύο λινκ που ανιχνεύουν ανάδρομα όλη αυτή την πορεία (τα βρήκα στην Wikipedia), και θα τα βάλω και στο γερμανικό φόρουμ. Γλώσσα εργασίας: τα αγγλικά!  Teng Leong-Chew: _Tracking the Literary Metamorphosis in_ 'Das Lied von der Erde' [αρχείο .pdf στην ενότητα References] και Teng Leong-Chew: _Das Lied von der Erde_: The Literary Changes [σελίδα του ιστότοπου mahlerarchives.net]


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## Costas (Dec 2, 2011)

Ένα ενδιαφέρον άρθρο από το cosmo.gr, που το πήρε από την Κυριακάτικη Ελευθεροτυπία (αλλά δεν δίνει σωστό λινκ):

Στην κινέζικη γλώσσα τα ονόματα από διάσημες μάρκες και φίρμες έχουν τη δική τους ιδιαίτερη και ενδιαφέρουσα ονομασία. Έτσι οι εταιρείες franchise αναγκάζονται να αλλάζουν τα ονόματα, ώστε να διαφημίζονται καλύτερα τα προϊόντα. Έτσι, η μετάφραση της Nike είναι "ανθεκτικά και επίμονα", της Coca Cola "νόστιμη διασκέδαση" και της Heineken ως "δύναμη της ευτυχίας!"

Για την επιλογή των ονομάτων στα διάφορα προϊόντα, "επιστρατεύονται" ειδικοί σύμβουλοι, προγράμματα υπολογιστών και γλωσσολογικές αναλύσεις.

Στα κινέζικα η Coca Cola προφέρεται "Κεκουκέλε" [ΣΣ: Κε *Κόου* Κε Λε] και σημαίνει "νόστιμη διασκέδαση." Έτσι ταιριάζει και ηχητικά με την αρχική ονομασία, αλλά σε δελεάζει να καταναλώσεις και το προϊόν!

Το απορρυπαντικό Tide, προφέρεται "Ταϊζί" και σημαίνει: "απαλλάσσει από τη βρομιά." Η Reebok σημαίνει "γρήγορα βήματα", ενώ τα πατατάκια Lay's προφέρονται Λέσι και μεταφράζονται ως "χαρούμενα πράγματα." Η BMW μεταφράζεται "πολύτιμο άλογο!"

Τέλος, πολλές εταιρείες αναγκάζονται να αλλάζουν τα ονόματα από διάφορα προϊόντα που θέλουν να λανσάρουν στην κινέζικη αγορά, επειδή στην κινέζικη γλώσσα έχουν αρνητική σημασία. Για παράδειγμα, η λέξη για τη μηχανή αναζήτησης Bing από τη Microsoft, στα κινέζικα σημαίνει "αρρώστια, ελάττωμα και ιός." Το αναθεωρημένο όνομα Μπι γινγκ σημαίνει "σίγουρη ανταπόκριση."

Η Peugeot δε, είχε σοβαρό πρόβλημα, καθώς στην κινέζικη αργκό η λέξη σημαίνει "πόρνη!"

Από τα λίγα παραδείγματα που γνωρίζω, έτσι είναι, και οφείλεται στο ότι στα κινέζικα κάθε συλλαβή (πλην ελαχίστων) σημαίνει κάτι, και μάλιστα μια γκάμα ολόκληρη σημασιών.
Άρα, π.χ. το Coca Cola αναλύεται σε = Ke Kou [κόου] Ke Le. Έχεις στην ουσία στη διάθεσή σου 4 συλλαβές για να αποδώσεις το προϊόν, και για κάθε συλλαβή έχεις συχνά δεκάδες εναλλακτικές σημασίες/γραφές, οπότε πράγματι είναι πεδίο δόξης λαμπρόν για τους διαφημιστές!
Μικροαλλαγές επιτρέπονται με σκοπό να επιτευχθεί το επιθυμητό σημασιολογικό αποτέλεσμα, π.χ. η Coca Cola δεν αποδόθηκε Kou Ka Kou La, που θα ήταν πιο κοντά στην προφορά, αλλά Ke Kou Ke Le, ακριβώς για να προκύψει κάτι 'νόστιμο' και 'διασκεδαστικό'.
Αυτό δεν σημαίνει ότι είναι υποχρεωτική η σημασιοδότηση της μεταγραφής. Σ' ένα κύριο όνομα ανθρώπου, π.χ., συχνά οι συλλαβές του αποδίδονται με κάποιες στανταρισμένες αντίστοιχες συλλαβές (είτε παγίως μία είτε ένα μικρό σύνολο εναλλακτικών), χωρίς αυτές να δηλώνουν κάτι συγκεκριμένο. Στα προϊόντα όμως, είναι φανερό πως υπάρχει λόγος για σημασιοδότηση.


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## LostVerse (Dec 2, 2011)

Ενδιαφέρον άρθρο. Παρόλο που δεν είναι ακριβώς το ίδιο, μου θύμισε την περίπτωση Mike Rowe Soft VS Microsoft.
Επίσης είχα ακούσει κάποια στιγμή αλλά δεν μπορώ να το επιβεβαιώσω ότι στην Ιαπωνία το μπλε θεωρείται χρώμα γρουσουζιάς, οπότε τα στρουμφάκια είχαν πρόβλημα να καθιερωθούν και στην αρχή λανσαρίστηκαν κίτρινα.


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## Costas (Dec 2, 2011)

Συνέντευξη του συγγραφέα Λιάο Γι-Ού (#175). (Artspace China)


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## Costas (Dec 3, 2011)

Θετική αποτίμηση των οικονομικών προοπτικών της Κίνας από τον ΟυωλΣτρητάριο κο. Steven Rattner: Will China Stumbe? Don't Bet on It (NYT). Δείγμα:

Not unlike the United States in the 19th century, China’s early stage of industrialization has brought with it an unsavory wild West flavor, from cronyism to fraudulent accounting, that justifiably worries investors. But behind those distractions is a country that is investing substantially in its future — about 46 percent of its gross domestic product, compared with 12 percent in the United States.


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## Costas (Dec 5, 2011)

Μερικά λινκ της ροκ σκηνής της Κίνας:
http://www.myspace.com/ihearttagteam
http://www.cuijian.com/
http://www.rockinchina.com/w/Yuguo
http://www.myspace.com/lonelychinaday
http://www.myspace.com/pk14
http://maybemars.org


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## Costas (Dec 6, 2011)

A concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, Xiaolu Guo, Vintage (από Λεξικοπωλείο)

Η αδέξια αφήγηση της 23χρονης Ζhuang που έρχεται για πρώτη φορά στην Ευρώπη να μάθει Αγγλικά με το Concise Chinese-English Dictionary υπό μάλης. Γλυκόπικρη ιστορία αγάπης, χάσμα πολιτισμών και γλωσσικής επικοινωνίας…


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## Costas (Dec 10, 2011)

Μια αεροπορική είδηση με...γλωσσικό ενδιαφέρον που βρήκα σ' ένα γαλλόφωνο μπλογκ περί Κίνας που μόλις ανακάλυψα. Έφταιγε ο πιλότος ή ο πύργος ελέγχου;...


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## LostVerse (Dec 11, 2011)

Σύμφωνα μ' *αυτό* το άρθρο, λιγότερο από ένας στους δέκα πιλότους στην Κίνα κατέχει στοιχειώδη αγγλικά κι η κατάσταση πρέπει να βελτιωθεί. Καθώς το άρθρο είναι από το 2007, προσωπικά συμπεραίνω ότι δεν φταίει ούτε ο πύργος ελέγχου ούτε ο πιλότος, αλλά μάλλον η εταιρεία, που δεν φρόντισε να τον εκπαιδεύσει.


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## Costas (Dec 15, 2011)

Ταραχές στο χωριό Ουκάν της επαρχίας Γουανγκ-ντόνγκ. (ΝΥΤ) Αρπαγή γης, ως συνήθως, και πριν από λίγες μέρες ένας από τους εκπροσώπους των κατοίκων, που είχε συλληφθεί, πέθανε όντας υπό κράτηση..."από καρδιά". Στη φωτογραφία της συγκέντρωσης στο πρώτο πλάνο υπάρχουν μόνο γυναίκες. Να κάθονται χώρια; Δεν ξέρω. Στο πανό πίσω στο βάθος γράφει "Ο λαός του Ουκάν αδικείται!"


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## Costas (Dec 16, 2011)

Από Νότια Κορέα η είδηση, αλλά αφορά ευρύτερα και την κινεζική ιστορία. Άγαλμα μπροστά από τη γιαπωνέζικη πρεσβεία στη Σεούλ έστησαν Κορεάτες, που δείχνει τη νεαρή Κορεάτισσα σεξουαλική σκλάβα των Γιαπωνέζων του Β' Παγκόσμιου Πολέμου. Στην ίδια θέση συγκεντρώνονται κάθε βδομάδα, από το 1992, όσες τέτοιες σκλάβες επιζούν. (ΝΥΤ) Ζητούν αποζημίωση από το ιαπωνικό κράτος (όχι από ιδιώτες). Η Ιαπωνία λέει ότι έδωσε ό,τι ήταν να δώσει το 1965, όταν εξομαλύνθηκαν οι σχέσεις των δύο χωρών (κάτι μου θυμίζει αυτό...)


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## Costas (Dec 19, 2011)

Ο Paul Krugman δεν γράφει συχνά άρθρα για την Κίνα. Εδώ ένα ανησυχητικό, για τη φούσκα των ακινήτων και φυσικά τις προεκτάσεις του ενδεχόμενου σπασίματός της σε παγκόσμιο επίπεδο. (ΝΥΤ) Εννοείται ότι το θέμα έχει άμεση σχέση με την αρπαγή γης από τις τοπικές κυβερνήσεις έναντι πινακίου φακής από τους φτωχούς "ενοικιαστές" της --τους αγρότες-- (η γη στην Κίνα ανήκει στο κράτος) και την πώλησή της στη φούσκα της αξιοποίησης, από την οποία μετά οι τοπικές κυβερνήσεις εξαρτιόνται για τα έσοδά τους.

Λέει κι ένα ωραίο ο Krugman: All economic statistics are best seen as a peculiarly boring form of science fiction, but China’s numbers are more fictional than most. I’d turn to real China experts for guidance, but no two experts seem to be telling the same story.


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## Costas (Dec 20, 2011)

Πρεμιέρα έκανε στην Κίνα άλλη μια ταινία για τη σφαγή του Νάντζινγκ (1937), του σκηνοθέτη Τζανγκ Γιμόου, με σταρ τον Κρίστιαν Μπέιλ, και με μεγάλο μπάτζετ. Οι κριτικές ως τώρα, αρνητικές. Αλλά η 'είδηση' είναι αλλού: ο Μπέιλ θέλησε να επισκεφτεί έναν τυφλό ακτιβιστή που παραμένει 'εκτοπισμένος στο σπίτι του', μετά την αποφυλάκισή του, αλλά δεν τον άφησαν (όπως και κανέναν άλλον εδώ και πάνω από ένα χρόνο). Βέβαια δεν υπήρχε ιδιαίτερη αμφιβολία ότι έτσι θα γινόταν, αλλά το έκανε για να δώσει δημοσιότητα στην υπόθεση. Υπάρχει μια δόση ειρωνείας στο ότι ο σταρ μιας ταινίας που χρηματοδοτείται και βγαίνει στις αίθουσες με τις ευλογίες του καθεστώτος κάνει 8 ώρες ταξίδι με μινιβάν για να φάει μερικές σπρωξιές από τους μυστικούς ώστε να δώσει κατά το μέτρο των δυνατοτήτων του δημοσιότητα σε μια δίκαιη υπόθεση.


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## Costas (Dec 20, 2011)

Από άρθρο του Τάκη Μίχα στο protagon.gr με τίτλο _Ελληνοκινέζικα_:

Ας υποθέσουμε ότι στην Κίνα ένας επιχειρηματίας καλείται να πληρώσει φόρο 100 χιλιάδες γουάν. Ο εφοριακός θα του προτείνει ότι έναντι ενός «δώρου» θα του μειώσει σημαντικά το ποσό που θα πρέπει να καταβάλλει. Θα του πει λοιπόν: «Ας κάνουμε γιαντζιου μαζί». Το θέμα εδώ είναι ότι τα Κινέζικα είναι τονική γλώσσα και όταν αλλάζει ο τόνος αλλάζει η σημασία της λέξης. Έτσι σύμφωνα με μια ερμηνεία η λέξη «γιαντζιου» σημαίνει «ερευνα,ψάξιμο», όταν όμως αλλάζει η τονική κλίμακα σημαίνει «τσιγάρα και αλκοόλ» (δηλαδή μπαξίσι). Έτσι λοιπόν η πρόταση που κάνει ο εφοριακός προς τον επιχειρηματία μπορεί να σημαίνει ανάλογα με τον τόνο της φωνής είτε το ανώδυνo «Ας το ψάξουμε μαζί το θέμα» ή το διεφθαρμένο «Δώσε τσιγάρα και αλκοόλ» (δηλαδή «Σκάστα μου»). Με αυτό τον τρόπο ο εφοριακός είναι καλυμμένος γιατί μπορεί πάντοτε να ισχυρισθεί ότι η πρόταση του παραμονεύθηκε. (sic)

Το πρώτο γιάντζιου (έρευνα) είναι yánjiū 研究, και το δεύτερο (τσιγάρα και ποτό) είναι yānjiǔ 烟酒。[Ακριβέστερη προφορά και για τα δύο: γιέντσιοου, αλλά για μεταγραφή καλύτερο είναι το γιάντζιου]


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## Costas (Dec 20, 2011)

Για όσους τυχόν ενδιαφέρονται για τις επερχόμενες (14 Ιαν.) προεδρικές _και_ βουλευτικές εκλογές στην Ταϊβάν και τα πολιτικά τους συμφραζόμενα. (Asia Times)


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## Costas (Dec 27, 2011)

Άλλος ένας Κινέζος απ' όσους είχαν υπογράψει τη Χάρτα 08 (βλ. ανάρτηση #1 αυτού του νήματος), και με παρελθόν φυλάκισης από την εποχή του "6/4" (4/6/1989), καταδικάστηκε από δικαστήριο σε 9 χρόνια φυλακή σε μια δίκη που διάρκεσε 2 ώρες. Ο κατηγορούμενος δεν έκανε έφεση, θεωρώντας ότι δεν είχε νόημα, αφού επρόκειτο για δίκη-παρωδία. Ο λόγος της καταδίκης ήταν η Mητέρα Όλων των Εγκλημάτων στον κομουνισμό (ακόμα και στον σημερινό κινεζικό καπιταλιστικό κομουνισμό): ζήτησε την κατάργηση του μονοκομματικού κράτους. Ο καταδικασμένος λέγεται 陈卫, Chen Wei, Τσεν Ουέι (BBC). Έχει γυναίκα και μια δεκάχρονη κόρη.


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## Costas (Dec 29, 2011)

Άλλη μία καταδίκη για έγκλημα γνώμης (παρακίνηση σε ανατροπή του κράτους), του αγωνιστή Chen Xi (陈西), σε 10 χρόνια φυλακή και 3ετή στέρηση πολιτικών δικαιωμάτων. (HRIC)


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## Costas (Dec 29, 2011)

Το Πεκίνο προσπαθεί να τιθασέψει τη φούσκα των ακινήτων, αλλά το αν η προσγείωση θα είναι ομαλή ή θα καταλήξει σε συντριβή του αεροσκάφους μένει να το δούμε. Εδώ μια χαρακτηριστική φωτογραφία (κλικ επάνω της για μεγέθυνση):




Και η λεζάντα:
Police officers stand in a line as they try to maintain order after a model of a new housing estate was smashed by some owners at a sales centre of a residential complex in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, December 23, 2011. The owners were unhappy because the new price of the complex was dropped by nearly 4000 yuan ($631) per square metre, local media reported. As China's private real estate market, a main driver of the country's growth, cools under a two-year-long tightening campaign, investors are starting to worry about home prices falling too sharply and too quickly.

( REUTERS/Lang Lang) από South China Morning Post


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## Costas (Jan 1, 2012)

Ένα ωραίο "ανιματρονικό" άγαλμα του Κομφούκιου από τον καλλιτέχνη Τζανγκ Χουάν, Zhang Huan, 張洹 [张洹 σε απλοποιημένη γραφή], εκτίθεται στο Rockbund Art Museum της Σαγκάης. (από laughingsquid.com)


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## Costas (Jan 2, 2012)

Σ' ένα άρθρο της Guardian για τη λαθρανασκαφή στην Κίνα που υπάρχει στο νήμα "Σε τούτα εδώ τα μάρμαρα" εντόπισα την εξής λεπτομέρεια:

In some cases, thieves have reportedly built small "factories" next to tombs – allowing them to break in without being noticed.

Σ' εμάς εδώ τι θα μπορούσαν να χτίσουν που να δένει με το περιβάλλον; Σκέφτηκα...μπουζουξίδικα ή κωλάδικα, αλλά θα τους ξεσκέπαζαν οι ανυποψίαστοι πελάτες που θα πήγαιναν.


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## Costas (Jan 3, 2012)

Οι εξευτελισμοί μιας παράλυτης (από το ξύλο) δικηγόρου, της Νι Γιουλάν, Ni Yulan 倪玉兰, και του άντρα της στα χέρια της κινεζικής διχτατορίας. (ΝΥΤ)(HRIC)


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## Costas (Jan 4, 2012)

Οι δέκα κορυφαίες νέες γλωσσικές εκφράσεις του κινέζικου ίντερνετ για το 2011. (Baidu Beat)


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## Costas (Jan 4, 2012)

*China pushes minimum wage rises*
(Financial Times)
On an hourly basis, Shenzhen’s minimum wage is now about four times less than the federal requirement in the US. In 2004, when Shenzhen introduced a minimum wage, basic pay was nearly 12 times cheaper than in the US.


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## Costas (Jan 5, 2012)

Ινστιτούτο Κομφούκιος υπάρχει και στην Ελλάδα (Αθήνα). Εδώ ένα άρθρο με διάφορες απόψεις για την εξάπλωσή τους στην Αμερική. (inside higher ed)


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## Costas (Jan 6, 2012)

Ένα ωραίο γιοουκου-άκι με γκροπλάν σε κοπέλες υπό τους ήχους δύο τραγουδιών των Low Wormwood (低苦艾）.


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## Costas (Jan 9, 2012)

Ένα podcast από το thisamericanlife μ' ένα σόου του Mike Daisey με τίτλο The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, διασκευασμένο για το ραδιόφωνο. Ο Daisey ταξίδεψε στο Shenzhen της Κίνας, μίλησε με εργάτες της Foxconn και άλλους, επισκέφτηκε εργοστάσια. Είναι πολύ καλός αφηγητής και πολύ σοβαρός επίσης· η ακρόαση αξίζει απολύτως το χρόνο της. Ακολουθούν σχολιασμός, συνεντεύξεις κλπ. Ετικέτες: Apple, i-Phone, i-Pad, China, Shenzhen, sweatshops, industrialization, rice paddies vs. factory assembly line.


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## Costas (Jan 10, 2012)

Όπου οι κάτοικοι του Χονγκ Κονγκ νιώθουν ότι υφίστανται διάκριση γιατί οι σεκιουριτάδες του D&G δεν τους αφήνουν να φωτογραφίζουν τη βιτρίνα του μαγαζιού, ενώ αφήνουν τους τουρίστες από τη Λαϊκή Κίνα. (Global Voices Online)


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## Costas (Jan 13, 2012)

Το άρθρο (στην ΝΥΤ) ενός πανεπιστημιακού λέει πως η Κίνα δεν είναι μονολιθική αλλά μοιάζει μάλλον με την Ευρώπη των πολλών χωρών, και συγκρίνει τα μοντέλα μείωσης της εισοδηματικής ανισότητας πόλης-υπαίθρου δύο μητροπόλεων, του Τσχόνγκ-τσινγκ (Chongqing) και του Τσχένγκ-ντου (Chengdu), το ένα με μαζική αστικοποίηση και το άλλο με αναβάθμιση του αγροτικού τομέα, και καταλήγει:

European leaders ought to take note. Central authorities should have the power not just to punish 'losers' as Europe has done in the case of Greece, but to reward 'winners' that set a good example for the rest of the union.

Έφτασε η δόξα μας ως τη Σαγκάη...

Κατά τα άλλα, φυγή στις ΗΠΑ του συγγραφέα του βιβλίου _Ο Καλύτερος Ηθοποιός της Κίνας_ (για τον Κινέζο πρωθυπουργό Ουέν Τζια-μπάο· εκδόθηκε στο Χονγκ Κονγκ) (Guardian), και οι διακοπές ενός λάτρη του απόβλητου κομουνιστή ηγέτη Τζάο Ζιγιάνγκ (του είχε στήσει εικονοστάσι!) στο ψυχιατρείο. (HRiC)


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## Costas (Jan 14, 2012)

Σχετικό με το #230:

Η Apple δημοσιοποιεί για πρώτη φορά τη λίστα των προμηθευτών της (χωρίς διευθύνσεις) (ΝΥΤ)
Jeff Ballinger, a global labor activist, said he was skeptical that transparency alone would change the behavior of Apple’s suppliers, unless Apple was willing to pay more. “They can say forced overtime is a big problem, can you give Saturday afternoons off?” he said, adding that the factories’ “response is going to be raise the prices you give us. That they don’t want to do,” he said of Apple.

Μαυραγοριτισμός με βαποράκια για τα iPhones, ουρές, κλείσιμο του μαγαζιού και εκτόξευση αβγών από τα απογοητευμένα βαποράκια (ΝΥΤ):
Demand for iPhones in China far exceeds supply, which has spawned an army of scalpers who hire migrant workers to snap up products that the scalpers then resell at much higher prices. The horde of more than 1,000 people who gathered outside the store Friday in the Sanlitun district of Beijing included organized teams of migrant workers, identifiable by matching armbands or hats. Some of the migrant workers said they were bused in and promised payment of 100 renminbi, or about $16, for purchasing a phone. Wary of unrest, police ordered the store not to open, according to one source familiar with the situation. Furious, some would-be customers threw eggs. Police dispersed the crowd and temporarily cordoned off the store. Those recruited by scalpers were particularly angry. Some said the store’s closing meant that they would get only 10 renminbi, meant as a food allowance, after standing in line all night in freezing temperatures.


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## Costas (Jan 16, 2012)

Μια διάλεξη του απολαυστικού Pierre Ryckmans (Simon Leys): Reading


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## Costas (Jan 16, 2012)

Ο αρχηγός της επιτροπής αγώνα του Ουκάν (#214) έγινε κομματικός υπεύθυνος του χωριού. (ΝΥΤ)


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## drsiebenmal (Jan 17, 2012)

*Κίνα: Πλειοψηφία ο αστικός πληθυσμός​​*(Καθημερινή)​

Για πρώτη φορά στην Ιστορία της Κίνας ο αριθμός των αστών ξεπερνά τον αριθμό των κατοίκων των επαρχιών της Κίνας, ανακοίνωσε σήμερα η εθνική στατιστική υπηρεσία της χώρας.
Στα τέλη του 2011 η πολυπληθέστερη χώρα στον κόσμο καταμετρούσε 690,79 εκατ. κατοίκους στις πόλεις έναντι 656,56 εκατ. κατοίκων στις επαρχίες, σύμφωνα με την υπηρεσία.

Οι αστοί αποτελούν πλέον το 51,27% του συνολικού κινεζικού πληθυσμού, που φθάνουν το 1,347 δισ. κατοίκους.

Στην Κίνα καταγράφεται επιτάχυνση της αστικοποίησης και μαζική έξοδος των κατοίκων των επαρχιών που αποδίδεται στην αποκολεκτιβοποίηση της γεωργίας, την εκβιομηχάνιση της Κίνας και την έλξη που ασκούν οι πόλεις σε αυτούς που αναζητούν εργασία.

Ο αστικός πληθυσμός της Κίνας εκτιμάται ότι θα φθάσει τα 800 εκατ. ανθρώπους το 2020, σύμφωνα με μια κυβερνητική έκθεση η οποία είχε δοθεί στην δημοσιότητα τον Οκτώβριο του 2011.​


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## Costas (Jan 17, 2012)

Το...επιγραμμικό κομμάτι της κομματικής Ημερησίας του Λαού στο Χρηματιστήριο. (ΝΥΤ)


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## Costas (Jan 17, 2012)

There was another winner in the election this weekend that handed President Ma Ying-jeou of Taiwan a second term in office — the faint but unmistakable clamor for democracy in China.
(...)
“On the other side of the sea, Taiwan erected a mirror. And on this side of the sea, we saw ourselves in the future”
(...)
“This is an amazing idea, to be able to choose the people who represent you,” said the man, who asked to remain nameless so he could speak without restraint. “I think democracy will come to China. It’s only a matter of time.” 
(...)
A Taiwanese man brags to his Chinese friend that he will go to the polls in the morning and know the results that evening. “You guys are too backward,” the Chinese friend responds. “If we had to vote tomorrow morning, we would already know who is elected by tonight.”
(ΝΥΤ)


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## Costas (Jan 18, 2012)

Chinese dissident poet charged with subversion
China National News
(ANI)
A veteran Chinese dissident, Zhu Yufu, has been charged with subversion for writing and publishing a poem on the internet, according to his lawyer. The poem, entitled _It's Time_, urged people to gather in support of freedom, the China Daily reports. Zhu's lawyer said no date had been set for the trial. Chinese officials have not commented on the reported charge. Zhu was formally arrested last April as China began a wide-ranging clampdown on dissent. The lawyer, Li Dunyong, said he had collected the indictment on Monday from a court in the eastern city of Hangzhou. He said Zhu was "in a good condition". Zhu is a veteran activist who was involved in the 1979 Democracy Wall movement, which pressed for a quicker pace of change in China. He has been jailed twice before for his activism - in 1999 for seven years and in 2007 for two years.


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## Costas (Jan 19, 2012)

Ιδού και το πειστήριο του εγκλήματος:

是时候了

是时候了，中国人！是时候了
广场是大家的
脚是自己的
是时候用脚去广场作出选择

是时候了，中国人！是时候了
歌曲是大家的
喉是自己的
是时候用喉唱出心底的歌曲

是时候了，中国人！是时候了
中国是大家的
选择是自己的
是时候用自己选择未来的中国


“It’s Time”

It’s time, Chinese people! It’s time
The square belongs to us all
The feet are our own
It’s time to use our feet to go to the square and make a choice

It’s time, Chinese people! It’s time
The song belongs to us all
The throats are our own
It’s time to use our throats to sing the song in our hearts

It’s time, Chinese people! It’s time
China belongs to us all
The choice is our own
It’s time to use ourselves to choose the future China

(Σε ορισμένες πηγές υπάρχει και το εξής σχόλιο: <γράφτηκε για την κινεζική "Επανάσταση των γιασεμιών">)


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## Costas (Jan 19, 2012)

Πέφτουν οι 10άρες σαν το χαλάζι κι ο πληγωμένος καλλιτέχνης αναστενάζει:

Writer sentenced to ten years for subversion
By Reuters in Beijing

A court in the mainland has sentenced writer Li Tie to 10 years in prison on subversion charges for writing essays that urged people to defend their rights, a relative said, the third person to be sentenced on such charges in less than a month. (...)


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## daeman (Jan 21, 2012)

...
*AI WEIWEI: NEVER SORRY
*
Ai Weiwei is known for many things—great architecture, subversive in-your-face art, and political activism. He has also called for greater transparency on the part of the Chinese state. Director Alison Klayman chronicles the complexities of Ai’s life for three years, beginning with his rise to public prominence via blog and Twitter after he questioned the deaths of more than 5,000 students in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. The record continues through his widely publicized arrest in Beijing in April of 2011. As Ai prepares various works of art for major international exhibitions, his activism heats up, and his run-ins with China’s authorities become more and more frequent. 

In this unprecedented look at Ai and those close to him, Klayman’s camera captures his forthrightness and unequivocal stance. She gives a larger picture of the artist as an individual, a symbol of China’s oppression, and a powerful voice against a country that still denies its citizens many basic freedoms. 

_Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry_ is Alison Klayman’s debut feature documentary, which she directed, produced, filmed, and coedited. She is a 2011 Sundance Documentary Fellow and one of Filmmaker’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film.” She has been a guest on The Colbert Report, as well as on CNN and NPR. Klayman lived in China from 2006 to 2010, working as a freelance journalist. She speaks Mandarin and Hebrew and graduated from Brown University in 2006. 


Πρώτη προβολή αύριο στο Φεστιβάλ του Σάντανς. Εδώ ο ιστότοπος του ντοκιμαντέρ κι εδώ η πολυτεχνίτισσα μιλάει για το έργο της:


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## daeman (Jan 22, 2012)

...
*CHINA HEAVYWEIGHT *

In southwestern China, state athletic coaches scour the countryside to recruit poor, rural teenagers who demonstrate a natural ability to throw a good punch. Moved into boxing training centers, these boys and girls undergo a rigorous regimen that grooms them to be China’s next Olympic heroes but also prepares them for life outside the ring. As these young boxers develop, the allure of turning professional for personal gain and glory competes with the main philosophy behind their training—to represent their country. Interconnected with their story is that of their charismatic coach, Qi Moxiang, who—now in his late thirties and determined to win back lost honor—trains for a significant fight.

_China Heavyweight_ artfully captures the playfulness among the trainees, their grueling conditioning, and the guiding principle that athletic achievement is for their country, rather than themselves. Director Yung Chang returns to the Sundance Film Festival (_Up the Yangtze_ screened in 2008) with an intimately observed film that both explores and reflects social change and development in modern China. 








International award‐winning filmmaker Yung Chang made his first feature documentary, _Up the Yangtze,_ in 2007. It played at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival and was one of the top-grossing documentary releases that year. _China Heavyweight_ is Chang's sophomore film. He is currently in production on _The Fruit Hunters,_ a feature documentary about nature, commerce, and obsession in the fruit underworld, slated for a fall 2012 release. He is also currently writing "Eggplant," his first feature film, about a Chinese wedding photographer. 
 

Sundance 2012 World Documentary Official Competition 






Synopsis:
In central China, a Master coach recruits poor rural teenagers and turns them into Western-style boxing champions. The top students face dramatic choices as they graduate -- should they fight for the collective good or for themselves? A metaphor for the choices everyone in the New China faces now.

千錘百煉 : "To be tried and tested a thousand times over."


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## Costas (Jan 23, 2012)

Η ψυχολόγος και συγγραφέας Εύα Στάμου, μετά το όχι και τόσο πετυχημένο άρθρο της για τον κανόνα της εγγύτητας (στα γλωσσικά δε μου φαίνεται και πολύ καταρτισμένη), γράφει ένα άλλο, καλύτερο κατά τη γνώμη μου, για την μπλόγκερ Ye Haiyan (protagon). [Η φωτογραφία της με τον Ai Weiwei, την οποία αναφέρει στο άρθρο, εδώ)


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## Costas (Jan 26, 2012)

Ένας αρκετά κλασικός καβγάς στο μετρό του Χογκ Κογκ ανάμεσα σε ντόπιους και σε τουρίστες επιβάτες από τη Λαϊκή Κίνα σχολιάζεται στη συνέχεια από έναν καθηγητή πανεπιστημίου του Πεκίνου, παρακαλώ, σε κινεζικό τηλεοπτικό κανάλι, με εξτρέμ χαρακτηρισμούς (το πιο ωραίο: αποκάλεσε το Χονγκ Κονγκ –που σημαίνει "ευωδιαστό λιμάνι"– "βρομερό λιμάνι"), και πυροδοτεί τις αντιδράσεις που περιγράφει και ερμηνεύει το άρθρο της Guardian, αντανακλώντας διαφορές ιστορικές, πολιτισμικές, γλωσσικές, οικονομικές. [Τα κινέζικα βίντεο, το πρώτο στα καντονέζικα και το δεύτερο στα μανταρίνικα, έχουν αγγλικούς υπότιτλους. Η ιστορία με το κατάστημα του D&G που αναφέρεται έχει παρουσιαστεί εδώ στο #231, και το βραβείο Κομφούκιου για την Ειρήνη που απονεμήθηκε στον Πούτιν, πάλι εδώ στο #201).


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## Costas (Jan 27, 2012)

Η κόντρα Νορβηγίας-Κίνας συνεχίζεται. (The Guardian) Αυτή τη φορά, στην επίθεση η Νορβηγία.


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## Costas (Jan 31, 2012)

Την επαύριο της έκθεσης της οργάνωσης Human Rights Watch για τη θέση της Κίνας στο διεθνή κατάλογο καταπάτησης των ανθρώπινων δικαιωμάτων, εδώ μια ανακεφαλαίωση των τελευταίων μηνών όσον αφορά τους διαφωνούντες διανοουμένους, συν το κλασικό δίλημμα: φεύγω ή μένω (αλλά στη φυλακή); (Asia Times Online)


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## Costas (Feb 1, 2012)

Τοπικές εκλογές στο χωριό Ουκάν (Reuters):

"For 40 years we've never had a proper election," said a bouffant-haired villager named Chen Junchao ahead of the election of the 11 election committee members by around 4,000 eligible voters in the village. "I've never seen these papers before," said an emotional Chen, clutching a white ballot registration slip stamped with an official red ink government seal. "I was crying when I saw this."
Not all are optimistic. One young woman with a baby swaddled against her said she would vote but worried a power struggle was under way for the March 1 village committee seats that could see some of the old corrupt guard regain influence.
(...)
Village-level elections are now common, if still stage-managed by the Party, but the situation in Wukan is unique in that its fledgling electoral steps were wrought from the jaws of unrest. After rioting in September, villagers of Wukan expelled the old village guard and barricaded themselves in for a dramatic 10-day stand-off in December.


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## Costas (Feb 3, 2012)

Από μια κριτική του Perry Anderson για 3 βιβλία Αμερικανών γραφειοκρατών για την Κίνα (London Review of Books), το κομμάτι για έναν κάπως λησμονημένο πόλεμο: της Κίνας εναντίον του Βιεντάμ το 1979:

Kissinger gives Deng full credit for what he terms ‘a turning point of the Cold War’ and the ‘high point of Sino-American strategic co-operation’. What was this? China’s war on Vietnam in 1979. Here Vogel and Kissinger converge, applauding Deng’s resolute action to thwart Vietnamese plans to encircle China in alliance with the USSR, invade Thailand, and establish Hanoi’s domination over South-East Asia. Conscious that not even all Deng’s colleagues approved the assault, which was far from a military success, Vogel separates by eight chapters and 150 pages Deng’s tour of Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore to ensure diplomatic cover for the attack he was planning, from the war itself. The first, presented – along with Deng’s far more important tour of the United States two months later – as a triumph of far-sighted statesmanship, receives lavish coverage; the second, less than half the space. In part, this distribution is designed to protect America’s image in the affair: Deng launched the war just five days after getting back from Washington with the US placet in his pocket. But it is also to gloss over Deng’s misadventure on the battlefield as expeditiously as possible. The last word, as usual, goes to an apologist, through whom Vogel can convey his standpoint without being directly identified with it. Lee Kuan Yew, an ardent supporter of the war, has told the world: ‘I believe it changed the history of East Asia.’

Vogel’s account of China’s war on Vietnam is that of a former servant of a Democratic administration. Showering Carter’s point men in the tractations over Deng’s visit with effusive epithets, he is careful to shield the president himself from any too explicit responsibility for giving the war the go-ahead. Kissinger, a Republican and once head of the National Security establishment where Vogel was an underling, can afford to be more forthright. Deng’s masterstroke required US ‘moral support’. ‘We could not collude formally with the Chinese in sponsoring what was tantamount to overt military aggression,’ Brzezinski explained. Kissinger’s comment is crisp: ‘Informal collusion was another matter.’

How is this zenith of Sino-American collaboration, as Kissinger repeatedly calls it, to be judged? Militarily, it was a fiasco. Deng threw 11 Chinese armies or 450,000 troops, the size of the force that routed the US on the Yalu in 1950, against Vietnam, a country with a population a twentieth that of China. As the chief military historian of the campaign, Edward O’Dowd, has noted, ‘in the Korean War a similar-sized PLA force had moved further in 24 hours against a larger defending force than it moved in two weeks against fewer Vietnamese.’ So disastrous was the Chinese performance that all Deng’s wartime pep talks were expunged from his collected works, the commander of the air force excised any reference to the campaign from his memoirs, and it became effectively a taboo topic thereafter. Politically, as an attempt to force Vietnam out of Cambodia and restore Pol Pot to power, it was a complete failure. Deng, who regretted not having persisted with his onslaught on Vietnam, despite the thrashing his troops had endured, tried to save face by funnelling arms to Pol Pot through successive Thai military dictators.

Joining him in helping the remnants of the world’s most genocidal regime continue to maul border regions of Cambodia adjoining Thailand, and to keep its seat in the UN, was the United States. Vogel, who mentions Pol Pot only to explain that despite his negative ‘reputation’, Deng saw him as the only man to resist the Vietnamese, banishes this delicate subject from his pages altogether. Kissinger has little trouble with it. No ‘sop to conscience’ could ‘change the reality that Washington provided material and diplomatic support to the “Cambodian resistance” in a manner that the administration must have known would benefit the Khmer Rouge’. Rightly so, for ‘American ideals had encountered the imperatives of geopolitical reality. It was not cynicism, even less hypocrisy, that forged this attitude: the Carter administration had to choose between strategic necessities and moral conviction. They decided that for their moral convictions to be implemented ultimately they needed first to prevail in the geopolitical struggle.’

The struggle in question was against the USSR. In these years, Deng continually berated his American interlocutors for insufficient hostility to Moscow, warning them that Vietnam wasn’t just ‘another Cuba’: it was planning to conquer Thailand, and open the gates of South-East Asia to the Red Army. The stridency of his fulminations against the Soviet menace rang like an Oriental version of the paranoia of the John Birch Society. Whether he actually believed what he was saying is less clear than its intended effect. He wanted to convince Washington that there could be no stauncher ally in the Cold War than the PRC under his command. Mao had seen his entente with Nixon as another Stalin-Hitler Pact – in the formulation of one of his generals – with Kissinger featuring as Ribbentrop: a tactical deal with one enemy to ward off dangers from another. Deng, however, sought more than this. His aim was strategic acceptance within the American imperial system, to gain access to the technology and capital needed for his drive to modernise the Chinese economy. This was the true, unspoken rationale for his assault on Vietnam. The US was still smarting from its defeat in Indochina. What better way of gaining its trust than offering it vengeance by proxy? The war misfired, but it bought something more valuable to Deng than the 60,000 lives it cost – China’s entry ticket to the world capitalist order, in which it would go on to flourish.


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## Costas (Feb 7, 2012)

Μια αρκετά βλοσυρή εκτίμηση για τη ΛΔΚ: πως είναι _φασιστικό_ κράτος (Truth-out). Στο πλαίσιο της ανάλυσης παραθέτει και τον εξής ενδιαφέροντα περιγραφικό ορισμό του φασισμού από τον Robert Paxton:

a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

Δε θα 'λεγα πως συμφωνώ με το δια ταύτα του άρθρου, για πολλούς και διάφορους λόγους, αλλά πάντως περιέχει αρκετές ενδιαφέρουσες πληροφορίες.


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## Costas (Feb 9, 2012)

A selection of works directed by Ai Weiwei, screened at the International Film Festival Rotterdam 2012.


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## Costas (Feb 10, 2012)

Σε σχέση με τα λεγόμενα του άρθρου που λινκάρισα στο #250, έπεσα σήμερα στον εξής τίτλο, που μπορεί να ενδιαφέρει όσους διαβάζουν κοινωνική ανθρωπολογία:
Susan Brownell, _Training the Body for China: Sports in the Moral Order of the People’s Republic_, University of Chicago Press (1995)


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## Costas (Feb 11, 2012)

Ο Zhu Yufu έφαγε τελικά εφτά χρόνια για το ποίημα (βλ. #250, 251) και για κάτι μηνύματα στο Skype: υποκίνηση ανατροπής του κράτους. (The Guardian)


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## Costas (Feb 18, 2012)

Σκέψεις ενός Αμερικανού ιστορικού πάνω στις αναλογίες της κατάστασης στην Κίνα τον καιρό της επανάστασης των Ταϊπίνγκ και στη σημερινή. (ΝΥΤ)


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## Costas (Feb 20, 2012)

*Foxconn lifts wages for workers 25% as Apple lets ABC News into plants* (Guardian).

'China can't guarantee the low wages and costs they once did," Ron Turi of Element 3 Battery Venture, a consulting firm in the battery industry, told the paper. (...) Foxconn has also announced plans to invest in millions of robots and automate aspects of production.


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## Costas (Feb 20, 2012)

Ragged Banner Press: Translating the Literature of Free Minds from China


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## Costas (Feb 20, 2012)

Και γαμώ το χρώμα διάλεξαν για τα παραβάν στις εκλογές του Ουκάν! (#248)


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## Palavra (Feb 20, 2012)

Το ροζ της επιληψίας


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## Costas (Feb 21, 2012)

Δεν το 'πιασα. Τι είναι αυτό το ροζ της επιληψίας;

Chinese Loan Words in the English Language (Yellow Bridge) (συνήθως μέσω των καντοζένικων ή και των γιαπωνέζικων).


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## Costas (Feb 22, 2012)

Ελληνικός ιστότοπος για την Κίνα: http://kinezika.info/


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## Costas (Feb 24, 2012)

Το διεθνές χρηματιστήριο των ζωγραφικών έργων και η θέση των Κινέζων καλλιτεχνών σ' αυτό τα τελευταία χρόνια. (Le Monde)


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## Costas (Feb 24, 2012)

*The Biggest Political Story in China?* Έτσι φαίνεται (The Daily Beast)


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## Costas (Feb 25, 2012)

Λόγω της μονοσύλλαβης δομής τους και των πάμπολλων ομωνύμων, τα κινέζικα πρέπει να είναι η γλώσσα με τη μεγαλύτερη δυνατότητα για λογοπαίγνια. Ιδού μερικά κολπάκια για μπασκετόφιλους, με αφορμή τον Jeremy Lin:

Creative 'Linguistics' behind the latest NBA phenomenon (The China Post)


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## Costas (Feb 26, 2012)

Άρθρο του Βήματος για την αθηναϊκή Τσάιναταουν: Η Chinatown της Αθήνας... ετοιμάζει βαλίτσες


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## Zazula (Feb 26, 2012)

Και στο upper κομμάτι τα πράγματα δεν πάνε καλύτερα, καθότι η Li-Ning ανακοίνωσε πως κλείνει το κατάστημά της, που ήταν στην Κηφισιά.


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## Costas (Mar 2, 2012)

Η ιστοσελίδα του αρχιτέκτονα Wang Shu, που κέρδισε το φετινό βραβείο Pritzker. (chinese-architects)


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## Costas (Mar 2, 2012)

Σε αγγλική μετάφραση, μια αντιπρόταση για μεταρρυθμίσεις που διαμορφώθηκε διαδικτυακά σε αριστερούς ιστότοπους της Λαϊκής Κίνας. "Αντι"πρόταση στις νεοφιλελεύθερες προτάσεις που διατυπώθηκαν πρόσφατα σε κύριο άρθρο της κομματικής Ημερησίας του Λαού και ζητούν περαιτέρω ιδιωτικοποιήσεις κλπ. [Καμιά _ρητή_ αναφορά σε σοσιαλισμό, και επίσης καμιά αναφορά (ρητή ή υπονοούμενη) σε πολυκομματικό σύστημα.]

A SIXTEEN-POINT PROPOSAL ON CHINA’S REFORM

1. That the personal and family wealth of all officials be publicized and their source clarified, and all "naked bureaucrats" be expelled from the Party and the government. (“Naked bureaucrats” refer to those officials whose family lives in developed countries and whose assets have been transferred abroad, leaving nothing but him/herself in China.)

2. That the National Congress concretely exercises its legislative and monitory function, comprehensively review the economic policies implemented by the state council, and defend our national economic security.

3. That the existing pension plans be consolidated and retirees be treated equally regardless of sector and rank.

4. That elementary and secondary education be provided free of charge throughout the country; compensation for rural teachers be substantially raised and educational resources be allocated on equal terms across urban and rural areas; and the state assume the responsibility of raising and educating vagrant youth.

5. That the charges of higher education be lowered, and public higher education gradually become fully public-funded and free of charge.

6. That the proportion of state expenditure on education be increased to and beyond international average level.

7. That the price and charge of basic and critical medicines and medical services be managed by the state in an open and planned manner; the price of all medical services and medicines should be determined and enforced by the state in view of social demand and actual cost of production.

8. That heavy progressive real estate taxes be levied on owners of two or more residential housings, so as to alleviate severe financial inequality and improve housing availability.

9. That a nation-wide anti-corruption online platform be established, where all PRC citizens may file report or grievance on corruption or abuse instances; the state should investigate in openly accountable manner and promptly publicized the result.

10. That the state of national resources and environmental security be comprehensively assessed, exports of rare, strategic minerals be immediately cut down and soon stopped, and reserve of various strategic materials be established.

11. That we pursue a self-reliant approach to economic development; any policy that serves foreign capitalists at the cost of the interest of Chinese working class should be abolished.

12. That labor laws be concretely implemented, sweatshops be thoroughly investigated; enterprises with arrears of wage, illegal use of labor, or detrimental working condition should be closed down if they fail to meet legal requirements even after lawfully limited term for self-correction.

13. That the coal industry be nationalized across the board, all coal mine workers receive the same level of compensation as state-owned enterprise mine workers do, and enjoy paid vacation and state-funded medical service.

14. That the personal and family wealth of managerial personnel in state-owned enterprises be publicized; the compensation of such personnel should be determined by the corresponding level of people's congress.

15. That all governmental overhead expenses be restricted; purchase of automobile with state fund be restricted; all unnecessary traveling in the name of "research abroad" be suspended.

16. That the losses of public assets during the "reforms" be thoroughly traced, responsible personnel be investigated, and those guilty of stealing public properties be apprehended and openly tried.


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## Costas (Mar 2, 2012)

Οι ίσες ευκαιρίες πρόσβασης των δύο φύλων στις δημόσιες τουαλέτες. Γνωστό το πρόβλημα και στην Ελλάδα (βλ. Ακρόπολη...) (ΝΥΤ)


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## Zazula (Mar 2, 2012)

Ναι, αλλά ΓΙΑΤΙ οι γυναίκες κάνουν πιο πολλή ώρα;


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## Costas (Mar 2, 2012)

Ε πώς: μπες, κλείδωσε, κατέβασ' τα, σκούπισε τη λεκάνη, ξανανέβασ' τα, ξεκλείδωσε, βγες. Ενώ οι άντρες οι περισσότεροι ξεμπερδεύουν στο όρθιο. Θα 'πρεπε να υπάρχουν ειδικοί ουρητήρες για γυναίκες και τα παντελονοβράκια τους να έχουν επί τούτου φερμουάρ.


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## Costas (Mar 3, 2012)

Ο τουαλετοακτιβισμός μάλλον απειλεί την πολιτική σταθερότητα. Απαγόρευση μετακίνησης στην ακτιβίστρια ώσπου να τελειώσουν οι μεγάλοι τις συνόδους τους:
(South China Morning Post)
Li, a 22-year-old public administration student, said officers from the Xinjiekou police station in the capital's central area visited her on Monday and warned her not to leave Beijing for two weeks.
"They told me not try to leave Beijing during the lianghui," Li said. The annual meetings of the Chinese People's Political Conference, beginning today, and the National People's Congress, beginning on Monday, are known as the lianghui (two meetings) on the mainland. Li said she had to cancel a weekend trip to Nanjing for the recording of a television programme about the Occupy Men's Toilet Movement on Jiangsu Satellite TV.
Her travel ban underscores a tightening of security in the capital for the two meetings.
China News Service reported that more than 700,000 security personnel have been mobilised for the two meetings and that vehicles from other cities have needed a special pass to enter Beijing since Wednesday.
The authorities have also banned all promotional and recreational flights within a 200 kilometre radius of Tiananmen Square until March 15.


Και ολίγον...σνούκερ! (The Mirror)
“Journey a nightmare. People are ignorant. Place stinks. Arena’s rubbish, tables poor, food is horrendous. Other than that I love China.” :blink:


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## Costas (Mar 5, 2012)

Φλιτζανοαλφάδιασμα ενόψει του lianghui (βλ. #271) (The Insider)


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## Costas (Mar 5, 2012)

Κινεζική Κρεμλινολογία (Τζονγκ-ναν-χαϊ-λογία) από τους Αμερικανούς του Jamestown Foundation, ενόψει των σημαντικών εξελίξεων και των ντεσού της υπόθεσης Ουάνγκ Λιτζύν (Wang Lijun) [βλ. #262].


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## Costas (Mar 9, 2012)

Νέα γαρνιτούρα προστίθεται στην υπόθεση Ουάνγκ Λιτζύν (#262, #273). (ΝΥΤ)


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## Costas (Mar 9, 2012)

Όλα τα αντιγράφουν οι Κινέζοι (μακάρι να μπορούσαμε κι εμείς), τα σόου της Victoria's Secret θα άφηναν; Αλλά σε πανεπιστήμιο, παρακαλώ! (China Smack)


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## Costas (Mar 9, 2012)

Η πολιτική τάξη της Κίνας όχι μόνο δε φοβάται πια να δείξει τον υλικό της πλούτο αλλά καίγεται να το κάνει. (China Smack)


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## Costas (Mar 10, 2012)

Ο Μπο Ξ(Σ)ιλάι, στη συνέντευξη Τύπου που έδωσε:
(ΝΥΤ)
Inside a packed room at the Great Hall of the People, Mr. Bo mounted a risky defense of his anticrime campaign, saying that Chongqing was a city run according to the law and that the crackdown was necessary both to protect citizens and create a better business environment.

"On this issue, shall we pretend to be deaf, or shall we be responsible to the people?" the state-run Xinhua news agency quoted Mr. Bo as saying. "We chose the latter."

He also displayed a bit of the flashy populism that has won the loyalty of many Chongqing citizens but has annoyed other leaders, proclaiming that China¹s Gini coefficient —a yardstick for the gap between the rich and poor— had reached 0.46, a level some social scientists would call alarming. On the Gini scale, zero represents complete equality, while 1 indicates a society in which one person controls all the wealth.

Reducing the wealth disparity is a major task for Chongqing¹s government, he said, adding: "If only a few people are rich, then we are capitalists. We¹ve failed."


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## oliver_twisted (Mar 13, 2012)

"Tiger Head, Snake Tails", by Jonathan Fenby


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## Costas (Mar 13, 2012)

Το άρθρο που λινκάρισες, αγαπητή, κινείται στα πλαίσια των "φιλελεύθερων" προτάσεων, των οποίων η "αριστερή" αντιπρόταση παρατέθηκε στο #267 (#267: "Αντι"πρόταση στις νεοφιλελεύθερες προτάσεις που διατυπώθηκαν πρόσφατα σε κύριο άρθρο της κομματικής Ημερησίας του Λαού και ζητούν περαιτέρω ιδιωτικοποιήσεις κλπ.). Επισημαίνω τούτο,

So long as the fiscal system starves local authorities of the cash needed to meet their obligations, they will resort to land requisitioning with the resulting social discontent.  σε συνδυασμό με την monopoly State ownership of land και με το Four provinces or municipalities have been allowed to issue bonds. Local initiatives in trading land leases have been reported,
καθώς οι συνέπειες απασχολούν συνεχώς την επικαιρότητα.


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## oliver_twisted (Mar 14, 2012)

Το έβαλα απλά για να υπάρχει, δεν σημαίνει ότι συμφωνώ. Κατά τ' άλλα, να πω ότι είναι ένα νήμα που παρακολουθώ με πολύ ενδιαφέρον. Καλή συνέχεια!


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## Costas (Mar 14, 2012)

Δεν υπαινίχθηκα ότι συμφωνείς ούτε ότι διαφωνείς, αγαπητή, πράγματα που άλλωστε είναι απόλυτο δικαίωμά μας. Απλώς το σχολίασα για να το συνδέσω με τα προηγούμενα (put it in context), καθώς μου φάνηκε ότι ανήκει στην ίδια προβληματική αυτής της περιόδου. Είσαι φυσικά ελεύθερη αλλά και ευπρόσδεκτη να βάζεις ό,τι θεωρείς πως αξίζει να υπάρχει εδώ, και να σε βλέπουμε! :)


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## Costas (Mar 14, 2012)

China approves detention system reforms
Legislature votes largely in favour of new criminal procedure law, but there are doubts about its actual enforcement. (Al Jazeera)

Έχει και βίντεο από μια τέτοια "μαύρη φυλακή", όπως ονομάζονται αυτές.


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## Costas (Mar 14, 2012)

Συνέντευξη Τύπου του πρωθυπουργού Ουέν Τζιαμπάο. (China Daily) [Προσέξτε τα σχόλια κάτω από το ρεπορτάζ...]


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## Costas (Mar 14, 2012)

China's death row TV hit: Interviews Before Execution (BBC)


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## Costas (Mar 15, 2012)

Ο "μαοΐζων" Μπο Ξ(Σ)ιλάι καθαιρέθηκε. (ΝΥΤ) (βλ. #277 για το προφίλ του και τις μπηχτές στη συνέντευξη του Ουέν Τζιαμπάο #283)


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## Costas (Mar 17, 2012)

*Did Bo’s [Bo Xilai's] Ouster Knock Out China’s ‘Red’ Sites?* (China Realtime Report)

Μετά την καθαίρεση του Bo Xilai, έκλεισαν αριστεροί (=μαοΐζοντες) ιστότοποι στην Κίνα, όπως το RedChinacn.com, στο οποίο είχε δημοσιευτεί μια ανάλογη πολιτική πλατφόρμα πρόσφατα --βλ. #267. Το πάτημα του λινκ σ' αυτό το ποστ δίνει τώρα πια 404 Not Found, επομένως την πλατφόρμα μπορείτε να τη διαβάσετε τώρα μόνο στο παρόν νήμα. 

“Sigh. Still the same thing,” wrote another microblogger. It’s just power, the blogger said, “changing from the left hand to the right hand.”


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## Costas (Mar 17, 2012)

Και λίγο Θιβέτ (εξόριστο). *Tibet exiles see rise of American-style politician* (Associated Press)


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## Costas (Mar 17, 2012)

Το This American Life ανασκεύασε και απέσυρε το επεισόδιο του Mike Daisey για τη Foxconn (#230), διότι ήταν εν πολλοίς κατασκευασμένο. Ο σταθμός δεν είχε τσεκάρει τα λεγόμενα του σόουμαν με την Κινέζα διερμηνέα του που είχε στην Κίνα, γιατί ο Daisey τούς είχε πει ότι ήταν αγνώστων λοιπών στοιχείων· παρ' όλα αυτά, είχε βγάλει στον αέρα το επεισόδιο. Τελικά όμως δεν ήταν έτσι τα πράματα, η διερμηνέας βρέθηκε, είπε την ιστορία πολύ αλλιώτικα, και τώρα ο σταθμός έφτιαξε νέο επεισόδιο με θέμα ακριβώς την ανασκευή. Ρεζιλίκια πράματα, δηλαδή...

Άρα, "πολύ καλός αφηγητής" ο κ. Mike Daisey, αλλά το "πολύ σοβαρός επίσης" χρειάζεται retraction...


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## Costas (Mar 17, 2012)

Προεκλογικά του Χόνγκ-Κόνγκ. (ΝΥΤ)


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## Costas (Mar 20, 2012)

Διέρρευσε (Αφέθηκε να διαρρεύσει;) ένα εσωτερικό κομματικό έγγραφο προκαταρκτικής έρευνας για την υπόθεση Bo Xilai (Μπο Ξ[Σ]ιλάι). Σύμφωνα με αυτό, ο λόγος που ο υφιστάμενός του, αρχηγός της αστυνομίας Wang Lijun (Ουάνγκ Λιτζύν), κατέφυγε στο αμερικανικό προξενείο και ζήτησε επίσημα πολιτικό άσυλο επειδή φοβόταν για την προσωπική του ασφάλεια, είναι ότι είχε αρχίσει έρευνα για διαφθορά που άγγιζε την οικογένεια του πολιτικού του προϊσταμένου, δηλ. του Μπο. Ποιος όμως είχε διατάξει αυτή την έρευνα; Είναι δυνατόν να ξεκίνησε από πρωτοβουλία των τοπικών ανακριτικών αρχών; Δεν είναι πιθανότερο να ξεκίνησε μετά από προτροπή που ερχόταν από το Πεκίνο; (άρθρο της ΝΥΤ)

The report does not address why Mr. Wang, a subordinate of Mr. Bo’s, would have sought to pursue his own corruption investigation against his boss. Corruption inquiries against a leader of the rank of Mr. Bo would normally be conducted by investigators under the direct authority of the party elite in Beijing, not by a provincial official.


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## Costas (Mar 21, 2012)

London Book Fair criticised for inviting only state-approved Chinese writers
Exiled Chinese poet Bei Ling says he is 'amazed no independent voice, no exiled or dissident writer' is being represented
(The Guardian)


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## Costas (Mar 22, 2012)

1.
Πορτρέτο στα πολύ πεταχτά ενός από τους ανθρώπους που επεξεργάστηκαν το σύστημα Pinyin (δεν ήταν φιλόλογος), 106 χρονώ σήμερα. Και με λίγη πολιτική, όπως πάντα στα περί Κίνας. (BBC)

2.
Lawyers in China to swear allegiance to Communist Party
The Justice Ministry in China says lawyers are now required to swear allegiance to the ruling Communist Party for the first time.
(BBC)


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## Costas (Mar 23, 2012)

Στις εκλογές του Χονγκ-Κονγκ ψηφίζουν χίλιοι διακόσιοι εκλέκτορες, όχι ο λαός. Γίνεται λόγος για γενικό εκλογικό δικαίωμα το 2017, αλλά ποιος ξέρει. Τέλος πάντων, διοργανώθηκε μια ανεπίσημη εκλογική διαδικασία, αλλά χακαρίστηκε (από ποια συμφέροντα άραγε;...). Οι προσπάθειες συνεχίζονται. (The Guardian)

Hong Kong's 7 million people have no say in their choice of leader. The territory returned to Chinese rule in 1997 with the British pushing China to grant it democracy, despite not offering this themselves during more than 150 years of colonial rule.


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## Costas (Mar 26, 2012)

Bo Xilai’s Ouster: Implications for the Country (HRiC)

[Σχετικά με το άρθρο 73 που αναφέρει το άρθρο: Article 73 allows that, “for [suspect] allegedly involved in crimes of harming state security, crimes of terrorism, or major allegations of bribery, when monitored residency in own home may impede investigation, with the authorization of the People’s Procuratorate or public security organ on higher level, the suspect can be placed under monitored residency in a designated location, but not in detention centers or places where the case is being handled.” _(Yaxue’s note: Translation my own, may not match the official translation in wording, should there be one.)_] από seeingredinchina

Εν τω μεταξύ τις τελευταίες μέρες κυκλοφορούν τεθωρακισμένα και πραιτωριανοί στο Πεκίνο.


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## Costas (Mar 28, 2012)

Ένα πολύ σπιρτόζικο άρθρο για τον Ευρωπαϊκό Γύρο του κινέζικου τουρισμού. Ενδιαφέρον και ευχάριστο. (The New Yorker)


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## Costas (Mar 28, 2012)

Independent Candidate Stripped, Beaten (Radio Free Asia) (ήταν υποψήφια για τις εκλογές που πέρασαν.)


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## Costas (Mar 28, 2012)

Ανάλυση των τελευταίων γεγονότων και ανασκευή των φημών περί πραξικοπήματος (βλ. και #294). (Asia Times)


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## Costas (Mar 29, 2012)

Το τελευταίο επεισόδιο στον κατατρεγμό του Ai Weiwei από το κινεζικό κράτος μέσω Εφορίας. (The Guardian)


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## Costas (Mar 29, 2012)

Ο δικηγόρος Gao Zhisheng δέχτηκε ημίωρη επίσκεψη από πατέρα κι αδερφό στη φυλακή του, στο μακρινό Ξ(Σ)ιντσιάνγκ, μετά από κάτι χρόνια. (Νew York Times)


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## Costas (Apr 1, 2012)

Τα αποτελέσματα της έρευνας της Fair Labor Association στη Foxconn, μετά από παραγγελία της Apple (πώς άλλαξαν -και δεν άλλαξαν- τα πράγματα από τον καιρό των επιθεωρητών εργασίας που μελετούσαν ο Μαρξ και ο Ένγκελς!) (The Guardian)


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## Costas (Apr 1, 2012)

Κλειστά τα σχόλια στα μεγα-μικρομπλόγκια τύπου Weibo (300 εκατομμύρια λογαριασμοί χρήστη) έως την Τρίτη, λόγω "κυκλοφορίας ανυπόστατων φημών" (περί πραξικοπήματος κλπ.) (ΝΥΤ)


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## Zazula (Apr 2, 2012)

Διά χειρός Niko Tziopanos:


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## Costas (Apr 3, 2012)

Ένα ωραίο βιβλίο για την τέχνη της καλλιγραφίας στη σύγχρονη Κίνα είναι το The Art of Calligraphy in Modern China, του Gordon S. Barrass (The British Museum Press, 200).


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## Costas (Apr 3, 2012)

Επειδή το άρθρο που λινκάρισα στο #282 για τις αλλαγές στην ποινική δικονομία της Κίνας είναι πολύ αόριστο, βάζω εδώ ένα άλλο άρθρο που είναι πολύ πιο σαφές. Και αυτό γιατί υπάρχουν πολλές βελτιώσεις αλλά και μια επιδείνωση, με αποτέλεσμα άλλοι να πανηγυρίζουν και άλλοι να καταγγέλλουν, και έτσι δημιουργήθηκε κομφούζιο (στο μυαλό μου). Από το thewest.com.au.

AFP Updated March 14, 2012, 6:21 pm 

BEIJING (AFP) - Chinese lawmakers on Wednesday passed into law controversial changes that give the police powers to detain some suspects for up to six months in secret locations known as "black jails".
Detentions in unofficial locations such as hotels or guesthouses in China are well-documented. Last year many people -- from renowned artist Ai Weiwei to rights lawyers and petitioners -- were illegally held in locations away from formal detention areas, sometimes for months.
But critics say the amendments to China's Criminal Procedure Law would legalise the practice for people considered a threat to the Communist Party such as political dissidents, dozens of whom were detained last year.
The bill was passed at the final session of the National People's Congress, with 2,639 delegates voting in favour of the amendments. Only 160 lawmakers opposed the bill, and 57 abstained from the vote.
"The legislation would provide dangerous exemptions from due process for entire categories of criminal suspects, including those who simply wish to peacefully express their opinion," Amnesty International said in a statement.
The proposed amendments caused a storm of protest from rights groups and judicial reformers when details first emerged in 2011, and have since been watered down.
A new clause in the latest draft would oblige police to inform relatives of those held outside formal detention centres within 24 hours of their detention, although it is not clear whether the location would be disclosed.
Liu Xiaoyuan, a lawyer and friend of Ai Weiwei, said in his blog that the modification from the original draft was "obvious progress."
"But when all is said and done, the law is only written on paper, and the crux is whether law enforcement agencies strictly respect it," he said.
China uses three methods of locking up suspects -- formal arrest, formal detention and "residential surveillance", which can be at home or in other locations, usually hotels or guesthouses.
In the first two cases, suspects are held in formal areas of detention such as police stations or prisons.
The controversy focuses mainly on the latter, where there is little accountability and where critics say police may feel freer to use torture.
The amended law for the first time includes a clause to allow police to hold some people under "residential surveillance" away from home for up to six months.
This form of detention is limited to people suspected of terrorism, endangering national security or serious bribery, where holding them under surveillance at their homes would impede investigations.
But activists point out that the charge of endangering national security is not clearly defined, and is regularly used to silence government critics.
Rights groups and legal scholars however say other amendments to the criminal law are positive.
Human Rights Watch -- while strongly critical about the secret detention clause -- said it welcomed provisions that could "strengthen procedural protections and due process for ordinary criminal suspects."
The group said this included "stricter time limits for detentions, better guarantees for access to a lawyer, and greater protection for juvenile and mentally ill defendants."

Όλα αυτά ενώ το 2011 ανακηρύχτηκε "most repressive year" για τα ανθρώπινα δικαιώματα στην Κίνα, σύμφωνα με την ετήσια έκθεση του Chinese Human Rights Defenders που εδρεύει στο Χονγκ Κονγκ:

"Lengthy prison sentences handed out in 2011, like the use of enforced disappearance against high-profile activists, appear to be intended to normalise what has previously been rare or exceptional," said CHRD. (από το ίδιο σάιτ)


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## Costas (Apr 5, 2012)

Ένα ενδιαφέρον άρθρο της Γινγκ Τζου για τη μάχη επίσημης-ποιοτικής και ποπ-τρας-τηλεόρασης, στην κινεζική της εκδοχή. (asian creative transformations)

(...) 
Now as the influence of communist ideology withers, the Chinese state is resorting to Confucianism in its reconstruction of “national culture.” The Chinese state is not alone in this. The effort to revive Confucianism and Classical Chinese learning is nothing new among traditionalist Chinese scholars and cultural commentators. Over the past decade or two they have actively participated in ritual recitation of the Classics, exhorting traditional private schools to soak up on traditional Chinese virtues and values.

Responding to the demand for learning the Classics in elementary education, Chinese universities have begun to train scholars of Confucian Classics. The first College of Chinese Classics was inaugurated in 2005 at the People’s University in Beijing. The revival of Confucianism at the grassroots among the traditionalists has paved the way for the state’s call on an all out cultural war against decadent Western culture.

However, the Chinese versus Western rhetoric in Hu [Jintao]’s charge of amoral Western influence is deceptive, or at least misguided. The current cultural clash is not China versus the West but an envisioned nationalistic high culture versus the vernacular pop culture ushered in by a market economy. The real clash is therefore between the mandate of a cultural tradition dictated by morality and the demand of a market system dictated by profit maximization.
(...)
So allow me remind the Chinese policy makers and cultural pundits that Western culture is not the real culprit in the withering of China’s high culture as marketization and globalization have pushed open the Pandora box of the vernacular. A reminder to my alarmed fellow Western observers that the recent [trash and reality-show TV] crackdown should not come as a surprise and that not all policy moves by the CCP signal a political and cultural Tsunami. Let’s all chill a bit.


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## Costas (Apr 7, 2012)

Όπως είπαμε, το σάιτ Utopia έκλεισε. Ξανάνοιξε, και ξαναέκλεισε. Βάλαν την εξήγηση (απλώς τα γεγονότα) στην αρχική τους σελίδα, αλλά μετά προφανώς τους είπαν να τη βγάλουν κι αυτή, κι έτσι ανακοίνωσαν "κλειστό λόγω εργασιών συντήρησης"... (Danwei)


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## Costas (Apr 7, 2012)

*The art of translation*

Ντοκιμαντέρ για (άντε και στα δικά μας;) (Global Times)


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## Costas (Apr 9, 2012)

Chinese teenager sold kidney to buy iPhone (The Guardian)


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## Costas (Apr 11, 2012)

Πυκνώνει το μυστήριο στην υπόθεση Μπο Ξ(Σ)ιλάι. Καταρχήν αποβλήθηκε από το ΠΓ και την ΚΕ του ΚΚΚ, και κατά δεύτερον κύρια ύποπτη για το θάνατο του Βρετανού επιχειρηματία θεωρούν τώρα οι κινεζικές αρχές τη σύζυγο τού Μπο, γνωστή πρώην δικηγόρο. Καλά πάμε. Κάπου βλέπω τον Ρίτσαρντ Γκηρ να σκάει μύτη ως πρωταγωνιστής της χολλυγουντιανής ταινίας γύρω από το θέμα... (ΝΥΤ)


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## nickel (Apr 11, 2012)

Costas said:


> Ένα πολύ σπιρτόζικο άρθρο για τον Ευρωπαϊκό Γύρο του κινέζικου τουρισμού. Ενδιαφέρον και ευχάριστο. (The New Yorker)


Νομίζω ότι δεν σου είπα ότι αυτό εδώ ήταν χορταστικότατο και πραγματικά διασκεδαστικό — διαβάστηκε βέβαια στο αναγνωστήρι, το Κιντλ, χωρίς το άγχος του κομπιούτερ. Θα το έβλεπα κι αυτό σε ταινία (αλλά χωρίς τον Ρίτσαρντ Γκιρ).


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## Costas (Apr 12, 2012)

Ναι, ταινία του τύπου If it's Tuesday it's Belgium!


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## Costas (Apr 12, 2012)

*Ni Yulan (γενν. 1960)*

Με αφορμή την καταδίκη τής (παυμένης από τις αρχές) δικηγόρου Νι Γιουλάν (#225) σε 2χρ και 8μ φυλακή για "απάτη" (Al Jazeera), ένα βίντεο με τη διαδρομή της 52χρονης αγωνίστριας μέσα από τον κλαυθμώνα των δακρύων, μέρες Πάθους που 'ναι. Καλή Ανάσταση. (HRiC)


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## Costas (Apr 14, 2012)

Με αφορμή την Έκθεση Βιβλίου του Λονδίνου, που έχει φέτος τιμώμενη χώρα την ΛΔΚ, και όπου υπήρξαν διαμαρτυρίες για τον αποκλεισμό συγγραφέων μη αρεστών στο καθεστώς της χώρας (#291), η Guardian δημοσιεύει μια σειρά με σύντομες ιστορίες Κινέζων συγγραφέων.


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## Costas (Apr 14, 2012)

Ένα ενδιαφέρον άρθρο από την Guardian με αφορμή μιαν επιχειρηματία που καταδικάστηκε σε θάνατο για παράνομη άντληση κεφαλαίων, και το οποίο θίγει το θέμα της εξωτραπεζικής χρηματοδότησης, που έχει κάποια σχέση με τη Θέση 15 της Χάρτας 08 περί χρηματοοικονομικής μεταρρύθμισης.


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## Costas (Apr 14, 2012)

Το νήμα εύχεται στους αναγνώστες του Καλή Ανάσταση!


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## Elsa (Apr 15, 2012)

Ο Άι-Κομφούκιος είναι τούτος, βρε; Χριστός Ανέστη, από τους αναγνώστες του νήματος! :)


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## Costas (Apr 15, 2012)

Αληθώς ανέστη ο Κύριος! :) Πρόκειται για τον Άi-Μιτροφάν (Μητροφάνη, και όχι Μητροφάνο, όπως λανθασμένα είναι γραμμένο στην εικόνα), που μαρτύρησε (ξίφει ετελειώθη) στα γεγονότα του "Κινήματος της Εταιρείας των Δίκαιων Αρμονικών Γροθιών" (Boxer Rebellion).


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## Costas (Apr 21, 2012)

Με καθυστέρηση αναρτώ εδώ μιαν ανοιχτή επιστολή προς το Βρετανικό Συμβούλιο για την Έκθεση Βιβλίου του Λονδίνου, σχετικά με την τακτική του να λειτουργήσει ως λογοτεχνικό πρακτορείο αποκλειστικά του κινεζικού καθεστώτος:

Open Letter to the British Council on the London Book Fair
April 15, 2012

Dear Madams/Sirs

It has come to our attention that for this month's London Book Fair you have invited the Administration of Press and Publication of the People's Republic of China (GAPP-PRC), which has long banned the works written by a large number of dissident writers, among them Dr. Liu Xiaobo, laureate of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize and the former and honorary president of Independent Chinese PEN Centre. The GAPP-PRC has carefully selected 181 publishers and 31 official writers to present its own achievement in government-approved and censored literatures.

In order to give English authors and readers a broader understanding of the situation of Chinese literature and Chinese writers, we would like to name only a few writers whose works have been completely banned and who had to serve in prison for their writings in China. Like Liu Xiaobo, they have lost their freedom to write as well as their personal freedom, which is why we believe they need all more the support from the British Council. We hope that through your support to introduce, cite and spread their literary works - fiction, verse and prose, as well as their writings which have been labelled and condemned as crimes - to their British colleagues and the British public. Among them are many PEN members and honorary PEN members, including the literary critic and poet Liu Xiaobo, presently serving his 11-year imprisonment, and his wife Liu Xia, a poet who has been held under house arrest for a year and a half; Zhu Yufu, a writer recently sentenced to seven years in prison mainly for a poem he wrote after his release from a 9-year imprisonment; Yang Tongyan(aka Yang Tianshui), a novelist and poet serving his 12-year sentence in jail after a previous 10-year imprisonment; Shi Tao, a journalist and poet serving his 10-year imprisonment; Nurmuhemmet Yasin, an Uighur novelist and poet serving his 10-year imprisonment; Tan Zuoren, an environmentalist and writer serving his 5-year imprisonment; Zhang Jianhong (aka Li Hong), a poet and novelist who died soon after his release on medical parole after suffering complete paralysis due to his stay in prison; Dr. David Tsui (aka Xu Zerong), an Oxford scholar who was released last year after serving 11 years in prison; Yu Jie, an author who has been forced to take asylum in the United States this year after he was silenced by brutal beatings and tortures for his book for a period of over one year; Liao Yiwu, a poet and author who has been forced into exile in Germany last year; Zhou Qing, a writer of Munich City whose works have been banned in China; Jiao Guobiao, a Beijing-based author whose works have been banned in China, Ma Jian, a London-based novelist, and Bei Ling, a Germany-based poet and publisher, both of whom were denied entry to China last year, and many others. Particularly, we wish British and international writers and visitors of the London Book Fair to hear the voice of Ms. Woeser, a Tibetan writer restricted at her home in Beijing, to help the general public understand the tragic events of continuous and large-scale self-immolations in Tibet, while dozens of Tibetan writers and scholars who have raised their voice about the political situation in Tibet, have been imprisoned there, including Domal Kyab, Tashi Rabten, Jangtse Donkho, Buddha, Kalsang Jinpa, Dokru Tsultrim, Kunchok Tsephel Gopey Tsang and Kunga Tseyang. In PEN's case lists alone there are over 40 writers imprisoned in China for their writings.

The British Council has emphasized that the Chinese writers are being invited for their writings in and about China, in order to broaden the understanding of Chinese literature in Britain and to promote cultural exchange between the two countries. We cannot but ask: to understand Chinese literature, should the British people rely on the recommendations by the Chinese government alone? Is there no need to learn about the authors who will never be able to get a recommendation from the government and whose works have been banned in China? Should Václav Havel have been ignored because he was imprisoned while his works had been banned by the former Czechoslovakian authorities? Should Joseph Brodsky's creations not have been considered a part of Russian literature when he was jailed in the former Soviet Union or after he was forced into exile? Should Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie no longer be able to promote cultural exchange between the United Kingdom and India? We believe that such a view, which the British Council is now running the risk of emphasizing, is unfair to the many writers who have been banned, imprisoned in, or exiled from China. London is the birthplace of PEN International. It is in the British tradition of humanism to be concerned about all the writers who are politically persecuted and to promote their release from prison. It is on this basis that we sincerely request the British Council to draw attention to the situation of the writers whose works are banned in China.

We have also noted that you are using the term "Chinese literature". As the official, government approved writers generally represent the government, the official literature allowed by GAPP-PRC is only a very limited part of Chinese literature, mainly representing so-called "socialist literature with Chinese characteristics". It cannot but reflect far less than a full view of Chinese literature. Chinese literature must include independent literature, beyond official censorship and banning, heretical literature, underground literature, prison literature and exile literature. Therefore, please do not support the Chinese government's GAPP-PRC's misleading presentation for British authors and readers.

A society where writers have lost their human rights and professional freedom under the conditions restricted by their government is not a free society. If the British Council wishes to promote an authentic cultural exchange in a free and civilized way, please do not disregard the independent writers whose works are dedicated to shaping a Chinese civil society, especially those who has lost freedom and whose works have been banned by GAPP-PRC to present at the Book Fair.

We are looking forward to hearing from you.
Kind regards,

Signed by

Independent Chinese PEN Centre
German PEN Center
Center PEN Swiss Romand
San Miguel PEN Center
Portuguese PEN Center
PEN The Netherlands
Lithuanian PEN Centre
Sydney PEN Center
PEN Centre for German-speaking Writers Abroad
PEN Canada
Centre Québécois du PEN
Uyghur PEN Center
PEN Esperanto, Writers in Prison Committee (WiPC)
PEN Flanders Center, Board member Geertrui Daem, head of WiPC Xavier Roelens, members Prof. Joris Gerits, Frank De Vos and Hilde Keteleer
Dr. Bashabi Fraser, Edinburgh Napier University, Member of Scottish PEN Center
Ulrich Schreiber, Director of International Literature Festival, Berlin
Prof. Gereon Sievernich, Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin
Beijing Spring
Qi's Cultural Foundation Tendency Inc. (Publisher, Taiwan)
Trieste PEN Centre
Hong Kong Journalists Association
China Eweekly (Initiatives for China)

For more information, contact Independent Chinese PEN Center (ICPC)

1) Tienchi Martin-Liao, President,
Tel: +49 176 5472 3721, +49-176 5472 3721(m)
email: [email protected]

2) Patrick Poon, Executive Secretary
Tel: +852-94173765
email: [email protected]

3) Yu Zhang, Coordinator of Press & Translation Committee
Tel: +46-8-50022792
email: [email protected], [email protected]

Websites: http://www.chinesepen.org/english and http://www.liuxiaobo.eu/


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## Costas (Apr 21, 2012)

Άρθρο της ΝΥΤ (Σχετ: παραπάνω, #314)

China’s supreme court on Friday overturned the death sentence of an ex-tycoon who was convicted of illegally raising money for her business in a case that prompted a public outcry.
(...)
The case also prompted debate over the financial difficulties Chinese entrepreneurs face in raising money in a country where the state-owned banking system channels most lending to state companies.
The communist government has launched a pilot project in Wu’s home city of Wenzhou [Ουέν-τζοου], known for its thriving private enterprises, aimed at making it easier for entrepreneurs to get bank loans.
(...)
Like many entrepreneurs, she raised money from private lenders outside the government-controlled banking system.

Πριν από 2 χρόνια περίπου ψηφίστηκε ένας νόμος που λέει πως όλες οι θανατικές καταδίκες θα πρέπει να στέλνονται στο Ανώτατο Δικαστήριο της χώρας για έγκριση.


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## Costas (Apr 22, 2012)

Βιβλίο περί γλώσσας (η Εισαγωγή και το Κεφ. 1 κατεβαίνουν σε pdf):

CHINESE UNDER GLOBALIZATION
Emerging Trends in Language Use in China

As China experiences tremendous economic and social transformation in the reform years, language use in China has also undergone remarkable changes in the past couple decades: the national obsession with learning the global English, which becomes both a resource for modernization and a source of contention; the expanding use of local languages and dialects in mass media, where standard Mandarin is promoted and legally prescribed as the principal language; the emergence of the Internet language that has become a creative source for constructing a distinct youth identity; the Cantonese writing movement that challenges the hegemony of the Chinese writing system, which is traditionally based on northern Mandarin, to name a few.
(...)
Contents
Synchronic Variation or Diachronic Change: A Sociolinguistic Study of Chinese Internet Language (Liwei Gao)
The Metaphorical World of Chinese Online Entertainment News (Chong Han)
The Use of Chinese Dialects on the Internet: Youth Language and Local Youth Identity in Urban China (Jin Liu)
“My Turf, I Decide”: Linguistic Circulation in the Emergence of a Chinese Youth Culture (Qing Zhang and Chen-Chun E)
Chinese Via English: A Case Study of “Lettered-Words” As a Way of Integration into Global Communication (Ksenia Kozha)
Learning English to Promote Chinese — A Study of Li Yang's Crazy English (Amber R Woodward)
More than Errors and Embarrassment: New Approaches to Chinglish (Oliver Radtke)
Writing Cantonese as Everyday Lifestyle in Guangzhou (Canton City) (Jing Yan)
Negotiating Linguistic Identities Under Globalization: Language Use in Contemporary China (Jin Liu and Hongyin Tao)


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## Costas (Apr 24, 2012)

1.
(New York Review of Books Blog)
Στιγμιότυπα από την Έκθεση Βιβλίου του Λονδίνου, με γουστόζικες στιχομυθίες τού (αντικυβερνητικού) αρθρογράφου με Κινέζους υπαλλήλους και Κινέζους παράγοντες της Έκθεσης: -You're a shit. –_Bici_, _bici_.

2.
(New York Review of Books Blog)
Πολιτική νεκρολογία για τον εξόριστο "Κινέζο Ζάχαροφ" Fang Lizhi (1936-2012), και ένα σύγχρονο δείγμα damnatio memoriae:

News of his passing spread quickly on the Chinese Internet. Students whom he had taught in the 1980s and admirers of his eloquent championing of human rights wrote their accolades. State Security officials noticed, and within hours ordered Internet police to delete all messages that mentioned the words “Fang Lizhi.” After that, tweets about Fang on Weibo (the Chinese version of Twitter) disappeared about a minute after posting.


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## Costas (Apr 24, 2012)

Στην Τσοχατζοπουλειάδα του 'μαοΐζοντος' Μπο Ξ(Σ)ιλάι φιγουράρουν αδερφοί, αδερφές, γυναίκα και γιος που κατέχουν και επενδύουν εκατομμύρια δολάρια. Ένα άρθρο κι ένας γενεαλογικός χάρτης. (ΝΥΤ)


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## Costas (Apr 24, 2012)

Dear all,

It is my pleasure to announce to you today the Leiden Weibo Corpus (LWC), an annotated linguistic 100-million word corpus containing 5.1 million messages from Sina Weibo, China¹s premier Twitter-like microblogging service.

The LWC is freely available online at http://lwc.daanvanesch.nl/. Data for the LWC was collected in January 2012. As such, it contains many linguistic phenomena that may not be found in older corpora, such as suffixation with '-ing', an aspectual marker borrowed from English.

Furthermore, Sina Weibo messages come with valuable meta data, such as the gender of the user and his location. This information allows the LWC to calculate how often words are used in different provinces and cities across China, which is useful for research into lexical variation across China.

Naturally, the LWC also supports searching for single words or grammar patterns, such as 'any verb followed by an aspectual particle and then a noun'. This feature may also be of interest to students and teachers of Mandarin who are looking for example sentences.

Please feel free to forward this announcement to anyone who might be interested. Any feedback regarding the LWC would be greatly appreciated; please send it to [email protected].

Best wishes,

Daan van Esch
graduate student in Chinese linguistics
Leiden University, the Netherlands


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## nickel (Apr 24, 2012)

Αν ξέρεις, κάνε τον κόπο να μου λύσεις μια απορία: αυτό το «suffixation with '-ing'» γίνεται ελεύθερα και δυναμικά; Δηλαδή, για να δούμε το αντίστοιχο στα ελληνικά, θα ήταν όχι το να παίρνουμε από τα αγγλικά έτοιμες λέξεις σε —_ινγκ_ (_κάμπινγκ, μπόουλινγκ_) αλλά το να φτιάχνουμε και δικές μας προσθέτοντας το —_ινγκ_ σε ελληνικές ρίζες: _το ψωνίζινγκ, το λακωνίζινγκ εστί φιλοσοφίνγκ_. Αυτό περιγράφει ή κάτι άλλο;


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## daeman (Apr 24, 2012)

Το γόπινγκ, το τσάπινγκ, το φύλλινγκ, το απαρεμφάτινγκ (γερουνδίζειν, ελληνιστί). ;)


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## Costas (Apr 25, 2012)

nickel said:


> το να φτιάχνουμε και δικές μας προσθέτοντας το —_ινγκ_ σε ελληνικές ρίζες: _το ψωνίζινγκ, το λακωνίζινγκ εστί φιλοσοφίνγκ_.


Αυτό. Ρήμα κινέζικο + ing, με υπονοούμενο ένα οριστικό άρθρο. Π.χ. τα 1, 2, 5, 6, 10 εδώ.


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## nickel (Apr 25, 2012)

Α, ακόμα χειρότερα! Το λακωνίζing εστί φιλοσοφing.


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## Costas (Apr 25, 2012)

Κανονικά, υπάρχει αντίστοιχο του ing, και είναι το 着 (zhe), π.χ. [1][2] κλπ., αλλά ίσως αυτό να μην είναι αρκετά ονοματικοποιημένο, ίσως δηλ. να είναι περισσότερο "-οντας" και λιγότερο "το+απαρέμφατο".


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## Costas (Apr 26, 2012)

Σκανδάλου Μπο Ξ(Σ)ιλάι συνέχεια. Ο Μπο παρακολουθούσε τα τηλεφωνήματα του προέδρου της Κίνας Χου Τζιν-τάο που (θεωρούσε ότι) τον αφορούσαν. Η δοσολογία της παρακολούθησης ξεπερνάει τα συνήθη επίπεδα της 'δημοκρατικής' Δύσης [Ουοτεργκέιτ κττ.]. (ΝΥΤ)

When Hu Jintao, China’s top leader, picked up the telephone last August to talk to a senior anticorruption official visiting Chongqing, special devices detected that he was being wiretapped — by local officials in that southwestern metropolis.
(...)
The story of how China’s president was monitored also shows the level of mistrust among leaders in the one-party state. To maintain control over society, leaders have embraced enhanced surveillance technology. But some have turned it on one another — repeating patterns of intrigue that go back to the beginnings of Communist rule. [Α ρε, Φέλιξ Εντμούντοβιτς, πού 'σαι να καμαρώσεις τους επιγόνους σου!]
(...)
The [Neil Heywood] murder account is pivotal to the scandal, providing Mr. Bo’s opponents with an unassailable reason to have him removed. But party insiders say the wiretapping was seen as a direct challenge to central authorities.
(...)
“Everyone across China is improving their systems for the purposes of maintaining stability,” said one official with a central government media outlet, referring to surveillance tactics. “But not everyone dares to monitor party central leaders.” ["Maintaining stability" είναι η επίσημη κωδική ονομασία του παλιού δικού μας "Ησυχία τάξις και ασφάλεια".]
(...)
One of several noted cybersecurity experts they [ο Μπο και το δεξί του χέρι, ο μπάτσος Ουάνγκ] enlisted was Fang Binxing, president of Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, who is often called the father of China’s “Great Firewall,” the nation’s vast Internet censorship system. Most recently, Mr. Fang advised the city on a new police information center using cloud-based computing, according to state news media reports. Late last year, Mr. Wang was named a visiting professor at Mr. Fang’s university. 
(...)
Li Zhuang, a lawyer from a powerfully connected Beijing law firm, recalled how some cousins of one client had presented him with a full stack of unregistered mobile phone SIM cards, warning him of local wiretapping. Despite these precautions, the Chongqing police ended up arresting Mr. Li on the outskirts of Beijing, about 900 miles away, after he called his client’s wife and arranged to visit her later that day at a hospital.
(...)
Mr. Bo had tried to tap the phones of virtually all high-ranking leaders who visited Chongqing in recent years, including Zhou Yongkang, the law-and-order czar [1][2 (σάιτ του Αμερικ. Κογκρέσου)] who was said to have backed Mr. Bo as his potential successor.
(...)
Beyond making a routine inspection, it is not clear why the disciplinary official who telephoned Mr. Hu — Ma Wen, the minister of supervision — was in Chongqing. Her high-security land link to Mr. Hu from the state guesthouse in Chongqing was monitored on Mr. Bo’s orders. The topic of the call is unknown but was probably not vital. Most phones are so unsafe that important information is often conveyed only in person or in writing.
But Beijing was galled that Mr. Bo would wiretap Mr. Hu, whether intentionally or not, and turned central security and disciplinary investigators loose on his police chief, who bore the brunt of the scrutiny over the next couple of months.
(...)
...tensions between the two men crested, sources said, when Mr. Bo found that Mr. Wang had also wiretapped him and his wife. After Mr. Wang was arrested in February, Mr. Bo detained Mr. Wang’s wiretapping specialist from Liaoning, a district police chief named Wang Pengfei.
Internal party accounts suggest that the party views the wiretapping as one of Mr. Bo’s most serious crimes. One preliminary indictment in mid-March accused Bo of damaging party unity by collecting evidence on other leaders.
Party officials, however, say it would be far too damaging to make the wiretapping public. When Mr. Bo is finally charged, wiretapping is not expected to be mentioned. “The things that can be publicized are the economic problems and the killing,” according to the senior official at the government media outlet. “That’s enough to decide the matter in public.”


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## Costas (Apr 28, 2012)

http://wiki.rockinchina.com/w/Main_Page


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## Costas (Apr 28, 2012)

Ο Τσεν Γκουανγκτσένγκ το 'σκασε, τυφλός καθώς είναι, μέσα στη νύχτα. [1][2][3]. Φοβάται τώρα για εφιαλτικά αντίποινα εναντίον των δικών του (δείγμα).


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## Costas (Apr 28, 2012)

Άρθρο της ΝΥΤ για την απόδραση του Chen Guangcheng και τα ζητήματα που θέτει για τις βραχυπρόθεσμες αμερικανοκινεζικές σχέσεις (Συρία, Ιράν κλπ.), καθώς εικάζεται ότι βρίσκεται στην Αμερικανική Πρεσβεία του Πεκίνου, προσπαθώντας να διαπραγματευτεί το να ζήσει στο εξής ως "νορμάλ Κινέζος πολίτης" (και όχι φυλακισμένος επ' αόριστον χωρίς κατηγορία στο σπίτι του, με τη γυναίκα του να ξυλοφορτώνεται και τα παιδιά του να πηγαίνουν στο σχολείο παρακολουθούμενα).


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## Costas (Apr 28, 2012)

Με τη Βόρεια Κορέα δεν ασχολούμαι, ωστόσο ένα άρθρο της ΝΥΤ για έναν Νοτιοκορεάτη Βουδιστή μοναχό που έχει ένα δίκτυο πληροφόρησης και ανθρωπιστικής βοήθειας για τη χώρα με οδήγησε στο μπλογκ του, που δημοσιεύει ένα σχετικό εβδομαδιαίο ενημερωτικό δελτίο, το North Korea Today, για κάθε ενδιαφερόμενο/η.

Προσθήκη: διαβάζοντας το Δελτίο, έπεσα δις και τρις στον όρο _Arduous March_, οπότε βάζω τον σχετικό σύνδεσμο προς τη Wikipedia.


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## Costas (Apr 28, 2012)

Στο #331, οι σύνδεσμοι 2 και 3 έχουν ένα βίντεο του Τσεν Γκουανγκτσένγκ που, μετά την απόδρασή του από το σπίτι του, απευθύνεται στον πρωθυπουργό Ουέν Τζιαμπάο (ο οποίος το παίζει φιλελεύθερος και φίλος του λαού σε σχέση με τους υπόλοιπους). Ιδού μια αγγλική του μετάφραση (Enter the News Dragon):

Dear Premier Wen Jiabo,

I finally escaped. All the stories online about the brutal treatment I received from the Linyi authorities, I can personally testify they are true. The reality is even harsher than the stories that have been circulating.

Premier Wen, I hereby formally make the following three requests.

*First*, I would like you to personally intervene in this matter by sending an investigation team to find out the truth. Those who ordered county-level police and officials to break into my house, beat and hurt me, refused me medical attention -- without any legal foundation or officers wearing uniforms -- whoever made the decision has to be investigated and punished according to law. Their actions are so cruel it has greatly harmed the image of the Communist Party.

They broke into my house and more than a dozen men assaulted my wife. They pinned her down and wrapped her in a blanket, beating and kicking her for hours.
(...)
*Second*, although I'm free, my worries are only deepening. My wife, mother and children are still in their evil hands. They have been persecuting my family for a long time and my escape would only prompt them into a mode of revenge. Such retribution would only become worse.

They once broke my wife's left orbital bone. She suffers lumbar disc protrusion from all the beating and there are still lumps on her ribs due to physical assaults. She has been cruelly denied medical treatment.

My elderly mother, on her birthday, was pushed to the ground with her head hitting the door. She was crying and accused them of attacking an old woman. They scoffed: "It's true we're young and that's why you can't beat us." How shameless, how cruel and how unjust.

My child goes to school accompanied by three guards. They search her bag every day and stop her from leaving school ground or home.

From July 29 to December 14 last year, they cut off power to my house. From last February onward, they have barred my mother from going out to buy groceries, making our lives extremely difficult.

I am very worried. I implore netizens to pay more attention to my family to ensure their safety. I also implore the Chinese government to ensure the safety of my family based on the principles of upholding the rule of law and protecting the interest of the people. If anything is to happen to my family, I will pursue this issue to no end.
(...)
*Third*, many people wonder why my situation has dragged on for so long without a resolution. I can say this: It's because the local authorities -- the decision-makers and the enforcers -- have no intention of resolving this. For the decision-makers, they are afraid of their crimes being exposed. For the enforcers, there is a lot of corruption involved.

I remember when they humiliated me last August in the Cultural Revolutionary style, they told me, you said in your video that 30 million yuan was spent on (your house arrest), that was the 2008 figure -- now the amount is more than double that and that's not even including bribery money for officials in Beijing. Some of the hired guards have complained that they make so little since most of the money has gone to others.

It's been a great opportunity for all of them to make money. As I understand, the township gives team leaders money to hire guards and each guard is supposed to get 100 yuan per day. Those team leaders tell potential hires that they get only 90 of the 100 yuan. Since most farmers get 50 to 60 yuan working in the field, and the guard job is considered safe and comfortable with meals included, of course people are willing to take it. In just one team, with more than 20 guards, the team leader gets 200 yuan extra per day. How corrupt is that?

The leader of the guards watching my wife sells vegetables he grows to the teams for a profit. These things are well known but there's nothing ordinary people can do about them.

As for the "stability maintenance" budget, they told us the county would give the township several million yuan at a time and local officials would still complain how little they get. You can see the serious corruption involved in this process and how they abuse money and power.
(...)


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## Costas (May 19, 2012)

Η Beijing Daily Online (κομματικό έντυπο) ξεσπαθώνει εναντίον του αρνητισμού των ΜΜΕ και εξηγεί ποιος πρέπει να είναι ο ρόλος τους στο πλαίσιο του κινεζικού συστήματος. Μετάφραση αποσπασμάτων (όχι από μένα):

Lately, among the so-called news reports that have attracted people’s eyes, many have been negative reports — food safety issues, conflicts between doctors and patients, construction quality issues, official corruption. Issues like these have appeared in an endless stream. With the build up made by the media, it has seemed that all food in China is “poisonous”, all construction projects are “tofu architecture”, all public officials are corrupt, all social tensions are unusually severe, and our development path ahead is dark and troubled.
. . .
For some time, these sorts of reports have been a trend among certain domestic media, particularly prevalent among certain commercial newspapers and magazines (小报小刊). They enthusiastically disseminate negative, extreme
and provocative speech, full of rampant speculation and scandal. They pursue low-brow novelty, and push inciting information, all in order to attract eyeballs. The emergence of this phenomenon has happened partly because of the influence of the so-called “freedom of speech” (新闻自由) of the West, and partly out of the pursuit of profit, with a mind to earning vulgar applause — forsaking the ethical bottom line of the media.

For some time, those Western concepts of journalism and news have been savored sweetly by some. Some media workers (媒体工作者) even suggest that the Western ideas like “freedom of speech” and the “fourth estate” are golden rules and precious precepts. In their eyes, publicizing the development achievements of the nation is “false,” and exposing darkness and misery is an expression of “social responsibility”. In fact, they don’t even understand views of the news in the West. In the two-party and multi-party political environments of the West, different media have different political standpoints, and for the sake of obtaining leadership opportunities, they blow with negative news, raking up bad things about their opponents . . .

Our national situation is different from that of the West, and imitating these “squid-like tactics” (乌贼战术) will only break up and divide social consensus, to the disadvantage of creating a harmonious social environment.

What Chinese society needs is not these media who indiscreetly criticize under the banner of “objective reporting.” Rather, we need media that are responsible and reliable, that truly protect the fundamental interests of the nation, the public and the Chinese peoples.

. . . Chinese media must sing the main theme. This is determined by China’s political system, and accords with the realities of China as a nation of 1.3 billion people. The fact is that for China to develop it must maintain social stability, and it must create a public opinion environment conducive to stability. This is where the responsibility of Chinese media lies, and it is also where the fundamental interests of the people of our country lies.

Το ενδιαφέρον είναι ότι τελευταία η αναζήτηση για Beijing Daily στο Weibo (κινεζ. Twitter) έχει μπλοκαριστεί, έχει επαναφερθεί κι έχει ξαναμπλοκαριστεί. Ενδοκομματική διαμάχη;


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## Costas (May 19, 2012)

Ο Τσεν Γκουανγκ-τσένγκ αναχώρησε με την οικογένειά του για τις ΗΠΑ.(ΝΥΤ) Εκείνος που την έχει πιο άσχημα τώρα είναι ο ανιψιός του, Τσεν Κε-γκούι (βλ. παραπάνω στο παρόν νήμα #331, λινκ πάνω στη λέξη 'δείγμα'), όπως λέει και το παρακάτω κομμάτι του άρθρου της ΝΥΤ που δεν εμφανίζεται στο κείμενο του βασικού λινκ:

In the two weeks since he left the embassy, Mr. Chen has expressed concern for relatives still at the mercy of local officials in Shandong. American diplomats said Chinese officials rejected a list of 13 people, many of them family members, that Mr. Chen had said he wanted protected from harassment.

A nephew, Chen Kegui, is in police custody accused of slashing and injuring men who broke into his family’s rural home last month in their search for Mr. Chen. The nephew faces a possible death sentence and has been denied access to his lawyers. His father, Chen Guangfu, has said he was tied to a chair and beaten for three days by interrogators seeking information on his brother’s whereabouts.

On Saturday, however, many Chinese dissidents and rights advocates were celebrating, among them Teng Biao, a prominent rights lawyer and friend who had advised Mr. Chen to go abroad.

“I am very happy Mr. Chen will finally have a chance at a normal life,” he said

(Τώρα, αν μπορούσαν να κάνουν κατιτίς οι Γιάνκηδες και για τους κρατουμένους του Γκουαντάναμο, ώστε να έχουν κι αυτοί a chance at a normal life, ή για τους Παλαιστίνιους κρατουμένους της απομόνωσης και της κράτησης χωρίς δίκη, καλά θα ήταν...)

Υστερόγραφο
Η φράση του άρθρου της ΝΥΤ "Mr. Chen, one of China's best-known dissidents", χρειάζεται ωστόσο απάντηση: "Chen Guangcheng would never call himself a dissident; he might hesitate to even describe himself as an activist. The incredible thing that we should keep in mind as representatives from the US and China decide Chen’s fate, is that he is a man who simply thought that the laws on paper should be enforced."


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## Costas (May 19, 2012)

Στο μεταξύ, αποφυλακίστηκε μετά από 23 χρόνια ο Li Yujun (Λι Υ-τζύν, 李玉君), που είχε αρχικά καταδικαστεί σε θάνατο και μετά μετατράπηκε η ποινή του, γιατί, μικροπωλητής 22 χρονών τότε, στις 3 Ιουνίου 1989, είχε βάλει φωτιά σ' ένα βυτιοφόρο με πινακίδες του Στρατού για να εμποδίσει την είσοδο των δυνάμεων του στρατού σε μια διασταύρωση του Πεκίνου. "Ελεύθερος" τώρα, στα 45 του, θα είναι υπό εποπτεία και χωρίς πολιτικά δικαιώματα για 8 χρόνια, στη διάρκεια των οποίων υποχρεούται να μην εκφράζει πολιτικές απόψεις στο ίντερνετ, να μη δίνει συνεντεύξεις στον Τύπο, να δηλώνει κάθε αριθμό κινητού τηλεφώνου που έχει, να δίνει το παρόν στην αστυνομία μια φορά το μήνα και να μην εγκαταλείψει το Πεκίνο. Η οικογένειά του τον είχε εγκαταλείψει και δεν τον επισκεπτόταν ποτέ. (sina.com.hk)


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## Costas (May 21, 2012)

Perry Link (NPR)
...until now, the so-called dissidents in China have been overwhelmingly elite intellectuals - writers and professors and the like. And they have come out with sophisticated statements about what political reform ought to be, and what universal principles of human rights are and how they should apply to China.
But at another level in China, you've got very widespread discontent that bubbles up from the bottom. So the importance of a man like Chen Guangcheng is that he is one of those from-below people. He's self-taught in the law and he came from the bottom up helping women to resist forced abortions and so on. And then his reputation spread, especially because of the Internet.


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## Costas (May 21, 2012)

Κουτσομπολιά για το περιβάλλον του Μπο Ξ(Σ)ιλάι. Ενδιαφέρον για όσους αγαπούν τις ταινίες δράσης με επιχειρηματίες, αστυνομικούς, κατασκόπους και σκυλιά-δολοφόνους. (ΝΥΤ)


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## Costas (May 21, 2012)

Πηγές αναφέρουν ότι ο αστυνομικός Ουάνγκ Λιτζύν της υπόθεσης Μπο Ξ(Σ)ιλάι θα δικαστεί τον επόμενο μήνα για προδοσία (South Morning Post).


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## Costas (Jun 1, 2012)

Πόιντ σίστεμ για τους χρήστες των κινεζικών μικρομπλόγκ. Πέρα από τα άλλα παραπτώματα που θα τιμωρούνται με αφαίρεση βαθμών (μέχρι διαγραφής του λογαριασμού), θα τιμωρείται στο εξής και η χρήση ομωνύμων των 'ευαίσθητων' κατά τη λογοκρισία λέξεων και ονομάτων (π.χ. Τιενανμέν, Άι Ουέι-Ουέι, Τσεν Γκουανγκτσένγκ κττ.) (NYT)


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## Costas (Jun 1, 2012)

And the best time to weibo something politically sensitive in China? After 11 o¹clock on a Friday night, according to the data. ³Interestingly, deletion of Sina Weibo messages tend to hit a low on Saturdays,² Tschang wrote. ³I¹m not too sure why that is, except that maybe censors want to take time off on weekends as well.² (Εμ, 16% ποσοστό απαλειμμένων μηνυμάτων δεν είναι και λίγο). (Nieman Journalism Lab)


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## Costas (Jun 5, 2012)

Κινεζική αριθμολογία (ίσως με τη βοήθεια των χάκερ) (ΝΥΤ):

The broad index of the Shanghai exchange fell 64.89 points on Monday, a figure that recalls the Tiananmen Square events on June 4, 1989. In another unusual development, the index opened on Monday at 2346.98 — a figure that, to some, looked like the date of the crackdown written backward, followed by the 23rd anniversary.
In a country where numerology is taken very seriously, Chinese censors quickly began blocking searches for “stock market,” “Shanghai stock,” “Shanghai stock market,” “index” and other related terms. They also deleted large numbers of microblog postings about the numerical fluke.
And even before tens of thousands of demonstrators, clad mostly in black, gathered several hours later around Victoria Park in downtown Hong Kong for the annual vigil, censors were also blocking searches for “Victoria Park,” “black clothes,” “silent tribute” and even “today.” 
(...)
Chinese culture puts a very strong, sometimes superstitious, emphasis on numbers and dates. The Beijing Olympics started at 8:08 p.m. on Aug. 8, 2008, a time and date chosen for the many eights, considered an auspicious number.


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## drsiebenmal (Jun 7, 2012)

Την ίδια ώρα, μακριά από την Κίνα... ;)

Έχω μπουχτίσει με το περίφημο κινεζικό ιδεόγραμμα της «κρίσης», που σημαίνει «κίνδυνος» και «ευκαιρία». Έχω βαρεθεί να το ακούω και να το διαβάζω. Καθηγητές, πολιτικοί, δημοσιογράφοι, bloggers και σοφοί πάσης φύσεως ξεκινούν γραπτά και ομιλίες με το υποτιθέμενο απαύγασμα σοφίας της κινεζικής γραφής. Όχι μόνον στη χώρα μας, αλλά παγκοσμίως και για αρκετά χρόνια. Φυσικά όλη η φασαρία δεν γίνεται για τον «κίνδυνο», αλλά για την «ευκαιρία». Βλέπεις κρίση; Ψάξε για την κρυμμένη ευκαιρία!

Ψάχνοντας, που λέτε, βρίσκω πως η κατάχρηση είναι απλώς ένα ενοχλητικό πταίσμα. Το σημαντικό ατόπημα είναι, όπως αναλυτικά εξηγεί ο καθηγητής κινεζικής γλώσσας και λογοτεχνίας στο πανεπιστήμιο της Πενσιλβάνια, Victor H. Mair, ότι το δεύτερο ιδεόγραμμα –ji‒ της σύνθετης λέξης wei-ji για την «κρίση» δεν σημαίνει ευκαιρία, αλλά «κρίσιμο σημείο», και όλη η κινεζική «λέξη» αντιστοιχεί στις δυτικές γλώσσες σε «κίνδυνος- κρίσιμο σημείο». Κάποιο ανάλογο στα ελληνικά θα ήταν να συμπεραίνει κάποιος από τη λέξη «οινόπνευμα» και την ετυμολογία της ότι ο αλκοολισμός ανεβάζει την ευφυΐα. [...]

Από το άρθρο Απατηλό μου ιδεόγραμμα! του Θαν. Σκόκου, στο σημερινό Protagon.


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## Costas (Jun 9, 2012)

Liu Xiaobo, _No Enemies, No Hatred: Selected Essays and Poems_. Βιβλιοπαρουσίαση της Julia Lovell (mclc)


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## Costas (Jun 9, 2012)

Πολλή φυματίωση ανθεκτική στα αντιβιοτικά, λέει, έχει πέσει, οπότε προσοχή. (Bangkok Post)


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## Costas (Jun 15, 2012)

Άρθρο της ΝΥΤ για το 双规，shuanggui, *σ*ουάνγκ γκούι (προφ. γκουέι):

*Accused Chinese Party Members Face Harsh Discipline*
(...)
When party members are caught breaking the rules — or even when they merely displease a superior — they can be dragged into the maw of an opaque Soviet-style disciplinary machine, known as “shuanggui,” that features physical torture and brutal, sleep-deprived interrogations.
And that is exactly what appears to have happened to Bo Xilai, once one of China’s most charismatic and ambitious politicians. Mr. Bo has not been seen in public since mid-March (...)
(...)
By contrast, the case against his wife, Gu Kailai, is being handled as an ordinary criminal matter, according to several people who have been briefed on the investigation. On paper at least, China’s criminal justice system has far more safeguards against abuse.
Shuanggui (pronounced shwang-gwei) is rooted in the ancient imperial justice system and was used by the Red Army to punish wayward soldiers during the civil war. The term is often translated as “double regulation,” a reference to a pair of rules that require party members accused of wrongdoing to appear at a specific time and place for questioning.
(...)
The Dui Hua Foundation, an organization in San Francisco that promotes changes to the Chinese prison system, says simulated drowning, cigarette burns and beatings are common tactics for getting detainees to talk. “The system is just Kafkaesque,” said John Kamm, the group’s executive director. [Σ.Σ.: οι καφκικές καταστάσεις *δεν* περιλαμβάνουν σωματικά βασανιστήρια, αλλιώς τι το πρωτότυπο θα είχαν ώστε να ονομαστούν καφκικές;]
(...)
“In the end I was so exhausted, I agreed to all the accusations against me even though they were false,” said [a] man, 48, who asked for anonymity because he hopes one day to regain his government job. The man said his detention was orchestrated by his boss, who was angry that he had tried to interfere with his nepotistic hiring practices.
(...)
Mr. Bo made abundant use of the system in Chongqing during his crackdown on criminals and those he deemed political opponents, leading to thousands of arrests and a number of executions. Among the party members targeted were Peng Changjian, a former deputy police chief who, according to the official news media, died of a heart attack during his interrogation, and Chen Honggang, Chongqing’s traffic police chief, who reportedly died after smashing his head against a wall.
(...)
A number of Chinese legal scholars say the system is not unlike the overseas renditions and detentions that the United States uses in its battle against terrorism. Though he finds the coerced confessions disturbing, He Jiahong, faculty director of the Renmin University Law School in Beijing, said shuanggui, by operating apart from local courts that are easily manipulated by party officials who control their funds, was a vital tool for fighting corruption.
“Although we do criticize shuanggui for being outside the legal framework, it is quite effective,” Mr. He added. “As the saying goes, all they need is a piece of paper, a pen and their mouth.”
Given the widespread hatred of official graft, it is hard to find much grass-roots sympathy for those caught up in the system.
(...)
“Shuanggui is useless because corruption is everywhere,” a young official said. “They might shuanggui some leaders, but the new leaders will be as corrupt as the old ones.”

Αποκαλυπτικό το πόσο διαφορετικά ερμηνεύουν το λήμμα δύο λεξικά:

MDBG: a disciplinary measure in the PRC outside the regular legal system under which party members are detained and interrogated

nciku: To give a clear explanation of one's issues at the prescribed time and place.


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## Costas (Jun 15, 2012)

Guardian:
Li Wangyang was found dead in a hospital ward in Shaoyang, central Hunan province, on Wednesday, two days after the anniversary of the brutal crackdown on the 1989 pro-democracy protests. He had a noose around his neck and local officials said he had killed himself.
But thousands of people have signed an online petition calling for an investigation into his death after relatives said his feet were on the floor when he was found and questioned whether he was physically able to hang himself given his ill health.
Li, 62, had spent more than 22 years in jail for his role in the protests in Beijing, but was released last year. He was blind, had severe hearing difficulties and was being treated for poor health.
Human Rights in China said police had taken Li's sister Li Wangling and her husband Zhao Baozhu to a hotel and were holding them there, citing an unnamed source who said the couple felt isolated and feared for their safety.
Earlier this week Zhao told the Los Angeles Times: "[Li] could barely hold a bowl without his hands shaking … how could this happen when there were security guards watching him? We have many questions."
(...)
Li was jailed for instigating counter-revolutionary propaganda after co-founding the Labour Autonomous Union to support the student protestors in 1989. When he was released in 2000 he sued for compensation – earning himself another lengthy sentence for the same crime."

_Προσθήκη_: ακτιβιστές δηλώνουν τώρα ρητά ότι "δεν θα αυτοκτονήσουν", ώστε να μην τους αυτοκτονήσουν...


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## drsiebenmal (Jun 16, 2012)

*Η πρώτη Κινέζα αστροναύτης (χμμμ) στο Διάστημα* (από το Έθνος)

*Σε τροχιά το κινέζικο διαστημόπλοιο*
Εικόνες απ την επιτυχημένη εκτόξευση στο Διάστημα πυραύλου, χάρη στον οποίο το διαστημόπλοιο 'Shenzhou 9' (θείο διαστημόπλοιο) -"με πλήρωμα μια γυναίκα και δύο άντρες κοσμοναύτες" περίπου ένα δεκάλεπτο μετά την εκτόξευση ετέθη επιτυχώς σε διαστημική τροχιά, μετέδωσε σήμερα η κινεζική κρατική τηλεόραση.

"Η φιλοδοξία του κινεζικού διαστημικού προγράμματος είναι η λειτουργία, στο εγγύς μέλλον, ενός διαστημικού επιστημονικού εργαστηρίου, του Tiangong 1", ανέφερε ο εκφωνητής της κρατικής τηλεόρασης της Κίνας. "Το επανδρωμένο διαστημόπλοιο θα παραμείνει 13 24ωρα στο Διάστημα και θα κάνει σύνδεση με το εργαστήριο".

Η εκτόξευση έγινε στην έρημο του Γκόμπι (βορειο-δυτική Κίνα), στη διαστημική βάση κοντά στο Τζιουκουάν της επαρχίας Γκανσού. Η ώρα της εκτόξευσης ήταν οι 18.37 τοπική ώρα, δηλαδή οι 13.37 ώρα Ελλάδας.

Πρώτη φορά, η Κίνα στέλνει μια γυναίκα στο Διάστημα.
Χρησιμοποιήθηκε, για να τεθεί σε τροχιά το κινεζικό διαστημόπλοιο, ένας πύραυλος 'Longue Marche 2F', ανέφερε τέλος στο Πεκίνο η κρατική τηλεόραση.

Να προσθέσω και το μικρό γλωσσικό μου: Δεν ξέρω κατά πόσο είναι σωστή η απόδοση των κινεζικών ονομάτων {τους αστροναύτες (αμερικάνικο) και κοσμοναύτες (ρώσικο) δεν τους λένε εκεί ταϊκοναύτες;}, αλλά εκείνος ο πύραυλος 'Longue Marche 2F' με σκότωσε. :) Είμαι, βλέπετε, της εποχής που πρωτοπέταξε η πρώτη γυναίκα στο Διάστημα, η Βαλεντίνα Τερεσκόβα, που οι πύραυλοι Saturn λεγόντουσαν Κρόνος και η "Longue Marche" (που, παρεμπιπτόντως, _δεν είναι_ αγγλικογραμμένα κινέζικα αλλά γαλλικά) ήταν η «Μεγάλη Πορεία». Αυτή του Μάο Τσετούνγκ alias Ζεντόνγκ, ξέρετε. {Ξέρετε;}


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## Costas (Jun 16, 2012)

Το Shenzhou αποτελεί λογοπαίγνιο. Γράφεται 神舟 και σημαίνει όντως "θεϊκό σκάφος", αλλά συνάμα ομοηχεί απολύτως (δηλ. και τονικά) με το 神州, που σημαίνει κατά λέξη "θεϊκή επαρχία/περιφέρεια" και δήλωνε παλιά την Κίνα (Θεϊκό κράτος/γη) [1][2].

Το επιστημονικό εργαστήριο Tiangong σημαίνει Ουράνιο Παλάτι, η κατοικία του Νεφριτένιου Αυτοκράτορα της κινεζικής μυθολογίας.

Το taikongren (υπάρχουν κι άλλοι όροι) δεν περιέχει ελληνικής προέλευσης λέξη, όπως τα αστρο- και κοσμο-, ώστε να αποδοθεί ταϊκοναύτης. Taikong είναι το Διάστημα, το outer space. Γενικά, οι ελληνικές ρίζες στα κινέζικα είναι απλώς _ανύπαρκτες_.

Όσο για την...Longue Marche, ορίστε η Νέα Μεγάλη Πορεία!


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## Zazula (Jun 16, 2012)

Κώστα, στο ταϊκονήμα (http://lexilogia.gr/forum/showthread.php?2560-Δυο-υποψήφιες-νέες-αγγλικές-λέξεις) βλέπω πως έχεις κάνει στροφή 180º.


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## Costas (Jun 16, 2012)

Ευτυχώς, ήρθα στα συγκαλά μου!


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## Costas (Jun 19, 2012)

Ο ανταποκριτής της Guardian από το 2003 αποχαιρετά την Κίνα για το Ρίο μ' ένα άρθρο που συγκεφαλαιώνει την πορεία της μεγάλης χώρας τα τελευταία δέκα χρόνια με πλήθος συνδέσμους. Μόνο ένα τσιτάτο, γλωσσικό: 

Like many newcomers, I delighted at discoveries of Chinese literature and Daoist philosophy, Beijing parks, the edgy eccentricity of Dashanzi and the glorious mix of classicism and obscenity in the Chinese language, though I never managed to master it. 

Και, επειδή στην ίδια σελίδα της εφημερίδας υπάρχει αυτή τη στιγμή ένας σύνδεσμος που λέει "Three taikonauts smile and wave", να επανέλθω στην πιο πάνω επισήμανση του αγαπητού Ζάζουλα περί ταϊκοναυτών: υποθέτω ότι, εφόσον ο Άγγλος γράφει για τον α ή β λόγο taikonaut, σε υποχρεώνει να το αποδώσεις ταϊκοναύτης και όχι Κινέζος αστροναύτης. Απευθείας όμως από τα κινέζικα εγώ δεν βλέπω το λόγο να αποδώσω το taikongren ως ταϊκοναύτη για τους λόγους που εξέθεσα απαντώντας στον αγαπητό Δόκτορα, και μου αρκεί απολύτως το Κινέζος αστροναύτης. Και φυσικά θεωρώ το θέμα άνευ σημασίας. Είτε ταϊκοναύτης είτε Κινέζος αστροναύτης, ένα και το αυτό είναι.


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## Costas (Jun 21, 2012)

Sex toy fools entire Chinese village (ABC).
Και το γιουτουμπάκι με το επίμαχο ρεπορτάζ του κινέζικου τηλεοπτικού σταθμού....


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## LostVerse (Jun 24, 2012)

Βίντεο από την πρώτη μη αυτόματη πρόσδεση κινέζικων διαστημοπλοίων σε τροχιά: www.youtube.com/watch?v=daRn5pFl_u4

εκτενής αναφορά: *China's first manual space docking successful*


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## Zazula (Jun 27, 2012)

Η καινούργια έκδοση του Μίνι ονομάζεται The Chinese Job.


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## Costas (Jul 3, 2012)

The New York Times goes Chinese.


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## Costas (Jul 4, 2012)

Δύο απ' το NYT:
China Says No More Shark Fin Soup at State Banquets
Oldest known pottery found in China (σύμφωνα με τον ανασκαφέα, μείον 20.000 χρόνια, παρακαλώ!) Τη μεγάλη προήγηση σε σχέση με την κεραμεική της Μέσης Ανατολής (μείον 8.000 χρόνια) την εξηγεί κάνοντας την υπόθεση ότι η κινέζικη κουζίνα βασίστηκε εξαρχής στο μαγείρεμα, ενώ στη Μέση Ανατολή στο ψήσιμο πίτας από αλεύρι.


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## Costas (Jul 4, 2012)

"The New York Times goes Chinese", αλλά, ακόμα δεν ξεκίνησε, άρχισαν τα όργανα (από το CPJ - Committee to Protect Journalists):

Just days after The New York Times' soft launch of its Chinese-language edition and accompanying microblog accounts, Berkeley-based China Digital Times website reports that the @nytchinese Sina Weibo feed is no longer accessible in China, along with two accounts hosted by Netease and Sohu. We couldn't pull them up this morning from New York, either.


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## Costas (Jul 4, 2012)

Βιβλιοκρισία μιας ανθολογίας σύγχρονων κινέζικων υπερσύντομων ιστοριών, The Pearl Jacket and Other Stories. (MCLC)


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## Costas (Jul 6, 2012)

Chinese Cars Make Valuable Gains in Emerging Markets (ΝΥΤ)


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## Costas (Jul 6, 2012)

Καθώς η Ελλάδα μοιάζει όλο και περισσότερο με χώρα της μαύρης Αφρικής, έχουν ενδιαφέρον τα δύο παρακάτω αρθράκια του μπλογκ Seeing Red in China για το πώς βλέπουν κάποιοι απλοί Αφρικανοί που δουλεύουν στην Κίνα την 'ευλογία' των κινεζικών επενδύσεων στις χώρες τους:

Beijing, a Boon for Africa? – A discussion with Africans in China about China in Africa
και
“They told us to love the Chinese and ‘look East’ for solutions” – Stories of China in Africa


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## LostVerse (Jul 6, 2012)

Έχει υπάρξει αναφορά στην πολιτεία που κατασκεύασε στην Ανγκόλα κινέζικη κατασκευαστική;

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...ngolan-city-designed-500-000-lying-empty.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilamba


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## Costas (Jul 6, 2012)

Σε συνέχεια του #360 (The Pearl Jacket), να μια πρόσθετη κριτική της μετάφρασης:

With regard to The Pearl Jacket review, I appreciate Shouhua Qi's endeavor. In my opinion, however, the translation is often literal, unidiomatic, and insensitive to speech registers. It does not compare to the fluent and inspired renderings by Goldblatt, Berry, and Rojas and Chow.

Yomi Braester
University of Washington

[Ο Howard Goldblatt είναι ο πιο γνωστός μεταφραστής της μοντέρνας κινεζικής λογοτεχνίας στα αγγλικά [δεν απέφυγε, σε μια ζωντανή παρουσίαση της μετάφρασης ενός βιβλίου, την καταδίκη της δουλειάς του από τον ίδιο το συγγραφέα παρόντος του ιδίου, όχι χωρίς να απαντήσει επιτόπου...]· ο Michael Berry έχει μεταφράσει το _Ζώντας/Να ζεις_ του Yu Hua, που γυρίστηκε και ταινία από τον Τζανγκ Γιμόου· οι Rojas και Chow μετέφρασαν το μπεστ-σέλερ Brothers του ίδιου Yu Hua.]


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## Costas (Jul 7, 2012)

The dirty truth about China's incinerators (The Guardian)
The boom in polluting waste-to-energy plants in China has led to a backlash from residents, including one man's long-running legal crusade

Η καύση απορριμμάτων και τα παρατράγουδά της (διοξίνη). Αλλά εμάς δεν μας αφορούν αυτά. Ο λαός νίκησε στην Κερατέα, και τώρα κοιμόμαστε ήσυχα...διακομματικώς.


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## Costas (Jul 7, 2012)

Coming out στην Κίνα (ΙΗΤ Rendezvous)


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## Costas (Jul 7, 2012)

A Few Moments in the China Rising Story. Πολύ καλά οργουελλικά μεζεδάκια, γραμμένα με συγγραφικό τάλαντο, από το "παράλληλο σύμπαν" της ανερχόμενης Κίνας, το σύμπαν εκείνων που την έχτισαν και τη χτίζουν με τις κατεστραμμένες ζωές τους. Αξιανάγνωστο. Για κάποιους λιγοστούς ανθρώπους, "where there is no freedom, freedom means everything". Όπως λέει και η Χάρτα 08,

"Οι Κινέζοι πολίτες, έχοντας ζήσει μια μακρόχρονη διαδρομή καταστροφής των ανθρώπινων δικαιωμάτων και δύσκολων και τραχιών αγώνων, αφυπνισμένοι πια, συνειδητοποιούν μέρα με την ημέρα ότι η ελευθερία, η ισότητα και τα ανθρώπινα δικαιώματα είναι οι κοινές οικουμενικές αξίες της ανθρωπότητας· πως η δημοκρατία, ο ρεπουμπλικανισμός και η συνταγματική διακυβέρνηση αποτελούν το θεσμικό πλαίσιο της σύγχρονης πολιτικής. Ένας ‘εκσυγχρονισμός’ που αφήνει απέξω αυτές τις οικουμενικές αξίες και αυτό το θεμελιώδες πολιτικό πλαίσιο είναι μια ολέθρια διαδικασία απαλλοτρίωσης των δικαιωμάτων του ανθρώπου, διάβρωσης της ανθρωπιάς και καταπάτησης της αξιοπρέπειάς του. Ποιο δρόμο θ’ ακολουθήσει η Κίνα του 21ου αιώνα; θα συνεχίσει αυτού του είδους τον υπό δεσποτική εξουσία ‘εκσυγχρονισμό’; ή θ’ αναγνωρίσει τις οικουμενικές αξίες, θα σμίξει με το κύριο ρεύμα του πολιτισμού και θα εγκαθιδρύσει ένα δημοκρατικό πολίτευμα; Πρόκειται για μια επιλογή που δεν μπορεί να την αποφύγει."


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## Costas (Jul 10, 2012)

The Man who Stayed Behind (IHT Rendezvous)


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## Costas (Jul 13, 2012)

Τα παρακάτω δεν είναι "την ίδια ώρα, στην Κίνα", αφού είναι παλιά, αλλά δεν πειράζει· πρόκειται για διάφορες εκτελέσεις των "Παιδιών του Πειραιά", στα μανταρίνικα και στα καντονέζικα. Στα μανταρίνικα, πρώτα, με τίτλο "Όχι την Κυριακή" από την Wu Meiling (Ου Μεϊλίνγκ, 巫美玲), της δεκαετίας του '60:





Δεύτερο στα μανταρίνικα, από την Pan Dihua (Παν Ντι-Χουά, 潘迪華, απλοπ. 潘迪华]), με άλλα όμως λόγια:





Τριτώνει στα μανταρίνικα, από την Teresa Teng (鄧麗君, απλοπ. 邓丽君 –περίπτωση κι αυτή, τραγουδίστρια με άσθμα!...], με τα λόγια του νο. 2:





Στα καντονέζικα τώρα, με τίτλο "Μικρός και μεγάλος" και σε στιλ τσα-τσά· το πρώτο παλιό (1962), με τους Zheng Junmian (Τζενγκ Τζυν-Μιαν 鄭君綿, απλοπ. 郑君绵) και Deng Jichen (Ντενγκ Τζι-Τσχεν, 鄧寄塵, απλοπ. 邓寄尘) και την Zheng Biying (Τζενγκ Μπι-Γινγκ, 鄭碧影, απλοπ. 郑碧影):





Το ίδιο, σε νεότερη διασκευή από την ταινία Dance of a Dream του 2001, με τους Andy Lau, Anita Mui, Sandra Ng κ.ά.:





Και κάτι παρεμπίπτον και κουφό: είχα ακούσει φαν να αυτοκτονούν, αλλά πατέρα μιας φαν να αυτοκτονεί, όχι...


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## Costas (Jul 13, 2012)

Βιβλιοκρισία: Dream of Ding Village (μυθιστόρημα· το AIDS σ' ένα κινέζικο φτωχοχώρι). (Seeing Red in China)

Παρατηρήσεις ως προς το ύφος:
At times the writing suffers from being overly descriptive and heavy handed with imagery, but from my experience, this seems to be a cultural difference in story telling as poetic Chinese is often far more adjective heavy than English. Some of the villagers in the story are also treated as simple-minded bumpkins, which is an unfortunately common trope in Chinese stories and movies. These flaws however did not keep me from enjoying (if that word can be used) this book.
(...) If you have an aversion to foul language though, this book may be grating for you. The F-word in English is much harsher than it is in Chinese, and in translation creates a rather coarse cast of characters.


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## Costas (Jul 14, 2012)

Σκλάβα της Αγάπης, μια ταινία του 1972 (Χονγκ Κονγκ) με σεξ, πολεμικές τέχνες, εκδίκηση και --για πρώτη φορά στο κινεζικό σινεμά–– λεσβιακό έρωτα (ανανταπόδοτο). Με υπότιτλους (CC). Enjoy! (Youtube, 1h26min)


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## Costas (Jul 15, 2012)

Σ' ένα πολυσέλιδο άρθρο της NYT για το πώς η Goldman Sachs πληρώθηκε 5 εκατομ. δολάρια για υπηρεσίες στο πλαίσιο των οποίων τύλιξε σε λαδόκολα εταιρικής συγχώνευσης μιαν αμερικάνικη εταιρεία τεχνολογίας αναγνώρισης φωνής, την Dragon Systems, συγχώνευσης η οποία αποδείχτηκε λίγους μήνες αργότερα φιάσκο και απέδωσε 0 δολάρια αντί για 580 εκατομ. δολάρια, βρήκα και τα εξής ενδιαφέροντα:

[James and Janet Baker] are widely credited with advancing speech technology far faster than anyone thought possible, primarily because of an epiphany Mr. Baker had while doing his doctorate research. He figured out that speech recognition could, in essence, be reduced to math. You didn’t have to teach a computer to recognize accents or dialects, Mr. Baker realized — you just had to calculate the mathematical probability of one sound following another. His algorithms proved remarkably accurate and eventually became the industry standard.
(...)
Then, in 1997, Dragon introduced Dragon NaturallySpeaking, a program that recognized more words than could be found in a standard collegiate dictionary. It was available in six languages and could handle normal speech, even sentences with words that sound alike, such as, “Please write a letter right now to Mrs. Wright. Tell her that two is too many to buy.” 
(...)
[Goldman Sachs banker] Mr. Elliott also testified that he was unaware of press reports at the time that suggested L.& H. [η εταιρεία-απάτη με την οποία συγχωνεύτηκε η Dragon Systems] was claiming huge revenue gains in Asia. If he had been aware, he said, he would have been “very skeptical” of those gains, *given the challenges that Asian languages present for speech recognition*.


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## Alexandra (Jul 15, 2012)

Συναρπαστικό ανάγνωσμα. Ευχαριστούμε, Κώστα!


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## Costas (Jul 15, 2012)

You're welcome!


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## Costas (Jul 16, 2012)

Συνέντευξη του Yu Jie, συγγραφέα και βιογράφου του Liu Xiaobo, στο The New York Review of Books:

(...)
_China doesn’t have apartheid._

No, China doesn’t have the racial component perhaps quite as much but it has fault lines, for example between country and city. The way that rural laborers are treated in the cities is similar to how blacks were treated in South Africa.
(...)
_Your Christianity is part of your political consciousness. Why is that?_

Over the past hundred years, China has studied a lot from the West but we haven’t studied the link between faith and liberty. Chinese have mainly learned from France and Germany: from France, the French Revolution, and from Germany, of course Marx and nationalism, which came to us via Japan. And from Russia we learned Leninism. But we haven’t learned much from this British-American tradition. Even in the early twentieth century we didn’t look very closely at the relationship between the political system and faith. Hu Shih, for example, never talked about the link between the separation of powers and religion. I think it’s only with our generation that we’re starting to think about this. One of the basic points is that the liberty to choose is God-given—not given by the state but by God. This means it’s higher than the state. It’s the foundation of Western democracy but many Chinese don’t understand this. 
(...)


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## Costas (Jul 19, 2012)

Γνωστό και έγκυρο κινεζικό λεξικό δεν συμπεριέλαβε κοινότατο όρο με τη σημασία 'ομοφυλόφιλος' [κανονικά σημαίνει 'σύντροφος/comrade']. (xinhua)


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## Costas (Jul 19, 2012)

June Fourth Elegies, συλλογή ποιημάτων του Liu Xiaobo με επετειακό χαρακτήρα (γραμμένων κάθε χρόνο για την 4η Ιουνίου).


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## Costas (Jul 20, 2012)

Η έφεση που άσκησε ο Ai Weiwei για τη φορολογική του υπόθεση απορρίφθηκε, βεβαίως-βεβαίως. (ΝΥΤ) Στη δίκη δεν του επιτράπηκε καν να παραστεί (ιδιοκτήτρια της καταδικασθείας εταιρείας είναι η γυναίκα του).


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## Costas (Jul 22, 2012)

灯泡 dengpao = light bulb / third wheel or unwanted third party spoiling a couple's date (slang) (MDBG).
Πολύ γούστο έχει η εικόνα του δυνατού γλόμπου που χαλάει όλη την ατμόσφαιρα!


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## daeman (Jul 23, 2012)

...
Στους δύο oύτε φανάρι δεν χωρεί, ιδίως κινέζικο. Turn down your love light. :)


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## Costas (Jul 23, 2012)

Εν αναμονή της παράδοσης της σκυτάλης στην ηγεσία της χώρας τον Οχτώβρη, τα κουτσομπολιά (ΝΥΤ) λένε ότι

Party leaders are considering reducing the number of Standing Committee seats to seven from nine, as was the case as recently as 2002, many insiders say. Mr. Hu is believed to support the change, which is in part aimed at curbing the entrenchment of interest groups at the top. That could mean taking two portfolios — probably propaganda and one dubbed “politics and law” that encompasses domestic security — and either adding them to the duties of other leaders or downgrading them to the Politburo level.

“With fewer people, they can concentrate power and increase their efficiency,” said one official at a state news media organization.


But there are other possible motives. The rapid expansion of security powers under Zhou Yongkang, the current Standing Committee member who heads the politics and law committee and supported Mr. Bo, has alarmed some party leaders, political analysts say. Since assuming the post in 2007, Mr. Zhou has capitalized on Mr. Hu’s focus on stability to build up the security apparatus, whose budget this year is officially $111 billion, *$5 billion more than the military budget*.

Στη φωτό, προσέξτε με πόσο φανατισμό προστατεύει τον εαυτό της η Ασιάτισσα απ' τον ήλιο!


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## Costas (Jul 25, 2012)

South Korean Activist Says He Was Tortured in China. (ΝΥΤ) Και, όπως φαίνεται, όχι όποιος κι όποιος ακτιβιστής.

Mr. Kim did not give details of the abuse he says he suffered, pending a formal complaint from the South Korean government to Beijing. But when a reporter asked him whether he suffered “physical abuse” and “sleep deprivation,” he said “Yes, both.” 
(...)
Mr. Kim said his group did not break Chinese laws. It collected information on human rights in North Korea and helped North Korean refugees living in China, he said. 
(...)
As a leader of the student movement that helped force the South Korean military strongman Chun Doo-hwan to make democratic reforms in the 1980s he was tortured and imprisoned by his own government. 
(...)
Mr. Kim, widely considered the leading ideologue of the South Korean student movement of the 1980s, secretly traveled to the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, in 1991 at the invitation of the North Korean leader at the time, Kim Il-sung. After his return home, however, he became a vocal opponent of the North’s government and has since campaigned for human rights for North Koreans.


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## Costas (Jul 29, 2012)

Συγκρούσεις αστυνομίας και διαδηλωτών για μία ρυπογόνο χαρτοποιία στην Κίνα. Καταγγέλλουν ρύπανση του περιβάλλοντος (Τα Νέα).
Γιαπωνέζικη η χαρτοποιία.

Οι διαδηλωτές κατέλαβαν ένα κυβερνητικό κτίριο, κατέστρεψαν υπολογιστές και άρπαξαν από όλους τους ορόφους αλκοολούχα ποτά, κρασιά, κούτες με τσιγάρα και άλλα είδη με τα οποία συνήθως δωροδοκούνται υπάλληλοι στην Κίνα.


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## Costas (Jul 30, 2012)

Μεγάλη πορεία διαμαρτυρίας στο Χονγκ Κονγκ για τη σχεδιαζόμενη εισαγωγή του νέου, εθνικού εκπαιδευτικού προγράμματος στα σχολεία (ΝΥΤ):

The new curriculum is similar to the so-called patriotic education taught in mainland China. The materials, including a handbook titled “The China Model,” describe the Communist Party as “progressive, selfless and united” and criticize multiparty systems, even though Hong Kong has multiple political parties. 

Critics liken the curriculum to brainwashing and say that it glosses over major events like the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen Square crackdown. It will be introduced in some elementary schools in September and be mandatory for all public schools by 2016. 

[Education minister Eddie Ng] later denied that the curriculum was akin to brainwashing.
(...)
Before the protest, Jiang Yudui of the pro-Beijing China Civic Education Promotion Association of Hong Kong added fuel to the fire when he told Hong Kong’s residents that the curriculum should “wash their brains.”

“A brain needs washing if there is a problem, just as clothes need washing if they’re dirty, and a kidney needs washing if it’s sick,” he said, according to the local news media. 

Οπότε διαλέγουν και παίρνουν: ή δεν είναι πλύση εγκεφάλου, ή είναι και καλά κάνει, γιατί ο εγκέφαλός τους "έχει πρόβλημα" και χρειάζεται πλύσιμο.


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## Costas (Aug 5, 2012)

Εκτενής περιγραφή των γεγονότων γύρω από τον αγωγό λυμάτων της χαρτοβιομηχανίας του #383 (αγνοήστε τον ατυχή τίτλο). (Asia Times)


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## Costas (Aug 5, 2012)

Ένα ακόμα σκαλοπάτι στην αύξηση της έντασης στη Νότια Κινεζική Θάλασσα. Ίμια εις τη νιοστή. (Associated Press) [Για χάρτη, γράψτε Paracel Islands στο Google Maps και κατεβείτε στα 500 χλμ]


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## Costas (Aug 8, 2012)

Ο ανιψιός του τυφλού ακτιβιστή Τσεν Γκουανγκτσένγκ, Τσεν Κεγκούι, θα δικαστεί για φόνο. Βλ. #331, #336.


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## Costas (Aug 8, 2012)

Έχεις δυο ακτιβιστές, που είναι και ζευγάρι. Πώς θα τους εμποδίσεις να κάνουν παιδί; Απλά, αρνείσαι να επικυρώσεις το γάμο τους, κι έτσι αν κάνουν παιδί θα παραβιάσουν την πολιτική οικογενειακού προγραμματισμού της χώρας, οπότε θα έχουν ντράβαλα. Οπότε η γυναίκα τελικά κάνει έκτρωση...


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## Costas (Aug 9, 2012)

Η δίκη-παρωδία της γυναίκας τού Μπο Ξ(Σ)ιλάι, Γκου Καϊλάι, ολοκληρώθηκε σε μια μέρα. Αναμένεται η απόφαση. (ΝΥΤ)


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## Costas (Aug 9, 2012)

Περί των πρόσφατων κινεζικών λεξικών, με 3-4 λινκ. (IHT Rendezvous)


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## Costas (Aug 10, 2012)

Expert: The Reincarnation of the Living Buddha Needs to Respect Religious Rituals and "Requires Approval from the Central Gov't"

All-time classic


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## Costas (Aug 10, 2012)

Guangdong to Pilot Two-child Policy (China Daily)


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## SBE (Aug 11, 2012)

Costas said:


> Η δίκη-παρωδία της γυναίκας τού Μπο Ξ(Σ)ιλάι, Γκου Καϊλάι, ολοκληρώθηκε σε μια μέρα. Αναμένεται η απόφαση. (ΝΥΤ)


Επειδή αυτό είχε κάμποση δημοσιότητα εδώ: εδώ ζητούσαν να αποδοθεί δικαιοσύνη και να καταδικαστεί η ένοχη (πάει και το τεκμήριο της αθωότητας και όλα). Ε, αποδόθηκε δικαιοσύνη και ήταν όπως τη θέλανε. Τώρα τους φαίνεται παρωδία η δίκη.


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## Costas (Aug 11, 2012)

Εντάξει, αλλά δεν νομίζω ότι, ακόμα κι αν ζητάς την καταδίκη του αντιδίκου, απαγορεύεται να θεωρήσεις τη δίκη παρωδία αν εξελιχτεί με τέτοιο τρόπο (7 ώρες συνολική ακροαματική διαδικασία για υπόθεση ανθρωποκτονίας, διορισμένοι από το κράτος συνήγοροι, αδυναμία πρόσβασης στο αποδεικτικό υλικό, κλπ. κλπ.). Δηλαδή και να του βγάλεις τα μάτια να θες του αντιδίκου σου, μπορείς να έχεις τη διανοητική ωριμότητα να κρίνεις αν η δίκη του ήταν παρωδία ή όχι. Έτερον εκάτερον, ανεξάρτητα από το αν ήταν καλό κουμάσι ο κύριος αυτός. Δηλαδή αν ήμουν θύμα του Μπέρια και ζητούσα την τιμωρία του, δεν σημαίνει ότι τον Μπέρια τον φάγανε με όλους τους δικονομικούς τύπους... Αλλά το ωραίο είναι ότι η κυρία είχε γράψει βιβλίο παλιότερα όπου κορόιδευε τις δικολαβίες της αμερικανικής δικαιοσύνης και τις αντιδιέστελλε με το τσεκουράτο κινεζικό ποινικό δίκαιο... Πάντως το ότι κίνητρο της δολοφονίας αναγνωρίστηκε ότι ήταν ο φόβος της από τις απειλές του Άγγλου ότι θα 'κανόνιζε' το γιο της, θεωρούν ότι θα την κάνει να σκαπουλάρει ίσως τη θανατική ποινή. Ο χειρισμός όλης της δίκης θυμίζει θέατρο μαριονετών, και πώς αλλιώς αφού πρόκειται για τη σύζυγο τόσο υψηλά ιστάμενου στελέχους του ΚΚΚ.


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## SBE (Aug 11, 2012)

Νομίζω ότι το κλειδί ήταν καίτ που διάβασα καπου, ότι η κατηγορούμενη "did not contest", που με πήγε στα αμερικάνικα σήριαλ, που όταν όλες οι πλευρές συμφωνούν δεν πας σε δίκη και εισπράττεις την ποινή με συνοπτικές διαδικασίες. Υπέθεσα ότι παρόμοιο συστημα θα έχουν και στην Κίνα. 

Από την άλλη ενδιαφέρον έχουν τα κουτσομπολιά της υπόθεσης, στα οποία επιδόθηκε ο αγγλόφωνος τύπος. Μας έδωσαν μια άλλη εικόνα της Κίνας. Διάβαζα π.χ. ότι η αδερφή της κατηγορούμενης αγόρασε στο Λονδίνο ακίνητα εκατομμυρίων, ο γιός να οδηγεί Φεράρι στο Χαρβαρντ κλπ


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## Costas (Aug 11, 2012)

Τα καθέκαστα της δολοφονίας με βάση το ρεπορτάζ ενός νεαρού που ήταν παρών στην αίθουσα του δικαστηρίου. (ΝΥΤ)

Όπως επισημαίνει το άρθρο, σκοτεινό παραμένει το αν ο σύζυγος και μέλος του Π.Γ. του ΚΚΚ Μπο Ξ(Σ)ιλάι γνώριζε τα του φόνου. Υποτίθεται ότι ο αστυνομικός διοικητής Ουάνγκ Λιτζύν, όταν είπε αργότερα στον Μπο ότι η γυναίκα του ήταν αναμιγμένη στη δολοφονία, εισέπραξε απ' αυτόν ένα χαστούκι και μια δυσμενή μετάθεση, η οποία προκάλεσε το φόβο του αστυνομικού για τη ζωή του και τη φυγή του προς το Αμερικανικό Προξενείο, που πυροδότησε το σκάνδαλο και την πτώση του Μπο. Περίεργο όμως έως απίθανο να κράτησε η μάνα κρυφό το σχέδιό της από τον άντρα της, αν και από την άλλη οι δυο τους είχαν πάψει από καιρό να έχουν σχέσεις. Πιθανότερο μου φαίνεται οι ηγέτες να μη θέλουν να προσαγάγουν τον Μπο σε δίκη, άπαξ και εξουδετερώθηκε, και άρα να τον κρατάνε επίτηδες εκτός της ιστορίας, τα δε περί χαστουκιού κλπ. να εκτυλίχτηκαν κάπως διαφορετικά. Η όλη ιστορία πάντως κάνει για χολλυγουντιανή ταινία, και προτείνω για σκηνοθέτη τον Τζανγκ Γιμόου!


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## Costas (Aug 16, 2012)

Ένα άρθρο της συνυπογράφουσας  Julia Lovell για δύο νέα λογοτεχνικά περιοδικά που περιέχουν και ένθετο με μεταφρασμένα έργα στα αγγλικά. (Prospect)


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## Costas (Aug 22, 2012)

Σε φεστιβάλ ανεξάρτητων ταινιών, τους κόψανε....το ρεύμα. (indiewire.com)


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## Costas (Aug 22, 2012)

Μια πολύ ενδιαφέρουσα συζήτηση (54min) στα αγγλικά με θέμα Editing Translations in Chinese and Japanese, από την πρόσφατη Έκθεση Βιβλίου του Λονδίνου όπου τιμώμενη χώρα ήταν η ΛΔΚ. (Notes on the Mosquito)

Μερικές νύξεις: ότι τα κινέζικα βιβλία, λόγω θεμάτων κόστους, συχνά είναι περισσότερο χειρόγραφα χωρίς επιμέλεια, ότι υπάρχουν μεγάλα θέματα στη μετάφραση λόγω τεράστιας διαφοράς στη δομή των γλωσσών (π.χ. δεν υπάρχουν χρόνοι), ότι οι γλωσσικές προκάτ εκφράσεις (chengyu) έχουν πολύ μεγάλη αποδοχή ενώ στα αγγλικά θεωρούνται κλισέ, ότι λογοτεχνικές αφηγηματικές συμβάσεις που έχουν απορριφθεί στα αγγλικά είναι απολύτως ΟΚ εκεί, ότι η πρόκληση συναισθημάτων και δακρύων είναι ΟΚ, κλπ. κλπ.


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## Costas (Aug 22, 2012)

In China, Gu Kailai’s Reprieve Reinforces Cynicism (ΝΥΤ)
Σχόλια και σκέψεις μετά την ολοκλήρωση της δίκης και την έκδοση της απόφασης.

Ένα πράμα που δε λέει, είναι πως οι βρετανικές αρχές είχαν ζητήσει να μην επιβληθεί η ποινή του θανάτου. Εννοείται πως αν η Κίνα ήθελε να στείλει τη φόνισσα στο απόσπασμα, όχι μόνο θα το έκανε αλλά θα παρουσίαζε κιόλας την επιβολή θανατικής ποινής ως απόδειξη εθνικής κυριαρχίας απέναντι στις εκκλήσεις των ξένων, όπως είχε συμβεί πριν από μερικά χρόνια, όταν είχε καταδικάσει σε θάνατο έναν ελαφρώς αφελή Βρετανό πολίτη που είχε βάλει ναρκωτικά άλλων στη χώρα και που οι Βρετανοί έλεγαν ότι ήταν ψιλοκαθυστερημένος και ζητούσαν τουλάχιστον να εξεταστεί από ψυχίατρο.


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## Costas (Aug 22, 2012)

Και μια και επανήλθα στην Έκθεση Βιβλίου του Λονδίνου, ας βάλω και το άρθρο που είχε γράψει τότε ο Ma Jian για να καταγγείλει τη στάση του Βρετανικού Συμβουλίου να καλέσει τον αρχηγό των λογοκριτών της Κίνας και να αποκλείσει όλους τους διαφωνούντες και εξόριστους Κινέζους συγγραφείς (project-syndicate). Και με αυτό το ποστ πατάω τα 4000.


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## Costas (Aug 24, 2012)

Απότομη προσγείωση για την κινεζική οικονομία (και όχι μόνο);
China Confronts Mounting Piles of Unsold Goods (ΝΥΤ)

Παράδειγμα (αυτοκίνητα):
Manufacturers have largely refused to cut production, and are putting heavy pressure on dealers to accept delivery of cars under their franchise agreements even though many dealers are struggling to find places to park them or ways to finance their swelling inventories. This prompted the government-controlled China Automobile Dealers Association to issue a rare appeal to automakers earlier this month.

“We call on manufacturers to be highly concerned about dealer inventories, and to take timely and effective measures to actively digest inventory, especially taking into account the financial strain on distributors, as manufacturers have to provide the necessary financing support to help dealers ride out the storm,” the association said.

Officially, though, most of the inventory problems are a nonissue for the government.

The Public Security Bureau, for example, has halted the release of data about slumping car registrations. Data on the steel sector has been repeatedly revised this year after a new method showed a steeper downturn than the government had acknowledged. And while rows of empty apartment buildings line highways outside major cities all over China, the government has not released information about the number of empty apartments since 2008.


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## Costas (Aug 24, 2012)

Ένα δυνατό, μισοεξομολογητικό κείμενο, You'll never be Chinese. (Prospect).

Take the recent cut in interest rates, which was done to boost domestic consumption, which won’t boost itself until the Party sorts out the healthcare system, which it hasn’t the money for because it has been invested in American debt, which it can’t sell without hurting the dollar, which would raise the value of the yuan and harm exports, which will shut factories and put people out of work and threaten social stability.


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## Costas (Aug 24, 2012)

Άλλη μια μαγνητοσκοπημένη συζήτηση (57min) από την Έκθεση Βιβλίου του Λονδίνου: Publishing Chinese Authors in the UK. Στο πάνελ και η Julia Lovell.


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## Costas (Aug 25, 2012)

Κι ακόμα μία: Bringing Chinese Poetry to the UK. Συμμετέχει ο ποιητής Yang Lian 杨炼。 Το πρώτο μέρος δεν αξίζει, μετά όμως στρώνει (μπλέκουν και ο Έζρα Πάουντ, ο Μπρεχτ). (Notes on the Mosquito)


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## Costas (Aug 28, 2012)

Punk and Protest in China and Russia, συνέντευξη με αφορμή τις Pussy Riot. (LA Review of Books)


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## Costas (Aug 30, 2012)

Ποιος δε θυμάται τον Κινέζο εκείνον αντιφρονούντα που είχε συλληφθεί χάρη και στη συνεργασία της Yahoo! και στη συνέχεια καταδικαστεί σε 10 χρόνια φυλακή για απόπειρα ανατροπής της κρατικής εξουσίας επειδή είχε γράψει αντικαθεστωτικά κείμενα και τα είχε στείλει μέσω Yahoo! και με ιμέιλ; Ε λοιπόν, την Παρασκευή αποφυλακίζεται. (The Standard)


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## nickel (Aug 30, 2012)

Costas said:


> ... καταδικαστεί σε 10 χρόνια φυλακή ...



«He was arrested in September 2002».
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_Xiaoning

Κι εκεί, όταν λένε δέκα χρόνια, εννοούν δέκα χρόνια!


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## Costas (Aug 30, 2012)

Σημαντική είδηση, αν επαληθευτεί:

*China plans to cut power of domestic security chief in party shakeup*
Communist leaders want to limit role and scope of successor to powerful Zhou Yongkang, who is expected to retire this year (The Guardian)

Όσο υπάρχει η central political and legal affairs committee, δεν μπορεί να υπάρξει καν σκέψη για ανεξάρτητη δικαιοσύνη. Βέβαια η είδηση δεν μιλά ούτε κατά διάνοια για κατάργησή της, απλώς για υποβιβασμό του στάτους του αρχηγού της, για θέση του εκτός Διαρκούς Επιτροπής του Πολιτικού Γραφείου, μέσω της μείωσης του αριθμού των μελών της από 9 σε 7.


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## Costas (Aug 30, 2012)

Ακόμα ένα βίντεο με ανάγνωση (δίγλωσση κινεζοαγγλική) έργων δύο σύγχρονων Κινέζων ποιητών, για προώθηση της ανθολογίας Push Open the Window. Της μίας τα έργα τα διαβάζει όμορφα η όμορφη Carolyn Forché:

if oceans are doomed to break dams
then let the bitter waters empty into my heart

(Notes on the Mosquito)


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## Costas (Aug 30, 2012)

(WantChinaTimes)
A couple from Guangxi in southern China who had each planned to cheat on the other did not expect that they would catch each other in the act with another partner at the same hotel on Aug. 22, the day before Qixi, or Chinese Valentine's Day.
The pair pretended to be strangers when they spotted each other but later had a big fight after they returned home from the same hotel, reports the state-run China News Service.
The report did not mention whether they arranged for a taxi together to return to the house.


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## Costas (Aug 30, 2012)

(WantChinaTimes)
Stephen Shen, director of Taiwan's Environmental Protection Administration, has caused a kerfuffle by strongly recommending that men should sit down when they urinate to avoid making a mess in bathrooms both in public and at home. Shen says he has adopted the practice and is urging other men in the country to do likewise. The response to Shen's call has dominated the news agenda and chat shows in this socially conservative country.
China Times, our Chinese-language sister newspaper, quoted one local mother as saying that her son often makes a mess when he pees standing up but though this is annoying to clean up after, she has never considered telling him to sit on the toilet instead and declared herself dumbfounded by Shen's remarks; other women commented meanwhile that sitting or standing is not the point, only that the toilet should be clean after it is used.
A Taipei woman surnamed Chen said, "I find it hard enough to get the male members of the family to lift the seat of the toilet when they pee, let alone persuade them to sit rather than stand." A mother of two, surnamed Wang, said she hopes the campaign to persuade men to sit on the toilet will be effective, but admitted her husband will not allow their son to pee sitting down for fear that he will lose his masculinity.


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## Costas (Aug 30, 2012)

Θα θυμάστε την έκθεση με τα πτώματα σε ζωντανές πόζες· νά πώς διαπλέκεται με την υπόθεση Μπο Ξ(Σ)ιλάι, σύμφωνα με ισχυρισμούς που διαψεύστηκαν αρμοδίως:

Bo Xilai's former mistress on display in Body Worlds: Boxun (ωραία η παρουσιάστρια, πάντως)
και
Body Worlds denies displaying Bo Xilai's mistress

(WantChinaTimes)


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## SBE (Aug 30, 2012)

Τα πρόσωπα των πτωμάτων δεν είναι κρυμμένα, άνετα μπορεί κανείς να υποθέσει με τι μοιάζουνε αν προσθέσεις δέρμα και λίπος.


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## Costas (Sep 8, 2012)

Costas said:


> Ποιος δε θυμάται τον Κινέζο εκείνον αντιφρονούντα που είχε συλληφθεί χάρη και στη συνεργασία της Yahoo! και στη συνέχεια καταδικαστεί σε 10 χρόνια φυλακή για απόπειρα ανατροπής της κρατικής εξουσίας επειδή είχε γράψει αντικαθεστωτικά κείμενα και τα είχε στείλει μέσω Yahoo! και με ιμέιλ; Ε λοιπόν, την Παρασκευή αποφυλακίζεται. (The Standard)





nickel said:


> «He was arrested in September 2002».
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_Xiaoning
> 
> Κι εκεί, όταν λένε δέκα χρόνια, εννοούν δέκα χρόνια!



Άρθρο του He Depu, πολιτικού κρατούμενου στις ίδιες φυλακές, για τις συνθήκες κράτησης κλπ. Εξηγεί επίσης γιατί δεν αποφυλακίστηκε νωρίτερα ο Ουάνγκ ("εννοούν δέκα χρόνια" εκτός κι αν...):
*Internet Dissident Wang Xiaoning Released from Jail; He Depu Portrays Prison Life with Wang* (HRIC)

Εν τω μεταξύ, μια γυναίκα που ζητούσε ικανοποιητική αποζημίωση για την αναγκαστική κατεδάφιση του σπιτιού της στο Τσχόνγκτσινγκ, την...πέταξαν μέσα στην μπετονιέρα. (fmn - φωτό)


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## SBE (Sep 8, 2012)

Είπα να δοκιμάσω πόσο καλό είναι το google translate με τα κινέζικα και δεν είχα υπομονή να ψάξω για καλά μαργαριτάρια, οπότε ο τίτλος μόνο:
Chongqing, a woman pushed into the blender to seek compensation for house demolition


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## Costas (Sep 8, 2012)

Μμ, η αποζημίωση ήταν κρυμμένη μέσα στην μπετονιέρα· οι άλλοι δεν τολμούσαν να βουτήξουν μέσα, οπότε έσπρωξαν εκείνην...


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## Costas (Sep 9, 2012)

Ένα [sic] πρωτότυπο τρόπο βρήκε μια μητέρα από την Κίνα για να μπορεί η ίδια αλλά και οι γύρο [ματαsic] της να ξεχωρίζει τα τετράδυμα παιδιά της.
Τι έκανε; Ξύρισε το μεγαλύτερο μέρος του κεφαλιού τους, ενώ στο κέντρο έχουν αφήσει [ξαναματαsic] περισσότερα μαλλιά, τα οποία σχηματίζουν αριθμούς από το ένα έως το τέσσερα.

(dailynews24.gr)


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## Costas (Sep 10, 2012)

Πολύ πρωτότυπη ιδέα ενός Κινέζου φωτογράφου, του Χουανγκ Τσινγκ-τζύν: Υπάρχοντα. (IHT Rendezvous)


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## Costas (Sep 13, 2012)

But with a traditional writing tool, black ink and a mind as calm as a still pond on a moonless night...


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## Costas (Sep 15, 2012)

A Panoramic View of China’s Cultural Revolution (ΝΥΤ)

I would put the “negative” negatives into brown envelopes in a secret compartment in my desk. In the spring of 1968, I sensed that I would be [searched] soon, I took batches of the negatives home every day after work. I sawed a hole in the parquet floor at home under desk and hid them there.

My wife stood at the window, watching out. I sawed the floor slowly, for over a week. It wasn’t like now when we have electric drills. I sawed it bit by bit. I needed to hide my things. My negatives, plus two Chiang Kai-shek and Yuan Shikai coins, my stamp collection which had images by Goya of naked women — they were all valuable. Not just my negatives.


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## Costas (Sep 15, 2012)

Σε τρία τέρμινα και σε μας;

Making Mandarin Mandatory — in U.S. Kindergartens (ΝΥΤ)


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## SBE (Sep 15, 2012)

> Some 20 percent of the residents live below the poverty line, and its public schools are among the lowest performing in the state. About half the kids don’t graduate from high school. But the county has just embarked on a bold plan to have all its children fully bilingual — in English and Mandarin — by the time they graduate from high school.



Σκοπεύουν να τα στείλουν μετανάστες στην Κίνα;


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## Costas (Sep 15, 2012)

The Homosexual Tradition in China (Brooklyn College)


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## Costas (Sep 15, 2012)

Defendant Chen Pingfu; male; Han nationality; born March 1, 1957; identification number 622725195703011415; undergraduate education; registration residence: Apt 101, 301 Xinxing Road, Shidong Township, Gaolan County; residing at Apt 3B-202, Building 2, Fengning Deshang Residential Complex, 284 Zhaolin Road, Anning District, Lanzhou. On June 27, 2012, Chen was put under residential surveillance on suspicion of inciting subversion of state power as determined by the Gaolan County Public Security Bureau.

The Gaolan County Public Security Bureau has concluded its investigation of this case. The Gaolan County People’s Procuratorate submitted his case to the Lanzhou Municipal People’s Procuratorate for examination and review for indictment. The examination conducted according to law has found that:

Between July 2007 and March 2012, the defendant Chen Pingfu registered blogs or microblogs under the name “Chen Pingfu” on NetEase, Baidu, Sohu, Mtime.com, Sina, Tianya, and other websites where he published or reposted 34 articles including “This Is a Fight for the Spiritual Destiny between Good and Evil” (这是一场心灵归宿的正邪大战), “Weasels Serve Chickens” (黄鼠狼为鸡服务) “Fight against Brutality, Pursue Civilization” (对抗野蛮，追求文明), (etc. etc......) In these articles he expressed such inflammatory views as that Marxism, Leninism, Mao Zedong Thoughts, Deng Xiaoping Theory, Three Represents, and Scientific Development have no benefit for the society and the people; that the Communist Party rule knows only to push ordinary people around and not let them make a living; that the current system is not democratic enough, and that democracy and constitutionalism should be implemented.

The aforementioned facts of crime are proven by documentary evidence, material evidence, and the defendant’s statements.

The procuratorate believes that the defendant Chen Pingfu disregarded state laws and spread speech attacking the Communist Party and the government to unspecified Internet users, defaming and slandering state power and the socialist system. His actions have violated the stipulations of Article 105(2) of the Criminal Law of the People’s Republic of China. The facts of the crime are clear, the evidence is reliable and sufficient, and he should be found criminally responsible for the crime of inciting subversion of state power. This procuratorate is initiating prosecution proceedings against the defendant on the basis of the provisions of Article 141 of the Criminal Procedural Law of the People’s Republic of China, and asks for a judgment in accordance with the law.

Η κοινωνική μοίρα αυτού του καθηγητή μαθηματικών κρατικής επιχείρησης που, όταν αρρώστησε στην καρδιά, δεν είχε λεφτά να κάνει εγχείριση και στη συνέχεια αναγκάστηκε να παίζει βιολί στο δρόμο για να βγάλει κάνα φράγκο, ελάχιστα απέχει από το λίαν προσεχές μέλλον, ή και το παρόν, της Ελλάδας. Η ποινική του όμως αντιμετώπιση για την έκφραση της αγανάκτησής του και της πολιτικής του κριτικής δια του λόγου, απέχει και –ελπίζω και εύχομαι– θα απέχει και στο μέλλον παρασάγγας. (HRIC)


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## Costas (Sep 15, 2012)

*Watchwords: the Life of the Party*
BY QIAN GANG

As a Leninist party, the Chinese Communist Party has always placed a strong emphasis on propaganda. It is infatuated with sloganeering, and it often turns to mass mobilization to achieve its political objectives. The phrases used by the Party are known as tifa (提法) — what, for the purpose of this series, I am calling “watchwords.” Matters of considerable nuance, tifa are always used deliberately, never profligately. They can be seen as political signals or signposts.
(...)
In order to help people understand the basic disposition of political terminologies in China today, I separate them into four color-coded segments along a red-blue scale.

(Figure)

There are four colors in the figure above: deep red, light red, light blue, deep blue. Deep-red political terms include “class struggle,” “dictatorship of the proletariat,” and “Mao Zedong Thought.” These are legacies of the totalitarian era, but they have not altogether disappeared in the present day, and their influence lingers. The officially sanctioned vocabularies of the Party today are light red, and they hold lexical supremacy in today’s politics.

Light-blue terms are those in popular use in China, permitted in China’s media but rarely, if ever, used officially (particularly at the level of the standing committee of the Central Politburo). Between the light blue and dark blue sections, we can imagine a line of prohibition. Deep-blue terms, ones explicitly prohibited from use, include politically sensitive terms like “separation of powers,” “multiparty system,” “nationalization of the armed forces,” “lifting the ban on political parties” (jiechu dang jin) and “lifting media restrictions” (jiechu bao jin).
(...)
In this series I tackle each of these watchwords in turn, explaining their meanings and origins, and their political journeys within the Party lexicon.

(China Media Project), και εδώ τα λινκ με τα επιμέρους άρθρα της σειράς.


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## Elsa (Sep 20, 2012)

Beggars at a religious folk festival in southern China have been ordered to stay in purposely built cages, or be removed from the festivities.
Organisers gave the beggars an ultimatum saying their presence ruins the experience for visitors at the temple fair in Nanchang, Jiangxi province and if they wished to beg they had to do so from inside small cages.
The zoo-like cages are so small adults are unable to stand and although they are free to leave at will, they are immediately banished from the festival area and have to leave the town if they do so.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...didnt-spoil-view-town-fair.html#ixzz271vLHoTn
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook


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## SBE (Sep 20, 2012)

Πριν δω τις φωτογραφίες νόμισα ότι τους κλειδώνουν σε κλουβιά, τώρα βλέπω ότι στην ουσία είναι πίσω απο διαχωριστικά. Όχι η καλύτερη λύση, αλλά ίσως αν εφαρμοστεί σε κανένα απο τα δικά μας πανηγύρια να κοπεί η συνήθεια.


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## Costas (Sep 22, 2012)

China is by far the most strategic long-term thinking country that I've covered. (Βίντεο συνέντευξης Γιαπωνέζου δημοσιογράφου, στα αγγλικά, FT China)


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## Costas (Sep 26, 2012)

Japanese books removed from sale by China in row over islands (The Guardian)


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## Costas (Sep 28, 2012)

Και ενώ η περσινή νικήτρια του Ρολάν Γκαρός, Λι Να, αποφάσισε, κόντρα στο ρεύμα, να συμμετάσχει στο γιαπωνέζικο Όπεν, κυκλοφορεί αυτές τις μέρες ο πρώτος τόμος της κινέζικης μετάφρασης του Finnegans Wake.


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## Costas (Sep 28, 2012)

Ένα ωραίο βιβλιοκριτικό άρθρο του Roy Chan για δύο βιβλία του Mark Gamsa: The Chinese Translation of Russian Literature: Three Studies, και The Reading of Russian Literature in China: a Moral Example and Manual of Practice. (MCLC)


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## Costas (Oct 5, 2012)

Hong Kong's $500 million marriage proposal (Asia Times)

Cecil Chao Sze-tsung, the 77-year-old owner of property developer Cheuk Nang (Holdings), also chose last week to make his public offer of HK$500 million (US$64.5 million) to any man who could win the hand of his openly lesbian daughter, Gigi. The tycoon, who boasts that he has slept with 10,000 different women, announced his extravagant marriage bounty after reports from Beijing a week earlier quoted Gigi, 33, as saying she had "wed" her same-sex partner of the past seven years, Sean Eav, five months ago during a holiday in France.


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## Costas (Oct 6, 2012)

Glut of Solar Panels Poses a New Threat to China (NYT)
Και όχι μόνο to China, θα πρόσθετα εγώ.


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## Costas (Oct 9, 2012)

Chinese internet users to overtake English language users by 2015 (The Telegraph)

Collective Labour Incidents Map (China Labour Bulletin)


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## Costas (Oct 12, 2012)

Ο νομπελίστας Μο Γιαν (Γιεν), αντιπρόεδρος της ελεγχόμενης Ένωσης Συγγραφέων (έχουν αποχωρήσει κάμποσοι απ' αυτήν), φέρεται να δήλωσε πως οι συγγραφείς στην Κίνα δεν αντιμετωπίζουν κανένα πρόβλημα ελευθερίας έκφρασης! Εδώ
Φαίνεται λοιπόν πως η Σουηδική Ακαδημία θεώρησε καλό να καλοπιάσει το ΚΚΚ, μετά την προπερσινή αποκοτιά των Νορβηγών, που ακόμα την πληρώνουν...


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## Costas (Oct 13, 2012)

Ο νομπελίστας από τη μεριά του δήλωσε, σύμφωνα με το Γαλλικό Πρακτορείο Ειδήσεων, ότι "ελπίζει να ανακτήσει ο Λίου Ξ(Σ)ιαομπό την ελευθερία του το συντομότερο δυνατό", ώστε "να ασχοληθεί πσυχή τε και σώματι με την έρευνα του πολιτικού και κοινωνικού συστήματος". (rfi)


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## Costas (Oct 13, 2012)

Πετάνε και στην Κίνα παπούτσια. (Global Voiσes)


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## Costas (Oct 13, 2012)

Costas said:


> Φαίνεται λοιπόν πως η Σουηδική Ακαδημία θεώρησε καλό να καλοπιάσει το ΚΚΚ, μετά την προπερσινή αποκοτιά των Νορβηγών, που ακόμα την πληρώνουν...


Στο ίδιο μήκος κύματος η παρέμβαση της Judy Amory σε μια λίστα που παρακολουθώ:

I was a bit surprised that the New York Times article, reciting the Nobel committee's history of giving the prize to dissidents, did not mention a track record of defusing government hostility by giving a reparations prize to a government loyalist. Case in point: Mikhail Sholokhov's 1965 Nobel, perhaps to atone for Boris Pasternak's 1958 award. Of course Mo Yan is not a party triumphalist as Sholokhov was. But I do detect some of the same motivation.

Πράγματι ο Μο Γιαν (Γιεν) δεν είναι υμνητής. Το σκεπτικό της απονομής τον αποκαλεί "a critic". Ο ίδιος στην πράξη δηλώνει ότι "τι τα θέλετε; Σ' αυτό τον κόσμο ζούμε, πρέπει να προσαρμοζόμαστε. Αν δεν είμαι στην Ένωση Συγγραφέων, ποιος θα πληρώσει τα ιατρικά μου έξοδα αν αρρωστήσω;" Εννοείται ότι άμα μπεις στο χορό, χορεύεις. Οι πιέσεις είναι μεγάλες και συνεχείς. Was wollen sie von mir? αναρωτιέται ο πρωταγωνιστής της ταινίας Mefisto στο τέλος-τέλος.


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## Costas (Oct 14, 2012)

Από τα "Ενθέματα της 14 Οκτ.:

Ο ξένος, ΙΙ: Στα νέα χωριά της Κίνας. Το Χουαξί [προφ. Χουασί], ένα ταπεινό κάποτε χωριό αγροτών βορειοδυτικά της Σαγκάης, σήμερα έχει τον τίτλο τού «χωριού των εκατομμυριούχων». Είναι κτισμένο με πανομοιότυπες πολυτελείς κατοικίες, όπου δεσπόζει ο ουρανοξύστης «Νέο Χωριό στον Ουρανό», ύψους 328 μέτρων. Οι 2.000 κάτοικοι μετέχουν ισότιμα στην ιδιοκτησία των μέσων παραγωγής, είναι επενδυτές και μέτοχοι στις επιχειρήσεις του χωριού. Απολαμβάνουν δωρεάν υγεία, παιδεία, διακοπές. «Κομμουνιστικοί ουρανοί φέγγουν πάνω από το Χουαξί, το χωριό των καθημερινών θαυμάτων». Έτσι αρχίζει το τραγούδι που ακούγεται κάθε μία ώρα από τα μεγάφωνα στην κεντρική πλατεία.

Εμπνευστής και διαχειριστής της μετεξέλιξης του χωριού σε θύλακα «σοσιαλιστικής ουτοπίας» είναι ο γραμματέας του τοπικού Κομμουνιστικού Κόμματος. Στην ουσία πρόκειται για μια καπιταλιστική επιχείρηση 2.000 μετόχων, την οποία διαχειρίζεται η εταιρεία Jiangsu Huaxi Group Corporation, εισηγμένη στο χρηματιστήριο της Σαγκάης από το 1998, με 57 θυγατρικές, εξαγωγές σε 40 χώρες ανά τον κόσμο και ετήσιο τζίρο 7,7 δισ. δολ.

Ενδιαφέρον είναι όμως πως στην επιχείρηση εργάζονται περίπου 35.000 εργάτες-εσωτερικοί μετανάστες, με σκληρούς όρους εργασίας και χωρίς άδεια παραμονής, αναγκασμένοι να διαμένουν έξω από τα όρια του Χουαξί. Έχουμε δηλαδή ανασύσταση του μεσαιωνικού μοντέλου της περιτειχισμένης πόλης.

Ο ξένος σήμερα τείνει να γίνει φιγούρα «οικουμενική». Θέματα που ξεκίνησαν κατά προτεραιότητα από τον ξένο (εργασία, στέγη κλπ.), τείνουν να αγκαλιάσουν ξένους και γηγενείς.

Υπάρχει ένα φάουλ στην τελευταία παράγραφο. Το "θέμα" αυτό δεν ξεκίνησε κατά προτεραιότητα από τον ξένο αλλά είναι απευθείας κληρονομιά της μαοϊκής κομουνιστικής περιόδου, οπότε οι αγρότες είχαν ταξινομηθεί ως ειδική κατηγορία του πληθυσμού με μειωμένα δικαιώματα μετακίνησης κλπ., σε αντίθεση με τη "χαϊδεμένη" εργατική τάξη (η διάκριση αστών-αγροτών έχει βέβαια ιστορία χιλιετιών στην Κίνα, και όχι μόνο). Εξαιτίας αυτής της κληρονομιάς και λόγω της καπιταλιστικής οικονομικής ανάπτυξης στις πόλεις και της αστυφιλίας των τελευταίων δεκαετιών, σήμερα το 17% του κινέζικου πληθυσμού (230 εκατομ.) είναι εσωτερικοί μετανάστες με μειωμένα δικαιώματα διαμονής, στέγασης, παιδείας, κοινωνικής ασφάλισης, με μειωμένους μισθούς κλπ.

Τα τελευταία χρόνια γίνονται αργές μεταρρυθμίσεις ώστε να υπάρξει χειραφέτηση των Κινέζων κατοίκων της υπαίθρου από αυτό το καθεστώς· πβ. τίτλους ειδήσεων των κινέζικων ΜΜΕ της τελευταίας διετίας, από τον πιο πρόσφατο προς τον πιο παλιό:

Migrant Workers in Shaanxi to Enjoy Urban Residential Treatment Beginning Oct
Children of Migrant Workers Must Meet Three Conditions to Sit University Entrance Exams Where They Reside
Six Cities to Issue Passports to Migrant Workers and Other Non-Residents Starting September
Hebei Govt Opinions: Migrant Workers with Stable Work and Residence Can Settle in Urban Areas
Beijing Migrant Schools Closed - Beijing: Parents Bodily Block Forced Demolition of School for Migrant Workers' Children
Survey of Young Migrant Workers: 80% Sans Farming Know-how, Many Find Settling into City Life Difficult
Guangdong and Henan to Change How They Refer to Migrant Workers


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## Costas (Oct 14, 2012)

Εκεί απαλλοτριώσεις, εδώ ΦΑΠ, χαράτσια κλπ.· εκεί για υποδομές και πληρωμή εσωτερικών χρεών, εδώ για πληρωμή του δημόσιου χρέους· εκεί με τη γη να ανήκει νομικά στο κράτος, εδώ στους ιδιώτες:

Local government debt fuels China's forced evictions rise (Έκθεση της Amnesty International μέσω Reuters)

(Reuters) - Forced evictions in China, a major source of social discontent, have risen significantly in the past two years as local officials and property developers colluded to seize and sell land to pay off government debt, Amnesty International said on Thursday.
Property disputes in a country where the government legally owns all land are often violent and have led to growing social instability, one of the challenges facing a new generation of Chinese leaders, led by Vice-President Xi Jinping.
Amnesty's 85-page report, compiled between February 2010 and January 2012, said violence exerted on residents resulted in deaths, imprisonment and self-immolations.
"Potentially, millions of people in the country are at risk of these illegal forced evictions and indeed protests about forced evictions are the single biggest issue of populist discontent in the country," Nicola Duckworth, Amnesty's senior director of research, told Reuters.
"So it's a huge issue, it's been going on for many, many years, we feel it's rising in scale now and it's really time to put an end to it."
Land sales by local governments soared as officials scrambled to raise the capital needed to hit ambitious targets for infrastructure building set by Beijing in a 4 trillion yuan economic stimulus plan, launched late in 2008 as the global financial crisis raged.
Frenzied speculative activity inflated a real estate bubble that resulted in local governments racking up debts of 10.7 trillion yuan ($1.7 trillion) by the end of 2010 as they also borrowed to build, compelling them to sell yet more land to pay back loans.
Beijing launched a campaign in 2010 to restrict speculative sales and development. There is some evidence of those restrictions working as total land area bought by developers fell 16.2 percent in the first eight months of 2012 versus 2011, with revenues down 7.6 percent in the same period.
China also unveiled new rules in 2011 to outlaw violent forced eviction, promising fair prices to the dispossessed.
Amnesty said it welcomed the regulations, but added they fell short of the standards it would like to see and applied only to urban residents.
Of 40 forced evictions Amnesty examined, nine culminated in the deaths of people protesting or resisting eviction.
A 70-year-old woman, Wang Cuiyan, was buried alive by an excavator in March 2010 when a crew of about 30 to 40 workers came to demolish her house in Wuhan city in central Hubei province, the report said.
Rights groups have repeatedly criticized the government for not doing enough to prevent forced evictions, especially when people are made to make way for large-scale events like the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the Shanghai World Expo in 2010. ($1 = 6.2849 Chinese yuan)

(Reporting by Sui-Lee Wee; Additional reporting by Nick Edwards in Beijing and Stefanie McIntyre in Hong Kong; Editing by Jeremy Laurence)

Η έκθεση της Διεθνούς Αμνηστίας εδώ.


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## Costas (Oct 14, 2012)

Η ομιλία του αυτοεξόριστου (με δραπέτευση από τα σύνορα) συγγραφέα Liao Yiwu (προφ. Γι-Ού) (The Corpse Walker· God is Red) στην τελετή απονομής του βραβείου Λογοτεχνικού Ρεπορτάζ Ρύσαρντ Καπουστσίνσκι. Μπόνους, ένα ωραίο ποίημα του φυλακισμένου φίλου του Li Bifeng. (HRIC)


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## Costas (Oct 15, 2012)

Συνέντευξη της Sabina Knight με θέμα τον νομπελίστα συγγραφέα Μο Γιαν (προφ. Γιεν) και το έργο του. (LA Review of Books)


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## Costas (Oct 15, 2012)

Ο θόρυβος γύρω από την απονομή του Νόμπελ Λογοτεχνίας στον Μο Γιαν (προφ. Γιεν) συνεχίζεται. Ο προαναφερθείς Λιάο Γι-Ού, που κυκλοφόρησε πέρσι τις αναμνήσεις του (από τη φυλακή), σε συνέντευξή του στο περιοδικό Σπήγκελ εκφράζει την απορία του που δεν υπάρχουν "κοινά ισχύουσες αξίες" και που το Νόμπελ (όχι βέβαια το ίδιο Νόμπελ) τη μια δίνεται σ' έναν φυλακισμένο, την άλλη σ' έναν "Staatsdichter". Το ίδιο περιοδικό, στην αγγλική του έκδοση, κάνει μια σούμα των τοποθετήσεων του γερμανικού Τύπου.


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## Costas (Oct 17, 2012)

Ολοκληρώθηκε η επιλογή των κοριτσιών που επιλέχθηκαν για τη στελέχωση της 1ης Γενιάς του κοριτσίστικου γκρουπ SNH48 (ShaNgHai), της κινέζικης δηλ. θυγατρικής του μητρικού γιαπωνέζικου σχήματος τσιχλοφουσκοπόπ AKB48. Η διαδικασία επιλογής είχε αρχίσει τον Απρίλη. Και όλα αυτά την επαύριο της σκληρής κόντρας μεταξύ των δύο χωρών για τα νησιά, που άφησε χείριστες εντυπώσεις.

Άραγε το μοντέλο θα εισαχθεί και στη Δύση, με δεδομένη την τεράστια εμπορική επιτυχία του στην Άπω Ανατολή; Πάντως, το νυμφίδιο ως εικόνα πουλάει εκεί τρελά, και στα δύο μάλιστα, απ' ό,τι φαίνεται, φύλα...


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## Costas (Oct 17, 2012)

Πανικός έχει πιάσει ορισμένους Αμερικανούς με τα Ινστιτούτα Κομφούκιος στα σχολεία τους, μην τυχόν και προπαγανδίζουν την ΛΔΚ, δεδομένου ότι οι διδάσκοντες είναι Κινέζοι που στέλνονται από την ΛΔΚ και πληρώνονται κατά το ήμισυ απ' αυτήν (διάρκεια βίντεο: 3.58). (Στην Αθήνα υπάρχει Ινστιτούτο Κομφούκιος με κατεύθυνση τα οικονομικά και τη διοίκηση επιχειρήσεων (της ΦΑΓΕ, ας πούμε...), αλλά σε πανεπιστημιακό επίπεδο ακόμα ψάχνουμε την Ιαπωνία και την Κίνα στο Τμήμα Τουρκικών και Σύγχρονων Ασιατικών Σπουδών του Αθήνησι, όσο για το Τμήμα Ασιατικών Σπουδών του Ιονίου Πανεπιστημίου, έπαθε κι αυτό αποπληξία. Κατά τα άλλα η χώρα θα βγει από την κρίση με _εξωστρέφεια_ και ανάπτυξη -και στον τουρισμό-...)


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## Costas (Oct 17, 2012)

Αρθράκι του Howard Goldblatt, μεταφραστή του Μο Γιαν στα αγγλικά, στην Guardian. (Περισσότερο χαιρετίσματα δια του Τύπου τού λέει).


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## Costas (Oct 17, 2012)

Ο μεταφραστής (κινεζ-αγγλ) Brendan O'Kane εξομολογείται και εκθέτει τα του επαγγέλματός του. Κείμενο πολλαπλά ενδιαφέρον. (sinosplice). Εδώ δε, λέει κι αυτός τη γνώμη του για το θέμα των ημερών: τον Μο Γιαν. (rectified name)


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## Costas (Oct 17, 2012)

Απόσπασμα από τους _Βατράχους_, του Μο Γιαν, σε μετάφραση Howard Goldblatt. (Granta Magazine)

I have to admit that, though I did not make it public, I was personally opposed to my Aunty’s marriage plans. My father, my brothers and their wives shared my feelings. It simply wasn’t a good match in our view. Ever since we were small we’d looked forward to seeing Aunty find a husband. Her relationship with Wang Xiaoti had brought immense glory to the family, only to end ingloriously. Yang Lin was next, and while not nearly the ideal match that Wang would have provided, he was, after all, an official, which made him a passable candidate for marriage. Hell, she could have married Qin He, who was obsessed with her, and be better off than with Hao Dashou . . . we were by then assuming she’d wind up an old maid, and had made appropriate plans. We’d even discussed who would be her caregiver when she reached old age. But then, with no prior indication, she’d married Hao Dashou. Little Lion and I were living in Beijing then, and when we heard the news, we could hardly believe our ears. Once the preposterous reality set in, we were overcome by sadness.

(η συνέχεια στο Granta Magazine)


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## Costas (Oct 18, 2012)

*Under Chinese, a Greek Port Thrives*. Ρεπορτάζ τής Liz Alderman (ΝΥΤ), με χάρτες, σλάιντς, βίντεο. Πολιτικά μπορεί ο καθένας να έχει τις απόψεις του, αλλά για το επίπεδο του δημοσιογραφικού προϊόντος, τι να πεις! Θλίψη προκαλούν οι συγκρίσεις με τα καθ' ημάς...


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## Costas (Oct 19, 2012)

Άρθρο του Cao Yaxue (Τσάο Γιαξ[σ]υέ) που κριτικάρει από ακτιβιστική σκοπιά τους υποστηριχτές της "ισορροπημένης" άποψης ότι η πολιτική στάση του Μο Γιαν δεν έχει τίποτα το επιλήψιμο, είναι κατανοητή δεδομένων των συνθηκών της Κίνας και απλώς ο άνθρωπος δεν είναι και δεν θέλει να είναι ήρωας, πράγμα που είναι απολύτως δικαίωμά του και απολύτως κατανοητό. Στην ουσία ο συντάκτης του άρθρου υποστηρίζει ότι τα περιθώρια έκφρασης αντιπολιτευτικής ή απλώς ανεξάρτητης γνώμης και τα περιθώρια άρνησης συμμετοχής σε φιλοκαθεστωτικές ενέργειες είναι ευρύτερα από αυτά που αφήνουν να εννοηθεί οι παραπάνω υποστηριχτές, τεκμηριώνει δε την άποψή του συγκρίνοντας τις δημόσιες ενέργειες (ή μη ενέργειες) του Μο Γιαν με αντίστοιχες άλλων Κινέζων συγγραφέων που επίσης έχουν κάποια (κάποτε αρκετά ψηλή) θέση στους καθεστωτικούς θεσμούς και δεν είναι ούτε θέλουν να γίνουν ήρωες [οι σκακιστές αναγνώστες του νήματος θα θυμηθούν ίσως τον Σοβιετικό Μιχαήλ Μποτβίννικ].

Σχολιάζει επίσης ο αρθρογράφος τα άρθρα της Julia Lovell (για την οποία βλ. σ' ετούτο το νήμα [1][2][3]) και του Brendan O'Kane (άρθρο που το λίνκαρα προ ημερών στο #448). Καλεί μάλιστα τον δεύτερο σε διάλογο και υπόσχεται ένα δεύτερο άρθρο πάνω σ' αυτό το τόσο σημαντικό θέμα, της δημόσιας δηλ. ευθύνης και των περιθωρίων ελιγμού των –φτασμένων και μη– διανοουμένων ή πνευματικών ανθρώπων, όπως τους λέμε, στα ανελεύθερα καθεστώτα μονοκομματικού ή δικτατορικού τύπου.

Για τις ομιλίες του Μάο Ζεντόνγκ στο Γιαν'άν (προφ. Γιεν'άν) πάνω στην τέχνη και τη λογοτεχνία, που αναφέρονται στο κείμενο του άρθρου και που υπήρξαν ο μπούσουλας της μαοϊκής περιόδου του ΚΚΚ στα θέματα αυτά, βλ. σχετικό λήμμα στην Wikipedia και την αγγλική μετάφραση του κειμένου στο Marxist Internet Archive.


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## Costas (Oct 19, 2012)

Σχετικά με το αμέσως παραπάνω άρθρο του Cao Yaxue, εδώ είναι μεταφρασμένες στα αγγλικά μερικές από τις γραπτές απαντήσεις Κινέζων διανοουμένων στο ερώτημα "τι πιστεύετε για την καταδίκη του Λίου Ξ(Σ)ιαομπό σε 11 χρόνια φυλακή;" (ανάμεσά τους και η [μη] απάντηση του Μο Γιαν, που την αναφέρει το άρθρο του Cao). Μια από τις απαντήσεις είναι από τον Wang Hui, διακεκριμένο εκφραστή της λεγόμενης Νέας Αριστεράς που έχει κατηγορηθεί για ακαδημαϊκή πλαστογραφία, ο οποίος, παρά την ιδεολογική διαφωνία του με τον κατ' ουσίαν δεξιό φιλελεύθερο Λίου, καταδικάζει τη φυλάκισή του για "αδίκημα γνώμης". (Under the Jacaranda Tree)


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## Costas (Oct 19, 2012)

Μερικοί τίτλοι σύγχρονης κινεζικής λογοτεχνίας στα αγγλικά. (Wall Street Journal)


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## Costas (Oct 19, 2012)

Σκανδαλάκι και στη Σουηδική Ακαδημία με επίκεντρο τη βράβευση του Μο Γιαν, σκανδαλάκι όμως που δεν αφορά τον Μο Γιαν αλλά τον "προξενητή" του. (Foreign Policy)

Εντωμεταξύ από του χρόνου τα Κινεζόπουλα του Λυκείου θα έχουν ένα διήγημα του νομπελίστα συγγραφέα στα σχολικά τους βιβλία. (ActuaLitte')

Εσείς πάλι μπορείτε, αγνοώντας τα ψυχροπολεμικά και υπεροπτικά σχόλια του οικοδεσπότη της εκπομπής, να ακούσετε (σε ωραία ανάγνωση της Sabina Knight) ένα μικρό απόσπασμα (2μισι λεπτά) από το βιβλίο του Μο Γιαν Red Sorghum, που είχε γυριστεί και ταινία από τον Τζανγκ Γιμόου. (npr) [Διπλό κλικ στο 5.05]


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## Costas (Oct 19, 2012)

Ο καθηγητής Charles Laughlin σχολιάζει το σημείο εκείνο της κριτικής εναντίον του Μο Γιαν που αναφέρεται στο ότι αυτός συμμετείχε στο συλλογικό γράψιμο με το χέρι των Ομιλιών του Μάο Ζεντόνγκ στο Γιαν'άν το 1942, για τα 70χρονα του γεγονότος. (βλ. παραπάνω, #451,γ). Ανάμεσα σε διάφορες ανοιχτές θύρες που παραβιάζει (οι περισσότεροι που τον επέκριναν, ιδίως οι Κινέζοι επικριτές του, δεν τον επέκριναν ως λογοτέχνη αλλά ως δειλό και απολύτως συμβιβασμένο --βλ. ομοίως το λινκαρισμένο άρθρο στο #451), δίνει και κάποιες ενδιαφέρουσες πληροφορίες σχετικά με αυτές τις ομιλίες, τη βραχυπρόθεσμη (βρόμικη) πολιτική τους στόχευση αλλά και τον ιστορικό τους ρόλο ως προς τη λογοτεχνία της ΛΔΚ (πρόσθεσα δύο λινκ προς την Wikipedia για τους δύο συγγραφείς που αναφέρονται ονομαστικά ως στόχοι του Μάο Ζεντόνγκ):

Most of [Mo Yan's critics] point to his participation in a handwritten commemorative edition of Mao Zedong’s 1942 “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art,” as though it were evidence of the author’s capitulation to the worst excesses of political repression in PRC history. As Mo Yan has pointed out in a press conference in his hometown of Gaomi today, the “Talks” is “a historical document whose existence is a matter of historical necessity.” [Σ.Σ. ελπίζω να εννοούσε "a matter of fact"] At the University of Virginia, we teach Mao’s “Talks” not only in my “Introduction to Modern Chinese Literature,” but also in our much broader survey “East Asian Canons and Cultures,” designed and taught by my colleague in traditional Japanese literature, Gustav Heldt. Mao’s “Talks” played a key role in the formation of the modern Chinese literary canon; as Mo Yan puts it, the new writers of the 1980s were very much focused on breaking through the limitations the “Talks” placed on literature, and yet there is still much in the “Talks” that he can accept. To me there is nothing odd about issuing a commemorative edition of this text on the 70th anniversary of the Yan’an Forum, or for leaders of the Chinese Writers’ Association to be involved with it.

Mo Yan’s detractors in China and abroad seem to read Mo Yan’s participation in the handwritten edition as an affirmation of Maoist repression of free speech and the oppression of intellectuals and artists, particularly in the Rectification Campaign of 1942 which accompanied the Forum. But to blame the oppression and even annihilation of intellectuals and artists on a text is misguided: political oppression consists of acts of violence, and Mao Zedong did not rely any speech or document to excuse his repressive actions and inactions; he simply performed them.

Secondly, Mao’s “Talks” does not lay down rules that must be obeyed, nor does it prescribe torture, incarceration, ostracism or death as penalties for disobedience. It is clear that Mao was concerned with discipline among intellectuals in Yan’an, and we know that he held the Forum as a pretext for criticizing Ding Ling, Wang Shiwei and other intellectuals who Mao thought were getting out of line. Wang was even executed, presumably for ideological sins, but it would be a mistake to lay the blame for the violence of Rectification on Mao’s “Talks.” The Forum and Mao’s “Talks” were political theater, meant to lend the appearance of interactivity, if not democracy, to the Rectification campaign.

The interesting thing about Mao’s “Talks,” though, from today’s perspective, is that in them, Mao emphasizes how writers who have come to Yan’an from all over China during World War II were entering into a new, unfamiliar rural environment, and that new literary works should reflect that change of space. They should abandon the environment of urban life, themes of social disintegration, and bourgeois consciousness that characterized much Chinese literature of the 1930s. Mao insisted that writers immerse themselves in this rural world and to look at China through the eyes of peasants. The new literature should abandon negativity and emphasize politically heroic characters and more optimism for the future. While this often led to insipid literature, it also had much in common with 1938 Nobel Prize for literature winner Pearl Buck’s way of writing China, and also something in common with Mo Yan’s rural fictional world.

I am not being facetious. The art of rural life and peasant consciousness is one of modern Chinese literature’s contributions to world culture. Mao Zedong deserves no credit for this, but the regard for the rural masses in the cultural world before and after the Yan’an Forum put a lot of wind in the sails of the revolution, even if much of it was hot air.

Criticizing Mo Yan’s participation in the handwritten “Talks” implies that Mo Yan was supposed to conspicuously refuse to participate in this unremarkable act of political ritual. But writing some passages of the “Talks,” part of the PRC’s historical iconography, is akin to singing “The East is Red” or visiting Mao Zedong’s mausoleum--a mild gesture of patriotism even less surprising when performed by a leader of the government’s Writer’s Association; does such an act really imply an affirmation of Mao’s worst atrocities?

Mo Yan is a literary man, but is also a government official, and in this latter capacity, one would expect him to perform any number of inane, meaningless and harmless ritual activities and observances. None of this should affect our view of him as a writer, nor has any of this clouded the vision of the Swedish Academy. Even Mo Yan’s critics must admit, in this day and age of the rise of the New Left in literary, academic and political arenas, that Mo Yan does not really seem to be an advocate of a return to Maoist socialism. As Mo Yan himself points out, the desire to break free of the limitations of “Mao’s Talks” was a major impetus for his generation’s emergence onto the literary scene in the 1980s. This both puts Mao’s “Talks” in its place, but also affirms its centrality to literary history.


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## Costas (Oct 20, 2012)

Ένας Γάλλος δημοσιογράφος ισχυρίζεται ότι το 2004 είχε πάρει συνέντευξη από τον Μο Γιαν κι εκείνος του είχε πει πως είχε χάσει πια την πίστη του στο Κόμμα, κι ο Γάλλος τον ρώτησε "από πότε;" κι ο Μο Γιαν του απάντησε "από το 1989". Η είδηση έχει ανάψει και το κινεζικό αντίστοιχο του Τουίττερ, το Ουεϊμπό, όπου όμως η αναφορά στο άρθρο του Γάλλου δεν λέει "από το 1989" αλλά από "εκείνη τη χρονιά" ["那一年"] (κωδική διατύπωση για το 1989 που κι αυτή η ίδια όμως μπανάρεται από τη λογοκρισία γύρω στην επέτειο της καταστολής, δηλ. στις 4 Ιουνίου). Όλοι περιμένουν τώρα να δουν τι θα πει ο συγγραφέας στην ομιλία του, όταν πάει στη Στοκχόλμη να παραλάβει το βραβείο.


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## Costas (Oct 20, 2012)

Η λίστα με τις "ευαίσθητες" λέξεις που μπλοκάρονται από τη λογοκρισία σε σχέση με την 4η Ιουνίου γύρω στην επέτειο της σφαγής φρονώ ότι αξίζει την πλήρη παράθεσή της (China Digital Times):

 *Sensitive Words: The Tiananmen Edition (Update)*

Update: In addition to “today” (今天), “yesterday” (昨天) and “tomorrow” (明天) are also blocked and have been added to the list of “Other Related Terms.”

As of June 4, the following search terms are blocked on Weibo (not including the “search for user” function):

Individual Chinese characters:

fire (火): as in candle flame (烛火), torch (火炬), oil lamp (圣火)
candle (烛): as in [wax] candle (蜡烛), candlelight (烛光); Sina Weibo removed the candle emoticon over the weekend.
blood (血): as in bloody suppression (血腥镇压), bloody incident (流血事件)
people (民): as in People’s Liberation Army (人民解放军), democracy (民主)
movement (运): as in democracy movement (民运), student movement (学运)
move (动): as in student movement (如学生运动), memorial event (悼念活动), mobilize troops (出动军队)
government (政): as in Fang Zheng(方政), regimental commissar (团政委), one-party dictatorship (一党专政)
crush (碾): as in Fang Zheng‘s legs were crushed (方政被碾断双腿), crush and destroy (碾毁)
tǎn (坦): as in tank (坦克)
ceremony (祭): as in ceremony for Tiananmen victims (祭奠六四遇难者)

Numerals and Words Related to the Date of the Tiananmen Massacre:

8, 8 (八), eight (捌), eight: All forms of “eight” and other forms of the numbers below.
9, 9 (九), nine (玖), nine
6, 6 (六), six (陆), six
4, 4 (四), four (肆), four
23, 23 (廿三), 23 (二十三): Today is the 23rd anniversary of the massacre.
35, 35 (三十五): Netizens call today May 35th to get around the censors.


Other Related Terms:

anniversary (周年)
today (今天): searching for today’s date.
yesterday (昨天)
tomorrow (明天)
that year (那年): netizen code for 1989.
declaration (宣言): as in “Hunger Strike Declaration” (绝食宣言)
commemorate (纪念): commemorate 6.4 [as Tiananmen is frequently referred to] (纪念六四), Heroes Monument (英雄纪念碑), etc.
redress (平反): recall 6.4
Victoria Park (维园): An annual candlelight vigil is held in Hong Kong’s Victoria Park to remember the Tiananmen massacre.
park (公园)
recall (追思)
mourn (悼念): as in mourn 6.4
silent tribute (默哀)
evening event (晚会)
black clothes (黑衣): Netizens called for people to walk in the streets wearing black clothes to remember Tiananmen.
go into the street (上街)
never forget (勿忘): as in never forget 6.4 (勿忘六四), never forget the national calamity (勿忘国难)
never forget (毋忘): same as above
(Tian)anmen Mothers (（天）安门母亲)

Little Secretary (小秘书): as in the Sina Weibo “Little Secretary”
Twitter (推特): Chinese-language tweets tend to be democracy activists. During sensitive times, many share information about gatherings.

ism (主义): as in “overthrow socialism” (推翻社会主义)
autonomous (自治): as in “Peking University Student Government”（北大自治会）

Names of People Active in Tiananmen:

Bei Dao 北岛: On the eve of the Tiananmen Massacre, poet Bei Dao submitted a plea for political reform to the central government.
Yuan Mu (袁木): Former State Council Information Office spokesman and apologist for the regime. In April 1989 he spoke with 45 students in 16 high schools.
Deng Liqun (邓力群): leftist influence within the Party
Chen Xitong (陈希同): then-mayor of Beijing. He recently said Tiananmen was an avoidable tragedy.
Yan Jiaqi (严家其): sociology student who went into exile in the U.S
Han Dongfang (韩东方): Capital Autonomous Workers Federation leader during Tiananmen
Feng Congde (封从德): retested
Zhai Weimin (翟伟民): major player in the Capital Autonomous Federation of University Students
Chen Ziming (陈子明): currently a contributing writer to Deutsche Welle’s “China Observer” column



The four listed above were all ordered under arrest by the Ministry of Public Security.

Retested Names:

Wu’er Kaixi (吾尔开希)
Liu Xiaobo (刘晓波)
Chai Ling (柴玲)
Wang Dan (王丹)
Ding Zilin (丁子霖)

(Fang) Lizhi (（方）励之)
(Hu) Yaobang (（胡）耀邦)
(Zhao) Ziyang (（赵）紫阳)
(Jiang) Zemin (（江）泽民)
Qiao Shi (乔石)
Deng Xiaoping (邓小平)
Li Peng (李鹏)
Wei Jianxing (尉建行)

Retested Terms:

suppress (镇压)
assemble (集会): as in “memorial service for 6.4″ (悼念六四集会)
revolt (造反)
massacre (屠杀): Tiananmen Massacre (天安门大屠杀)
open fire (开枪)
demonstrate (游行)
protest (抗议)
sit-in (静坐)
demonstrate (示威)
persecute (迫害)
student strike (罢课)
conflict (冲突)
take a walk (散步)

liu+si (6.4 in pinyin)
bajiu (89 in pinyin)
Chang’an Avenue (长安街)
square (广场)
square
Tianan(men) (天安（门）)
Zhongnanhai (中南海)
member of standing committee (常委)
political bureau (政治局)
Gang of Four (四人帮)

sensitive (敏感)
turmoil (动乱)
democracy movement (民运（民主运动）)
gunfire (枪声)
mothers of the motherland (祖国母亲)
Hunger Strike Declaration (绝食书)
non-violent non-cooperation (非暴力不合作)
student leader (学生领袖)

student federation (学联)
Independent Federation of Chinese Students and Scholars (学自联)
Capital Autonomous Workers Federation (工自联)
Capital Autonomous Federation of University Students (北高联)
Capital Autonomous Federation of University Students (高自联)
Operation Yellowbird (黄雀行动)
Chinese Spring (中国之春)
Independent Chinese PEN Center (独立中文笔会)

Overseas Media:

BBC
Voice of America (美国之音)
Radio Free Asia (自由亚洲)
Radio France Internationale (法广)
Boxun (博讯)
SeeChina (看中国)
Apollo (阿波罗)

Note: All Chinese-language words are tested using simplified characters. The same terms in traditional characters occasionally return different results. CDT Chinese runs a project that crowd-sources filtered keywords on Sina Weibo search.

CDT independently tests the keywords before posting them, but some searches later become accessible again. We welcome readers to contribute to this project so that we can include the most up-to-date information. To add words, check out the form at the bottom of CDT Chinese’s latest sensitive words post.
June 3, 2012 11:17 PM
Posted By: Anne Henochowicz


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## Costas (Oct 20, 2012)

Πέρσι είχε γίνει μεγάλος ντόρος με τις εξελίξεις στο Ουκάν.

Εδώ μερικά ρεπορτάζ για το τι απέγινε και πώς εξελίσσεται αυτή η ιστορία. (China Digital Times)


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## drsiebenmal (Oct 20, 2012)

Costas said:


> *Sensitive Words: The Tiananmen Edition (Update)*
> people (民): as in People’s Liberation Army (人民解放军), democracy (民主)
> movement (运): as in democracy movement (民运), student movement (学运)
> government (政): as in Fang Zheng(方政), regimental commissar (团政委), one-party dictatorship (一党专政)



Δεν νομίζω ότι χρειάζεται καλύτερη απόδειξη ότι κάτι έχει πάει στραβά σε μια χώρα που δηλώνει λαϊκή δημοκρατία και αναγκάζεται να μπλοκάρει λέξεις όπως λαός, κίνημα, κυβέρνηση...


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## Costas (Oct 20, 2012)

Άρθρο για το βαθμό διείδυσης του ιδιωτικού κεφαλαίου στα κλιμάκια εξουσίας της ΛΔΚ. (The Jamestown Foundation)


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## Costas (Oct 20, 2012)

Η άποψη της μεταφράστριας του Μο Γιαν Anna Gustafsson Chen για το θέμα που δημιουργήθηκε με τον Göran Malmqvist (βλ. παραπάνω #454). Έχει ενδιαφέρον και για μια φευγαλέα εικόνα της αγοράς του μεταφρασμένου λογοτεχνικού βιβλίου στη Σουηδία:

1. When the Swedish Academy¹s Nobel Committee is interested in a certain author they will start by reading those of his/her works that are available in translation into a language that the Committee members can read. That would mean Swedish, English, French, German and possibly some other European languages. If the Committee needs more materials they can engage a translator to translate for them. This is done under secrecy, of course.

2. In this case, the Nobel Committee asked Göran Malmqvist to translate a number of essays and short stories for them. Since he is a member of the Academy as well as an acclaimed translator this is by no means odd ­ this way they could get a very good translation to read and at the same time diminish the risk that outsiders would know what they were working with. It is important to remember that Malmqvist made his translations on request from the Nobel Committee once they were already interested in Mo Yan and had read most of his earlier translated works.

3. Malmqvist cannot himself decide who will be awarded the Nobel Prize. The Nobel Committee consists of five Academy members, and Malmqvist is not one of them. He can promote a candidate that he likes, but so can all the other Academy members. And in the end, he has only one vote, just like all the others.

4. If Malmqvist would have wanted to promote a certain writer for his own personal gain, he would not likely have chosen Mo Yan, whose works he never translated before. He would have gained much more if either Bei Dao, Li Rui or Cao Naiqian had been awarded the Nobel Prize.

5. As for translators, no translator has exclusive rights to a certain author. There exists a sort of gentleman¹s agreement among Swedish translators ­ if your colleague has worked with an author for a long time you don¹t snatch that author away from under that translator¹s nose once the author becomes famous. For this reason, some people in Sweden have criticized Malmqvist and claimed that it¹s unfair of him to act the way he has. My point of view is that since he already translated these essays and short stories it would be a pity if nobody could read them. Better to publish them than to let them rot away in his computer.

6. The Academy¹s Permanent Secretary, Peter Englund, has told the press that Malmqvist will give his translations to the publisher for free. This way, he won¹t gain financially. Of course, some people then criticized this decision as well, saying that Malmqvist would dump the market for other translators of Chinese literature. Since I am basically the only other active translator from Chinese to Swedish and since the publishing house (the same one) didn¹t pay one cent out of its own coffers for my translation of Life and Death are Wearing Me Out (I did that job on a scholarship from elsewhere) I¹d say the market is pretty dumped as it is. Translating Chinese literature into Swedish is not something you can make money from.

7. In short: knowing Malmqvist, I don¹t suspect for one moment that he promoted Mo Yan for his own personal gain. I do think, however, that he needs some media training and that he needs to realize that you should nevernevernever send e-mails when you¹re upset.


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## Costas (Oct 21, 2012)

Οι συντοπίτες του Μο Γιαν (για την ακρίβεια, η οικεία νομαρχία) σκέφτονται πώς να βγάλουν λεφτά από τη φήμη του συγγραφέα (The Financial Times):

(...)
Local officials in the writer’s hometown of Gaomi in the Eastern province of Shandong have dreamed up a plan to create a ‘Mo Yan Experience Park’ and a ‘Red Sorghum Culture Park’.
The idea is to attract tourists by planting ’10,000 mu’ (approx 666 ha) of red sorghum, a grain local farmers gave up planting many years ago because it didn’t earn enough. Mo Yan wrote the novel which Zhang Yimou, the acclaimed director, used as the basis for his famous film ‘Red Sorghum’.
Fan Hui, a local official, was quoted in a Beijing newspaper on Thursday as saying he envisioned investing about Rmb10m a year and a total of Rmb670m, and the sorghum “must be planted even at a financial loss”. He was also quoted as telling the writer’s father that the family must refurbish its ancestral home, Mo Yan’s birthplace, to be included in the planned park because the house and the son were no longer his alone but belonged to Chinese society now.
Within hours, the idea met with a wave of derision. So when contacted on Friday, a Gaomi government spokesman described the plan as Fan’s ‘personal views’. Nonetheless, the city government’s website carried a statement quoting mayor Yang Jianhua as saying: “We must further stress the most important points, create a ‘Mo Yan’ brand and stress the ‘Mo Yan’ factor.”
(...)


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## bernardina (Oct 21, 2012)

Costas said:


> Nonetheless, the city government’s website carried a statement quoting mayor Yang Jianhua as saying: “We must further stress the most important points, create a ‘Mo Yan’ brand and stress the ‘Mo Yan’ factor.”



καταραμένε καπιταλισμέ...


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## Costas (Oct 21, 2012)

Εμένα μου άρεσε το

The idea is to attract tourists by planting ’10,000 mu’ (approx 666 ha) of red sorghum, a grain local farmers gave up planting many years ago because it didn’t earn enough. Mo Yan wrote the novel which Zhang Yimou, the acclaimed director, used as the basis for his famous film ‘Red Sorghum’.
Fan Hui, a local official, was quoted in a Beijing newspaper on Thursday as saying he envisioned investing about Rmb10m a year and a total of Rmb670m, and the sorghum “must be planted even at a financial loss”.

Το προτείνω στους Σαντορινιούς που πουλάνε φάβα Σαντορίνης και άμα ρωτάνε οι τουρίστες "πού είναι τα χωράφια με τη φάβα;" δεν ξέρουν τι να πουν....


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## nickel (Oct 21, 2012)

Costas said:


> Το προτείνω στους Σαντορινιούς που πουλάνε φάβα Σαντορίνης και άμα ρωτάνε οι τουρίστες "πού είναι τα χωράφια με τη φάβα;" δεν ξέρουν τι να πουν....


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## Costas (Oct 22, 2012)

Ένα κλασικό καλαμπούρι:


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## nickel (Oct 22, 2012)

Ο τίτλος του σχετικού γιουτιουμπακίου απαγγελίας είναι *Holy shi...*


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## Costas (Oct 24, 2012)

Είναι δυνατόν αυτό να οφείλεται σε υπερφόρτωση του φορτηγού; Έτσι πάντως είπε η αστυνομία. (φωτό)


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## Zazula (Oct 24, 2012)

Μήπως εννοούσε ότι το φορτηγό υπερέβη το όριο βάρους που υπήρχε (σηματοδοτημένο, να υποθέσω) για τη συγκεκριμένη γέφυρα; Πάντως ένα τέτοιο φορτηγό έχει νόμιμο όριο φόρτωσης 26t, οπότε πόσο να το υπερφορτώσεις; Άντε 35t — λογικά οι συνήθεις γέφυρες τέτοιας κατασκευής θα άντεχαν. Πέρναγαν κι άλλα οχήματα εκείνη την ώρα (υπάρχει άλλη σηματοδότηση και για τη μεταξύ των οχημάτων απόσταση); Μήπως ήταν θέμα ιδιοσυχνότητας; Πάντως κι εμένα το μυαλό μου θα πήγαινε σε κατασκευαστικό πρόβλημα της ίδιας της γέφυρας μας (είτε κατά τη σχεδίαση είτε κατά τη δόμηση).


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## Costas (Oct 24, 2012)

Zazula said:


> Μήπως εννοούσε ότι το φορτηγό υπερέβη το όριο βάρους που υπήρχε (σηματοδοτημένο, να υποθέσω) για τη συγκεκριμένη γέφυρα;


Ναι, αυτό κατάλαβα τουλάχιστον κι εγώ ότι εννοούσε. Τώρα, για τη σήμανση, δεν ξέρω. Κι εμένα (και αυτών που αναμετάδωσαν την είδηση ως άξια λόγου από 'πολιτική' άποψη) το μυαλό μου εκεί πήγε που λες κι εσύ.


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## bernardina (Oct 24, 2012)

Γρρρρήγορα ο οδηγός στο πλησιέστερο laojiao για επανεκπαίδευση, αυτοκριτική και γαϊδουρινή δουλειά μέχρι να βάλει μυαλό. Καθημερινά, δε, να γράφει εκατό φορές _δεν θα ξαναπεράσω με υπερφορτωμένο φορτηγό από γέφυρα της τιμημένης λαϊκής δημοκρατίας μας_.

Ζάζουλα, είσαι καχυποπτώδης και όργανο του διεθνούς καπιταλισμού. Έρχεται κι εσένα η ώρα σου...


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## bernardina (Oct 24, 2012)

A circle-shaped piece of landscape architecture in Fushun, Liaoning province, on September 13, 2012. The 157-meter high building named "Ring of Life" cost around a hundred million RMB ($16 million USD) and used 3,000 tons of steel, local media reported. (Reuters/China Daily)







Έχει κι άλλες εδώ: Scenes fron 21st-century China


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## Costas (Oct 24, 2012)

Κι εδώ έχει παλιά χτίρια (αλλά η γλώσσα είναι τα κινέζικα), π.χ. αυτό της φωτογραφίας του λινκ είναι παλιό αστυνομικό τμήμα (που αναφέρεται στην ιστορία του άρθρου που λινκάρω ακριβώς αποκάτω, απ' όπου και το ίδιο το λινκ).

Μια και ο λόγος για laojiao (劳教): Sheng Shuren: The Story of a Journalist in New China, σε 5 μέρη. Η τύχη ενός αριστερού διανοουμένου της αστικής τάξης στην κομουνιστική Κίνα τις δεκαετίες 1950-1970. Αχτένιστο σαν κείμενο, αλλά πολύ ενδιαφέρον, από τον Yaxue Cao (Γιαξ(σ)υέ Τσάο). (Seeing Red in China)


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## bernardina (Oct 24, 2012)

Κώστα, δεν σ' το έχω πει ως τώρα, αλλά το νήμα σου είναι ένα από τα συναρπαστικότερα της Λέξι. Προσωπικά, σ' ευχαριστώ γι' αυτό.


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## Costas (Oct 24, 2012)

Σ' ευχαριστώ απεριορίστως, Μπερναρντίνα! :)


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## Costas (Oct 24, 2012)

Το δεύτερο και τελευταίο μέρος της κριτικής εξέτασης του Mo Yan από τον Yaxue Cao. Πέρα από τα πολιτικά, έχει και κάποιες παρατηρήσεις για το στιλ του (τον "παραισθητικό ρεαλισμό" που ανέφερε η Σουηδική Ακαδημία). (Seeing Red in China)


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## Zazula (Oct 24, 2012)

Costas said:


> Κι εμένα (και αυτών που αναμετάδωσαν την είδηση ως άξια λόγου από 'πολιτική' άποψη) το μυαλό μου εκεί πήγε που λες κι εσύ.


Πάντως τις περισσότερες υποψίες μου θα τις συγκέντρωνε το ενδεχόμενο κάποιος να 'βαλε χέρι στις πρώτες ύλες κι έτσι η κατασκευή τελικά να προέκυψε πολλαπλώς υποδεέστερη της προδιαγραφείσας και σχεδιασθείσας...


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## Costas (Oct 24, 2012)

Ε ναι, όπως και στον περίφημο σεισμό του Σιτσουάν το Μάη του 2008, όπου γκρεμίστηκαν επιλεκτικά τα περισσότερα δημόσια σχολικά κτίρια.


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## Costas (Oct 26, 2012)

Θα πρότεινα στον κ. Τσοχατζόπουλο, όταν αποφυλακιστεί, να πάει να γίνει λούστρος του Ουέν Τζιαμπάο, ώστε να ξαναφτιαχτεί ο άνθρωπος:
(ΝΥΤ)

*Billions in Hidden Riches for Family of Chinese Leader*
(...)
(...) many of the holdings found by The Times would not need to be disclosed under the rules since they are not held in the name of the prime minister’s immediate family — his wife, son and daughter.
Eighty percent of the $2.7 billion in assets identified in The Times’s investigation and verified by the outside auditors were held by, among others, the prime minister’s mother, his younger brother, two brothers-in-law, a sister-in-law, daughter-in-law and the parents of his son’s wife, none of whom is subject to party disclosure rules.
(...)


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## Costas (Oct 26, 2012)

Ένα σπουδαίο ρεπορτάζ του Evan Osnos (The New Yorker) για τη διαφθορά στους σιδηροδρόμους, με παράλληλη εξιστόρηση του εξωπραγματικού ράλι των υποδομών στον τομέα (χάρη και στα δισεκατομμύρια της αντιυφεσιακής τονωτικής ένεσης του 2008) και του "ατυχήματος" της 23ης Ιουλίου 2011. Αξίζει πολλαπλά το διάβασμα· απομονώνω εδώ πρώτο ένα απόσπασμα, έτσι για τον αθέλητο σουρεαλισμό της κατάστασης [η πρόσθεση του λινκ, δική μου]:

Ding’s given name, Shumiao, betrayed her rural roots, so she changed it to Yuxin, at the suggestion of her feng-shui adviser. She was easy to lampoon—Daft Mrs. Ding, people called her—but she had a genius for cultivating business relationships. A longtime colleague told me, “When I tried to teach her how to analyze the market, how to run the company, she said, ‘I don’t need to understand this.’ ” Caixin chronicled her audacious social ascent. To gain foreign contacts, she backed a club “for international diplomats,” which managed to attract a visit in 2010 by Britain’s former Prime Minister Tony Blair. Her lavish receptions drew members of the Politburo. She joined the lower house of the provincial legislature, and made so many charitable gifts that in 2010 she ranked No. 6 on the Forbes China list of philanthropists.

Κι αυτό καλό είναι για σκηνή ταινίας:

The ministry was so large that bureaucrats would create fictional departments and run up expenses for them. Procurement was a prime opportunity for graft. The ministry spent nearly three million dollars on a five-minute promotional video that went largely unseen. The video led investigators to the ministry’s deputy propaganda chief, a woman whose home contained a million and a half dollars in cash and the deeds to nine houses.

Επίσης ένα άλλο για το πώς βλέπει ο κόσμος τη διαφθορά, θερμομετρική ένδειξη πολύ ανησυχητική για το μέλλον του συστήματος (άλλος ένας λόγος να μαζεύουν όσο μπορούν πιο πολύ ιδιωτικό πλούτο για την ώρα του μπαμ):

“The officials are getting greedier and greedier,” he said. “In the past, whenever we were working on a tunnel, the local officials visited the site. Now they just stay in their big, beautiful office and collect their money.”

Και το βουλοκέρι της καταστροφής:

“Inside the system today, if you don’t take bribes you have to get out. There’s no way you can stay. If three of us are in one department, and you are the only one who doesn’t take a bribe, are the two of us ever going to feel safe?”


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## Costas (Oct 26, 2012)

Σ' ένα άλλο άρθρο του ίδιου Evan Osnos βρήκα ένα λινκ προς μια συνέντευξη του ειδικού στην κινεζική κρεμλινολογία Cheng Li, του πανεπιστημίου του Πρίνστον, με τίτλο The Bo Xilai Crisis: Confidence Gained or Risk Increased?, που συνοψίζει ωραία τα διακυβεύματα της δίκης του Bo Xilai και της επερχόμενης αλλαγής ηγεσίας στη Λαϊκή Κίνα, η οποία αλλαγή δεν είναι, παρά τα φαινόμενα, λιγότερο κρίσιμη για το παγκόσμιο γίγνεσθαι από την εκλογή του επόμενου Αμερικανού προέδρου:

(...)
A review of the recent intellectual discourse in China reveals a heated discussion about the current risk of revolution in the country. One of the most popular books in intellectual circles today is the Chinese translation of Alexis de Tocqueville's classic study, _The Old Regime and the Revolution_. One frequently quoted passage is Tocqueville's argument that revolution usually takes place not when the old regime resists change but, rather, when it begins to reform itself. Conservative hardliners in the CCP leadership may ultimately decide to resist political reform at all costs, rendering the current consensus on reform either wishful thinking or a temporary condition. Some policy differences in the leadership, especially concerning political reform and personnel appointments, could become contentious and even result in factional infighting spiraling out of control. The new leadership may find it increasingly difficult to build the kind of consensus necessary to govern effectively. Thus, the upcoming Bo Xilai trial may polarize Chinese society and enhance the risk of sociopolitical unrest.
(...)
Thus, although we still do not know for sure whether the crisis is a blessing or a curse, the party's handling of the Bo Xilai case gives some hope that things are moving in the right direction. Time will tell whether this landmark trial can provide the CCP leadership with the confidence to pursue bold and genuine political reforms and provide the Chinese public with renewed confidence in a reborn ruling party. If not, China is headed toward even greater trouble, not only because demagogic figures in the mold of Bo Xilai may be even more brazen and despicable in the future, but also because the regime will lose all of the credibility and legitimacy that it so desperately needs to restore.


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## Costas (Oct 26, 2012)

Διαβάζοντας μια παλιότερη συνέντευξη του ίδιου Cheng Li, του Απριλίου, έπεσα στην εξής εκτίμησή του για την υπόθεση Wang Lijun (ο αρχιμπάτσος του Bo Xilai):

I do have doubts about the way Wang Lijun is being portrayed as having approached Bo regarding an investigation into Bo’s and Gu’s involvement in the death of Neil Heywood. This does not make sense to me. Wang’s entire career had been based on his patron-client ties with Bo. He was considered Bo’s close confidant, knew many if not all of Bo’s dirty secrets, and had done many highly questionable things during his three years as Bo’s police chief in Chongqing. Therefore, given their close ties, it puzzles me that Wang would have challenged Bo on Gu’s potential role in Heywood’s death. Wang may have felt that he simply could not cover up this case. Still, I think there are probably some missing pieces to this story.

Χτες λοιπόν μια Κινέζα ιατροδικαστής της εισαγγελίας αμφισβήτησε την αιτία θανάτου του Βρετανού Neil Heywood (βίντεο, WSJ), συγκεκριμένα το ότι πέθανε από τη συγκεκριμένη ουσία που ειπώθηκε στη δίκη.

Ακόμα, ο Cheng Li έκανε σ' εκείνη τη συνέντευξη κάποιες σκέψεις και παραλληλισμούς:

The Cultural Revolution and the 1989 Tiananmen incident are two of the great disasters in the history of the CCP, but in the aftermath of these events you see opening and reform after the Cultural Revolution and the acceleration of China’s market transition and integration with the outside world after Tiananmen, respectively. Positive political developments came out of these terrible events. There is hope that something similar may yet happen following the Bo crisis. Lessons will be learned, a consensus will be reached, and bold decisions will be pursued. Wen Jiabao, in recent comments at the National People’s Congress, said very clearly that the party-state leadership system needs to be changed and that the rule of law should be emphasized in the handling of Wang Lijun’s case in order for the CCP to endure the test of history.

Learning from this crisis is not a choice for the CCP as much as it is a necessity. If nothing changes, the party will continue to lose its credibility. I believe the characterization of the Chinese political system as “resilient authoritarianism” is incorrect. While the prevailing view had been that this year’s leadership procession would go smoothly, two years ago I argued that the upcoming succession would be highly problematic and feature some sort of major crisis. Now the general sentiment is that China is in a terrible situation due to a vicious power struggle, but I am more optimistic. China has removed a major danger and avoided the worst scenario, which would have been taking the country down a Maoist, ultranationalist path. Of course, Bo’s chances of accomplishing this were always slim, but now they are close to zero. This is solid progress, and a reason to be more optimistic about China’s future.

I am not arguing that Bo’s downfall will only have positive ramifications and that nothing will go wrong. However, there are always opportunities to learn lessons and make improvements, and I think the potential for China to do so is not insignificant. It is worth remembering that the assassination of a Taiwanese writer by agents of Taiwan’s Nationalist Party was a trigger that helped spur the island’s transition from authoritarianism to democracy in the mid-1980s. Similarly, China must now either make changes to be on the right side of history or be left behind. The Bo Xilai crisis can be either a curse or blessing for the CCP—a curse if the party pretends that its rule can remain as before, but a blessing if the party decides to transform itself.


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## Costas (Oct 26, 2012)

Ένα άλλο από τα ωραία λινκ του Evan Osnos παραπάνω είναι προς το βιβλίο του Andrew Wedeman, _Double Paradox: Rapid Growth and Rising Corruption in China_. Τσιτάρω από την "Περιγραφή του βιβλίου" στο Amazon:

According to conventional wisdom, rising corruption reduces economic growth. And yet, between 1978 and 2010, even as officials were looting state coffers, extorting bribes, raking in kickbacks, and scraping off rents at unprecedented rates, the Chinese economy grew at an average annual rate of 9 percent. In _Double Paradox_, Andrew Wedeman seeks to explain why the Chinese economy performed so well despite widespread corruption at almost kleptocratic levels.

Wedeman finds that the Chinese economy was able to survive predatory corruption because corruption did not explode until after economic reforms had unleashed dynamic growth. To a considerable extent corruption was also a by-product of the transfer of undervalued assets from the state to the emerging private and corporate sectors and a scramble to capture the windfall profits created by their transfer. Perhaps most critically, an anticorruption campaign, however flawed, has proved sufficient to prevent corruption from spiraling out of control. Drawing on more than three decades of data from China -as well as examples of the interplay between corruption and growth in South Korea, Taiwan, Equatorial Guinea, and other nations in Africa and the Caribbean- Wedeman cautions that rapid growth requires not only ongoing and improved anticorruption efforts but also consolidated and strengthened property rights.


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## Costas (Oct 27, 2012)

Σύμφωνα με την αστυνομία του Θιβέτ, η αυτοπυρπόληση σαν πράξη διαμαρτυρίας είναι αντισυνταγματική. (rfa)


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## Costas (Oct 27, 2012)

Ο Cheng Li στη συνέντευξή του στο #481 πιο πάνω υποστήριξε πως το γεγονός ότι η ηγεσία του ΚΚΚ αποφάσισε να περάσει τον Μπο Ξ(Σ)ιλάι από δίκη και όχι από το παράλληλο πειθαρχικό σύστημα που υπάρχει για τα στελέχη του κόμματος, απόφαση που κατ' αυτόν υπαγορεύτηκε από το ότι τα εγκλήματα που τον αφορούν παραήταν χοντρά, ότι το γεγονός λοιπόν αυτό είναι θετικό σημάδι για την πορεία που θέλει να χαράξει γενικότερα η ηγεσία για τη χώρα. Πάντως, και για να μη δημιουργούνται παρανοήσεις, αυτό δεν σημαίνει ότι ειδήσεις σαν και την παρακάτω (από το κινεζόφωνο BBC) θα είναι στο εξής αδιανόητες:

*Lawyer Hired to Represent Bo Xilai Knows Not Whether He'll Be Allowed to Speak in Bo's Defense*


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## Costas (Oct 29, 2012)

Protests Over Chemical Plant Force Chinese Officials to Back Down (NYT)


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## Costas (Oct 29, 2012)

Asian Schools Jump in Rank (NYT). Εννοεί τα πανεπιστήμια. Ενδιαφέρον ειδικά για όσους ψάχνονται ακόμα με σπουδές-καριέρα.


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## Costas (Oct 29, 2012)

Me and My Censor. Εμπειρίες μιας Κινεζοαμερικανίδας αρχισυντάκτριας σ' ένα επιχειρηματικό περιοδικό στη Κίνα τα χρόνια πριν από τους Ολυμπιακούς του Πεκίνου. Ενδιαφέρον και νόστιμο. (Foreign Policy)


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## Costas (Oct 30, 2012)

Ρεπορτάζ από τις κινητοποιήσεις ενάντια στο χημικό εργοστάσιο στο Νίνγκμπο (#486), με αφήγηση του ρεπόρτερ από τη σύλληψη (χωρίς τραυματισμό, και κατοπινή απόλυσή του) στην κλούβα και με βιντεοκλίπ από τις μαζικές εκδηλώσεις. (itv news)


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## Costas (Oct 30, 2012)

Για τους ενδιαφερόμενους για μεταφρασμένη στα αγγλικά κινεζική λογοτεχνία και τους βιβλιοθηκάριους αγγλόφωνων βιβλιοθηκών, CLT (Chinese Literature Today).


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## Costas (Oct 31, 2012)

Ενδιαφέρον το δελτίο Τύπου του Chinese Publishing Industry, που επιμελείται ο Eric Abrahamsen του Paper Republic.


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## Costas (Oct 31, 2012)

Μια υπεράσπιση της στάσης του Μο Γιαν μέσα από μιαν ιστορική αναδρομή στο ρόλο του διανοουμένου στην κινεζική ιστορία. (The Atlantic)


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## bernardina (Oct 31, 2012)

Έχεις βαλθεί να μας καταστρέψεις...


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## Costas (Oct 31, 2012)

Αφού πρώτα έχω καταστραφεί ο ίδιος...


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## nickel (Oct 31, 2012)

Το Κιντλ μου αγκομαχεί, να το ξέρετε, και μαζί του κι εγώ. Έμεινα πίσω μια βδομάδα λόγω ξενυχτιών (όπου η κλινανάγνωση ήταν ίσα-ίσα για να μου κλείνει τα βλέφαρα) και τώρα το χρέος δείχνει «μη βιώσιμο». Να οργανώσουμε έξοδο ανάγνωσης, όπου δεν θα μιλάμε μεταξύ μας, μόνο θα φέρουμε βιβλία που χρωστάμε να διαβάσουμε και θα εμπνεόμαστε ο ένας από το βύθισμα του άλλου.


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## Costas (Oct 31, 2012)

Όταν πεθάνω θα ξεκουραστώ, κατά το κοινώς λεγόμενον...


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## SBE (Oct 31, 2012)

Aκόμα καλύτερα, αντί για ομάδες αυτο-ανάγνωσης, οργάνωσε ομάδες που θα διαβάζει ο καθένας από ένα άρθρο και θα γράφει περίληψη δέκα σειρών για τους υπόλοιπους.


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## Costas (Nov 1, 2012)

Μ' αρέσει η λακωνικότητα!
Για σύγκριση με π.χ. ΗΠΑ, εδώ.


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## SBE (Nov 1, 2012)

Και η λακωνικότητα και η μηχανική μετάφραση.


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## bernardina (Nov 1, 2012)

Κατά τη παραμονή τους στην Κίνα , τα άτομα που αποκαλυφθούν να παθαίνουν από ένα από τα παραπάνω νοσήματα θα απελαθούν.
Παθαίνω! :lol:


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## Costas (Nov 1, 2012)

Στο έντυπο της αίτησης της βίζας το λέει πιο αναλυτικά, και πεντανόστιμα: Are you _affiliated_ with any of the following diseases?


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## nickel (Nov 1, 2012)

Costas said:


> Me and My Censor. Εμπειρίες μιας Κινεζοαμερικανίδας αρχισυντάκτριας σ' ένα επιχειρηματικό περιοδικό στη Κίνα τα χρόνια πριν από τους Ολυμπιακούς του Πεκίνου. Ενδιαφέρον και νόστιμο. (Foreign Policy)


Με την αναμενόμενη καθυστέρηση διάβασα το παραπάνω και είναι το καλύτερο κείμενο που έχω διαβάσει για τη λογοκρισία, έστω κι αν είναι μια ψηφίδα μονάχα, μια σχεδόν όμορφη ψηφίδα, σε ένα μωσαϊκό που, όπως γράφει, περιλαμβάνει ξυλοφόρτωμα και φυλάκιση. Η Έβελιν χτίζει το κείμενο υποδειγματικά, ξεκινώντας από τα γραφικά και τα ανώδυνα, και φτάνοντας στην απόγνωση του ελεύθερου πολιορκημένου. Highly recommended reading.


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## SBE (Nov 1, 2012)

Ορισμένες ψυχώσεις των Κινέζων (της λογοκρισίας) θυμίζουν κάποιες ψυχώσεις των Ελλήνων, αν και με διαφορετικό τρόπο. Για παράδειγμα το άρθρο, Νίκελ, αναφέρει πως οι χάρτες έπρεπε να δείχνουν και τα νησιά που κανονικά σε τέτοιες κλίμακες είναι αόρατα. Στην Ελλάδα τις μισές φορές που ένας ξένος χάρτης δεν δείχνει μια βραχονησίδα γίνεται ζήτημα από το κοινό.


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## Costas (Nov 2, 2012)

Η πολιτική οικονομία της διατήρησης της σταθερότητας (npr):

(...)
Beijing this year is spending $111 billion on its domestic security budget, which covers the police, state security, militia, courts and jails. This is now higher than its publicly disclosed military expenditure.
(...)
"I think money spent on stability maintenance is a big burden to society, including the government," she says. "Once interest groups coalesce around that funding, they need to feed themselves via the stability maintenance machine. Then more instability is needed, right?"
(...)
He is brutally honest about how corrupt the system has become. He describes how his rural town spends roughly $25,000 per year on one particular petitioner, sometimes resorting to paying him not to cause trouble. (...) He also admits that he pays bribes to erase complaints that petitioners have already lodged, which could block the chances of promotion for himself and his superiors. "We have to beg related departments to cancel records," he admits. "We have to bribe them and the police. They profit from their power, and so gain more power to sell off."
(...)
Even the train conductors profit from the security apparatus, by spotting the petitioners and tipping off officials so they can be detained on arrival in Beijing. "They sold them to the Beijing liaison office," he says, "for $64 a head."
(...)


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## Costas (Nov 2, 2012)

Οχτώ χρόνια φυλακή στον Cao Haibo (Τσάο Χαϊμπό) γιατί έφτιαξε φόρουμ στο διαδίκτυο με τίτλο "Ένωση για την αναζωογόνηση του έθνους". Το έγκλημα: "ανατροπή της κρατικής εξουσίας" (όχι "προτροπή σε ανατροπή της κρατικής εξουσίας"). Στον κομουνισμό ένας μόνο συνεταιρισμός είναι νοητό να υπάρχει, το Κομουνιστικό Κόμμα και τα πιόνια του. Στον μεταολοκληρωτικό κομουνισμό μπορείς να διαμαρτυρηθείς, αλλά μόνο σαν άτομο (πάλι ρισκάρεις, βέβαια). Ουαί και αλίμονο όμως εάν αμφισβητήσεις το δικαίωμα του ΚΚ να είναι ο μόνος πολιτικός συνεταιρισμός, είτε το κάνεις μόνος σου είτε συνεταιριστείς για να το κάνεις· αποτελεί αυτομάτως εσχάτη προδοσία, le`se majeste', ανατροπή της κρατικής εξουσίας, βεβήλωση του ιερού σώματος, του τοτέμ. Το είδαμε και με την Αλληλεγγύη στην Πολωνία. Γι' αυτό και παθαίνουν παράνοια με την Εκκλησία: μην τυχόν και ο υπαρκτός αυτός θεσμός πάρει πολιτική χροιά.


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## Costas (Nov 2, 2012)

Sabina Knight, _Chinese Literature. A Very Short Introduction_, μόλις 137 σελίδες για 3000 χρόνια! Βιβλιοκριτική (mclc)


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## Costas (Nov 2, 2012)

Σύμφωνα με έκθεση της Κινεζικής Ακαδημίας Επιστημών, το 2011 η αστυφιλία στην ΛΔΚ ξεπέρασε για πρώτη φορά το 50% κι έφτασε το 51,3%. (discovery, κινέζικα)


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## Costas (Nov 2, 2012)

Words without Borders, November 2012: Banned Chinese Writers


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## Costas (Nov 2, 2012)

Κινεζική Κρεμλινολογία, αρ. 2. Ενδιαφέρουσα η φωτογραφία που θα δείτε στο άρθρο, όπου ο νυν και ο πρώην πρόεδρος φιγουράρουν στα μεγάλα φωτοπορτρέτα τους ντυμένοι στο παλιό στιλ κουστουμιού Σουν Γιατ-Σεν, αντί για τα κλασικά Δυτικά κουστούμια. (ΝΥΤ)


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## Costas (Nov 2, 2012)

Πλάνο για σταδιακή κατάργηση της λήψης οργάνων από τους εκτελεσμένους θανατοποινίτες. (WHO)


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## Costas (Nov 3, 2012)

Είχα προβληματιστεί προ ημερών και είχα εντέλει εκτιμήσει ότι δεν άξιζε τον κόπο και δεν το 'χα βάλει εδώ, αλλά μετά απ' αυτό απόψε άλλαξα γνώμη:






Για το νόημα του τίτλου: 草泥马 (grass mud horse) style, που μας έχει ξανααπασχολήσει στο παρελθόν, διαβάστε εδώ.


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## Zazula (Nov 4, 2012)

Κι εγώ το 'χα δει κι αναρωτιόμουν ποιος να 'ναι άραγε αυτός ο Ai Weiwei με κοντά ένα εκατομμύριο θεάσεις (εγώ το 'χα βρει έτσι: 草泥马style).


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## Costas (Nov 4, 2012)

Εννοείται (;) ότι το βίντεο εξαφανίστηκε πολύ γρήγορα από τον κινέζικο κυβερνοχώρο.


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## Costas (Nov 5, 2012)

Τίποτα το ιδιαίτερο, απλώς μια σύνοψη για το ποιοι φεύγουν, ποιοι έρχονται, εν αναμονή της αλλαγής ηγεσίας στο Πεκίνο. (ΝΥΤ)


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## Costas (Nov 6, 2012)

Κινέζικο γλυπτό εμπνευσμένο από τον Μιγιαζάκι (Spirited away), με παγκόσμια εφαρμογή...


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## Palavra (Nov 6, 2012)

Εμένα μου θύμισε Φάρμα των Ζώων, πάντως...


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## Costas (Nov 6, 2012)

Fury at torn Mao pics (People's Daily online). Fury από ορισμένους (πολλούς, βέβαια). Άλλοι δεν αγανάχτησαν.


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## Costas (Nov 6, 2012)

Άρθρο του Geremie R. Barmé σχετικά μ' ένα άρθρο του αναλυτή Yuan Peng. Κάνει ωραίες ιστορικές καταδύσεις. (The China Story)

Nonetheless, of the ‘New Five Black Categories’ in Yuan’s analysis, four are not new. Nor indeed is the discussion of social anomie or unruly elements, given the fact that the Chinese party-state is presently much taken with the theory and practice of ‘social management’ 社会管理. What caused particular offence (apart from Yuan’s clear identification of perceived ‘threats’) was that ‘vulnerable groups’ 弱势群体 were included in the list. Critics were appalled that in a booming modern China that boasts of its aspirations to achieve global status the groups most deserving of support, protection and care were being identified as an incipient danger. That such a suggestion came from an analyst working for a government think tank that was itself created to protect the Chinese revolution, and its own elevation of the formerly dispossessed and oppressed classes of the country seemed nothing less than confronting. To offer the state policy advice that overtly targets the marginalised and disempowered appeared, to many, as inhumane and in blatant contradiction of the Communist Party’s founding principles and avowed value system.

Edit: Κάτσε να βάλω και το σχετικό εδάφιο του Yuan Peng εδώ, για όσους δεν έχουν χρόνο (τα παχιά δικά μου):

During this period, the US will avail itself of various non-military means to delay or hinder China’s progressive rise. In so doing it will hope to gain strategic advantage, revitalise itself and consolidate its hegemonic position. The main ways in which the US is doing this are:

Using the exchange rate of the Renminbi as an entré, and a short-term strategy of opening up China’s fiscal markets so as to comprehensively infiltrate China’s ‘third industry’. The overall aim is to control the pulse rate of China’s development and, in the process, to gain massive financial advantage;
In the name of ‘Internet freedom’ transforming the traditional mode of pursuing top-down democracy and freedom. Utilising *rights lawyers, underground religious activities, dissidents, Internet leaders and vulnerable groups* as core constituencies with the aim of infiltrating China’s grass roots so as to carry out a bottom-up process to create thereby conditions to ‘transform’ China.
Strengthening alliances and enhancing partnerships while undermining China’s relationship with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Pakistan and Myanmar, while kick-starting the US-Russian relationship to put China on the back foot diplomatically and undermine a rising China’s external environment and to limit our strategic space.

In this way the US is using a ‘global [or 360-degree] environment’ encompassing ‘sea, air, space and the Internet’ to pursue its goals of undertaking dialogue and determining relevant protocols in the hope of actually weakening China’s strategic challenges to the US in all of the above arenas.


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## Costas (Nov 6, 2012)

Θα υπάρξουν μεταρρυθμίσεις με την αλλαγή ηγεσίας; Δεν θα υπάρξουν; Θα είναι σημαντικές ή διακοσμητικές; Ριζικές ή ανεπαρκείς; Θα προέλθουν από πάνω ή από κάτω; Τι θα σημαίνουν για τη σταθερότητα της χώρας και τη διεθνή της θέση; Άρθρο της Guardian.

Να και πώς περιγράφει ο Jeremy Paltiel, an expert on the Communist party at Carleton University in Canada, την άλυτη αντίφαση της εφαρμογής του λενινικού μοντέλου του δημοκρατικού συγκεντρωτισμού στη διοίκηση του κράτους:

The party cannot be an organisation of executives who are subject to a single discipline and at the same time a deliberative assembly of people free to present their opinions and pursue their interests. If the discipline were to be relaxed, the party would cease to function as the backbone of the state and lower levels could no longer be relied upon to follow the will of the centre.


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## Costas (Nov 6, 2012)

Palavra said:


> Εμένα μου θύμισε Φάρμα των Ζώων, πάντως...


Άμα δεις τον τίτλο του αρχείου κάτω δεξιά (εγώ το βάφτισα έτσι, αλλά τον πήρα από τη λεζάντα-σχόλιο του ιστότοπου), είναι ο τίτλος της –αριστουργηματικής– ταινίας του Μιγιαζάκι.


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## Costas (Nov 6, 2012)

China's 'golden decade' brings some relief to rural poor (The Guardian)
The gap widens between town and country, but welfare state begins to take root with healthcare, pensions and free lunches


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## Costas (Nov 6, 2012)

Άλλη μια άποψη (100% υπέρ) για τον Μο Γιαν και το Νόμπελ του:

MO YAN¹S EXPLOSIVE NOBEL
By Anna Schonberg
Stanford M.A in East Asian Studies

The Nobel Prize for Literature awarded to Chinese writer Mo Yan has created such uproar that the merits of his writing have hardly been considered. Taking center stage are cries about the political implications of honoring a member of the Communist Party and questions about the Party politics of the writer himself. Then financial questions are posed: How will China best cash in on Mo Yan? How can he be used to boost tourism to China? The mayor of Mo Yan¹s hometown wants to create a ³Mo Yan brand,² and there is talk of turning his hometown into a theme park.

Seven years ago I interviewed Mo Yan, and have an entirely different take on the current debate.

It was September 2005 and I was writing for a Hong Kong based magazine. Mo Yan¹s brilliant epic Big Breasts and Wide Hips had just come out in English, translated by Howard Goldblatt. I was certain that he was a future Nobel winner and must be featured. But, articles on designer clad, diamond-encrusted socialites were popular and the magazine had no money for culture. I decided to do the piece anyway. With the help of Goldblatt, I contacted Mo Yan.

I paid my own flight to Beijing and went off to meet the author of that wild ride of a novel that has come to be known as his magnum opus.

I arrived to the Beijing hotel lobby twenty minutes early, hoping that meeting times had not been lost in translation. The atmosphere of the entire lobby suddenly radiated what felt like a nuclear reaction to Mo Yan¹s entrance. We know the thrill of tween girls at Taylor Swift concerts, but the concentrated, silent adoration of this humble novelist was something beyond.

Our subsequent conversation over coffee about his novel turned immediately to politics. It became clear that Mo Yan's relationship with Communist Party policy is infinitely complex. Mo Yan said that if he had written the same book 20 years ago he might have been shot. He said that he does not take political sides in his novel, but tries to, "treat all as human. I want to show the real China and real life. It seems that [my book] is about a village, but it is actually about China's history. In this book I want to cover every critical issue of the last century." Speaking about his future works, his face darkened as he mentioned the unknown consequences he always fears they could provoke. He added, "a writer without controversy is not a good one. A book without controversy is not a good one, either."

Mo Yan does all of his writing in his hometown of Gaomi, 300 miles southeast of Beijing, surrounded by family and rural peasant life. He claims he could not write the same books in Beijing. "In my hometown, I live in a small house, totally isolated from the outside world. There is no telephone. People around me are just like the people in the book." Regarding the magical, fantastical elements of his storytelling, they are there for political reasons. The symbolic elements in his novels, he told me, are not a salute to the imaginary but indicators of a reality still too dark to be named.

Mo Yan's works contain innumerable criticisms of the corruption of the Communist Party to which he belongs, still many of his fellow Chinese artists are denouncing his win. Dissident writer Yu Jie says it is a victory for the Communist Party. The American educated artist Ai Weiwei paints Mo Yan to be a sell out, citing Mo Yan¹s transcription of "Mao's Talks on Literature and Art" to mark the 70th anniversary of the speech. In it, Mao spoke vehemently about the duty of writers to create characters drawn from real life and to, "help the people discard what is backward and develop what is revolutionary."

Minus the propaganda obfuscating Mao's directives, is it so hard to see that perhaps Mo Yan was paying an ironic tribute to the Cultural Revolution responsible for his pen name (literally "no words") while he has published thousands of pages? Political censorship has elevated Mo Yan's writing because his revolutionary ideas can only be expressed with subtlety and vivid imagination. His characters, drawn directly from his own peasant background in Gaomi, are a fateful twist on what Mao intended 70 years ago.

Peter Englund, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy that awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, said he considers Mo Yan, "a critic of the system, sitting within the system." To write such compelling fiction featuring current government corruption, inhumane policies and the country's bloody history without being jailed, censored or having to leave his native villagers and country in favor of citizenship abroad, speak to the deep level of artistry in Mo Yan¹s novels and his commitment to his people.

Although Mo Yan publicly supported the exiled Nobel Literature Laureate Gao Xingjian, he has declined comment on many other issues until now. So it is notable that his first statement after receiving the Nobel called for the release of jailed Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo. The clout of his Nobel now permits him to vocalize opinions that have hitherto only been possible through his writing. Judgments about his Party membership and politics are preemptively naïve when all is considered.

Mo Yan¹s comments to me during our interview about the main character Shangguang Jintong in Big Breasts and Wide Hips add yet another layer of irony to the contention sparked by the award he has received. Jintong is the pampered son of a Chinese peasant mother and a Swedish missionary father. Mo Yan explained him to me saying, "he is handsome and strong but he is a dwarf emotionally. The combination of western and eastern cultures should have produced something better, but it did not." He has also said censorship is a great spur to creativity. Is it possible that Jintong is an allusion to the voice for change that Chinese artists dilute when they escape to the more lenient west. Ponder that if you will, dissident critics.

But, be assured none of this current debate can really be affecting Mo Yan all that much, given his stance that controversy is the mark of good writing. By his own standards, he has proved himself a tour de force. I am just worried where he will write his next novel once Gaomi is turned into a theme park.


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## Costas (Nov 7, 2012)

Κράτος, γκάνγκστερ και δικηγόροι (τους)
Τσόνγκτσινγκ, εποχή Μπο Ξ(Σ)ιλάι: Η αστυνομία βασανίζει έναν γκάνγκστερ κατά την προφυλάκισή του. Στη δίκη ο δικηγόρος του το καταγγέλλει. Η αστυνομία ξαναβασανίζει τον γκάνγκστερ και τον απειλεί ότι αν δεν καταγγείλει τον συνήγορό του ότι τον συμβούλεψε να καταγγείλει ψευδώς ότι βασανίστηκε από αυτήν, θα καταδικαστεί στη δίκη σε θάνατο. Εκείνος υπακούει, τρώει ισόβια αντί για θάνατο, ο δικηγόρος καταδικάζεται σε 18 μήνες, εκτίει, αποφυλακίζεται.
Εποχή μετά-Μπο Ξ(Σ)ιλάι: Ο δικηγόρος αποφασίζει να υπερασπιστεί τον πρώην πελάτη του, ο οποίος τον έστειλε στη φυλακή, στην εκδίκαση της έφεσής του. (Caixin Online)


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## Costas (Nov 7, 2012)

Τα προβλήματα και τα διλήμματα της 2ης μεγαλύτερης οικονομίας του κόσμου δεν μπορεί παρά να έχουν πλανητική σημασία, πόσο μάλλον μέσα σ' ένα διεθνές περιβάλλον γενικής και βαθιάς οικονομικής κρίσης. Συνεπώς, θα τολμούσα να πω ότι η επερχόμενη αλλαγή ηγεσίας στη ΛΔΚ είναι πιο σημαντική από τις χτεσινές αμερικανικές εκλογές. Ακολουθεί ένα άρθρο που περιγράφει μερικά από αυτά τα κοινωνικοοικονομικά προβλήματα και διλήμματα. (ΝΥΤ)


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## Costas (Nov 8, 2012)

Μετά το Al Jazeera, τώρα και το CCTV America. Άρθρο. (Foreign Policy) [Τη γιγαντοοθόνη με το πρακτορείο Xinhua στην Times Square, που αναφέρεται μέσα στο άρθρο, μπορεί να τη δει κανείς εδώ.]


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## Costas (Nov 8, 2012)

2 MOOC's σχετικά με την Κίνα:

1.
A New History for a New China, 1700-2000: New Data and New Methods, Part 1
Our goal is to demonstrate how a new scholarship of discovery is redefining what is singular about modern China and modern Chinese history. The current understanding of human history and social theory is based largely on Western experience or on non-Western experience seen through a Western lens. This course offers alternative perspectives derived from Chinese experience during the last three centuries. We present specific case studies of the new scholarship of discovery and in the process cover such subjects as education, power, property, revolution, stratification, and social mobility in Part One and ethnicity, family, gender, life, religion, sexuality in Part Two to compare how Chinese historic behavior and intellectual construction of these analytic categories and abstract subjects differed from Western behavior and understanding. We also trace the persistence of these differences to Chinese behavior and thinking today.

Course topics are grouped around three common criteria used in the West to categorize contemporary societies - class, race, and gender - as well as two other important historical categories and abstractions: public and private, and state and society: public and private because the expansion of both civic and private spheres underlie our Western understanding of human values, institutions, and behavior; and state and society because state documents and narratives constitute the majority of our information about China, and because Confucian and Communist categories and abstractions provide almost all the alternative framing we have for Chinese history beyond Western comparisons.

2.
Science, Technology, and Society in China I: Basic Concepts
Science and technology continue to play an increasingly central role in our lives, not least in countries such as China that are undergoing rapid technological, economic and social change. This course is the first of a trilogy of short courses on science and technology in China. In this part, we explore in general terms how engineering and scientific knowledge and practice are influenced by the dynamic interactions between science, technology and society. We lay the groundwork for mastering the remaining two parts of the course by introducing overarching concepts and ideas, providing you with a platform on which to think about the science/technology–society relationship and related policy issues with a focus on China. This understanding will then be applied more specifically to China in the next two courses in the series. Part 2 will examine the impact of the Industrial Revolution in the West on scientific and technological progress in China. Part 3 will examine science and technology in Chinese society today and the basis for the policy prescriptions the Chinese government is currently employing to promote innovation and technology development.


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## Costas (Nov 9, 2012)

Να πώς είδαν οι Κινέζοι συνέταιροι της Durex τη διαφορά ανάμεσα στον Ομπάμα και τον Ρόμνεϋ.... (Huffington Post)

奥巴马和罗姆尼的区别是。。。

Σημ. Κατά σύμπτωση το όνομα του Ρόμνεϋ, 罗姆尼, προφέρεται Luomuni.


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## daeman (Nov 9, 2012)

..
Την ίδια ώρα, στην Αφρική, από την Κίνα όμως:

South African report highlights Chinese labor abuses in the Sub-Sahara

A new report by Johannesburg-based South Africa Resource Watch (SARW) claims that Chinese companies have engaged in widespread labor abuses in sub-Saharan Africa and subjected local employees in the mining industry to harsh and unfair working conditions. 

The report, which investigates Chinese labor practices in Zimbabwe, Zambia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, states that small PRC mining companies are the chief culprits with respects to labor abuses and infractions. 

According to the report Chinese mining companies have used contract labor in violation of Zimbabwe's Labour Relations Act, which has become a key "bone of contention" for local trade unions, while many PRC firms still fail to observe minimum wage requirements. 

The report further claims that most Chinese mining firms exceed statutory working hours of eight hours a day, requiring employees to work 12 to 18 hours, and that at the Makwiro platinum concessions workers do not receive overtime for 12 hours on the job. 

In Zambia the report asserts that huge pay disparities exist between Chinese and local employees, with Chinese staff members awarded three times the remuneration given to a Zambian for the same amount of work. 

Despite highlighting a litany of labor abuses by Chinese firms in several countries, the report argues that a "win-win partnership" between the African continent and the Middle Kingdom is still possible, and that companies such as Sino Steel are making signal efforts to improve local working conditions.




Costas said:


> [...] Σημ. Κατά σύμπτωση το όνομα του Ρόμνεϋ, 罗姆尼, προφέρεται Luomuni.



Ντουζ πουάν pour le Royaume-Uni Pays du Milieu! :laugh:


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## Costas (Nov 9, 2012)

Κάποτε, πριν από χρόνια, κρατούσα λίστα με τα ατυχήματα στα ορυχεία της ΛΔΚ, ημερομηνία, τόπο, και κυρίως αριθμό νεκρών (ήταν μπόλικοι, δεκάδες κάθε φορά). Η πηγή ήταν η Ημερησία του Λαού. Τα άρθρα της πάντα τέλειωναν με την ίδια φράση, του τύπου, ο Τάδε αρμόδιος προσέτρεξε στον τόπο του ατυχήματος, τα αίτια ερευνώνται. Τα συμβάντα επαναλαμβάνονταν με τέτοια συχνότητα και σταθερότητα (τα περισσότερα σε ιδιωτικά, παράνομα ορυχεία), ώστε κάποια στιγμή βαρέθηκα, κουράστηκα, και σταμάτησα. Θύμιζε το Μοντέλο, του μακαρίτη του Κώστα Σφήκα. Ελπίζω να έχει καλυτερέψει η κατάσταση.


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## Costas (Nov 10, 2012)

Ο Τάκης Μίχας ξαναχτυπά! Τελευταία στέλνει "γράμματα από τον Μεγκόγκ". Σε τούτο δω, με τίτλο "Γράμμα από το κέντρο του κόσμου", αναφέρεται στο 18ο Συνέδριο του ΚΚΚ που διεξάγεται αυτές τις μέρες. (protagon)


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## Costas (Nov 10, 2012)

Τον περασμένο Σεπτέμβρη ο Ξ(Σ)ι Τζινπίνγκ εξαφανίστηκε για δεκαπέντε μέρες, και οι φήμες οργίασαν. Τώρα ένας δημοσιογράφος ισχυρίζεται ότι γνωρίζει τον (κομμάτι ευτράπελο) λόγο. (Prospect Blogs)


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## Costas (Nov 11, 2012)

Εθνική ομοψυχία στο 18ο Συνέδριο (The Guardian):

Five delegates are on the Forbes rich list, with the wealthiest, Liang Wengen, chairman of the construction equipment manufacturer Sany Group, worth almost $6bn. According to the Beijing News, there are also 26 migrant worker delegates, marking the first time the 250 million-strong demographic group has been represented at a party congress.


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## Costas (Nov 11, 2012)

Για τους γαλλόφωνους, μια γαλλική τηλεοπτική εκπομπή (1ω05λ)με καλεσμένους, με αφορμή το 18ο Συνέδριο και με θέμα την Κίνα ως εταίρο, ως απειλή, ως φόβητρο...(απαράδεκτος ο οικοδεσπότης, ειδικά στην αρχή, καλοί όμως οι καλεσμένοι και ενδιαφέροντα τα βιντεάκια). (france5)


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## Costas (Nov 13, 2012)

Κοπτοραπτική (δική μου) από ένα άρθρο για το δημοκρατικό πείραμα του χωριού Ουκάν, όπου βέβαια η ουσία είναι η γη που απαλλοτριώθηκε: (bloomberg)

Outgoing General Secretary Hu Jintao, forecast to remain as China’s president until Xi takes that job in March, showed last week that China’s leaders recognize the need for change. In a Nov. 8 speech opening the 18th Communist Party Congress, he said his successors must reform the “land expropriation system” and “give more to farmers and take less from them.”

China’s fast, low-cost industrialization and urbanization were made possible partly because farmers were forced to make huge sacrifices by getting only a small fraction of the true market value of their land taken by the government.

China’s rapid growth, which has averaged 10.6 percent in the past decade, has been built in part on land sales like those in Wukan. City governments have relied on real-estate transactions for much of their revenue because they have few other sources of income, such as property taxes. China’s government is studying an expansion of an experimental property tax system.

Local governments have been able to take advantage of real estate prices that rose 160 percent in the 1998-2011 period. (growth...has averaged 10.6 percent in the past decade)

The new council now publishes its finances on posters hung around the village, including council members’ salaries of as much as 1,800 yuan ($243) a month. The council holds open town meetings and construction has begun on a pipe that will bring running water to Wukan. “The old village committee ruled us with fear and threats,” said Zhang Bingcai, a seafood trader. “Not this one.” 

Provincial governor and Politburo member Wang Yang pledged at the national legislature in March to highlight the lessons of the Wukan case at a conference this year. Eight months later, no such event has been publicized.While Wang was considered a candidate to join the Politburo Standing Committee at the party congress by analysts surveyed by Bloomberg News in September, he is no longer a frontrunner, said Jean-Pierre Cabestan, head of the department of government and international studies at Hong Kong Baptist University.

Compounding the situation, local governments use land as collateral for loans to fund their operations. Almost a quarter of local governments’ 10.7 trillion yuan in debt by the end of 2010 was backed by land, according to China’s National Audit Office.

“If the land issues are not solved this time, Wukan residents are likely to give up on democracy, and lose faith in elections,” said Zhuang. “Who knows, they may take matters into their own hands and even protest again.”


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## Costas (Nov 14, 2012)

Πρόσφατα δημοσιεύτηκε το ιστορικό βιβλίο _Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962_, του Yang Jisheng, σε αγγλική μετάφραση (στην ΛΔΚ είναι απαγορευμένο). Ο συγγραφέας διαμένει στην Κίνα. Εδώ μας εξιστορεί με δυο λόγια το περίφημο Μεγάλο Άλμα προς τα Μπρος και τη θανάσιμη κατάληξή του για 36 εκατομμύρια ανθρώπους. Δημοσιοποιεί επίσης την ανησυχία του για την προσωπική του τύχη. (ΝΥΤ)

The rural population was brought under control by a thorough collectivization of agriculture. The state could then manage grain production, requisitioning and distributing it by decree. Those who tilled the earth were locked in place by a nationwide system of household registration, and food coupons issued to city dwellers supplanted the market. The peasants survived at the pleasure of the state. 

Να σημειωθεί ότι η ατελής κολεκτιβοποίηση του αγροτικού τομέα είναι, κατά το 18ο Συνέδριο του ΚΚΕ, η αιτία της πτώσης του "σοσιαλισμού" στην ΕΣΣΔ (αφαίρεσα τους δείκτες των υποσημειώσεων):

Σωστά εκτιμούσε [Σ.Σ.: ο Ι.Β. Στάλιν, ως ΓΓ της ΚΕ του Κόμματος] ότι στην EΣΣΔ η συνεταιριστική ιδιοκτησία (κολχόζ) και η κυκλοφορία προϊόντων ατομικής κατανάλωσης με τη μορφή εμπορευμάτων είχαν αρχίσει να γίνονται τροχοπέδη στην ισχυρή ανάπτυξη των παραγωγικών δυνάμεων, γιατί παρεμπόδιζαν την πλήρη ανάπτυξη του Κεντρικού Σχεδιασμού σε όλη την έκταση της παραγωγής – κατανομής. Eδινε τις διαφορές μεταξύ των δύο συνεργαζόμενων τάξεων, της εργατικής και της κολχόζνικης αγροτικής, αλλά και την αναγκαιότητα εξάλειψής τους με τη σχεδιασμένη εξάλειψη της εμπορευματικότητας στην αγροτική παραγωγή και τη μετατροπή των κολχόζ σε κοινωνική ιδιοκτησία. H σοβιετική ηγεσία, στις αρχές της δεκαετίας του 1950, εκτιμούσε, σωστά, ότι τα προβλήματα στο πεδίο της οικονομίας ήταν εκδήλωση της όξυνσης της αντίθεσης ανάμεσα στις παραγωγικές δυνάμεις που αναπτύσσονταν και τις σχέσεις παραγωγής που καθυστερούσαν. H ανάπτυξη των παραγωγικών δυνάμεων είχε φτάσει σ’ ένα νέο επίπεδο μετά και τη μεταπολεμική ανόρθωση της οικονομίας. Mια νέα δυναμική ώθηση στην περαιτέρω ανάπτυξη των παραγωγικών δυνάμεων απαιτούσε εμβάθυνση και επέκταση των σοσιαλιστικών (ανώριμων κομμουνιστικών) σχέσεων. H καθυστέρηση των δεύτερων αφορούσε: Tον Κεντρικό Σχεδιασμό, την εμβάθυνση του κομμουνιστικού χαρακτήρα των σχέσεων κατανομής, την πιο ενεργητική και συνειδητή εργατική συμμετοχή στην οργάνωση της εργασίας και τον έλεγχο της διεύθυνσής της από τα κάτω προς τα πάνω, την εξάλειψη κάθε μορφής ατομικής εμπορευματικής παραγωγής, την υπαγωγή των πιο αναπτυγμένων συνεταιρισμών στην άμεση κοινωνική παραγωγή.

Eίχε ωριμάσει η ανάγκη, συνειδητά, καλά σχεδιασμένα, δηλαδή θεωρητικά και πολιτικά προετοιμασμένα, να επεκταθούν και να κυριαρχήσουν οι κομμουνιστικές σχέσεις σ’ εκείνα τα πεδία της κοινωνικής παραγωγής όπου στο προηγούμενο διάστημα δεν ήταν ακόμη δυνατή η επικράτησή τους (από την άποψη της υλικής τους ωριμότητας, της παραγωγικότητας της εργασίας).

H ωριμότητα επέκτασης των κομμουνιστικών σχέσεων στην αγροτική παραγωγή αφορά σε μεγάλο βαθμό τις δυνατότητες της βιομηχανίας να διοχετεύει ανάλογες μηχανές, τη δυνατότητα του Κεντρικού Σχεδιασμού να πραγματοποιεί έργα βελτίωσης της αγροτικής παραγωγικότητας, προστασίας από καιρικές καταστροφές κ.ά. Παρά το γεγονός ότι στις αρχές της δεκαετίας του 1950 στην EΣΣΔ υπήρχε ακόμα ανισομετρία, είχαν διαμορφωθεί σημαντικές προϋποθέσεις μηχανοποίησης και υποδομών που έδιναν τη δυνατότητα για να προχωρήσει αυτή η κατεύθυνση. Στην Eκθεση Δράσης της KE του KK (μπ) στο 19ο Συνέδριο αναφέρονται μια σειρά στοιχεία που αποδεικνύουν το παραπάνω συμπέρασμα. H ύπαρξη 8.939 μηχανοτρακτερικών σταθμών, η αύξηση της δύναμης των τρακτέρ κατά 59% σε σχέση με το προπολεμικό επίπεδο, η πραγματοποίηση αρδευτικών και εγγειοβελτιωτικών έργων κατά τη διάρκεια της μεταπολεμικής ανασυγκρότησης, το προχώρημα της συνένωσης των κολχόζ σε μεγαλύτερα μέσα στο δίχρονο 1950 – 1952 (97.000 κολχόζ το 1952 από 254.000 το 1950) κλπ.

Oμως, παρέμεναν ακόμη μικρά κολχόζ τα οποία έπρεπε να συνενωθούν σε μεγαλύτερα στην κατεύθυνση της κοινωνικοποίησης της αγροτικής παραγωγής, όπως υποστήριζε η ηγεσία του KK μπολσεβίκων. Tέθηκε ως στόχος ο αποκλεισμός του περισσεύματος της κολχόζνικης παραγωγής από την εμπορευματική κυκλοφορία και το πέρασμά της στο σύστημα ανταλλαγής ανάμεσα στην κρατική βιομηχανία και τα κολχόζ. Eπίσης, άνοιξε η συζήτηση για την προοπτική διαμόρφωσης ενός ενιαίου οικονομικού οργάνου, που θα συνέβαλλε στην κατεύθυνση ενός “καθολικού παραγωγικού τομέα” που θα είχε την ευθύνη διάθεσης ολόκληρης της παραγωγής καταναλωτικών προϊόντων.

Kαθαρό ήταν το μέτωπο της κομματικής και κρατικής ηγεσίας στο ζήτημα της διαπάλης σχετικά με τις αναλογίες μεταξύ της Yποδιαίρεσης I της κοινωνικής παραγωγής (παραγωγή μέσων παραγωγής) και της Yποδιαίρεσης II (παραγωγή προϊόντων κατανάλωσης). Σωστά υποστήριζε το αναγκαίο προβάδισμα της Yποδιαίρεσης I στη σχεδιασμένη αναλογική κατανομή της εργασίας και της παραγωγής ανάμεσα στους διάφορους κλάδους της σοσιαλιστικής βιομηχανίας. Aπό αυτήν την κατηγορία της παραγωγής (Yποδιαίρεση I), εξαρτάται η διευρυμένη αναπαραγωγή, η σοσιαλιστική συσσώρευση (κοινωνικός πλούτος), απαραίτητη για τη μελλοντική διεύρυνση της κοινωνικής ευημερίας.

Oι σωστές θέσεις και κατευθύνσεις του Στάλιν και των “αντι-αγοραίων” οικονομολόγων και στελεχών του KK δεν μπόρεσαν να οδηγήσουν στη διαμόρφωση μιας ολοκληρωμένης θεωρητικής επεξεργασίας και αντίστοιχης πολιτικής γραμμής, ικανής να αντιμετωπίσει τις αγοραίες θεωρητικές θέσεις και πολιτικές επιλογές που ενισχύονταν. Σε αυτό συνέβαλαν οι ισχυρές κοινωνικές πιέσεις, αλλά και οι αντινομίες, ανεπάρκειες, ταλαντεύσεις που υπήρχαν στο αντι-αγοραίο ρεύμα.

Ε, ναι· μια και οι παραγωγικές δυνάμεις είχαν ωριμάσει σε σχέση με τη δεκαετία του '30, χρειαζόταν, για να εξασφαλιστεί "η διευρυμένη αναπαραγωγή, η σοσιαλιστική συσσώρευση (κοινωνικός πλούτος)", να ζήσει η Ουκρανία ένα δεύτερο Γκολοντόμορ στο βωμό της "Υποδιαίρεσης Ι", αν και πάλι δεν θα κατάφερνε να παραβγεί σε νεκρούς τον αχτύπητο Μεγάλο Τιμονιέρη.


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## Costas (Nov 15, 2012)

Οι πάνω από 300.000 οικιακές βοηθοί που πηγαίνουν στο Χονγκ Κονγκ να δουλέψουν, και το Σαϊλοκικό σύστημα που πλέκεται γύρω τους από τις εταιρείες εξεύρεσης και εκπαίδευσης προσωπικού, τις εταιρείες παροχής δανείων (με τη βοήθεια και των 7-Eleven με το θερμικό χαρτί...), και την κυβέρνηση του Χονγκ Κονγκ. (Bloomberg)


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## Costas (Nov 20, 2012)

How to say: Chinese Leaders' Names (BBC)

Xi Jinping: SHEE jin PING (-sh as in ship, -j as in Jack, -i as in sit, -ng as in sing)
Li Keqiang: LEE kuh chee-AANG (-ee as in street, -aa as in father, -ch as in church, -ng as in sing)
Zhang Dejiang: JAANG duh jee-AANG (-j as in Jack, -aa as in father, -ng as in sing)
Zhang Gaoli: JAANG gow LEE (-j as in Jack, -aa as in father, -ng as in sing, -ow as in now)
Wang Qishan: WAANG chee SHAN (-aa as in father, -ng as in sing -ch as in church)
Liu Yunshan: LYOH yuen SHAN (-ly as in million, -oh as in no, -ue as in French vu)
Yu Zhengsheng: YUE jung SHUNG (-ue as in French vu, -j as in Jack, -u as in bun, -ng as in sing) 

Η απόδοση του Xi [Jinping] ως SHEE είναι ανεπιτυχής. Πιο πολύ με See μοιάζει.


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## Costas (Nov 20, 2012)

Winter arrives too early.
Our trees begin to wither.
We no longer have the nutrients to offer them;
Our dark hair slowly freezes to white
In the snows of passing time.
Our skin is like chapped fields.
Winter is here,
We all love to hibernate.
Our hearts are tired
Our blood is tired,
We nestle beneath the snow to hibernate.

Ο ποιητής Λι Μπιφένγκ (Li Bifeng, 李必丰） καταδικάστηκε σε 12 χρόνια...χειμερία νάρκη. [1][2] (Για "απάτη")


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## Costas (Nov 24, 2012)

Καθώς οι αυτοπυρπολήσεις στο Θιβέτ συνεχώς αυξάνονται, οι κινεζικές αρχές αποφάσισαν να εγκαταστήσουν ομάδες πυρόσβεσης στα μοναστήρια... (The Guardian)


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## Costas (Nov 24, 2012)

Taiwan has barred the Dalai Lama from visiting the island next month. He had been invited by the Taiwan chapter of the Federation of Business and Professional Women, headed by former Vice President Annette Lu.
A spokeswoman for Ms Lu said the ban reflected a fear of angering the mainland.
The exiled Tibetan leader visited Taiwan in 2009 to comfort typhoon victims.
The visit was criticised by Beijing and reportedly triggered mass cancellations of mainland tour groups to the island. (rthk)


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## Costas (Nov 25, 2012)

Η κινεζική σύνταξη συχνά θυμίζει στριφνή, μακαρονική καθαρεύουσα:
"Η της Χάννας Άρεντ προ μισού αιώνος αφορώσα εις τα του ολοκληρωτισμού χαρακτηριστικά ανάλυσις δια την υφ' ημών τωρινήν κατανόησιν του εν αλλαγήι τελούντος "νέου ολοκληρωτισμού" εισέτι έχει σπουδαίαν σημασίαν."


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## bernardina (Nov 25, 2012)

Costas said:


> Η κινεζική σύνταξη συχνά θυμίζει στριφνή, μακαρονική καθαρεύουσα:
> "Η της Χάννας Άρεντ προ μισού αιώνος αφορώσα εις τα του ολοκληρωτισμού χαρακτηριστικά ανάλυσις δια την υφ' ημών τωρινήν κατανόησιν του εν αλλαγήι τελούντος "νέου ολοκληρωτισμού" εισέτι έχει σπουδαίαν σημασίαν."


:woot:


Τώρα μ' έφτιαξες!


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## bernardina (Nov 25, 2012)

Modeling for teen-girl clothes on Tmall, 72-year-old grandpa becomes Internet sensation

Ένας απίθανος εβδομηνταδυάχρονος παππούς που δεν διστάζει να ποζάρει ως μοντέλο για τα ρούχα της εγγονής του, ακολουθώντας μια έμπνευση της στιγμής. Ή τι συμβαίνει όταν ο άνθρωπος είναι ασφαλής στην ταυτότητά του και δεν αισθάνεται την ανάγκη να διατυμπανίσει ότι έχει πηδήξει το μισό Πεκίνο προκειμένου να αποδείξει κάτι.


Η τελευταία φωτογραφία αφιερωμένη με αγάπη στον Ζαζουλέα!


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## Zazula (Nov 25, 2012)

bernardina said:


> Η τελευταία φωτογραφία αφιερωμένη με αγάπη στον Ζαζουλέα!


Με σκέφτεσαι, όπως πάντα! View attachment 3329


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## Costas (Nov 26, 2012)

Για τους πορτογαλόφωνους και, με λίγη προσπάθεια, τους άλλους ρομανόφωνους, μια από τις πρώτες Δυτικές αναφορές για την Κίνα και την Καντόνα, από το κεφ. VII του 2ου βιβλίου της 3ης Δεκάδας της Ασίας (Décadas da Ásia), έτους 1563, του ιστορικού και δημόσιου άντρα João de Barros (1496-1570).


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## Costas (Nov 26, 2012)

Ανέγερση 220 ορόφων, με ρυθμό 5 ορόφους την ημέρα; (gizmodo)


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## Costas (Nov 26, 2012)

Οι αυτοπυρπολήσεις διαμαρτυρίας στο βουδιστικό Θιβέτ καλα κρατούν, και τώρα οι αρχές θεσπίζουν οικονομικά και άλλα αντικίνητρα που πλήττουν τους ανθρώπους, τα χωριά και τα μοναστήρια που εμπλέκονται με οποιονδήποτε τρόπο. (Radio Free Asia)


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## Costas (Nov 28, 2012)

Εδώ είναι τα ζόρικα... 
*China planning 'huge fracking industry'*
Chinese plans to expand fracking for shale gas prompt fears over local water and international climate impacts (The Guardian, με βάση έρευνα του Caixin -υπομονή με το λινκ....-)
Εννοείται ότι μέσα στο παιχνίδι είναι και όλες οι δυτικές Αδελφές.

If fracking takes off in China as planned, it will likely exacerbate the nation's existing water crisis. "Most of the nation's shale gas lies in areas plagued by water shortages," the report says. With about 20 percent of the world's population and only 6 percent of the world's water resources, China is one of the least water-secure countries in the world. Its water shortages are made worse by pollution: According to the Ministry of Water Resources about 40 percent of China's rivers were so polluted they were deemed unfit for drinking, while about 300 million rural residents lack access to safe drinking water each year.

Στην Κίνα πουλάνε και εμφιαλωμένο νερό που δεν είναι από πηγή αλλά purified. Να αποφεύγεται.

Αλλά κι ετούτη η είδηση δεν πάει πίσω (γνωστό βέβαια το θέμα, αλλά άλυτο):
*UN: methane released from melting ice could push climate past tipping point*
Doha conference is warned that climate models do not yet take account of methane in thawing permafrost (the Guardian)

UNEP's report came as governments argued over the future of the Kyoto protocol at the Doha climate talks. One of the main aims of the talks is an agreement to continue the protocol beyond the end of this year, when its current provisions and targets expire. But only the EU and a handful of other relatively small emitters, including Australia, Norway and Switzerland, have agreed.

*Japan was once a strong defender of the protocol, taking pride in the fact that it was negotiated there. But the country has now abandoned it, in part because of fears that its neighbour, China, has taken a competitive advantage because it is not obliged to reduce its emissions.*

Masahiko Horie, of the Japanese negotiating team, said: "Only developed countries are legally bound by the Kyoto protocol and their emissions are only 26% [of global emissions]. If we continue the same, only one quarter of the world is legally bound and three quarters of countries are not bound at all."

He said it was more important to Japan to formulate a new framework that would require action on emissions from developing as well as developed countries. At the talks, governments are expected to draw up a work plan that would set out how they will draw up such a new global agreement by 2015, coming into force in 2020.

But many developing countries want developed countries to continue with Kyoto beyond 2012 as part of any deal. Andre Correa do Lago, head of the Brazilian delegation, said: "If rich countries which have the financial means, have technology, have a stable population, already have a large middle class, think they cannot reduce [emissions] and work to fight climate change, how can they ever think that developing countries can do it? That is why the Kyoto protocol has to be kept alive. If we take it out, we have what people call the Wild West. You are not going get the [emissions] reductions necessary."

The talks will continue until the end of next week.


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## Costas (Nov 30, 2012)

Βιβλιογραφικά ξεφυλλίσματα.
1ον, για σκακιστές: The [Chinese-]Chess Master, ή 棋王 (qíwáng), μυθιστόρημα της δεκαετίας του '80 (όχι του 2006, όπως λέει το λινκ), του Τζονγκ Ατσένγκ, και The Go Master, ταινία σε σενάριο του ίδιου, του 2006.
2ον, για θεατρόφιλους: 1935, Summit meeting at Moscow με Στανισλάβσκι, Εϊζενστέιν, Μεϋερχόλντ (φάλαγγα+εκτέλεση το 1940), Τρετιακόφ (εκτέλεση το 1937), (τον εξόριστο) Μπρεχτ (αυτός μισοξύπνησε το 1953), και....Μέι Λανφάνγκ. Όπως λέει και το λήμμα του λινκ, ο Μπρεχτ παρακολουθώντας τον Μέι επεξεργάζεται το περίφημο Verfremdungseffekt [1][2, σελ. 121, όπου μαθαίνουμε ότι την έννοια την είχε λανσάρει ο Σκλόβσκι το 1917].


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## Costas (Nov 30, 2012)

Θα ήταν διασκεδαστικό αν δεν ήταν εφιαλτικό. Chinese thugs knocked out by amateur Kung Fu fans. (The Telegraph)

"This mob of thugs [για να τους αναγκάσουν να υπογράψουν και να δώσουν τα σπίτια τους στην τιμή που υπαγόρευαν τ' αφεντικά τους] would block the street most days. They would pick on the women, threatening to kill their kids. Then people started tossing bricks through windows and letting off fireworks at night. Some people got beaten on the street."
On October 29, as Mr Shen went to work and his wife popped out for a packet of instant noodles, a mob of "30 to 50 men" materialised at their front door.
"My wife tried to close the door, but they pushed it back and she tripped over. That is how the fight started," said Mr Shen. With a flurry of kicks and punches, he and his 18-year-old son, a fellow kung fu devotee, set about the attackers, rendering seven of them near unconscious in the hallway.
(...)
When the police arrived, however, they were little help, insisting that since the thugs were unarmed, it was Mr Shen and his family who were in the wrong. They urged the family to sign the contract.
Instead, the Shens posted their homemade video online, where it has gone viral (...)
(...)
They then fled, on the evening of November 21, to Beijing. Upon arriving in the capital, however, Mr Shen's son was arrested by the police, who said they would charge him with assault.

Και η αποθέωση του...κράτους δικαίου:

As the Telegraph interviewed Mr Shen, however, his phone rang. It was, he said, a man named Zhou Jin, who claimed to be a member of the Central Military Commission, which oversees the People's Liberation Army.
"He said he had seen my plight and was outraged. He said I should not give any interviews to the media and he would come and collect me in his car this afternoon," said Mr Shen.


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## Costas (Nov 30, 2012)

Ένα καλό λεύκωμα γνωριμίας με τον νέο ΓΓ του ΚΚΚ και προσεχώς πρόεδρο της ΛΔΚ, τη γυναίκα του και τα υπόλοιπα μέλη της Διαρκούς Επιτροπής του ΠΓ. (The Telegraph)


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## nickel (Nov 30, 2012)

Costas said:


> a mob of "30 to 50 men" materialised at their front door.



Θα είμαι πιο προσεκτικός στο εξής όταν θα νιώθω τον πειρασμό να μιλήσω για υπερβολές του Χόλιγουντ.

Το βιντεάκι δεν έχει κάτι εντυπωσιακό, μόνο τα θύματα που δεν λένε να σηκωθούν (να η διαφορά: στα χολιγουντιανά σηκώνονται αμέσως).


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## Costas (Dec 1, 2012)

Μπράβο που έβαλες το βίντεο, νίκελ! Σ' ενός το μπράτσο μπροστά μοιάζει να έχει σχηματιστεί μια λιμνούλα αίματος. Επίσης έχει ενδιαφέρον ότι όλα αυτά εκτυλίσσονται μπροστά σ' ένα νηπιαγωγείο, στις 4 το απόγεμα. Ακόμα, εντυπωσιακός ο βαθμός εγκατάλειψης του οδοστρώματος, ίσως επίτηδες, μετά μάλιστα από την αποχώρηση του 70% των νοικοκυριών.

Ας συγκεφαλαιώσω τους υπότιτλους:

Η 70χρονη γιαγιά (η μάνα του άντρα) που υποτιτλίζει, το μικρό της όνομα είναι "Κραυγή αγριόχηνας"! Μιλάει για πάνω από 30 μπράβους την πρώτη μέρα, από τους οποίους οι 7 έφαγαν το ξύλο της αρκούδας και οι άλλοι "έβαλαν την ουρά στα σκέλια". Αλλά το πιο σουρεαλιστικό είναι ότι η αστυνομία, που την κάλεσε η νύφη, τους απάντησε "δεν πρέπει να ξανατσακωθείτε για ένα μήνα, γιατί σε λίγο αρχίζει το 18ο συνέδριο του ΚΚ [αυτό που έχει στο μεταξύ λήξει], κι όταν περάσει αυτό, τα ξαναλέμε"! Το δέχτηκε αυτό η οικογένεια, μα την άλλη ακριβώς ημέρα μαζεύτηκαν πάνω από 50, αυτή τη φορά, κουμάσια και δεν τους άφηναν να μπουν στο σπίτι. Αυτοί καλέσαν επανειλημμένα το 100 (=110), όπως είχαν κάνει και την πρώτη φορά, αλλά η αστυνομία δεν πήγε, ενώ οι μπράβοι έκαναν σαματά και χτυπούσαν αυτοκίνητα με κόσμο μέσα, παρότι στη διασταύρωση παραπέρα είχε περίπολα της αστυνομίας, που όμως δεν έκαναν τίποτα. Στο τέλος λοιπόν παρακαλεί όσους καλούς ανθρώπους υπάρχουν στην κοινωνία να σώσουν την οικογένειά της και χρησιμοποιεί ως ικεσία και το γνωστό ρήμα που στα αγγλικά είναι kowtow (磕头)· αφήνει δε και τα τηλέφωνα της οικογένειας.


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## Costas (Dec 1, 2012)

Θα μπορούσε να υποθέσει κανείς ότι το πικτογραφικό διήγημά του ο Xu Bing (Ξ(Σ)υ Μπινγκ) το εμπνεύστηκε με αφετηρία την κινεζική γραφή. Όχι όμως· το εμπνεύστηκε πολύ απλά από τα εικονίδια που μας κατακλύζουν. (China File)


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## Costas (Dec 1, 2012)

Τον Ιούνιο του 2008, την προ Κρίσης εποχή, είχε ανεβεί στο Μέγαρο Μουσικής σε τρεις συνέχειες το Περίπτερο με τις Παιωνίες, πολύ γνωστή κινεζική όπερα Kunqu που στην πλήρη ανάπτυξή της περιλαμβάνει 55 πράξεις (πρέπει να ήταν η διασκευή τού [όχι "τής", εφόσον τουλάχιστον πρόκειται για το ίδιο πρόσωπο] Wang Shiyu στο λήμμα της Wikipedia). Εδώ βιντεοσκοπημένο το ανέβασμά της από το Metropolitan Museum της Νέας Υόρκης σε 70λεπτη διασκευή από τον γνωστό συνθέτη Tan Dun· ακούγεται και δική του μουσική.

Η πλοκή της διασκευής που είχα δει τότε ήταν φτωχή, αφού και πάλι είχε απομονωθεί η ερωτική ιστορία, η δε λύση της, όπως λέει και το λήμμα της Wikipedia, απογοητευτική, χωρίς καμιά δραματική κορύφωση κλπ. (σαν εκσπερμάτωση χωρίς ηδονή ένα πράμα). Ωστόσο, πέρα από τη μουσική, που σε άλλους αρέσει και για άλλους (τους περισσότερους, συμπεριλαμβανομένων των νέων, τουλάχιστον, Κινέζων) αποτελεί μαρτύριο, η ποίηση των στίχων ήταν κάτι το εκπληκτικό. Στην παρούσα 70λεπτη διασκευή δεν μπορώ να πω ότι το είδα αυτό, με εξαίρεση δυο-τρεις στίχους στην πράξη του ονείρου, που βέβαια είναι από τις κορυφαίες έτσι κι αλλιώς, όπως λέει η Wiki. Ωστόσο εγώ θυμάμαι πολλά άλλα κομμάτια εκθαμβωτικού λυρισμού στην εννιάωρη συνολικά διασκευή του 2008:

The Peony Pavilion is distinguished particularly by the play's highly refined and subtle lyrics and is hailed as another height in Chinese literature. Aided by the then newly developed Kun music, the lyrical proses of the Peony Pavilion weave a fabric of nuances and metaphors that elegantly transgresses the divide between the beauty of nature and man's inner cosmos of emotions and desires. Through the lights and shadows of its lyrical fabric transpire a ravishing sensitivity and intoxicating effeteness and, almost antithetically, a persistent tone of youthful optimism. The magic of the play's language quickly carries the audience to a unique experience of literary and musical pleasure. The Peony Pavilion is a banquet of metaphors, a dance of the imagination and most of all, a celebration of sensitivity.
(ΣΣ. Δεν καταλαβαίνω γιατί τέτοιου είδους παράγραφοι αποδοκιμάζονται από τη Wikipedia.)

Η παραγωγή ανέβηκε σε συνδυασμό με την έκθεση _Κινεζικοί Κήποι: Ανακτορικά Περίπτερα, Ενδιαιτήματα Λογίων, Εξοχικά Αναχωρητήρια._ Άμποτε και σε μας τέτοια, να ξεφύγουμε από τους "Αυτοκρατορικούς Θησαυρούς" και τα ρέστα.


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## Costas (Dec 1, 2012)

Chinese 'highway house' is demolished after owners agree to move (The Guardian). Και γαμώ τις φωτογραφίες!


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## nickel (Dec 1, 2012)

Costas said:


> The Peony Pavilion is distinguished particularly by the play's highly refined and subtle lyrics and is hailed as another height in Chinese literature. Aided by the then newly developed Kun music, the lyrical proses of the Peony Pavilion weave a fabric of nuances and metaphors that elegantly transgresses the divide between the beauty of nature and man's inner cosmos of emotions and desires. Through the lights and shadows of its lyrical fabric transpire a ravishing sensitivity and intoxicating effeteness and, almost antithetically, a persistent tone of youthful optimism. The magic of the play's language quickly carries the audience to a unique experience of literary and musical pleasure. The Peony Pavilion is a banquet of metaphors, a dance of the imagination and most of all, a celebration of sensitivity.
> (ΣΣ. Δεν καταλαβαίνω γιατί τέτοιου είδους παράγραφοι αποδοκιμάζονται από τη Wikipedia.).


Αν εννοείς το μήνυμα:


> This article may contain wording that promotes the subject in a subjective manner without imparting real information. Please remove or replace such wording and instead of making proclamations about a subject's importance, use facts and attribution to demonstrate that importance.


δεν αποκλείεται να βγαίνει αυτόματα όταν ο δείκτης κοσμητικών επιθέτων και άλλων εξυμνητικών λέξεων (distinguished, refined, subtle, hailed, lyrical, weave, elegantly, transgress, beauty, ravishing, intoxicating, magic, unique κ.ά.) υπερβαίνει το όριο σοροπιάσματος που έχει ορίσει η Wikipedia.


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## nickel (Dec 1, 2012)

Costas said:


> Chinese 'highway house' is demolished after owners agree to move (The Guardian). Και γαμώ τις φωτογραφίες!


Όπως φαίνεται, περισσότερο από το θόρυβο των αυτοκινήτων, τους έδιωξε η συρροή δημοσιογράφων. :)

Και να και ο όρος: 
_Dingzihu_ is the Chinese term for residents that refuse to move during demolition. The term means "nail house" – a reference to how they stick out. 

Εμείς έχουμε τους κάφρους, αυτοί έχουν τους κάρφους.


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## Costas (Dec 1, 2012)

nickel said:


> Αν εννοείς το μήνυμα:
> _This article may contain wording that promotes the subject in a subjective manner without imparting real information. Please remove or replace such wording and instead of making proclamations about a subject's importance, use facts and attribution to demonstrate that importance._
> 
> δεν αποκλείεται να βγαίνει αυτόματα όταν ο δείκτης κοσμητικών επιθέτων και άλλων εξυμνητικών λέξεων (distinguished, refined, subtle, hailed, lyrical, weave, elegantly, transgress, beauty, ravishing, intoxicating, magic, unique κ.ά.) υπερβαίνει το όριο σοροπιάσματος που έχει ορίσει η Wikipedia.


Λες να έχουν προχωρήσει τόσο πολύ...προς τη λάθος κατεύθυνση; [Κάτσε να βρω καμιά βυζαντινή "έκφρασιν" για την Αγιασοφιά, να τη βάλω...:)] Τέλος πάντων, ας βάλουν τότε ένα ανάλογο μήνυμα όταν οι αναφορές στα charts, στο box office κλπ. υπερβαίνουν το όριο ασημαντότητας που θα ορίσουν.


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## Costas (Dec 1, 2012)

Προσοχή μη χρειαστείτε μετάγγιση αίματος κατά τη διάρκεια ταξιδιού σας στην ΛΔΚ... (Seeing Red in China)


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## daeman (Dec 1, 2012)

nickel said:


> [...] Και να και ο όρος:
> _Dingzihu_ is the Chinese term for residents that refuse to move during demolition. The term means "nail house" – a reference to how they stick out.
> 
> Εμείς έχουμε τους κάφρους, αυτοί έχουν τους κάρφους.


Τους έχουμε κι εμείς τους κάρφους, απωανατολίτικους πάλι, γιαπωνέζικους όμως: the nail that sticks out gets hammered down.
The house that stuck out gets battered down. Το σπίτι που έστεκε στο δρόμο σαν καλαμιά στον κάμπο το γκρέμισε η φαγάνα.


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## daeman (Dec 1, 2012)

Costas said:


> Προσοχή μη χρειαστείτε μετάγγιση αίματος κατά τη διάρκεια ταξιδιού σας στην ΛΔΚ... (Seeing Red in China)



Μια ενδιαφέρουσα σπονδυλωτή ταινία του 2005 για τον HIV, που στο ένα από τα τρία μέρη της ασχολείται με αυτό ακριβώς το θέμα της αιμοδοσίας επί πληρωμή στην Κίνα μέσω της οποίας μεταδίδεται ο ιός: *Three Needles*. 

Ναι, η πλοκή των τριών ιστοριών παρουσιάζεται κάπως αποσπασματικά και δεν αναπτύσσεται όπως θα μπορούσε, ώστε να δοθεί προτεραιότητα στο θέμα του AIDS και το μήνυμα (όπως λένε οι κριτικές), ωστόσο αυτή η ελλειπτικότητα δεν με ενόχλησε καθόλου και πιστεύω ότι αξίζει μια θέαση, έστω και μόνο για την υπέροχη φωτογραφία - βοηθάνε πολύ και τα απέραντα, μαγευτικά τοπία στην Αφρική και την Κίνα - και τις πολύ καλές ερμηνείες. Πολύ βαρύ το θέμα, η ταινία όμως δεν πλακώνει τον θεατή όπως θα ήταν ίσως αναμενόμενο ούτε γίνεται διδακτική, αλλά τον αφυπνίζει.

Περίληψη της μιας από τις τρεις ιστορίες, της κινεζικής, από τον ιστότοπο της ταινίας:
In CHINA,
When Jin Ping [_στδ._ Λούσι Λιου] sets up her mobile blood collection service in the tiny village of Tonghu, the local peasants rejoice and prosper. But one farmer, Tong Sam, is barred from selling his blood because he has the flu, so he lies about his little daughter’s age so she can sell blood twice a month in his stead. Sam uses the money to improve his humble farm, to plant more rice and buy an ox for plowing. But by the time his abundant crop is ready for harvesting, his wife and daughter are both mysteriously dead. Sam sets out on a journey across the province to find out why, but receives little interest from the government. He returns to find his entire village overwhelmed with disease, and Jin Ping’s blood collection business disappeared into thin air.

και από τη Wikipedia:
In rural China, a heavily pregnant Jin Ping is caught by Chinese military men with crates of black market blood in her van. The blood is destroyed and she is subsequently gang raped. Jin Ping is then shown visiting a village and convincing the inhabitants to give blood for $5 each. They all agree, except Tong Sam, a rice farmer, as he is unable to give blood as he is sick. However, as Jin Ping's equipment is not safe, most of the people in the village contract HIV and die of AIDS, including Tong Sam's family. The military men led by Xuan arrive in the village to help with the disease, and they help Tong Sam grow rice, which he then gives out to his remaining neighbors. Government officials arrive in the town to test people for AIDS, but the testing is $10 per person, which one neighbor thinks is a scam because it "cost $5 when she gave me the virus."

και το τρέιλερ:


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## Costas (Dec 3, 2012)

Άρθρο της NYT για το ανέβασμα της σύντμησης της όπερας Το Περίπτερο με τις Παιωνίες (#555).

Όσον αφορά την απόδοση από την εφημερίδα της προφοράς του είδους αυτού όπερας, Kunqu, ως kun-CHU, μου φαίνεται άκυρη: προτιμήστε το κούν-*τσ*ύ ή koon-chü (ή koun-tchu στα γαλλικά).


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## Costas (Dec 4, 2012)

Ο ανιψιός του Chen Guangcheng, Chen Kegui (βλ. #336), καταδικάστηκε σε 3 χρόνια φυλακή. (BBC)

Επίσης, αίσθηση προκάλεσε η είδηση που δημοσιεύτηκε σε πολλές εφημερίδες, ακόμα και κομματικές, ότι 10 άτομα καταδικάστηκαν για παράνομη σύλληψη και κράτηση αιτούντων θεραπεία σε μιαν από τις λεγόμενες "μαύρες φυλακές" (μαύρες με την έννοια ότι δεν είναι δηλωμένες, άρα δεν ισχύουν οι όποιες εγγυήσεις του Ποινικού Κώδικα). Η είδηση (ΝΥΤ), που θεωρήθηκε ορόσημο από τους αγωνιστές των δικαιωμάτων του πολίτη και τους νομικούς, στη συνέχεια διαψεύστηκε από το δικαστήριο (Global Times). Μυστήριο!


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## Costas (Dec 4, 2012)

Αν καίγεστε να συμμετάσχετε σε Διαγωνισμό Εκφώνησης Κινεζικού Γλωσσοδέτη για Ξένους, παρακαλώ υποβάλετε τα κλιπάκια σας εδώ. :cheek::twit:


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## Costas (Dec 4, 2012)

Όπως έλεγε (#375) ο βιογράφος του Λίου Ξ(Σ)ιαομπό Yu Jie (Γιού [προφ. Ÿ] Τζιε): No, China doesn’t have the racial component perhaps quite as much [ΣΣ. όσο το apartheid] but it has fault lines, for example between country and city. The way that rural laborers are treated in the cities is similar to how blacks were treated in South Africa.
Εδώ ένα χαρακτηριστικό παράδειγμα, όπου ο λόγος για το μη δικαίωμα συμμετοχής δεκαπεντάχρονης κοπέλας στο εκπαιδευτικό σύστημα του τόπου οικογενειακής διαμονής της με ίσους όρους και στα ίδια σχολεία και σχολές, επειδή η ταυτότητα διαμονής της είναι σε άλλη επαρχία. Ο αγώνας της, και οι αντιδράσεις, που μιλούν ρατσιστικά για "ακρίδες": (South China Morning Post Blogs)

15-year-old Zhan Haite has sparked something of a national debate online, one which has dyed-in-the-wool Shanghainese natives blasting her - and other out-of-province kids enrolled at schools in the city but lacking a local hukou - as locusts [όρος παρμένος από τους μισόξενους του Χονγκ-Κονγκ] unwelcome in the city or its schools.
Zhan moved to the city with her parents when she was just four years old and went straight into the local education system, thriving academically throughout her nine years of compulsory education.
She hit her first obstacle when the better public junior middle schools in the city began refusing to accept her as a student due to based on her non-local status.
Not only that, but Zhan's hukou dictates, despite being born in Guangdong, she has to take the gaokao in Jiangxi, her ancestral home province. Doing so, however, means sharply higher test score requirements than would be asked of a Shanghai graduate for entry to the same university.
Instead of putting her into a vocational school or relocating to Jiangxi to let Zhan finish school smoothly but with significantly reduced expectations, the family chose to stay in Shanghai and challenge the system..
(...)
When Zhan tried earlier this year to deliver her demand to be allowed to continue with school in the city, in person, to local education authorities, other parents showed up and blocked her from getting close.
When she followed that up with a call to her young and adult interlocutors to debate her in public, police showed up at Zhan's door with the concern that a larger-than-expected turnout would spin out of control.
She told police that not a single person had signed up for her debate, but when she and several supporters - young and old - showed up on October 25, so too did a number of "local" Shanghainese. There to protest the presence of Zhan and other "locusts" in their city, the crowd dispersed with little incident.
(...)
She has also taken to calling her harshest critics 'skinheads', the neo-nazi sort, which has prompted reactions ranging from constant age-inappropriate harassment online and even at her home, to threats of Rwandan-style 'genocide' on local forums targetting Shanghai residents with origins outside the city, although no incidents of violence have been reported.
"No Shanghainese would want to see the streets flow with locust blood," wrote an editor with one local finance news website yesterday, "and have their filth contaminate our sacred home."

Και μια νότα αισιοδοξίας:
The issue of regional discrimination in assigning _gaokao_ seats has come to a head recently due to the Chinese State Council's decision to begin phasing out the practice in major coastal cities in 2013.


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## Zazula (Dec 4, 2012)

Costas said:


> Γιού [προφ. Ÿ]


Ουμλάουτ είναι αυτά; :)


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## Costas (Dec 4, 2012)

Ναι. :)


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## Costas (Dec 4, 2012)

Γεωπολιτικά Κίνας-Ιαπωνίας-ΗΠΑ με επίκεντρο την πρόσφατη κρίση στα νησιά Diaoyu-Senkaku. (Asia Times Online)

China Daily ran a gloating article on the collapse in Japanese auto sales in China. In a chart it compared the Japanese drop-off in October year-to-year to a rise in sales for some other suppliers:
Mazda: down 45%
Honda: down 54%
Nissan: down 41%
Toyota: down 44%

Contrasted with:
GM: up 14%
Ford: up 48%

The interesting element of this graphic is that the only non-Japanese suppliers listed are both Americans. The largest foreign player in China auto sales - Germany's Volkswagen, whose share is equal to the four Japanese makers combined and experienced a huge jump in sales at Japanese expense in October - was ignored. Also ignored was South Korea's Hyundai, the third-largest in the market, and which also posted a healthy boost in sales.

The implied message here is that Japan's loss can be America's gain, an interesting exercise in wedging that invites the United States to deepen its economic engagement with the rising regional power, while decoupling from the fading regional power that is locked in a zero-sum strategic battle with its local adversary. 

(Άλλοι βέβαια διαφωνούν -πάντα από το ίδιο άρθρο:)

... [R]uminations on how to accommodate China's continued rise are predicated on just that: China's continued rise. Despite the glaring examples of the collapse of the Bubble in 1989 and the Great Recession (2008 - continuing), policy wonks are failing to check to see if indeed there is a floor beneath them, relying on an axiomatic faith in China's not hitting a wall.

China's investment-as-a-percentage-of-GDP ratio of 50% is unsustainable, however. In order to preserve the illusion of prosperity in the face a global recession and a once-in-a-decade leadership handover, the government of China has greenlighted an immense extension in credit. The bills will come due, sooner than most big thinkers are willing to admit.

When the Great Reckoning comes for the People's Republic, the governments and economies with the fewest strong ties to China will be the lucky ones.


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## Zazula (Dec 4, 2012)

Costas said:


> China Daily ran a gloating article on the collapse in Japanese auto sales in China. In a chart it compared the Japanese drop-off in October year-to-year to a rise in sales for some other suppliers:
> Mazda: down 45%
> 
> Contrasted with:
> Ford: up 48%


Η Ford και η Mazda έχουν γνωστή μακρά συνεργασία (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazda#Partnership_with_Ford_Motor_Company) και joint ventures, και ΕΙΔΙΚΑ στην Κίνα έχουν κοινή (κινή! ) παρουσία: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Changan_Ford_Mazda


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## Costas (Dec 4, 2012)

Όπως φαίνεται από το άρθρο στον ιστότοπό του, τα στοιχεία αυτά ο αρθρογράφος τα παίρνει από ένα άρθρο της China Daily στο οποίο λινκάρει και το οποίο πράγματι υπάρχει στη βάση δεδομένων της, αλλά που βγάζει μήνυμα λάθους όταν πατάς το λινκ. Το αφαίρεσαν; Το μόνο σχετικό που βρήκα στην ίδια ημερομηνία (6 Νοεμ.) αφορά μονάχα τη Mazda. Πάντως, απ' ό,τι είδα στο δικό σου λινκ, Ζαζ, η κοινοπραξία αυτή παράγει κυρίως Ford και πιθανότατα δεν καλύπτει όλη την παρουσία των δύο εταιρειών στη ΛΔΚ. Από κει και πέρα, δεν γνωρίζω.


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## Costas (Dec 4, 2012)

Bulgaria, the hometown of yogurt (China Daily)

Originally yogurt was produced only in Bulgaria and...the life [sic] organism in yogurt can survive only in Bulgaria "και εξάγουμε τα βακτήρια καθημερινά στην Ιαπωνία. (...) Σε αγορές ακινήτων ισοδυνάμου 200.000 ευρώ δίνουμε άδεια παραμονής και σε επενδύσεις 2.000.000 ευρώ, ιθαγένεια. Είμαστε μια από τις τρεις μόνο χώρες που πληρούν τα κριτήρια του Μάαστριχτ, έχουμε χαμηλότατους φόρους [για τις επιχειρήσεις], πράγμα για το οποίο είμαστε πολύ περήφανοι, και μπορούν οι Κινέζοι να επενδύσουν σε κατασκευή μερών αυτοκινήτων και σε outsourcing of business operations."


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## Costas (Dec 4, 2012)

Το 3ο, λέει, Παγκόσμιο Πρωτάθλημα Ματζόνγκ διεξάχθηκε στο Τσόνγκτσινγκ. (China Daily)

Mahjong has a checkered history in China. Some sources claim the game was devised thousands of years ago by the sage Confucius, while others date its beginnings to the 1880s and 90s. Either way, the game - in which players attempt to collect suits of tiles, similar to Western card games such as bridge or rummy - provokes strong reactions. While devotees praise it as an intellectual pursuit, opponents vilify it as the basest form of gambling.

The perception of a game for unruly gamblers resulted in mahjong being outlawed when the People's Republic of China was founded in 1949, and it wasn't until the 1980s that it was played openly again. Even now, many view the game with suspicion and enthusiasts are sometimes embarrassed to admit their passion for fear of appearing anti-social.

Intrigued, [Russian computer programmer] Pavel Anokhin began playing the game himself. "I don't see much difference between mahjong and chess in terms of the level of mental difficulty.

Meanwhile, members of the British rock band Pink Floyd were so enamored of the game that they even called one of their songs A Pillow of Winds, a reference to a particular scoring combination.

In 1998, the General Administration of Sport of China published the paper Competition Rules of Chinese Mahjong, which prompted many enthusiasts to believe that nationwide leagues might come into existence because an official standard had been established.

However, negative perceptions of the game sparked outrage among the public, many of whom felt the leagues would result in adverse social consequences.

Chairman Mao Zedong once said the game was one of three treasures China had given the world, the others being Chinese traditional medicine and the classic novel A Dream of Red Mansions. [Αυτό πώς συνδυάζεται με την απαγόρευση παραπάνω;]


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## Costas (Dec 4, 2012)

Οι ιστορίες μερικών Κινέζων μουσικών που έπεσαν θύματα της "αντιδεξιάς καμπάνιας" του ΚΚΚ. (South China Morning Post)

Instigated by Mao Zedong, the campaign followed seemingly genuine calls by the leadership for criticisms that might help to “rectify the party”. For nearly two months, discussions were organised at work units across the country and criticisms put on record. Then Mao pounced, calling his tactics “an overt conspiracy” that lured “the snakes out of their holes”.


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## Costas (Dec 6, 2012)

Ανοιχτή επιστολή Κινέζων συγγραφέων (όχι του Μο Γιαν) προς τον νέο ΓΓ του ΠΓ του ΚΚΚ για την απελευθέρωση του Λίου Ξ(Σ)ιαομπό (και της γυναίκας του που τελεί εδώ και χρόνια σε κατ' οίκον φυλάκιση), και συλλογή υπογραφών από τον Ντέσμοντ Τούτου. (South China Morning Post)


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## Costas (Dec 8, 2012)

Ο Μο Γιαν, όντας στη Σουηδία για την απονομή του βραβείου Νόμπελ, απαντά σε σχέση με τη λογοκρισία και λέει ότι είναι υπέρ, εφόσον έχει τα υψηλότερα στάνταρ, δηλ. εφόσον είναι ένα είδος αρχής ενάντια στη διασπορά ψευδών ειδήσεων κλπ. Επίσης λέει ότι δεν θα υπογράψει την επιστολή που ανέφερα στο προηγούμενο ποστ, γιατί του αρέσει να διατηρεί την ανεξαρτησία του. Τέλος, όσον αφορά την ταμπακέρα της επιστολής, δηλ. την απελευθέρωση του Λίου Ξ(Σ)ιαομπό που καταδικάστηκε όχι πάντως για διασπορά ψευδών ειδήσεων, παραπέμπει στην παλιά του δήλωση του Οχτωβρίου, όπου είχε ευχηθεί την αποφυλάκιση του συναδέλφου του εν γράμμασι, αλλά με ποιον ακριβώς σκοπό; "ώστε 'να ασχοληθεί ψυχή τε και σώματι με την έρευνα του πολιτικού και κοινωνικού συστήματος' " (βλ. #437); Και πράγματι:

Although Mo has previously said he hopes Liu will be freed soon, he refused to elaborate more on the case. "On the same evening of my winning the prize, I already expressed my opinion, and you can get online to make a search," he said, telling the crowd that he hoped they wouldn't press him on the subject of Liu. Some, however, have interpreted Mo's October comments as if he hoped the release of Liu would make the jailed activist see sense and embrace the Communist Party line. (The Vancouver Sun μέσω The Associated Press)

Σε μεγάλο μπελά μπήκε ο αντιπρόεδρος της Ένωσης Συγγραφέων Μο Γιαν· ούτε ψύλλος στον κόρφο του! Και χωρίς να θέλω να τον υπερασπιστώ, καταλαβαίνω τη δεινή του θέση.


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## Costas (Dec 8, 2012)

Η νομπελίστα Ρουμάνα συγγραφέας Χέρτα Μύλλερ είχε προ καιρού δηλώσει ότι η απονομή του βραβείου Νόμπελ στον Μο Γιαν από τη σουηδική επιτροπή αποτέλεσε "καταστροφή". Επίσης, ο συγγραφέας Λιάο Γι-Ού, που κατάφερε φέτος να δραπετεύσει από τα κλειστά γι' αυτόν σύνορα της Κίνας και ζει πια στη Γερμανία (και που ο φίλος του συγγραφέας Λι Μπιφένγκ έφαγε 12 χρόνια, υποτίθεται για απάτη αλλά κατά τον Λιάο επειδή οι αρχές θεώρησαν ότι τον βοήθησε να περάσει τα σύνορα [βλ. #538]), καταδίκασε την απονομή και τη συνέκρινε με την απονομή του 1965 στον Σόλοχοφ. Υπάρχουν ενδείξεις ότι η απονομή εκείνη υπήρξε ο καρπός πολύχρονων πιέσεων από τη μεριά της ΕΣΣΔ και ότι μάλιστα ανέτρεψε προηγούμενες εκτιμήσεις της επιτροπής ότι το έργο του Σόλοχοφ δεν άξιζε την τιμή. Παρακάτω τα σχετικά υλικά, εν αναμονή του αποχαρακτηρισμού των πρακτικών της Επιτροπής, που γίνεται μετά πάροδο 50 ετών. Οι σουηδομαθείς θα μπορέσουν να διαβάσουν και την πλήρη συνέντευξη με την Μύλλερ, καθώς και άρθρο για την υπόθεση Σόλοχοφ. Γίνεται επίσης μνεία ενός βιβλίου με τίτλο Obedient Autonomy, που αφορά το να ζεις ως διανοούμενος στην Κίνα. Το παρακάτω κείμενο του Σουηδού Magnus Fiskesjö αποτελεί στην αρχή σχολιασμό προγενέστερου (ψιλοαρνητικού) σχολιασμού της συνέντευξης της Μύλλερ:

The key point [ΣΣ. of the interview] was what the journalist described fittingly as Müller's "compromiselessness" (a Swedish word, kompromisslöshet, and I don't know if there is an English noun equivalent -- but "integrity" comes close), arising from her life experience of refusing to compromise her writing to government censorship under the Ceaucescu dictatorship, refusing to be a collaborator and spy for its "security" agency, and so on. This fundamental stance is, the interview suggests, what led her to oppose the choice of Mo Yan, because of the situation of government censorship in China, with the continuing imprisonment of Liu Xiaobo and other people who continue to be imprisoned for writing and expressing their views.

So it is definitely about much bigger and more interesting issues than the emotions of one "Rumanian emigré" (woman). As I understand it, Mo Yan represents almost the opposite stance: one of compromise. Reading his pronouncements on censorship I am reminded of the fascinating book _Obedient Autonomy_ which portrays and analyses the professional life of intellectuals in the Chinese system, a life of institutionalized compromising, which is of course very difficult to escape or avoid, as it also would have been in Romania under Ceaucescu. And it would have been more interesting to probe such important matters, including the comparison of the compromiselessness of Herta Müller and other European writers under Communism, which became such a cherished ideal for many (Müller was by no means alone), and, in contrast, why and how, in China, compromising dominates, -- while there are now also challenges to this (there was just on this list a report of 40 writers and intellectuals in China openly calling for Liu's release).

The Dagens Nyheter, the same paper that published the interview with Herta Müller, is today publishing an article by Liao Yiwu ("To Write Without Witnessing is Shameful"), addressed to the "ladies and gentlemen of the Nobel committee for literature", where Liao agrees with Müller on Mo Yan, and compares the prize to Mo Yan to that given to Sholokhov in 1965. [εδώ η αγγλική εκδοχή].

Almost as if presaging the debate over how Mo Yan received the prize after that given to Gao Xingjian which displeased the Chinese government, another Swedish paper back on October 11, 2012 carried a detailed review of internal Swedish Academy papers (which become accessible only after 50 years) revealing persistent Soviet government pressure on the Academy to award the prize to Sholochov, a veritable campaign that started in 1946, building on the increased Soviet prestige after WWII, and motivated by Soviet resentment to the earlier Nobel prizes to the "un-Soviet" writers Ivan Bunin (1933) and to Boris Pasternak (1958). The article reviews how the Academy several times conducted very lengthy internal reviews of Sholokhov's work and found it unworthy, but strangely reversed these judgments in 1965, going for Sholokhov -- apparently over Anna Achmatova, one of the greatest Russian poets also not approved by the Soviet government. Why this was, we shall only know in a couple of more years. The article (in Swedish only) by Magnus Ljunggren, a professor emeritus in Russian literature at Göteborg University, is here.

The DN has now also released the Herta Müller interview (full text only in Swedish) from behind their paywall.


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## Costas (Dec 8, 2012)

Ένα όμορφο διαφημιστικό σποτ για το βιβλίο του Μο Γιαν Sandalwood Death, που μόλις κυκλοφόρησε στα αγγλικά από τις εκδόσεις του Πανεπιστημίου της Οκλαχόμας σε μετάφραση Howard Goldblatt.


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## Costas (Dec 8, 2012)

Πολύ πλάκα!
“Dear Mr. Mo Yan, I’m a Chinese artist. In March 2011, I shipped a chair from Berlin to Nobel Peace Prize recipient Mr. Liu Xiaobo. Unfortunately it disappeared after entering China. Will you please take this chair back to China and give it to Mr. Liu Xiaobo? Many thanks. — Meng Huang, December 4, 2012, Berlin.”
(Όπως θα θυμάστε, η καρέκλα του Λίου έμεινε άδεια κατά την απονομή, αφού ο ίδιος ήταν φυλακισμένος.) (Seeing Red in China)


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## Costas (Dec 8, 2012)

Ο αριθμός δίνεται με επιφύλαξη: Beijing black jail 'releases thousands of petitioners', όπου το thousands σύμφωνα με μια απελευθερωμένη σημαίνει 70.000! Το νούμερο είναι τόσο γιγάντιο ώστε δυσκολεύομαι να το πιστέψω. Ιδού πάντως η είδηση. (South China Morning Post)


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## Costas (Dec 8, 2012)

Πηγαίνουν και οι 80άρηδες στο αναμορφωτήριο, και μάλιστα βετεράνοι του εμφυλίου και μέλη του κόμματος! (Sina English)


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## Costas (Dec 8, 2012)

Και πράγματι, η είδηση (#580) περί δεκάδων χιλιάδων απελευθερωθέντων από τις λεγόμενες μαύρες φυλακές ήταν μούφα, δηλ. ο αριθμός: εδώ λέει πως επρόκειτο για 300 έως το πολύ χίλιους. (Christian Science Monitor)


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## Costas (Dec 8, 2012)

Η ομιλία του Μο Γιαν στην τελετή απονομής του βραβείου Νόμπελ Λογοτεχνίας. Πολύ ωραία, γεμάτη ιστορίες. Να κι ένα κομμάτι που ταιριάζει σε όσους/ες πενθούν:

When we dug up the grave, we saw that the coffin had rotted away and that her body had merged with the damp earth around it. So we dug up some of that soil, a symbolic act, and took it to the new gravesite. That was when I grasped the knowledge that my mother had become part of the earth, and that when I spoke to mother earth, I was really speaking to my mother.

Μεταφρασμένη η ομιλία έξοχα από τον Howard Goldblatt (για τον οποίον είχα λινκάρει παλιά ένα σούπερ περιστατικό, με το συγγραφέα του Wolf Totem να ασκεί κριτική στο μεταφραστή του μπροστά σε κοινό. Διαβάστε και τη συζήτηση στα σχόλια, έχει ιδιαίτερο ενδιαφέρον και αφορά βέβαια θέματα που έχουν συζητηθεί και σ' εμάς εκτενώς.)

Υπάρχει ένα σημείο που με ιντριγκάρισε. Περιγράφει τη μητέρα του ως αγράμματη και πάμφτωχη αγρότισσα αλλά με δεμένα πόδια. Ωστόσο έχω διαβάσει επανειλημμένα (π.χ. εδώ) ότι η συνήθεια αυτή δεν αφορούσε τις γυναίκες που έπρεπε να δουλέψουν, πόσο μάλλον στα χωράφια. Περίεργο αυτό (έπεται συνέχεια).


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## bernardina (Dec 9, 2012)

Costas said:


> Υπάρχει ένα σημείο που με ιντριγκάρισε. Περιγράφει τη μητέρα του ως αγράμματη και πάμφτωχη αγρότισσα αλλά με δεμένα πόδια. Ωστόσο έχω διαβάσει επανειλημμένα (π.χ. εδώ) ότι η συνήθεια αυτή δεν αφορούσε τις γυναίκες που έπρεπε να δουλέψουν, πόσο μάλλον στα χωράφια. Περίεργο αυτό (έπεται συνέχεια).



Πράγματι φαίνεται περίεργο. Οι γυναίκες που δούλευαν στα χωράφια έπρεπε να έχουν γερά πόδια ακριβώς για να μπορούν να δουλεύουν. Αυτή η απάνθρωπη συνήθεια, ντυμένη (όπως και τόσες άλλες) με τον μανδύα της αισθητικής, αφορούσε μόνο τις γυναίκες της ανώτερης τάξης, τις αριστοκράτισσες. Όποιος έχει γερό στομάχι ας δει αυτές τις εικόνες με ενδιαφέροντα στοιχεία στο πλάι (έχω δει και χειρότερες). Το δέσιμο των ποδιών ήταν αυτό που έδινε στη γυναίκα το χαρακτηριστικό κοφτό και γρήγορο περπάτημα, το οποίο θεωρούνταν δείγμα χάρης και θηλυκότητας και προκαλούσε έντονα ερωτικά συναισθήματα, ενώ το αντίθετο έδειχνε ταπεινή καταγωγή. Στην πραγματικότητα η γυναίκα, από πολύ μικρή, άρχιζε να υφίσταται το καθημερινό μαρτύριο του δεσίματος με τους επιδέσμους έτσι ώστε στο τέλος το πέλμα της να αποκτήσει την όψη "πόδι πουλιού" ή το περπάτημα του λωτού, όπως ονομαζόταν. Συχνά όμως, εξαιτίας αυτής της πρακτικής, το πόδι νεκρωνόταν και ακρωτηριαζόταν.
Στο Ανατολικός Άνεμος Δυτικός Άνεμος της Περλ Μπακ, που είχα διαβάσει σε νεαρότατη ηλικία και μου έχει εντυπωθεί, υπάρχει μια πολύ συγκινητική περιγραφή όπου ο δυτικοσπουδαγμένος νεαρός γιατρός, γόνος καλής οικογένειας προσπαθεί να πείσει την παραδοσιακά αναθρεμμένη σύζυγό του να λύσουν τα πόδια της γιατί θεωρεί βάρβαρο το έθιμο. Η αναστροφή της διαδικασίας περιγράφεται ως εξίσου οδυνηρή με το δέσιμο, παρά τα ζεστά ποδόλουτρα και το σταδιακό λασκάρισμα των επιδέσμων, καθώς τα οστά του ταρσού προσπαθούν να επανέλθουν στη φυσιολογική τους θέση.
Απ' αυτή την άποψη λοιπόν, χίλιες φορές καλύτερα να ήσουν αγρότισσα :)

(Συγνώμη για τη σύντομη πραγματεία, αλλά είναι ένα θέμα που κι εμένα με είχε ιντριγκάρει από πολύ νωρίς  )


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## Costas (Dec 9, 2012)

bernardina said:


> (Συγνώμη για τη σύντομη πραγματεία, αλλά είναι ένα θέμα που κι εμένα με είχε ιντριγκάρει από πολύ νωρίς  )


(Πάντα τέτοιες πραγματείες, μη μας λυπάσαι!)
Στο άρθρο της Wikipedia μιλάει και για κατώτερες τάξεις, αλλά της πόλης, αν καταλαβαίνω καλά, και για την πρώτη κόρη που μελλόταν να γίνει κυρία, ενώ οι άλλες, οι άδετες, προορίζονταν για υπηρέτριες και παλλακίδες.


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## bernardina (Dec 9, 2012)

Costas said:


> (Πάντα τέτοιες πραγματείες, μη μας λυπάσαι!)
> Στο άρθρο της Wikipedia μιλάει και για κατώτερες τάξεις, αλλά της πόλης, αν καταλαβαίνω καλά, και για την πρώτη κόρη που μελλόταν να γίνει κυρία, ενώ οι άλλες, οι άδετες, προορίζονταν για υπηρέτριες και παλλακίδες.



Προφανώς δεν έχω καμία όρεξη ούτε και πρόθεση να γράψω φεμινιστικό μανιφέστο, θυμάμαι όμως καθαρά, από κείμενα που έχω διαβάσει, να εκθειάζεται πρώτον: το ότι μια γυναίκα με τόσο μικρά πόδια ήταν αναγκασμένη να στηρίζεται στο μπράτσο του άντρα προκειμένου να βαδίσει, αφού η βάση στήριξης του σώματός της δεν της επέτρεπε να περπατήσει μόνη. Επίσης, οι ηλικιωμένες έπρεπε να στηρίζονται σε μία ή και δύο υπηρέτριες ακόμα και για να μετακινηθούν μέσα στο σπίτι. Τα πόδια έμεναν δεμένα και την ώρα του ύπνου, γιατί ακόμα και η πιο ασήμαντη μετατόπιση των οστών συνεπαγόταν φριχτούς πόνους, από τους οποίους δεν απαλλασσόταν ποτέ ούτως ή άλλως. Πολλές κατέφευγαν στην παρηγοριά του οπίου για να τους αντέξουν.
Δεύτερον, αυτά τα τοσοδούλικα παραμορφωμένα πόδια αποτελούσαν κάτι σαν φετίχ και ενέπνεαν ερωτισμό στους άντρες. Go figure. Προφανώς είναι δύσκολο (; ) να καταλάβει κανείς αν αυτό ήταν καθαρα ζήτημα αισθητικής του αισθησιασμού (κάτι σαν την αγάπη ενός δυτικού προς το χυμώδες στήθος ή τα τροφαντά οπίσθια -ή και το αντίθετο, φυσικά) ή απλώς ο άντρας ηδονιζόταν ασύνειδα από την αίσθηση της υπεροχής και της κυριαρχίας του και μόνο. Άβυσσος η ψυχή του ανθρώπου -και ειδικά σε ό,τι αφορά τη λίμπιντό του.
Το θέμα είναι ένα: Πόνος. Οι γυναίκες υπέφεραν αφάνταστα υπακούοντας σε ένα παράλογο έθιμο, όχι επειδή διαφορετικά ακολουθούσε αποκλεισμός, αλλά επειδή δεν υπήρχε καν η επιλογή άρνησης. Ευτυχώς η Επανάσταση έβαλε οριστικά τέλος σ' αυτή την τρέλα. 

ΥΓ. Παράβαλε τις γυναίκες της φυλής Kayan (τις γυναίκες στρουθοκαμήλους, όπως τις λένε) ή τις γυναίκες με τα χείλη σαν πιάτα, της φυλής Surma. Τυχαίο που η τιμωρία στις πρώτες είναι το κόψιμο των δαχτυλίων και ο θάνατος, επειδή οι αδύναμοι αυχενικοί μύες δεν μπορούν να συγκρατήσουν τους σπονδύλους, ενώ οι δεύτερες φαίνονται αποκρουστικές σε οποιονδήποτε άλλον αρσενικό εκτός από αυτούς της φυλής τους;


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## Palavra (Dec 9, 2012)

Αυτό το τελευταίο ισχύει και για τις Καγιάν, Μπέρνι. Είχα δει ένα ντοκιμαντέρ στο οποίο έλεγε ότι η συνήθεια με τους δακτυλίους ξεκίνησε επειδή τους έκλεβαν τις γυναίκες οι άλλες φυλές, και ήθελαν να τις κάνουν αποκρουστικές για όλους τους άλλους εκτός από τα μέλη της φυλής τους.

Εντωμεταξύ, αυτό με το δέσιμο στα πόδια δεν πρέπει να ήταν διαδεδομένο σε όλες τις περιοχές της Κίνας, όχι; Ρωτάω επειδή η ιστορία κάποιων στιλ κουνγκ φου, όπως το γουίνκ τσαν, μιλούν για πολεμίστριες.


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## Costas (Dec 9, 2012)

Αυτό για το κόψιμο των δαχτυλίων ίσον θάνατος πού το διάβασες; Στη Wikipedia λέει τα εξής:

In 2006 some of the younger women in Mae Hong Son started to remove their rings, either to give them the opportunity to continue their education, or in protest against the exploitation of their culture and the restrictions that came with it. In late 2008 most of the young women who entered the refugee camp removed their rings. *One woman who had worn the rings for over 40 years also removed them. After removing the rings, women report discomfort which fades after about three days. The discoloration is more persistent.*

The government of Burma began discouraging this tradition as it struggled to appear more modern to the developed world. Consequently, many women in Burma began breaking the tradition, though a few older women and some of the younger girls in remote villages continued to wear rings. In Thailand the practice has gained popularity in recent years because it draws tourists who bring revenue to the tribe and to the local businessmen who run the villages and collect an entry fee of 250B per person. The Karenni National People's Liberation Front (KNPLF), an armed cease-fire group, have also made attempts to invite the Kayan to return to Kayah State in order to set up their own tourist villages.

Έδιτ:
Palavra, στο ίδιο άρθρο δίνει τις εξής θεωρίες των ανθρωπολόγων:
Many ideas regarding why the coils are worn have been suggested, often formed by visiting anthropologists, who have hypothesized that the rings protected women from becoming slaves by making them less attractive to other tribes. Contrastingly it has been theorised that the coils originate from the desire to look more attractive by exaggerating sexual dimorphism, as women have more slender necks than men. It has also been suggested that the coils give the women resemblance to a dragon, an important figure in Kayan folklore.[10] The coils might be meant to protect from tiger bites, perhaps literally, but probably symbolically.[11]

Και συμπληρώνει:
Kayan women, when asked, acknowledge these ideas, but often say that their purpose for wearing the rings is cultural identity (one associated with beauty).


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## bernardina (Dec 9, 2012)

Δεν θυμάμαι πού το διάβασα, προφανώς σε κάποιο από τα πολλά φεμινιστικά μανιφέστα 

Όντως, βλέπω τώρα και αλλού ότι δεν ισχύει. Εδώ μάλιστα δίνει πολλά άλλα διαφωτιστικά στοιχεία. Και το εντυπωσιακότερο ότι χαρακτηρίζει _μητριαρχική_ τη συγκεκριμένη κοινωνία, πράγμα εξαιρετικά ενδιαφέρον. Αξίζει να το διαβάσει κανείς.
Χμ, χρήσιμο να διορθώνεις τις λανθασμένες πληροφορίες σου. ;) Ευχαριστώ για την ευκαιρία.
Συγνώμη που ξεστρατίσαμε το νήμα, ε;


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## Costas (Dec 9, 2012)

Παρακαλώ· και δεν υπάρχει κανένα πρόβλημα με το ξεστράτισμα, όσο έχει ποιότητα.

A Fringe Politician Moves to Japan’s National Stage (ΝΥΤ)


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## SBE (Dec 9, 2012)

Κι εγώ είχα ακούσει το ίδιο με τη Μπερνι για τους δακτύλιους. 

Όσο για τα πόδια των Κινέζων, είχα διαβάσει κάποτε σχετικά με το πώς Άγγλοι ιεραπόστολοι έπειθαν τους γονείς να κόψουν τη συνήθεια, με μέθοδο που μπορεί να εφαρμοστεί στο κόψιμο κάθε τέτοιας συνήθειας. Το πρώτο βήμα που θυμάμαι ήταν ότι επειδή οι γονείς ανησυχούσαν ότι δεν θα παντρευτεί η κόρη τους, μετά από τη σχετική ενημέρωση (πλύση εγκεφάλου, για ορισμένους), εκμεταλλευόμενοι την απέχθεια που δημιουργούσε η ενημέρωση, έβαζαν τους γονείς να υποσχεθούν ότι δεν θα επιτρέψουν να παντρευτεί ο γιός τους γυναίκα με δεμένα πόδια. Αρκεί να δήλωναν ενάντιες στη συνήθεια μια- δυο επιφανείς οικογένειες, με περιζήτητους γαμπρούς που όλοι ήθελαν να συγγενέψουν μαζί τους, και αμέσως οι φιλόδοξοι γονείς άλλων οικογενειών άρχιζαν να ανησυχούν ότι θα χάσουν τον καλό γαμπρό. Ή αρκεί να έπαιρναν πολλούς με το μέρος τους, και πάλι άρχιζαν οι ανησυχίες ότι δεν έχει μείνει κανένας γαμπρός για την κόρη σου. Βεβαίως η διαδικασία είναι αργή, δεν έχει την αμεσότητα της νομοθεσίας, αλλά δεν έχει και την παραβατικότητα της νομοθεσίας. 

Παρεμπιπτόντως, μια φίλη μου Κινέζα απο το Χονγκ Κονγκ είχε αναφέρει ότι ο ένας παππούς της είχε δύο συζύγους. Η αδερφή της είχε παντρευτεί με πολύ παραδοσιακό γάμο και μου είχαν στείλει φωτογραφίες, τις οποίες είχε δει ένας συνάδερφός μου από το Πεκίνο αλλά όπως μου εξήγησε, δεν ήξερε τίποτα για το τελετουργικό- όπως επίσης δεν ήξερε τι σημαίνει να έχεις αδέρφια.


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## Costas (Dec 9, 2012)

Ε, ίσως κάτι ανάλογο πρέπει να γίνει και με τις κουλούρες. Να δηλώσουν τα τουριστικά γραφεία ότι δεν θα στέλνουν κόσμο να δει τις γυναίκες με τις κουλούρες, ενώ αντιθέτως θα στέλνει για να δουν όλη την υπόλοιπη κουλτούρα τέλος πάντων. Βέβαια, πιο εύκολα το λες παρά γίνεται. Ποια είναι η άλλη κουλτούρα; Εδώ οι τουρίστες στην Ελλάδα ακόμα το Ζορμπά ζητάνε...


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## Costas (Dec 9, 2012)

Μέσα στα συμφραζόμενα της διαμαρτυρίας της Herta Mueller για την απονομή του βραβείου Νόμπελ Λογοτεχνίας στον Μο Γιαν, ο Lee Haiyan αναδεικνύει την παράμετρο του πατριωτισμού για να εξηγήσει τη διαφορά ανάμεσα στην αποδοχή που έχει το ΚΚΚ από τους Κινέζους συγγραφείς σε σύγκριση με την απόρριψη των ΚΚ από συγγραφείς όπως η Mueller:

The problem then is the ill repute, to put it mildly, of Mo Yan’s employer in the eyes of a broad swath of international critics, who find it hard to fathom why any thinking Chinese could go on tolerating or even supporting the Party’s autocratic/authoritarian/totalitarian (pick your modifier) rule. What seems to elude these critics is that the Party is also a nationalist (with a small n) party whose power and authority are legitimated in large part by its leadership role in ridding China of foreign encroachment and ending the so-called “Century of Humiliation.” For this it has evidently earned the undying allegiance of the intellectual elite for whom foreign aggression is a far greater evil than internal persecution or abuse. China’s fiercely patriotic intelligentsia (both domestic and diasporic) are apparently willing to overlook a great deal and ready to rally behind the Party so long as it is perceived to be the only viable player to chaperon China’s “rise” while warding off disorder, separatism, and territorial challenges.

By contrast, Herta Müller’s reaction can be explained by communism’s association with Soviet domination in Eastern Europe, not national liberation. No European communist party has ever become so ineluctably bound up with the fate of the fatherland/motherland and claimed (and fanned) the citizens’ love of country the way the Chinese Communist Party has.

Εδώ μπορεί βέβαια κανείς να αντιτείνει ότι ειδικά η Ρουμανία της Mueller είχε τον 'πατριώτη' Τσαουσέσκου στο τιμόνι από ένα σημείο κι έπειτα.


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## Costas (Dec 9, 2012)

Όσοι διάβασαν τον (συναρπαστικό) λόγο του Μο Γιαν στην απονομή του βραβείου (λινκ στο #583), θα είδαν ότι ο συγγραφέας έκλεισε με 3 παραβολές. Να πώς τις ερμηνεύει με οξύνοια ο Α.Ε. Clark:

Toward the end of his speech accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature, Mo Yan offered three "stories" (故事) as his response to the controversy that greeted his selection for the Prize. Falling somewhere along the spectrum between allegory and parable, they can be interpreted in the light of recent events. Controversy focused on Mo Yan's acquiescence (as vice-chairman of the official writers' association) in his government's restraint of speech and its persecution of some writers; and especially on his choice not to protest the imprisonment of Liu Xiaobo, who had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace two years before and remains incommunicado.

_First story_ The year would have been '63 or '64. The "exhibit of suffering" (苦难展览) would have comprised dioramas showing landlords squeezing rent from the poor, serfs being tortured, and similar scenes said to characterize life in China under the old regime. Eight-year-olds will not be emotionally moved by a static depiction of a world they have never experienced. But to meet the expectations of their teacher, he and his classmates feigned grief and horror. The only student who did not put on an act was disciplined after Mo Yan and several other students informed on him. The lesson which the author draws is: "When everyone around you is crying, you deserve to be allowed not to cry, and when the tears are all for show, your right not to cry is greater still."

Apologists for the Communist Party of China often dismiss foreigners' concern for human rights as a cloak for "China-bashing." Those who appeal on behalf of persecuted writers and lawyers, in this view, do not care about those whose plight they publicize: they merely seek to embarrass China. I interpret this response of Mo Yan to his critics as a fairly blunt statement that he doesn't care what happens to people like Liu Xiaobo and Liu Xia and he doesn't believe anyone else cares either; he is impatient with what he considers hypocrisy and affirms his right to hold aloof from it. That the message is wrapped in a contrite anecdote about the dark side of Maoism is, I think, an artful piece of misdirection.

_Second story_. One evening when he was in the army, an elderly officer glanced at the (empty) seat in front of Mo Yan and asked, "Where is everyone?" Mo Yan took offense at the implication that he was no one.

It's hard not to see here a veiled allusion to Liu Xiaobo's empty chair in Oslo and the tendency of many commenters to compare the two prizewinners, seldom to Mo Yan's advantage. If that is correct, then Mo Yan is annoyed that the absent Liu Xiaobo has drawn attention which properly belongs to the present Mo Yan. Complicating this interpretation is the regret which the author says he now feels for the vehemence of his youthful reaction. He could be acknowledging a pique while claiming to rise above it; or -- more cynically -- he might judge that an expression of remorse makes it socially acceptable to give vent to his annoyance.

_Third story_. There is one scapegoat, who is saved, and seven (many) scapegoaters, who perish. The temple in which the artisans have sought shelter from the storm is "dilapidated" (破庙): that detail sets up the denouement, but it also carries certain connotations for anyone who lived through the assault on the Four Olds. The artisans are guilt-ridden, superstitious, and prone to moralistic judgments.

I believe this story is directed at those fellow-writers (like him, bricklayers of the word) who have challenged the morality of Mo Yan's support for the regime. The entire moral edifice on which they rely, and from which they claim to cast him out, is in his view flawed and doomed. History will continue to unfold, sometimes full of storms and suffering: personal morality has not caused history and will not change it. If other writers wish to ostracize him, that may be exactly what he needs, and it won't do them any good. He considers himself fortunate to be a pragmatist.


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## Costas (Dec 9, 2012)

Σχετικά με τη συζήτηση που είχαμε παραπάνω για το δέσιμο των ποδιών των γυναικών, ορίστε ένα σάιτ που εξετάζει το ζήτημα κι έχει και βιβλιογραφία για τους ενδιαφερομένους. [Τα αγγλικά του δεν είναι και άψογα...] 
Φαίνεται πως η πρακτική του δεσίματος στις αγροτικές οικογένειες ήταν πολύ πιο διαδεδομένη στο Βορρά (πατρίδα της μητέρας του Μο Γιαν), όπου καλλιεργούσαν στάρι και άλλα στεγνά δημητριακά, απ' ό,τι στο νότο, όπου κυριαρχούν οι υγροί ορυζώνες, και όπου άρα οι γυναίκες δεν θα μπορούσαν να δουλέψουν ξυπόλυτες, αν είχαν δεμένα πόδια.


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## Costas (Dec 9, 2012)

O Jim Maguire του Associated Press εισέδυσε στο σπίτι της γυναίκας του Λίου Ξ(Σ)ιαομπό, φωτογράφου Λίου Ξ(Σ)ιά, όπου κρατείται σε κατ' οίκον φυλάκιση, ουσιαστικά, εδώ και δύο χρόνια. (Βίντεο) (Yahoo News μέσω AP)


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## bernardina (Dec 10, 2012)

Costas said:


> Σχετικά με τη συζήτηση που είχαμε παραπάνω για το δέσιμο των ποδιών των γυναικών, ορίστε ένα σάιτ που εξετάζει το ζήτημα κι έχει και βιβλιογραφία για τους ενδιαφερομένους. [Τα αγγλικά του δεν είναι και άψογα...]
> Φαίνεται πως η πρακτική του δεσίματος στις αγροτικές οικογένειες ήταν πολύ πιο διαδεδομένη στο Βορρά (πατρίδα της μητέρας του Μο Γιαν), όπου καλλιεργούσαν στάρι και άλλα στεγνά δημητριακά, απ' ό,τι στο νότο, όπου κυριαρχούν οι υγροί ορυζώνες, και όπου άρα οι γυναίκες δεν θα μπορούσαν να δουλέψουν ξυπόλυτες, αν είχαν δεμένα πόδια.



Ωωω.. ωραίο υλικό για μελέτη. Θενκς, Κώστα. :)


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## bernardina (Dec 10, 2012)

Throughout time women have bounded, changed, anchored, formed, deformed, mutilated, manipulated, damaged, and altered their bodies in order to survive in the state society. 
Η πικρή αλήθεια. Παντού και εις τον αιώνα των αιώνων.
Κατά τ' άλλα, το ανάγνωσμα είναι στ' αλήθεια σπαρακτικό.


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## Palavra (Dec 10, 2012)

Σας πειράζει να αυτονομήσω τη συζήτηση; Νομίζω ότι έχει ψωμί και εδώ επιβαρύνει το νήμα από τη μία, και αδικείται από την άλλη.


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## bernardina (Dec 10, 2012)

Το νήμα είναι του Κώστα. Εκείνος είναι αρμόδιος να απαντήσει. Εγώ είμαι ταπεινή επισκέπτρια. :)


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## Costas (Dec 10, 2012)

Όχι, Παλάβρα, αυτονόμησέ το. Απλώς, φαντάζομαι με copy-paste, όχι με cut, έτσι δεν είναι;


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## Costas (Dec 11, 2012)

Πορτρέτο του μεταφραστή του Μο Γιαν, και πολλών άλλων έργων της σύγχρονης κινεζικής λογοτεχνίας, Howard Goldblatt. Ωραίο, αλλά με πολλά λάθη διορθωτή (μερικά τα διορθώσανε μετά το κράξιμο). (Tablet)

Η Κινέζα συγγραφέας που σαγήνεψε τον Goldblatt και τον έστρεψε στην κινεζική λογοτεχνία, η Xiao Hong, είχε γράψει μεταξύ άλλων κι ένα διήγημα με τίτλο _Άνοιξη σε μια μικρή πόλη_, που έγινε ταινία δύο φορές, την πρώτη το 1948 [1][2] και τη δεύτερη το 2002 [1][2]. Η δεύτερη αυτή είχε παιχτεί στη χώρα μας το 2003.

Κάτι πρωτότυπο:
At the end of her life, she [Xiao Hong] wrote a novel and a sequel about a character by the name of Ma Bole, whose journeys in the book mirrored her own. “There was no question she wanted to make it a trilogy,” he said. Thanks to his efforts, Xaio [=Xiao] Hong’s work has largely been rediscovered in China. *Goldblatt hopes to write the concluding volume* and have them all translated.


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## Costas (Dec 12, 2012)

Η ατζέντα αγορών επιχειρήσεων της Β. Αμερικής από τους Κινέζους, κυρίως από τις κρατικές επιχειρήσεις τους, για τα επόμενα χρόνια. (ΝΥΤ)


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## Costas (Dec 12, 2012)

Προτού η εξέλιξη της επικαιρότητας σκεπάσει λίγο-λίγο με τη σκόνη της την απονομή του βραβείου Νόμπελ Λογοτεχνίας στον Μο Γιαν, ας δούμε κάποια σημεία της ομιλίας του συγγραφέα που προκάλεσαν σχόλια και ερμηνείες. Να πώς έκλεισε την ομιλία του ο Μο Γιαν:

The announcement of my Nobel Prize has led to controversy. At first I thought I was the target of the disputes, but over time I’ve come to realize that the real target was a person who had nothing to do with me. Like someone watching a play in a theater, I observed the performances around me. I saw the winner of the prize both garlanded with flowers and besieged by stone-throwers and mudslingers. I was afraid he would succumb to the assault, but he emerged from the garlands of flowers and the stones, a smile on his face; he wiped away mud and grime, stood calmly off to the side, and said to the crowd:

For a writer, the best way to speak is by writing. You will find everything I need to say in my works. Speech is carried off by the wind; the written word can never be obliterated. I would like you to find the patience to read my books. I cannot force you to do that, and even if you do, I do not expect your opinion of me to change. No writer has yet appeared, anywhere in the world, who is liked by all his readers; that is especially true during times like these.

Even though I would prefer to say nothing, since it is something I must do on this occasion, let me just say this:

I am a storyteller, so I am going to tell you some stories.

When I was a third-grade student in the 1960s, my school organized a field trip to an exhibit of suffering, where, under the direction of our teacher, we cried bitter tears. I let my tears stay on my cheeks for the benefit of our teacher, and watched as some of my classmates spat in their hands and rubbed it on their faces as pretend tears. I saw one student among all those wailing children – some real, some phony – whose face was dry and who remained silent without covering his face with his hands. He just looked at us, eyes wide open in an expression of surprise or confusion. After the visit I reported him to the teacher, and he was given a disciplinary warning. Years later, when I expressed my remorse over informing on the boy, the teacher said that at least ten students had done what I did. The boy himself had died a decade or more earlier, and my conscience was deeply troubled when I thought of him. But I learned something important from this incident, and that is: When everyone around you is crying, you deserve to be allowed not to cry, and when the tears are all for show, your right not to cry is greater still.

Here is another story: More than thirty years ago, when I was in the army, I was in my office reading one evening when an elderly officer opened the door and came in. He glanced down at the seat in front of me and muttered, “Hm, where is everyone?” I stood up and said in a loud voice, “Are you saying I’m no one?” The old fellow’s ears turned red from embarrassment, and he walked out. For a long time after that I was proud about what I consider a gutsy performance. Years later, that pride turned to intense qualms of conscience.

Bear with me, please, for one last story, one my grandfather told me many years ago: A group of eight out-of-town bricklayers took refuge from a storm in a rundown temple. Thunder rumbled outside, sending fireballs their way. They even heard what sounded like dragon shrieks. The men were terrified, their faces ashen. “Among the eight of us,” one of them said, “is someone who must have offended the heavens with a terrible deed. The guilty person ought to volunteer to step outside to accept his punishment and spare the innocent from suffering. Naturally, there were no volunteers. So one of the others came up with a proposal: Since no one is willing to go outside, let’s all fling our straw hats toward the door. Whoever’s hat flies out through the temple door is the guilty party, and we’ll ask him to go out and accept his punishment.” So they flung their hats toward the door. Seven hats were blown back inside; one went out the door. They pressured the eighth man to go out and accept his punishment, and when he balked, they picked him up and flung him out the door. I’ll bet you all know how the story ends: They had no sooner flung him out the door than the temple collapsed around them.

I am a storyteller.

Telling stories earned me the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Many interesting things have happened to me in the wake of winning the prize, and they have convinced me that truth and justice are alive and well.

So I will continue telling my stories in the days to come.


Προφανώς ο real target στον οποίον αναφέρεται στην αρχή είναι ο φυλακισμένος Νομπελίστας Ειρήνης Λίου Ξ(Σ)ιαομπό. Πάμε παρακάτω. Ο Μο Γιαν αφηγείται τρεις ιστορίες, οι οποίες ερμηνεύτηκαν ποικιλοτρόπως. Ας δούμε την ερμηνεία του A.E. Clark, του Ragged Banner Press:

Toward the end of his speech accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature, Mo Yan offered three "stories" (故事) as his response to the controversy that greeted his selection for the Prize. Falling somewhere along the spectrum between allegory and parable, they can be interpreted in the light of recent events. Controversy focused on Mo Yan's acquiescence (as vice-chairman of the official writers' association) in his government's restraint of speech and its persecution of some writers; and especially on his choice not to protest the imprisonment of Liu Xiaobo, who had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace two years before and remains incommunicado.

_First story_ The year would have been '63 or '64. The "exhibit of suffering" (苦难展览) would have comprised dioramas showing landlords squeezing rent from the poor, serfs being tortured, and similar scenes said to characterize life in China under the old regime. Eight-year-olds will not be emotionally moved by a static depiction of a world they have never experienced. But to meet the expectations of their teacher, he and his classmates feigned grief and horror. The only student who did not put on an act was disciplined after Mo Yan and several other students informed on him. The lesson which the author draws is: "When everyone around you is crying, you deserve to be allowed not to cry, and when the tears are all for show, your right not to cry is greater still."

Apologists for the Communist Party of China often dismiss foreigners' concern for human rights as a cloak for "China-bashing." Those who appeal on behalf of persecuted writers and lawyers, in this view, do not care about those whose plight they publicize: they merely seek to embarrass China. I interpret this response of Mo Yan to his critics as a fairly blunt statement that he doesn't care what happens to people like Liu Xiaobo and Liu Xia and he doesn't believe anyone else cares either; he is impatient with what he considers hypocrisy and affirms his right to hold aloof from it. That the message is wrapped in a contrite anecdote about the dark side of Maoism is, I think, an artful piece of misdirection.

_Second story_. One evening when he was in the army, an elderly officer glanced at the (empty) seat in front of Mo Yan and asked, "Where is everyone?" Mo Yan took offense at the implication that he was no one.

It's hard not to see here a veiled allusion to Liu Xiaobo's empty chair in Oslo and the tendency of many commenters to compare the two prizewinners, seldom to Mo Yan's advantage. If that is correct, then Mo Yan is annoyed that the absent Liu Xiaobo has drawn attention which properly belongs to the present Mo Yan. Complicating this interpretation is the regret which the author says he now feels for the vehemence of his youthful reaction. He could be acknowledging a pique while claiming to rise above it; or -- more cynically -- he might judge that an expression of remorse makes it socially acceptable to give vent to his annoyance.

_Third story_. There is one scapegoat, who is saved, and seven (many) scapegoaters, who perish. The temple in which the artisans have sought shelter from the storm is "dilapidated" (破庙): that detail sets up the denouement, but it also carries certain connotations for anyone who lived through the assault on the Four Olds. The artisans are guilt-ridden, superstitious, and prone to moralistic judgments.

I believe this story is directed at those fellow-writers (like him, bricklayers of the word) who have challenged the morality of Mo Yan's support for the regime. The entire moral edifice on which they rely, and from which they claim to cast him out, is in his view flawed and doomed. History will continue to unfold, sometimes full of storms and suffering: personal morality has not caused history and will not change it. If other writers wish to ostracize him, that may be exactly what he needs, and it won't do them any good. He considers himself fortunate to be a pragmatist.


Ας δούμε τώρα ένα ρεπορτάζ για τις σχετικές συζητήσεις στην Κίνα (Bloomberg News):

What animated many of the tweets and editorials were three odd parables that Mo told at the end of his lecture, without offering any interpretation of them. In China, where censorship requires astounding feats of metaphor as a matter of daily online life, highly opaque Nobel Prize-quality parables are guaranteed to attract eager problem solvers (if only as literary Sudoku to be solved by weekend’s end).

All three parables have received some attention, but it is the third one which has China’s netizens in a sort of Talmudic tizzy.

(...)

Many microbloggers, likely among them readers of Mo’s novels and the petty cruelties that the powerful inflict on the powerless within them, reasonably sense politics of a sort in the tale, though not the kind of politics that can necessarily be interpreted as a critique of the Communist Party.

Guo Jing, a reporter and popular host with the state-run China National Radio, took such an approach via a tweet to Sina Weibo, China’s most popular microblog, on Sunday: “Mo Yan demonstrated his political attitude in the last story of his speech: A nation with a mob mentality but without beliefs, a sense of independence, and a spirit of repentance, will earn collective retribution.”

Li Xingwen, a columnist for Party-owned Beijing Youth Daily, offered two plausible deconstructions that also seem to blame Chinese society, and not the ruling Communist Party, for whatever tragedy the temple collapse represents. He wrote in an editorial on Sunday: “On one hand, the survival or extinction of ‘the one and the seven’ in the damaged temple suggests that society has its own justice and evil can’t escape a final judgment; on the other hand, the story is about democracy at a crossroads: The majority’s tyrannical policies were stupid and they finally ate their own bitter fruit. Via these three stories Mo Yan showed his viewpoint: never follow the crowd, never protest for show, and never encroach on personal freedom in the name of the majority.”

Not every interpretation is quite so flattering to Mo, or to the Communist Party. Indeed, across Weibo -- and in less obvious ways, in Chinese newspapers -- the Chinese seem genuinely conflicted about how to interpret their new Nobelist’s tale. In a Saturday tweet by Weibo user Kai Yan, Mo is both a Communist Party pawn and a satirist whose subject-matter is China’s all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee: “Mo Yan’s prize was controversial and recently he supported censorship. He was also condemned by the global media for not joining those who support Xiaobo’s release. However, his acceptance speech was interesting. One story in his speech was about eight masons who took shelter from rain in a temple … this is an obvious satire of the Communist Party’s court intrigues.”

It’s obvious to Kai Yan, at least. For others, it remains a cryptic curiosity. Still, for all the discussion of Mo’s politics, there’s an undeniable online consensus that China’s first literary Nobelist should be left to do his work without having to answer such questions (especially when posed by foreign media). Most online commentators are more concerned with the first half of the lecture, in which he offers elegiac remembrances of his mother and hometown and how they made him the man -- and the writer -- he is today.

One popular tweet, later forwarded thousands of times on Sina Weibo (most notably it was quoted in a Sina Weibo tweet by Kai-fu Lee, former president of Google China, and then forwarded by his followers), sums up the sentiment: “I have not read Mo Yan’s books, but after listening to his speech I know why he would win. He has a good mother and extended family, he’s honest and kind-hearted, he has a life of hardship and rich experience, he is good at observing and remembering … he is a calm and ordinary Chinese.” 


Είναι φανερό λοιπόν, σε μένα τουλάχιστον, ότι ο Μο Γιαν πέτυχε να αποδείξει το βασικό: ότι ξέρει να λέει συναρπαστικές ιστορίες που κάνουν το κοινό να κρέμεται απ' τα χείλια του και να συζητά το βαθύτερο νόημά τους, ιστορίες βγαλμένες απ' την παλιά κινεζική λογοτεχνική παράδοση (Mo Yan’s writing harked back to earlier modes of Chinese folktales. “They weren’t new in Chinese literature; they were new in modern Chinese literature,” Goldblatt said.). Όπερ έδει δείξαι, προκειμένου περί ενός βραβείου λογοτεχνίας. Τώρα, το αν έπρεπε να διαλέξουν αυτόν ή αν, λόγω πολιτικού κωλύματος, έπρεπε να τον κόψουν και να δώσουν το βραβείο σε κάποιον άλλον, αυτό είναι θέμα που δεν απασχολεί πια τον ίδιον...


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## Costas (Dec 12, 2012)

Ο Σουηδός Magnus Fiskesjö, σ' ένα σχόλιό του προ ημερών αναφέρθηκε με πολύ θετικό τρόπο σ' ένα βιβλίο με τίτλο Obedient Autonomy, που ενδιαφέρει τους αρχαιολόγους και τους κοινωνικούς ανθρωπολόγους, ου μην αλλά και τους σινολογούντες, οπότε σκέφτηκα να βάλω το λινκ προς μια παρουσίαση του βιβλίου. (China Perspectives)


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## Costas (Dec 12, 2012)

Μια βραδιά με τον Howard Goldblatt (βίντεο)

He [Mo Yan] writes _in_ Chinese _for_ Chinese; and makes it very very difficult for those of us who translate him to other languages to...to translate! (...) Mine [=my rendering of the novel's title: _Life and Death are Wearing me Out_] was the best sounding and the farthest away from the original! (...) If you like Dickens, you're gonna love Mo Yan (…) We have pruned some of them, 'we' meaning editors and publishers [his long novels] (…) [for his last novel before he got the prize] I got 1200 dollars to translate a 500 page novel (εξαιτίας χρεοκοπίας. Κανονικά, η προκαταβολή θα ήταν 7500-15% η προμήθεια του ατζέντη, το υπόλοιπο δια 2 μεταξύ του συγγραφέα και του ιδίου, άρα 3188)

Συζητάει επίσης τους προβληματισμούς του για τους τίτλους των βιβλίων.

Translation theory is sort of like trying to analyze how your knee works walking downstairs: you're gonna fall.
Domestication/Foreignization: “You’re not going to get a foreignized text past an editor” [εκτός κι αν είσαι ο Nabokov] “And when an editor sends me back an unmarked text I begin to get very very nervous” (εδώ σας στέλνουν τίποτα πίσω;…) «I don’t want to be out there naked; I want some help” Με τις πραγματικά ξένες γλώσσες (κινέζικα, γιαπωνέζικα, αραβικά) πρέπει να γράψεις ελεύθερα, αλλιώς χάθηκες. Να πας παράγραφο παράγραφο και ν’ αλλάζεις ό,τι πρέπει, αλλιώς δεν γίνεται. “The single most obvious spot where this happens is in chengyu, so you can say ‘when the dragon soars and the phoenix farts’ or you can say what it means. I have done both. And sometimes I do both at the same time” “I’m putting untranslated words like _dieh_, instead of dad or pa or whatever”, γιατί είναι καιρός να βάλουμε κινέζικες λέξεις στα αγγλικά, όπως έχουμε κάνει με τα γιαπωνέζικα (τατάμι κττ.) «διάβασα πρόσφατα ένα ινδικό βιβλίο κι είχε εκατοντάδες ινδικές λέξεις αμετάφραστες, φαγητά και ρούχα, και δεν με πείραζε καθόλου (that’s foreignization), στο κάτω-κάτω σήμερα έχουμε το ίντερνετ, μπορείς να κοιτάξεις ό,τι θες». Μετά εξετάζει το πρόβλημα της απόδοσης των κύριων ονομάτων, που σχεδόν πάντα κάτι σημαίνουν.Μιλάει για τη χρήση διαλέκτων (ο Ezra Pound είχε χρησιμοποιήσει black Southern dialect για το Book of Songs!), για τα ρέτζιστερς, για τις ομοιοκαταληξίες στα οπερατικά κομμάτια.»

Στις εύκολες γλώσσες με πολλούς μεταφραστές πληρώνουν με τη λέξη, 110 δολλάρια τις 1000 λέξεις. That’s why they say “keep a day job”. Στις σπάνιες: έχω δουλέψει 50-50, 20-80 με τον συγγραφέα• όχι επί των πωλήσεων, αλλά επί της προκαταβολής. ΠΟΤΕ δεν έχουμε κερδίσει από δικαιώματα επί των πωλήσεων το ποσό της προκαταβολής π.χ. 20.000 δολάρια. Βέβαια με τον Μο Γιαν αυτό θ’ αλλάξει τώρα. Αλλά βέβαια έτσι κι αλλιώς δεν θα έχω 50-50 μαζί του! Συνήθως παίρνω εφάπαξ, μεταξύ 10 και 30 χιλ δολ, έχω πάρει και περισσότερα, πολύ πιο συχνά και λιγότερα. Αναφέρει και την Ελλάδα σαν μια από τις χώρες όπου δεν υπάρχουν μεταφραστές από τα κινέζικα ή υπάρχουν αλλά δεν είναι αρκετά καλοί ή κάνουν άλλες δουλειές από μετάφραση λογοτεχνίας και επομένως μεταφράζουν δυστυχώς από τα αγγλικά. (Πού στο διάολο μας θυμήθηκε, απ’ όλες τις χώρες;) Οπότε πληρώνουν τα τελείως λιγότερα, αφού όλοι γνωρίζουν αγγλικά. Προτιμώ να μεταφράζω πεθαμένους συγγραφείς, αλλά δυστυχώς τώρα ζουν πολλά χρόνια! Εκτός κι αν είναι απολύτως απαραίτητο δεν ξαναδιαβάζω ποτέ τις μεταφράσεις μου μετά τη δημοσίευσή τους, γιατί ξέρω ότι θα…φρίξω. Τη δεκαετία του ’90, μόλις 3% των λογοτεχνικών βιβλίων στις ΗΠΑ ήταν μεταφράσεις. Μια ανθολογία κινεζικών διηγημάτων, που της βρήκανε τον πιο πιασάρικο τίτλο (Mao wouldn’t be amused with this) και το πιο κραχτικό εξώφυλλο (πάλι με τον Μάο) πούλησε 15000 αντίτυπα σε 15 χρόνια, which is good. Τα βιβλία μένουν 2 βδομάδες στο βιβλιοπωλείο, μετά τελειώσανε, επιστρέφονται. Το ποσοστό επιστροφής είναι 50%. Σ’ ένα βιβλίο που λεγόταν Παλιοί Τόποι του εκδότη δεν του άρεσε και το ‘κανε Ασημένια Πόλη, και το επόμενο βιβλίο που έγραψε ο συγγραφέας είχε κατά τύχη τον τίτλο Ιστορίες της Ασημένιας Πόλης! Now what?


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## Costas (Dec 13, 2012)

(Goldblatt κάπου στο προηγούμενο βίντεο): "Όταν παινεύουν τη γλώσσα του συγγραφέα, θέλω να πεταχτώ και να φωνάξω That's me!" Το γράφω τώρα γιατί σ' ένα αρνητικό άρθρο της Anna Sun για τη γλώσσα του Mo Yan λέει και το εξής:

The English translations of Mo Yan’s novels, especially by the excellent Howard Goldblatt, are in fact superior to the original in their aesthetic unity and sureness. The blurb for The Republic of Wine from Washington Post says: “Goldblatt’s translation renders Mo Yan’s shimmering poetry and brutal realism as work akin to that of Gorky and Solzhenitsyn.” But in fact, only the “brutal realism” is Mo Yan’s; the “shimmering poetry” comes from a brilliant translator’s work.

Το άρθρο αυτό έχει και μια λίστα από ονόματα Κινέζων συγγραφέων του 20ού και του 21ου αιώνα, για τους ενδιαφερομένους. Βεβαίως άλλοι της απαντούν ότι δεν έχει δίκιο για τη γλώσσα του Μο Γιαν.


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## Costas (Dec 13, 2012)

Ένα ωραία συμπυκνωμένο 8λεπτο βίντεο για τον Άι Ουέι Ουέι, τη ζωή του, την τέχνη του, το ντοκιμαντέρ γι' αυτόν που γύρισε η Alison Klayman, στο οποίο είχε αναφερθεί προ καιρού ο daeman, τον ακτιβισμό του. (PBS)


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## Costas (Dec 14, 2012)

The Rehabilitation of Pearl Buck, του Peter Conn (China File).
[Αναφέρει και τη φαιδρή εκείνη ιστορία με το κολοσσικό άγαλμα του Κομφούκιου που στήθηκε χωρίς σχόλια στην πλατεία Τιεν Αν Μεν και μετά εξαφανίστηκε πάλι χωρίς σχόλια.]


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## Costas (Dec 14, 2012)

Άρθρο του Lucas Klein (Notes on the Mosquito), συγγραφέα και μεταφραστή, με λινκ για την υπόθεση Μο Γιαν (γιατί πρέπει πια να μιλάμε για 'υπόθεση'), με ένα ενδιαφέρον στοιχείο --πέρα από την 'αρχειοθέτηση' των λινκ--: αμφισβητεί την είδηση ότι ο Μο Γιαν υπερασπίστηκε τη λογοκρισία, λέγοντας ότι η λέξη που χρησιμοποίησε σημαίνει απλώς έλεγχος (check)· παραθέτει και το πρωτότυπο. Θέτει επίσης ένα γενικότερο ζήτημα ανακριβών αποδόσεων από τα κινεζικά προς τα αγγλικά, που χρωματίζουν τα λεγόμενα ανάλογα με τις επιθυμίες των ΜΜΕ.

[Όσο για τη μετάφραση του Goldblatt στην ιστορία με την άδεια καρέκλα, που επίσης την παραθέτει δίγλωσση, με εντυπωσίασε η ελευθερία του. Πιστός στο νόημα, _ξαναγράφει_ το κείμενο. Βέβαια ίσως έτσι που το γράφω να ακούγεται μπανάλ, αλλά στα συγκεκριμένα δεν είναι. Θα μπορούσε αυτό να οφείλεται και στο ότι πρόκειται για κείμενο προφορικής διάλεξης, αλλά, με βάση τα όσα έλεγε στο βίντεο που λινκάρισα προχτές πιο πάνω, έτσι (και περισσότερο) πρέπει να δουλεύει και στο γραφτό.]


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## Costas (Dec 14, 2012)

_I also want to express my respect for the translators from various countries who have translated my work. Without you, there would be no world literature. Your work is a bridge that helps people to understand and respect each other._

Φαντάζομαι όλοι κάθε χρόνο το ίδιο θα λένε, αλλά δεν παύει να ισχύει και να πρέπει να λέγεται.


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## Costas (Dec 14, 2012)

Να και η πρώτη συντέντευξη Τύπου των "παραπονούμενων αστυνομικών όλης της χώρας" στο Πεκίνο! [που όμως τα ΜΜΕ δεν τόλμησαν να τη δείξουν] (βίντεο)


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## Costas (Dec 15, 2012)

Άρθρο για την κινητικότητα που παρατηρείται τελευταία με τις καταγγελίες του συστήματος των laojiao, των αναμορφωτηρίων δια της εργασίας, όπου τους μπουζουριάζουν χωρίς δίκη, δηλαδή του κομουνιστικού Arbeit macht Frei. (NYT)

[Η στο άρθρο μεταξύ άλλων αναφερόμενη περίπτωση του 80χρονου βετεράνου του πολέμου της Κορέας έχει αναφερθεί στο παρόν νήμα προ ημερών. Επίσης, το tiger bench ως μέθοδο βασανισμού το συνάντησα κατά τύχη χτες διαβάζοντας ένα άρθρο για τα βασανιστήρια της Μεγάλης Δημοκρατίας, του NRAστάν ντε!, στο Γκουαντάναμο, όπου είχε μια ιστορική αναδρομή στα έργα και τις ημέρες του αρχηγού των μυστικών υπηρεσιών ασφαλείας του Γκουομιντάνγκ, του "Κινέζου Χίμμλερ" Ντάι Λι, τη δεκαετία του 1930, αλλά με κάπως θολή περιγραφή: "“tiger’s bench”, an ancient Chinese method of torture “by which the ligaments beneath the knee are pulled out”", ενώ το παρόν άρθρο της ΝΥΤ λέει "When she complained about dizziness from the paint used to make paper lanterns, Ms. Liu said, she was hogtied to a chair for a week, a dreaded punishment known as the “tiger bench.” Deprived of food and water for several days, she said, she repeatedly lost consciousness. “When they unshackled me from the chair, my legs had turned black with bruises.” Αν ευκαιρήσω, θα το ψάξω.]


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## SBE (Dec 15, 2012)

Ε, λοιπόν, είναι άρρωστοι αυτοί οι εγκέφαλοι που σκέφτονται τέτοια βασανιστήρια...


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## Costas (Dec 15, 2012)

Διαπιστώνω μια διαφορά ανάμεσα στην εικόνα και στη φωτογραφία που υπάρχουν στο λινκ. Στη μια περίπτωση δικιολογείται η φράση που παρέθεσα πιο πάνω για θραύση των συνδέσμων κάτω από το γόνατο, αλλά στη δεύτερη, όπου τα τούβλα είναι βαλμένα κάτω από τις γάμπες, μάλλον σε φάλαγγα με πάνε. Μάλλον τελικά ο 'πάγκος της τίγρης' δεν είναι συγκεκριμένο βασανιστήριο αλλά ένας πολυχρηστικός πάγκος βασανιστηρίων. Να πώς ορίζει τον όρο το Wiktionary:

A type of torture method predominantly used in China in which prisoners are forced to sit on a small iron bench that is approximately 20 cm (6 inches) tall with their knees tied together. With their hands tied behind their backs or sometimes placed on their knees, they are forced to sit straight up and look straight ahead without movement for long periods of time.

Οπότε ξεκινάμε με αυτό και μετά αρχίζουν οι...παραλλαγές. Να και τα γουγλοευρήματα εικόνας του κινέζικου όρου 老虎凳。


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## Costas (Dec 15, 2012)

Όλα έτοιμα για τη νέα υπερταχεία Πεκίνο-Καντόνα, που θα συντομεύσει τη διαδρομή από 22 σε 8 ώρες, αλλά σχετικά με αυτό το "παράλληλο σύμπαν" πρέπει να ειπωθεί (πέρα από το φοβερό δυστύχημα πέρσι) ότι όλοι οι σχολιαστές επιμένουν ότι η Κίνα πρέπει να πάψει να βασίζεται αποκλειστικά στις εξαγωγές και στις γιγάντιες επενδύσεις σε υποδομές υψηλού γοήτρου και τεχνολογίας και να αναπτύξει την εσωτερική της αγορά, προϋπόθεση δε γι' αυτό είναι να μειώσει την ανισότητα (0,61 Gini!) και να φτιάξει ένα εθνικό σύστημα υγείας και συντάξεων που να επιτρέψει στους καταναλωτές να αποχτήσουν περίσσεια εισοδήματος προς κατανάλωση ή να αποδεσμεύσουν προς κατανάλωση κεφάλαια που τώρα τα αποταμιεύουν για την κακιά ώρα. Ας ακούσουμε και μια εργάτρια που ετοιμάζεται να επιστρέψει στον τόπο της για την κινεζική Πρωτοχρονιά (China Daily USA):

Liang Xiuxia, 39, traveled from her rural hometown in Zhoukou, Henan province, to Guangzhou 20 years ago and is now working as a hospital cleaner.
She earns 1,700 yuan per month and regards a ticket home by high-speed rail as "too expensive".
The nearest station along the Beijing-Guangzhou high-speed rail to Liang's hometown is in Luohe city, Henan province. A high-speed railway ticket for a trip from Guangzhou to Luohe will cost at least 586 yuan, more than one-third of Liang's monthly income and three times the price for a seat on an ordinary train.
"I won't consider going home by high-speed rail this Spring Festival because a round trip already costs me more than 1,000 yuan. And I still need to spend another 1,000 yuan to buy gifts for my family back in my hometown," said Liang, whose first choice is traveling by coach, not even by ordinary train, because she doesn't need to transfer to a bus from Luohe to Zhoukou.
She isn't excited about the high-speed railway even though it will take her only about six hours to go home. She would rather be on a bus or an ordinary train for more than 15 hours.
"Saving time doesn't matter to me. Saving money does. I think the main concern for every migrant worker is about money," said Liang.
"I don't eat breakfast to save one or two yuan per day, so I'm unlikely to spend 600 yuan on a train ticket."
The railway authorities should take migrant workers' needs into consideration when developing the high-speed railway, said Shuai Bin, the professor.
"High-speed railway tickets are unaffordable for most migrant workers, so railway authorities should open more low-speed railway lines during travel peak periods such as the Spring Festival," he said.


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## Costas (Dec 17, 2012)

Τα εκλογικά αποτελέσματα της Ιαπωνίας. Οι Φιλελεύθεροι Δημοκράτες πάλι στο τιμόνι. Τους ψήφισαν ακόμα και οι άστεγοι της Φουκουσίμας. (ΝΥΤ)


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## Costas (Dec 17, 2012)

Ο Chen Pingfu (#425) _δεν_ κατηγορείται πια για ανατροπή του κράτους· η εισαγγελία απέσυρε τη συγκεκριμένη κατηγορία. [Δεν είναι ίσως είδηση, αλλά καλό είναι να μαθαίνει κανείς όσο μπορεί τι ακριβώς απέγινε η κάθε υπόθεση.]


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## Costas (Dec 17, 2012)

"Μαύρων φυλακών" συνέχεια. Ένα άρθρο του περιοδικού Caixin με γαργαλιστικές λεπτομέρειες. Δεν είναι τίποτα: αγοράζεις το χώρο, κι όταν φτάσει ο/η παραπονούμενος/η στο επίσημο Γραφείο Παραπόνων του Πεκίνου, οι εκεί υπάλληλοι ειδοποιούν το γραφείο Πεκίνου της επαρχίας προέλευσης των παραπονουμένων, και αυτό πάλι τα κεντρικά της επαρχίας του. Στη συνέχεια δίνεται η εντολή για τη μεταφορά στο "σωφρονιστικό κατάστημα". Νοικοκυρεμένα, δικαιοκρατικά πράματα. (Caixin)


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## Costas (Dec 18, 2012)

Το κορυφαίο βραβείο αρχιτεκτονικής Pritzker απονεμήθηκε για το 2012 στον Κινέζο αρχιτέκτονα Wang Shu, 王澍 [1][2][3]. Οι απόψεις του πάνε κόντρα στην ουρανοξυστική φρενίτιδα που επικρατεί στη χώρα του (βλ. συνέντευξη [3]), αν και έχτισε ένα τέτοιο συγκρότημα (κατοικιών), με τα εξής δύο ατού: 1) το 90% πουλήθηκε σε οικογένειες και όχι σε επενδυτές, και 2) όροφο παρά όροφο έχει μια κεντρική αυλή ανοιχτή στον ουρανό.

(Πάντως, δεν είδα να τον ρώτησε κανείς κάτι για τον Liu Xiaobo...)


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## Costas (Dec 18, 2012)

Ο A.E. Clark επεξεργάζεται περαιτέρω τα ερμηνευτικά του σχόλια στις τρεις ιστορίες που είπε ο Μο Γιαν στο τέλος της διάλεξής του στη Στοκχόλμη (#604) και δίνει ένα κείμενο γεμάτο φίνες παρατηρήσεις και ερμηνείες στο Ragged Banner Press, καταλήγοντας, αναφορικά με τη χρησιμότητα της ερμηνευτικής του προσπάθειας, ως εξής:

Why does this matter? It doesn’t affect the merit of Mo Yan’s works. This analysis has no bearing on whether Mo Yan deserved the Nobel Prize.

It matters, on the simplest level, because it is useful to understand what people are saying to you. That they might choose to rebuke you so subtly that you could easily miss the message may seem an odd form of communication. But you have probably witnessed such exchanges, in which the speaker is annoyed by the hearer and believes himself a lot cleverer. There is often an in-group, perhaps a domestic audience, that is expected to get the point. If the target makes a fuss, he can be assured it was a misunderstanding.[SUP]7[/SUP]

It matters, more seriously, because we need to identify differences honestly. It is beguiling to say, What we’ve got here is failure to communicate, and often that is true. But sometimes what we’ve got is a conflict of core interests or a clash of mutually exclusive values, which no amount of communication will resolve.

It matters, finally, because – even if he never wanted this role – winning the most prestigious international prize moves Mo Yan to the forefront of China’s pursuit of soft power. The leadership is surely pleased that he dismisses as hypocritical nonsense the values underlying the defense of human rights against the State. We will hear more of this, from Mo Yan and others, and it won’t always be so subtle. That is not to say there will be no improvements in the area of human rights. Liu Xia has probably already been assigned better guards.
------------------
(7) In 1972, Zhou Enlai clinked his wineglass against Richard Nixon’s in a particular way that only Chinese would recognize as disrespectful to a guest. The pianist Lang Lang, invited to the White House in 2011, played a melody from a Korean War propaganda movie.


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## Costas (Dec 20, 2012)

Κύριο άρθρο της NYT για τον νέο (επανακάμψαντα) πρωθυπουργό της Ιαπωνίας και άλλο άρθρο για τη νέα πρόεδρο της Ν. Κορέας.

But his career-long fondness for right-wing nationalist statements and gestures is serious cause for concern.
As a candidate this fall, Mr. Abe visited the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, which honors Japan’s war dead, major war criminals included. He shamelessly denies the wartime sexual enslavement of Korean women by Japanese military forces and seeks to tone down past apologies. He says he will reinterpret Japan’s antiwar constitution to permit a more assertive foreign policy. And he favors revising Japan’s already euphemistic school textbooks to further disguise Japan’s militaristic excesses and promote more patriotic pride.
Mr. Abe’s attempts to rewrite Japan’s wartime history understandably disturb neighboring nations, like China and South Korea, that bore the brunt of Japanese aggression. Deliberate manipulation of these resentments by cynical Chinese leaders does not make them less real. Nor does it help that Mr. Abe’s grandfather and political inspiration, the former prime minister, Nobusuke Kishi, served as a top official during the harsh Japanese occupation of the northern Chinese region of Manchuria in the 1930s and as a cabinet minister during World War II.


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## Costas (Dec 21, 2012)

Μια ευχάριστη, εικαστική μέθοδος εκμάθησης βασικών κινέζικων χαρακτήρων:


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## Costas (Dec 24, 2012)

Τα πρώτα 10 μιμίδια του κινεζικού διαδικτύου για το 2012: (WSJ)


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## nickel (Dec 24, 2012)

Να ρίχνουμε και καμιά ενδιαφέρουσα εικονογράφηση...

...it has to be only a matter of time before someone decides they can’t stand the nudity in one of the headline items sold during November’s Poly auction.

Συνέχεια στη WSJ:
Mr. Zhao, the 43-year-old head of China's Poly Auction, smoked cigarettes feverishly in the corner as bidding on the painting—one of the night's most anticipated works—opened at a sky-high 16 million yuan ($2.6 million). But in less than three minutes, Mr. Zhao could relax. The painting, which depicts five partly nude women at a mah-jongg game, sold for $2.7 million, proving that the Chinese art market ...

Wow!







Lui Liu: _Beijing 2008_​


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## Costas (Dec 24, 2012)

Ένας Χαν πηγαίνει να προσκυνήσει στον τόπο της αυτοπυρπόλησης ενός από τις δεκάδες τέτοιους Θιβετιανούς του δύοντος 2012. (Seeing Red in China)


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## Costas (Dec 24, 2012)

Οι κυριότερες περιβαλλοντικές ειδήσεις από την Κίνα για το 2012, δοσμένες από το περιβαλλοντικού ενδιαφέροντος China Dialogue (παίζουν και οι Armani, Zara κλπ.)


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## Costas (Dec 24, 2012)

Πιθανόν να αναβαθμίστηκε η "Χρυσή Ασπίδα" κι έτσι τέρμα το Google Drive! (the west.au)


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## drsiebenmal (Dec 26, 2012)

Κίνα: Δόθηκε στην κυκλοφορία η μεγαλύτερη σιδηροδρομική γραμμή ταχείας κυκλοφορίας στον κόσμο («Κέρδος»)


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## Costas (Dec 26, 2012)

drsiebenmal said:


> Κίνα: Δόθηκε στην κυκλοφορία η μεγαλύτερη σιδηροδρομική γραμμή ταχείας κυκλοφορίας στον κόσμο («Κέρδος»)


Σχετικό, με σχολιασμό. (Η καημένη η "Γκουανσχού" του άρθρου της εφημερίδας Κέρδος είναι η Guangzhou, Γκουανγκ-Τζόου, κατά κόσμον Καντόνα.)


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## Costas (Dec 26, 2012)

Τέρμα λοιπόν το Google Drive στην Κίνα (#628), και ο αρθρογράφος εδώ μιλάει για Web of Failure: How China’s Internet Policies Have Doomed Chinese Soft Power (Tech in Asia). Αν και δεν ξέρω πώς θα μπορούσε η Κίνα του μεταμαοϊκού ΚΚΚ να έχει soft power. Με τι ιδεολογικό εμπόρευμα; Τέλος πάντων.


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## Costas (Dec 27, 2012)

1.
71 διανοούμενοι και πανεπιστημιακοί ζητούν χαλάρωση ελέγχων και λιγότερες παρεμβάσεις στη Δικαιοσύνη με ανοιχτή επιστολή τους. (Bloomberg)
Petition letters seeking reform have a long tradition in China. In 1895, a petition signed by imperial civil examination candidates led to a short-lived period of national cultural and political reforms that ended when conservative opponents of the movement beheaded six of its leaders.
2.
Θα απαιτείται στο εξής το αληθινό όνομα για χρήση του διαδικτύου. (Caixin)
Βέβαια αυτό το έχουμε ακούσει εδώ και χρόνια:
Real name registration is currently required for *mobile phones, 3G network cards and landline phones*. (...) In 2003, China required Internet users provide government identification at *Internet cafes*. Real name *personal website* registration was implemented by MIIT in March 2005.
Δεν καταλαβαίνω τι άλλο μένει.
Κατά τα άλλα, the proposal raises concerns over whether such constraints would be clearly specified under law or subject to wide interpretation as a regulation.
3.
Τα ιδιωτικά ορυχεία έχουν φριχτή φήμη. Τα περισσότερα "ατυχήματα", πριν από μερικά χρόνια που παρακολουθούσα το θέμα, γίνονταν εκεί. Να ωστόσο το πορτρέτο ενός διαφορετικού, να υποθέσω, ιδιοκτήτη ορυχείου (μοναδική περίπτωση που, αφού του άρπαξαν με δικαστική απόφαση το ορυχείο, έγινε αγωνιστής, κατά τον -επίσης αγωνιστή- αρθρογράφο). (Under The Jacaranda)


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## Costas (Dec 27, 2012)

How India is turning into China (and not in a good way) (New Republic) (μέσω Cadmian)

The country’s [=China's] world-class infrastructure— airports, highways, high-speed railroads—would have been inconceivable without an efficient state that ruthlessly appropriated land from peasants while providing financial assistance and the best scientific and technical expertise.
(...)
The police and army have long enjoyed a range of arbitrary powers—the infamous Armed Forces Special Powers Act allows soldiers to kill Indian citizens with impunity. Last year, 2,730 bodies were found dumped in unmarked graves in Kashmir, and human rights groups reported nearly 800 extrajudicial killings between 2007 and 2010 in the northeastern state of Manipur. Innumerable prisoners of conscience—India’s own Liu Xiaobos—have languished in Indian prisons: These include Kashmir’s Shabir Shah, who spent two decades in jail, and, more recently, the reputed doctor Binayak Sen. (India’s great advantage over China is still its large number of courageous activists and dissenters, such as Irom Sharmila, the world’s longest hunger-striker.) In recent years, the Chinese regime has, alarmingly, enhanced its ability to police the Internet and to crack down on dissent. Relatively little attention, however, has been paid to the Indian government’s schemes to censor websites and access phone records; the federal Communications and Information Technology minister recently made the absurd demand that social media sites prescreen content.

China’s integration into the global economy has created a bellicosely nationalistic, rich minority. In India, similarly, big industrialists such as the Tatas and Ambanis, together with the emerging middle class, grow fonder of such business-friendly politicians as Narendra Modi, the Hindu-nationalist chief minister of Gujarat, whose complicity in the murder of over 2,000 Muslims in 2002 didn’t prevent his landslide reelection—or dampen his ambition to become prime minister. In expropriating public resources for private industrial and infrastructural projects and suppressing his critics, Modi is the primary Indian exponent of capitalism with Chinese characteristics. There are equally significant—and worrisome—signs of a creeping populist authoritarianism in the middle-class cult of Adolf Hitler, the popularity of Mein Kampf, or the recent mourning by some of India’s best-known figures in politics, sports, and entertainment of Bal Thackeray, Mumbai’s infamous demagogue (and Hitler enthusiast).


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## Costas (Dec 30, 2012)

Ένα ιστορικό στιγμιότυπο: βίος, πολιτεία και δολοφονία (1913) του Song Jiaoren. (The Economist)


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## Costas (Dec 31, 2012)

Υπόθεση Chen Kegui [1][2], αδελφού του Chen Guangcheng, που καταδικάστηκε στις 30 Νοεμ. σε 3 χρόνια και 4 μήνες φυλακή γιατί δεν έκατσε να τον σκοτώσουν νύχτα μέσα στο ίδιο του το σπίτι:
Η δήλωση του δικηγόρου του Si Weijiang (1η Δεκ.) για την παρωδία δίκης και η δήλωση του πατέρα του (6 Δεκ.) για το ίδιο θέμα. Από την πρώτη:

As Liu Zongyuan (柳宗元) writes in his _Discourse of the Snake-Catcher_, “When the government officials came to my village, they scream and shout and bully the villagers.” Now, the actions of Zhang Jian and the others went far beyond that. Under the laws of our socialist nation, our town officials are sneaking in the deep of night into ordinary citizens’ homes, using violence against innocent citizens, and when the citizens take action in self-defense, stopping before it goes too far, they are unexpectedly charged with intentional injury. According to The Tang Code, “any intruder invading another person’s home at night will be caned with bamboo 40 times. If the homeowner kills the intruder on the spot, he is exempt from criminal charges.” The Ming Code and Qing Code also state: “In any instance that an intruder enters another person’s house without cause, he will be caned with a rod 80 times. The owner will not be charged should he kill the intruder on the spot.”
(...)
Whose country is this anyway? Who has brought this shame to our country?

Και από τη δεύτερη:
History is created by the people. Water can support a boat or capsize it. Are those in power not aware of a rule as plain as this?

Πίσω στα δικά μας, κυρίως μη βγείτε από το σπίτι σας αν δείτε όργανα του κράτους να ποδοπατούν έναν άνθρωπο με χειροπέδες! Surtout pas!


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## Costas (Dec 31, 2012)

Για δεύτερη φορά μέσα σε λίγους μήνες η ΝΥΤ κάνει ρεπορτάζ εναντίον ενός υψηλόβαθμου στελέχους της κινεζικής κρατικής οικονομίας, κατηγορώντας τον εμμέσως ότι βοήθησε συγγενείς του να πλουτίσουν αγοράζοντας σε εξαιρετικά χαμηλή τιμή μετοχές εταιρείας που ήταν υπό τη θεσμική επίβλεψή του, προτού αυτή εισαχθεί στο χρηματιστήριο με δημόσια προσφορά μετοχών και η αξία της εκτοξευτεί. Εμπλέκει και πάλι τον πρώην πρωθυπουργό Ουέν Τζιαμπάο στην υπόθεση. Εμπλέκεται επίσης η "δική μας" Cosco.


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## Costas (Dec 31, 2012)

Διαφωνούντες έσπασαν τον κλοιό απομόνωσης της Λιού Σιά, συζύγου του νομπελίστα Ειρήνης Λιού Σιαομπό. (Καθημερινή)
Το βίντεο (4min).


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## Costas (Dec 31, 2012)

China: A Century of Revolution [1949-1976] Part 2. (βίντεο) Και με αυτή την αναδρομή στα μεταπολεμικά έργα και τις ημέρες του μεγαλύτερου δημαγωγού της Ιστορίας, το νήμα κλείνει το 2012 και εύχεται νέες περιπέτειες του χρόνου, να 'μαστε πρώτα καλά! :)


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## Costas (Jan 2, 2013)

Σε συνέχεια της είδησης ότι ο Hu Jia, ο Xu Youyu (Ξ[Σ]ϋ Γιόου-Ϋ) και άλλοι διαδικτυακοί φίλοι έσπασαν για λίγα έστω λεπτά την απομόνωση της γυναίκας τού Liu Xiaobo, Liu Xia, μέσα στο σπίτι της (#637 δύο ποστ πιο πάνω, όπου το βίντεο), νά το σπίτι, η κάτοψη και ο χάρτης (5 λεπτά απ' την Τιαν Αν Μεν, που λέει ο λόγος!)(sina.hk):






Με βάση τη φωτογραφία της όψης του συγκροτήματος, νομίζω ότι στην κάτοψη αριστερά το μπλε ορθογώνιο "B", που αναπαριστά το πρόπυλο της εισόδου, θα 'πρεπε να 'ναι όχι δεξιά από το κόκκινο ορθογώνιο "Α" αλλά κολλημένο από κάτω του. Το πρόπυλο αυτό έχει εξώπορτα, διαδρομάκι και εσώπορτα, όπως βλέπουμε στην ανάπτυξη του "Β" κάτω δεξιά, μέσα στο μπλε πλαίσιο (στην κάτοψή του έχουν σημειώσει και τον υπνόσακο ή ό,τι είναι αυτό πάνω στην καρέκλα αριστερά).
Ενδιαφέρον έχει ότι στο χάρτη του Πεκίνου που εμφαίνει τη θέση του σπιτιού ο δείχτης δείχνει όχι το Βορρά αλλά το Νότο. Η Τια(ε)νανμέν (Πύλη της Ουράνιας Γαλήνης) και η Απαγορευμένη Πόλη είναι στο κάτω αριστερά μέρος του χάρτη.
Το εσταντανέ τής εδώ και χρόνια κατ' οίκον φυλακισμένης φωτογράφου (με άδειες εξόδου για να επισκέπτεται τον άντρα της και τη μάνα της) είναι από το βίντεο του #637.

Ο Χου Τζια δήλωσε [κινεζιστί] ότι η "δεν μπορούμε ν' αφήσουμε να συνεχιστεί άλλο η παράνομη κράτηση της Λίου Ξ(Σ)ιά".

-------------------------------
Νωρίτερα, στις αρχές Δεκεμβρίου, ένας διαφωνών απεύθυνε ανοιχτή επιστολή στο νέο ηγέτη της χώρα Ξ(Σ)ι Τζινπίνγκ, με θέμα κυρίως την απόλυτη καταπάτηση κάθε κανόνα δικαίου στην αντιμετώπιση όποιου σηκώνει κεφάλι (Seeing Red in China):

This country’s law enforcers and related authorities have been out there to make life impossible for anyone who speaks the truth and common sense. They force employers to fire these citizens; they pressure landlords into squeezing out tenants by suspending legitimate leases and forcing these aforementioned citizens to move. They even transport these citizens away from the cities where they make a living, or threaten their spouses, family and close friends. They illegally monitor these citizens’ communications and privacy. They go as far as forcing them to “travel”, placing them under house arrest, or beating them up outright. They employ countless thuggish means of oppression, but all of them can be summed up in three characters: “despicable” (下三烂).
(...)
I hereby state: If I violate the law of the People’s Republic of China, please summon me, indict me and try me according to legal procedures. If the law enforcement and those who are supposed to defend the law use any unlawful methods against me, my family, my relatives or my friend, my answer will be that a reasonable, modest liberal can also be blood-roiled, and I will not hesitate to defend my dignity and the law with my own life.

Sincerely,

Li Huaping (李化平)

Citizen of the People’s Republic of China, ID no. 510102196609066591
December 10, 2012, World Human Rights Day


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## Costas (Jan 3, 2013)

Mapping China's Red Nobility (Bloomberg). Νόστιμο γραφικό.


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## Costas (Jan 6, 2013)

Ένα άρθρο του Pankaj Mishra στην Guardian όπου ασκεί πολεμική στον Salman Rushdie (είχε γράψει πως ο Μο Γιαν είναι patsy του καθεστώτος του Πεκίνου) και στους υπόλοιπους αυτοδίκαιους μοραλιστές δαχτυλοκουνιστές του Κινέζου συγγραφέα, και τους λέει ότι αν θέλουν να έχουν στοιχειώδη αξιοπιστία οι κραυγές τους θα πρέπει πρώτα να κοιταχτούν στον καθρέφτη καλά-καλά και, αν επιζήσουν από αυτό το κοίταγμα (πόλεμος του Βιετνάμ, Παλαιστινιακό, πόλεμος στο Ιράκ και στο Αφγανιστάν, Μπράντλεϋ Μάννινγκ, drones κλπ.), τότε εντάξει. Αλλιώς, είναι υποκριτές. Βγάζει δε στη φόρα διάφορα άπλυτα διαφόρων 'ηρώων' της Δυτικής λογοτεχνίας. Εμ βέβαια! Φο και Πίντερ δεν είναι πολλοί!... Στο άρθρο απάντησε ο Salman Rushdie, και του ξαναπάντησε ο Mishra (τα λινκ διαθέσιμα στην ίδια εφημερίδα, στο Σχετικά Άρθρα).

Why Salman Rushdie should pause before condemning Mo Yan on censorship
The Nobel laureate's political choices are deplorable, but why don't we expose western novelists to the same scrutiny?


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## Costas (Jan 6, 2013)

.....
.....
Ένας υπέροχος γελοιογράφος, ο Kuang Biao，邝飚, που αξίζει να γνωρίσουμε. Οι σχέσεις του με την εξουσία είναι...ταραχώδεις. [1][2]. Από το λινκ [1], νά ένα δείγμα της σημασιολογικής καταρράκωσης την οποία επιφέρει στη γλώσσα η πολιτική ανελευθερία:

The Southern Metropolis Daily’s Visual Center cartoon editor Kuang Biao created a cartoon based solely on hearsay with an existing orientation bias and put it on his personal blog at Sina.com. The cartoon’s content involved sensitive matters and violated propaganda discipline and related newspaper office regulations and had a negative impact. After the newspaper office discovered [the cartoon], it hurriedly deleted and managed it, and furthermore asked Sina in a timely manner to assist in deleting and blocking the violating posts, making a concerted effort to reduce negative impact.

This publication’s editorial committee has stressed time and again that publication employees strictly abide by news propagation discipline and establish a high level of overall awareness. They are responsible for that awareness and political sensitivity. The cartoon that Kuang Biao took upon himself to create and propagate passed along fault and disfavor to the group and to the publication’s related employees, having a negative impact.


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## nickel (Jan 6, 2013)

Αυτή εδώ είναι συγκλονιστική!







In a famous 1980 Communist Party meeting, a senior leader named Chen Yun said China should institute reforms slowly and carefully, as if “crossing the river by feeling for the stones.” This cartoon seems to suggest that the party has so focused on groping stones that it’s forgotten to actually climb out toward reform — or decided against it.


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## Costas (Jan 6, 2013)

*Google concedes defeat in China censorship battle*
US company quietly drops warning message that Chinese users saw when searching for politically sensitive phrases
(The Guardian)


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## Costas (Jan 6, 2013)

nickel said:


> Αυτή εδώ είναι συγκλονιστική!


Συμφωνώ απολύτως!


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## Costas (Jan 7, 2013)

The China Story: Yearbook 2012: Red Rising, Red Eclipse
Πολύ χορταστική επετηρίδα γραμμένη από πλειάδα Αυστραλών μελετητών για την Κίνα της περιόδου 2008-2012 σε πολλές εκφάνσεις της, κυρίως πολιτικές, γεωστρατηγικές και κοινωνικές. Κατεβαίνει και κεφάλαιο-κεφάλαιο σε pdf, ePub και Kindle. Δωρεάν. Γενική εποπτεία: Geremie Barmé.


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## Costas (Jan 7, 2013)

Βράζει το καζάνι της αγανάχτησης για τη λογοκρισία από την Πρωτοχρονιά και δώθε, με αφορμή μια σκαστή τέτοια περίπτωση στο Πρωτοχρονιάτικο μήνυμα πολύ γνωστής εφημερίδας. Ομαδικές ανοιχτές επιστολές διαμαρτυρίας [1][2], κλείσιμο φύλλων, κλείσιμο μπλογκ, ρεσάλτο σε μπλογκ· αλλά ο φόβος, που φυλάει τα έρημα, είναι αυτή τη στιγμή μικρότερος από την οργή, εν μέρει επειδή η Κίνα βρίσκεται σε περίοδο μεταβίβασης της εξουσίας και άρα αβεβαιότητας. Κάποιοι έχουν κατέβει στους δρόμους. (scmp) (ΝΥΤ)

Addendum:
"The ice has thickened, and this is not one day’s Winter"
"Wherever he goes ten thousand horses stand mute" [i.e., no one dares say anything].
Το μεγάλο πρόβλημα, της μετάφρασης: τ' αλλάζεις ή τ' αφήνεις; Είναι τόσο ωραία...


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## Costas (Jan 7, 2013)

Σχολιασμός της "υπόθεσης Southern Weekly" (南方周末) από τον Yaxue Cao τού Seeing Red in China:

The Southern Weekend incident that has been raging started from a Weibo post complaining about a procedural breach by the Propaganda Department: The paper has a long tradition of publishing a New Year’s greeting letter, and this year’s letter was entitled “China’s Dream, the Dream of Constitutionalism.” Approved by censors (everything the paper publishes has to be approved by censors) and signed off by editors, it was ready to be printed. But without the knowledge of the editors, officials at the Propaganda Department rewrote it, retitled it as “Chasing the Dream”, and put it in print (...)

Over the last few days, Weibo was ablaze with condemnation of the Party’s control of media and support for the Southern Weekend. Several statements and petitions by the journalists themselves, by interns, by prominent intellectuals, by the public have been circulated.

Now, what I want to point out in this post is this: Whatever the journalists at the Southern Weekend may want at the bottom of their hearts, they have NOT been appealing for freedom of the press, or the lift of censorship. They are merely protesting the procedural breach and demanding the resignation of Tuo Zhen (庹震), the Party’s propaganda chief in Guangdong.
(...)
However, most of their supporters online and offline are taking the opportunity to appeal for significantly more: freedom of the press and other fundamental demands.


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## Costas (Jan 8, 2013)

Σ' ένα καινούργιο άρθρο της ΝΥΤ σχετικά με τις εκδηλώσεις διαμαρτυρίας φοιτητών και άλλων μορφωμένων και ενδιαφερομένων για την ελευθερία έκφρασης έξω από τα γραφεία της Southern Weekend στην Καντόνα, αναφέρεται:

“Hoping for a spring in this harsh winter,” Li Bingbing, an actress, said to her 19 million followers on a microblog account. Yao Chen, an actress with more than 31 million followers, cited a quotation by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Russian Nobel laureate and dissident: “One word of truth outweighs the whole world.” 

Προσωπικά μού κάνει εντύπωση που τόσο μεϊνστρίμ προσωπικότητες του θεάματος παίρνουν θέση, έστω και τόσο πλάγια, σ' αυτό το θέμα ενώπιον των εκατομμυρίων "οπαδών" ή "φαν" τους. Επίσης:

Many of the people who showed up Monday at the newspaper offices in Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong Province, carried banners with slogans and white and yellow chrysanthemums, a flower that symbolizes mourning.

Πάντως τα χρυσάνθεμα κατασχέθηκαν και μερικοί μετά μάζευαν τα πέταλά τους...


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## Costas (Jan 8, 2013)

China facing 'extremely grave' environmental crisis (The Telegraph)

Το δώρο του Αϊ-Βασίλη ήταν 9 τόνοι ανιλίνη στο ποτάμι, πράγμα που ανάγκασε τις αρχές να διακόψουν κάθε παροχή νερού σε μια ολόκληρη πόλη. Το έργο το 'χουμε ξαναδεί, μόνο που δεν είναι έργο...


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## Earion (Jan 8, 2013)

Η μια έχει 19 εκατομμύρια θαυμαστές, η άλλη 31. Οι διορθωτές των γραπτών για τις εισαγωγικές των πανεπιστημίων μιας επαρχίας έχουν να αξιολογήσουν εκατοντάδες χιλιάδες γραπτά





Μα τι κλίμακες είναι αυτές; Πώς να τις συλλάβει ο νους του ανθρώπου;


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## Costas (Jan 8, 2013)

Ωραιότατη φωτό!
Ε, ναι, τα μέλη του ΚΚΚ (όχι όλα απολύτως συνειδητά, βεβαίως βεβαίως...) είναι 80 εκατομμύρια. Πού 'σαι ρε Παπαρήγα! Θυμάμαι που η Κινέζα δασκάλα μας πριν από πολλά χρόνια μάς έλεγε πως το βασικό με την Κίνα είναι οι γιγάντιες κλίμακες σε όλα τα επίπεδα. Ο μισός δήμος Πεκίνου είναι σχεδόν όσο όλη η Ελλάδα σε πληθυσμό.


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## Costas (Jan 8, 2013)

Έχω ξαναναφερθεί στο βιβλίο Tombstone για το Μεγάλο Άλμα προς τα...Μπρος, αλλά μια και μου ήρθε διαφημιστική πρόταση από το Amazon, βάζω εδώ το λινκ. (Το περίεργο είναι ότι όταν μπαίνω με το δικό μου λογαριασμό μού βγάζει οψιόν για Kindle, ενώ όταν μπαίνω ξεκάρφωτα βγάζει χωρίς καθόλου Kindle...)


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## Costas (Jan 8, 2013)

Η μεγάλη χτεσινή είδηση είναι ότι China Says It Will Overhaul Sprawling System of Re-education Through Labor (ΝΥΤ).

Established by Mao Zedong in the 1950s to swiftly neutralize political opponents, re-education through labor has evolved into a sprawling extralegal system of 350 camps where more than 100,000 people toil in prison factories and on farms for up to four years. Sentences are meted out by local public security officials, and defendants have no access to lawyers and little chance for appeal.

Αφιερωμένο εξαιρετικά στους μαοϊκούς του τότε και του σήμερα, στο σημερινό ΚΚΕ που θεωρεί ακόμα την Κίνα σοσιαλιστική και σε έναν τουλάχιστον αρθρογραφούντα υποψήφιο βουλευτή του ΣΥΡΙΖΑ στις πρόσφατες εκλογές.


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## Costas (Jan 8, 2013)

Η αντίδραση του Πεκίνου στις διαμαρτυρίες γύρω από την υπόθεση Southern Weekly, όπου οι διαμαρτυρόμενοι δημοσιογράφοι και διανοούμενοι ζήτησαν την παραίτηση του υπεύθυνου λογοκρισίας Tuo Zhen (scmp):

China’s top propaganda organ has sent out an urgent memo stressing that the Communist Party still had “absolute control” of the press in China – and this would not change, sources said on Tuesday. In the memo, sent on Monday to party chiefs and media officials, the Publicity Department of the Communist Party’s Central Committee said it had reached three conclusions over the recent censorship row at Southern Weekly. These are:

“The party has absolute control of China’s media. This basic principle is unshakable,” it said.
“The Southern Weekly publishing incident has nothing to do with Guangdong province’s propaganda chief, comrade Tuo Zhen.”
“Hostile foreign forces had interfered in the Southern Weekly incident,” the memo added.

These three points have been confirmed by a senior editor at a Beijing newspaper and an editor at a Guangzhou newspaper.
The memo requires officials to continue to prevent editors and journalists from expressing online support for Southern Weekly. It also asked newspapers to print an editorial published by the state-run newspaper, the Global Times. Bouquets of chrysanthemums and a Guy Fawkes mask laid in front of the Southern Weekend newspaper office in Guangzhou on January 7, 2013. The harsh editorial claimed China did not have the ‘social infrastructure’ to support a free press. “Because of China’s social and political realities, the press freedoms asked by these people simply don’t exist,” read the editorial. “Media reform is only part of China’s large reforms, and it will never become a special area,” it added.

Addendum:
Αναφορικά με το It also asked newspapers to print an editorial published by the state-run newspaper, the Global Times, το AFP σημειώνει το εξής:
But in an unusual move, major web portals carrying it in Chinese -- Sina, Sohu, Tencent and Netease -- posted disclaimers. The message on Sina said its republication "does not mean that our website agrees with its opinion or verifies what it describes".


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## Costas (Jan 9, 2013)

Νεότερα από την υπόθεση Southern Weekly. (ΝΥΤ) Όσον αφορά την παρουσία υποστηριχτών του ΚΚ, όχι πως αυτοί δεν υπάρχουν, αστείο πράμα, αλλά ας μην ξεχνάμε τη δημόσια διανομή χρημάτων σε φιλοκυβερνητικούς διαδηλωτές ακόμα και στο Χονγκ Κονγκ πρόσφατα, πόσο μάλλον στην Κίνα του 50 cent Party. Εξόχως ειρωνική είναι επίσης η φωτογραφία της ιατρικής μάσκας με την προτροπή "Μη Μιλάς!" να πλαισιώνει το V (for Vendetta), όταν αυτό το Μη Μιλάς! είναι το λογοτεχνικό ψευδώνυμο του πρόσφατου Κινέζου νομπελίστα συγγραφέα Μο Γιαν:


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## bernardina (Jan 9, 2013)

Take a *Wall* on the Wild Side

Ή πώς η φύση καταλαμβάνει το Μεγάλο Σινικό Τείχος και άλλες φωτογραφίες


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## Costas (Jan 9, 2013)

Όπως τα δικά μας καλντερίμια!


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## Costas (Jan 10, 2013)

Από το σημερινό, ανακεφαλαιωτικό τού έτους 2012 και προβλεπτικό του 2013, άρθρο του Γ. Βαρουφάκη στο protagon, δύο παράγραφοι για την Κίνα:

Η Κίνα (στη βάση γιγάντιων τονωτικών ενέσεων, υπό την μορφή δημοσίων επενδύσεων) διατήρησε την ελάχιστη μεγέθυνση που της εξασφαλίζει τη συγκράτηση των κοινωνικών συγκρούσεων, με αντίτιμο όμως (α) την κατάρρευση του ποσοστού κατανάλωσης (στο 27% του ΑΕΠ – κάτι που καθιστά την χώρα ανίκανη να προσφέρει αρκετή ζήτηση στον υπόλοιπο κόσμο) και (β) τη δημιουργία επικίνδυνης φούσκας στην αγορά ακινήτων (που απειλεί την Κίνα με μια Κρίση όπως εκείνη της Ιαπωνίας ή της Ν. Κορέας της δεκαετίας του 1990).
(...)
Η Ιαπωνία και η Κίνα τελούν υπό καθεστώς πανικού καθώς η ενεργός ζήτηση για τις εξαγωγές τους από ΗΠΑ και Ευρώπη, δίχως τις οποίες δεν καταφέρνουν να σταθεροποιούν την εγχώρια οικονομία τους, όλο και φθίνει.


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## Costas (Jan 10, 2013)

Λίγο Βιετνάμ: Activists Convicted in Vietnam Crackdown on Dissent (ΝΥΤ)


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## Costas (Jan 11, 2013)

We don't need high-rise buildings, the status of the world's second-largest economy, or an aircraft carrier. What China needs now is a newspaper that tells the truth. That is because the right to tell the truth represents human dignity. Major powers that command respect worldwide possess newspapers that speak the truth. Our authorities have long exerted control on speech, but this time they altered an article and made a newspaper tell lies. To me, this feels as if the insult toward freedom of speech has been lifted up a level. I cannot stand it, and I believe many other people feel the same. (Li Chengpend, 44 ετών, μικρομπλόγκερ, 6,6 εκατομμ. παρακολουθητές) (Asahi Shimbun)

Βέβαια οι ανάγκες των κυρίαρχων είναι διαφορετικές. Η Beijing News, που αρνιόταν να δημοσιεύσει όπως είχε διαταχτεί το κύριο άρθρο της κομματικής Global Times όπου δηλώνεται με τον πιο αψιμυθίωτο τρόπο το μη διαπραγματεύσιμο της απόλυτης δεσποτείας των κομουνιστών στον Τύπο της ΛΔΚ, αναγκάστηκε τελικά να υποκύψει, όταν απειλήθηκε με κλείσιμο. Το δημοσίεψε στη σελίδα 29, μισό, χωρίς όνομα επιμελητή.

According to several sources with inside information related to the Beijing News, Yan Liqiang, the deputy head of the Beijing municipal Communist Party committee propaganda department, repeatedly called the newspaper's editors on the afternoon of Jan. 8, demanding that the editorial be printed. When the editors refused, Yan was forced to visit the newspaper's head office later that afternoon, where he met with Dai Zigeng, president of Beijing News. "We want to decide through a democratic vote," Dai apparently told Yan. There were about 100 reporters and editors in the newsroom at the time. When they were asked if the editorial should be carried or not, everyone opposed running it. "We will not carry the editorial," Dai said. "If you still insist that we carry it, I will resign my post." Some reporters said: "If the president resigns, we will also quit."
Yan left the company without hearing the answer he wanted and began ratcheting up the pressure to get the journalists to comply. At 1:30 a.m. on Jan. 9, he called the printing plant and ordered them not to print the Beijing News if the Global Times editorial was not included. Some people in the newsroom began posting messages about the developments on Weibo, the Chinese microblogging service. However, those messages were immediately deleted. Reporters and editors out of the office began showing up in the newsroom in the early morning hours. Yan finally said, "If you continue to refuse to run the editorial, we will have to disband the Beijing News." The ultimatum worked. The editors were forced to run the editorial. (Asahi Shimbun)

Εν τω μεταξύ, ο νέος (και παλιότερος) πρωθυπουργός της Ιαπωνίας σκέφτεται να ανακαλέσει τη συγνώμη της χώρας του, του 1995, για τα όσα έκανε στον Β' Παγκόσμιο Πόλεμο. (Asahi Shimbun)


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## Costas (Jan 11, 2013)

Εάν η είδηση είναι ακριβοδίκαιη, μετά τις σινιέ τσάντες, το τριών δολαρίων δαχτυλίδι του αρραβώνα της πριγκίπισσας Καιτούλας και τα αυστριακά χωριά-μνημεία του Ουνέσκο, έχουμε τώρα και μεγαθήριο σε κλεψιράιτ σχέδια της Zaha Hadid στην Κίνα, συγκεκριμένα στο Τσόνγκ-τσινγκ. (artdaily.org)


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## Costas (Jan 11, 2013)

Οι αυτοπυρπολήσεις στο Θιβέτ είναι γνωστές (και πολλές). Ποιος δε θυμάται τις αντίστοιχες της δεκαετίας του '60, στο Ν. Βιετνάμ; Να λοιπόν ένα γράμμα του Βιετναμέζου Thich Nhat Hanh (βουδιστή ζεν εξόριστου εδώ και χρόνια στη Γαλλία· του επιτράπηκε να επισκεφτεί το Βιετνάμ το 2005) προς τον Μάρτιν Λούθερ Κινγκ από το 1965, με αυτό ακριβώς το θέμα. Εξηγεί στο χριστιανό Μ.Λ. Κινγκ γιατί η αυτοπυρπόληση δεν είναι αυτοκτονία με τη χριστιανική έννοια. Ο Κινγκ πρότεινε τον επιστολογράφο για το βραβείο Νόμπελ Ειρήνης. (aavw - Afro-American Involvement in the Vietnam War)

Αποικία του Θιβέτ, 2012: (China Digital Times)
- All subsistence stipends, disaster relief assistance, and other public welfare policies enjoyed by the self-immolator’s family are to be revoked. The family is hereby permanently disqualified from such programs. All government financed and implemented projects are to be cancelled in the town of the self-immolator. Any and all current or planned projects are to be adjusted and cancelled.
- Immediately investigate the identities of any local Tibetan who visits the home of the self-immolator’s family to offer condolences or donate money… Public security organs are to immediately take action and enact an intense crackdown.
- Any civilian or monk who visits the family of a “self-immolator” to give condolences or donate money must undergo criticism and reeducation. Revoke subsistence stipends, disaster relief assistance, and all other public welfare policies enjoyed by those who organize trips to family homes or represent civilians or monks on visits to family members.
- Revoke subsistence stipends, disaster relief assistance, and all other public welfare policies for any village or temple which organizes large-scale donation or fundraising events. The village community and/or temple(s) are hereby disqualified from applying for any government financed or implemented project for three years. Any and all current or planned projects are to be adjusted and cancelled.
- Those leading or organizing the visitation of civilians or monks to deliver condolences to family members of a “self-immolator” or institute apportionment… must be quickly and severely punished in accordance with the law. If the Party secretary or village head participates… immediately enact a political reshuffling of the town government. If any activities were organized by living Buddhas of local temples or management committees, the offending temple is to be closed in accordance with the law.
- Cadres found ignoring Party discipline and state law who visit family members of “self-immolators” to offer condolences or donate money are to be immediately fired from their public post and transferred to the custody of judicial organs to be dealt with according to the law.


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## Costas (Jan 11, 2013)

Οι Κινέζοι διαλέγουν τα ονόματα που δίνουν στα παιδιά τους ελεύθερα (δεν έχουν το δικό μας σύστημα με τους παππούδες/γιαγιάδες). Να ένα συγκεκριμένο παράδειγμα: ένα κορίτσι το ονόμασαν οι γονείς του 琳夕，Πετράδι στο Σούρουπο. Η μαμά αγαπούσε μια συγγραφέα ονόματι 林夕 (Δάσος το Σούρουπο), που μοιάζει πολύ σαν γραφή με το προηγούμενο και είναι ίδιο σαν προφορά. Ένας πρόσθετος λόγος όμως είχε να κάνει με τα παιχνίδια της γραφής· δηλ. αν πάρετε του πρώτου χαρακτήρα (του 琳) το δεξιό κομμάτι (το 林) και το βάλετε από πάνω απ' το δεύτερο χαρακτήρα (το 夕), τότε προκύπτει ο χαρακτήρας 梦, που σημαίνει Όνειρο. Ε, κατακυρώθηκε το όνομα!


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## SBE (Jan 11, 2013)

Ενδιαφέρον. Μια φίλη μου Κινεζοαυστραλέζα λέγεται Γι Α (Ία αγγλιστί). Οι γονείς της είναι αμφότεροι διδάκτορες κινεζικής ιστορίας (της παλιότερης, όχι της σύγχρονης). Και θυμάμαι που είχε πιάσει κουβέντα με μια Κινέζα απο την Κίνα και της έγραψε το όνομά της κι η άλλη χαμογέλασε και σχολίασε "οι γονείς σου ήταν πολύ φιλόδοξοι". Ξέρω ότι το ένα από τα δύο σημαίνει κάτι σε ευημερία, ευτυχία, αφθονία, τύχη κλπ.


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## Costas (Jan 13, 2013)

On Scale of 0 to 500, Beijing’s Air Quality Tops ‘Crazy Bad’ at 755 (ΝΥΤ)


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## Costas (Jan 16, 2013)

6λεπτο βιντεοσκοπημένο σχόλιο του Gao Wenqian (του Human Rights in China) για την υπόθεση Southern Weekly και το κύμα πολιτικής ανυπακοής και συμπαράστασης που ξεσήκωσε. Καθώς μιλάει προβάλλονται και εικόνες από διάφορες μορφές διαμαρτυρίας και αλληλεγγύης (πολύ ωραίοι οι 'γύψοι' στο 2:53· επίσης γλυκύτατες οι 'φοιτητριούλες' του 3:41 με τα...καπιταλιστικά συνθήματα "ο λαός έχει δικαίωμα να μιλά", "δεν υπάρχει χειμώνας που να μην τελειώνει", καθώς και η καλλονή επίσης φοιτήτρια με το...αμερικανοκίνητο "ναι στην ελευθερία των ειδήσεων, όχι στο φίμωμα της κοινής γνώμης". Επίσης, προσέξτε τις ακροστιχίδες στο 4:06 και στο 4:10, σε σελίδες που μιλούν για GDP και τέτοια).

People have come to detest Hu Jintao's empty words during his decade of rule (...) Of course, we can't rule out retaliation later, because that is what the Communist Party has always done. This event will have a profound impact on the history of China. Regardless of its outcome, the incident will change the direction of politics and affect the entire political environment from this point onward.

Two main things distinguish this incident. First, people from all walks of life have participated in it, unlike before. Previously, incidents were often confined to a single region or industry. This one is cross-region, cross-industry, and has turned into a society-wide citizen action. Not only have journalists come forward to show their solidarity with Southern Weekly, but the incident has spread to the Beijing News, where the staff collectively refused to publish Party propaganda. Further, grassroots activists and social elites have come together [to show support]. Scholars from the mainland, Taiwan, and Hong Kong have issued statements; plus, those who don’t usually get involved, like Confucian scholars and TV and movie stars, have used various methods to issue statements or express their own views.


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## Costas (Jan 19, 2013)

China lets Gini out of the bottle;  wide wealth gap (Reuters)
Άλλος λέει 0,47, άλλος 0,61...


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## Costas (Jan 19, 2013)

Κυκλοφόρησε και στα γαλλικά το βιβλίο του συγγραφέα Liao Yiwu (Λιάο Γϊού) για τα χρόνια του στη φυλακή (την πρώτη φορά), Dans l'Empire des Ténèbres. (Paris-Match)


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## Costas (Jan 19, 2013)

Το Κόμμα των 50 σεντς αναλαμβάνει δράση στο Weibo. (South China Morning Post)
Προ ημερών ένας πολύ γνωστός μπλόγκερ (6+ εκατομ. ακόλουθοι) σε μια παρουσίαση βιβλίου του πήγαν να τον μαχαιρώσουν, κι αυτός έβγαλε μετά 50αράκια και τους τα πέταγε.


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## Costas (Jan 21, 2013)

Ο αδερφός του φυλακισμένου (σε μυστική δίκη) δικηγόρου Γκάο Τζισένγκ ταξίδεψε μερικές χιλιάδες χιλιόμετρα στο Ξ(Σ)ιντζιάνγκ να τον δει. Ούτε καν πότε τελειώνει η κράτησή του δεν του επιτράπηκε να τον ρωτήσει! (RFA)


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## Costas (Jan 23, 2013)

Η περιοχή "Πηγές των Τριών Ποταμών" (Κίτρινος, Γιανγκτσέ και Μεκόνγκ) του Θιβέτ και τα προβλήματά της από την κλιματική αλλαγή. (China Dialogue)

Αστυνομικοί τής βίασαν την 11χρονη κόρη και την εκπόρνευσαν, διαμαρτυρήθηκε για τις χαμηλές ποινές τους, την έστειλαν γι' αυτό χωρίς δίκη στην αναμόρφωση δια της εργασίας, την άφησαν λόγω της κατακραυγής, μήνυσε το κράτος γι' αυτό, και μετά την απόρριψη της μήνυσής της τώρα μήνυσε τους δεσμώτες της. (sina)


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## Costas (Jan 24, 2013)

Διευθυντής σύνταξης περιοδικού στην *Ταϊλάνδη* έφαγε 10 χρόνια φυλακή για προσβολή του βασιλιά για δύο αλληγορικά άρθρα, χωρίς ονομαστικές αναφορές, που παραλλήλιζαν τη βασιλική οικογένεια με συνωμότες μαζικής δολοφονίας και τον βασιλιά με φάντασμα, αντίστοιχα. Ο συντάκτης των άρθρων, παλιός υπουργός, έχει καταφύγει στην Καμπότζη. (ΝΥΤ)


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## SBE (Jan 24, 2013)

Απ'όσο ξέρω από Ταϊλανδούς συμφοιτητές, εκεί τη βασιλική οικογένεια δεν την πιάνεις στο στόμα σου. 
Είχε έρθει επίσκεψη στο Καίμπριτζ μια από τις πριγκίπισσες και είχε πάει στην αντίστοιχη δεξίωση ένας συμφοιτητής μου Ταϊλανδός, και ενώ στο φέισμπουκ είχε βάλει φωτογραφία με τον εαυτό του και τον Κάρολο, φωτογραφία με κάποιον υψηλόβαθμο Κινέζο πολιτικό, φωτογραφία με τον έναν, φωτογραφία με τον άλλο, δεν υπήρχε ούτε μία με την πριγκίπισσά του. Όταν ρώτησα είπε ότι κάτι τέτοιο θα ήταν πολύ χοντρό σφάλμα, θα έδειχνε έλλειψη καλών τρόπων και ίσως να έβρισκε και το μπελά του.


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## Costas (Jan 24, 2013)

Ζαζουλική είδηση (χωρίς βίντεο):
Chinese workers dance Gangnam Style to protest over unpaid wages (The Guardian)


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## Costas (Jan 25, 2013)

Καθημερινές ιστορίες πόνου, αδικίας, απανθρωπιάς και ανελευθερίας. (scmp)


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## bernardina (Jan 25, 2013)

Costas said:


> Ζαζουλική είδηση (χωρίς βίντεο):
> Chinese workers dance Gangnam Style to protest over unpaid wages (The Guardian)



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHx_xj6eL84


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## Costas (Jan 25, 2013)

Καλώς, καλώς: Εδώ. Αλλά κάνει ώρα να φορτώσει (καλύτερα πατήστε το pause και περιμέντε να φορτώσει το πρώτο λεπτό, όπου και ο χορός) και τα πλάνα είναι δευτερολέπτου...Όλο το υπόλοιπο είναι τα χαρτιά με τις οφειλές, φυσικά.


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## Costas (Jan 26, 2013)

Η Κίνα και το αθέμιτο πλεονέκτημα της φτηνής “ποιότητας”, του γιατρού Χρίστου Δαγρέ (Protagon)
Η ένδειξη C.E. = China Export!


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## Costas (Jan 27, 2013)

“Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Soviet Communist Party collapse? An important reason was that their ideals and beliefs had been shaken. In the end, ‘the ruler’s flag over the city tower’ changed overnight. It’s a profound lesson for us! To dismiss the history of the Soviet Union and the Soviet Communist Party, to dismiss Lenin and Stalin, and to dismiss everything else are [sic] to engage in historic nihilism, and it confuses our thoughts and undermines the Party’s organizations on all levels.”

“Why do we must [sic] stand firm on the Party’s leadership over the military?” Xi continued, “because that’s the lesson from the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the Soviet Union where the military was depoliticized, separated from the Party and nationalized, the party was disarmed. A few people tried to save the Soviet Union; they seized Gorbachev, but within days it was turned around again, because they didn’t have the instruments to exert power. Yeltsin gave a speech standing on a tank, but the military made no response, keeping the so-called ‘neutrality.’ Finally, Gorbachev announced the disbandment of the Soviet Communist Party in a blithe statement. A big Party was gone just like that. Proportionally, the Soviet Communist Party had more members than we do, but nobody was man enough to stand up and resist.”

“Our reform has always been a thorough reform. I don’t agree with the idea that China’s reform has been falling behind in some regard. It might be quicker or slower in some ways and at some points, but all in all, there is no such thing that [sic] China has changed in this way but not in that way. The key is what to reform and what not. There are things we have not changed, cannot change, and will not change no matter in how long a time. And it cannot be characterized as failure to reform.”

So, what are the things that cannot be changed? Xi Jinping said, “Some people define reform as changes towards the universal values of the west, the western political system, or it will not constitute reform. This is a stealthy tampering of the concept and a misunderstanding of our reform. Of course we must uphold the banner of reform, but our reform is reform that keeps us moving forward on the path of socialism with Chinese characters. We will walk neither the closed and rigid old path, nor the evil path of changing the flag.”

Αποστροφές του νέου ΓΓ του ΠΓ της ΚΕ του ΚΚΚ, Ξ(Σ)ι Τζιν-Πινγκ. (Seeing Red in China)


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## Costas (Jan 28, 2013)

The Education Revolution
Next Made-in-China Boom: College Graduates (NYT)
To the extent that China succeeds, its educational leap forward could have profound implications in a globalized economy in which a growing share of goods and services is traded across international borders. Increasingly, college graduates all over the world compete for similar work, and the boom in higher education in China is starting to put pressure on employment opportunities for college graduates elsewhere — including in the United States.


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## SBE (Jan 28, 2013)

Δεν ξέρω αν είναι τωρινό το φαινόμενο, ξέρω πάντως ότι όταν έψαχνα για δουλειά στην ηλεκτρονική, ήταν σχεδόν βέβαιο ότι αν εμφανιζόταν κανένας Kινέζος υποψήφιος η δουλειά ήταν δική του. Θυμάμαι περίπτωση που περιμέναμε δύο υποψήφιοι τη σειρά μας για συνέντευξη κι ανοίγει η πόρτα και βγαίνει ένας Κινέζος. Κοιταχτήκαμε με τον άλλο υποψήφιο με απογοήτευση. Και όντως, τελικά τη δουλειά την πήρε ο Κινέζος. Οι εργοδότες λέγανε για δικαιολογία ότι οι Κινέζοι ήταν ξεφτέρια. Η αλήθεια ήταν αλλού πάντως. Τους Κινέζους τους θεωρούσαν εύκολη περίπτωση, ότι θα δουλεύουν με χαμηλό μισθό και χωρίς απαιτήσεις και θα φοβούνται την απόλυση (που σημαίνει και άμεση απέλαση στις πιο πολλές περιπτώσεις).


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## Costas (Jan 29, 2013)

Οι αυτοπυρπολήσεις διαμαρτυρίας στην Κίνα είναι γνωστές από το Θιβέτ. Μάλιστα η εξόριστη κυβέρνηση του Θιβέτ κάλεσε το λαό της να μη γιορτάσει την επερχόμενη Θιβετιανή Πρωτοχρονιά, σε ένδειξη πένθους και τιμής για τους πάνω από 100 αυτοπυρπολημένους των τελευταίων ετών. Φαίνεται δε ότι η αυτοπυρπόληση σαν μέθοδος αυτοκτονίας-διαμαρτυρίας συνδέεται με τη βουδιστική παράδοση, αν και περιπτώσεις τέτοιες έχουμε και αλλού, ακόμα και από Έλληνα στη διάρκεια της εφτάχρονης διχτατορίας. Οι κρατικές αρχές έχουν ποινικοποιήσει τις αυτοπυρπολήσεις και καθέναν που τις υποστηρίζει, τις τιμά, τις υποθάλπει ή δεν τις αποτρέπει, και επίσης έχει καταστήσει συλλογικά υπεύθυνες τις οικογένειες και τις κοινότητες των αυτοχείρων, με διακοπή χρηματοδότησης, κοινωνικών προγραμμάτων κλπ.

Τέλος πάντων, προ ημερών, στην τελείως Χαν επαρχία Σαντόνγκ, άτομο που είχε αποβληθεί από το σπίτι του ώστε αυτό να κατεδαφιστεί αυτοπυρπολήθηκε μέσα στο χτίριο όπου συνέρχονται το Εθνικό Κογκρέσο του Λαού και η Λαϊκή Συμβουλευτική Διάσκεψη για πρώτη φορά μετά το 18ο Συνέδριο του boss, δηλ. του ΚΚΚ. Αν αρχίσουν να διαμαρτύρονται και οι Χαν με αυτό τον συγκεκριμένο τρόπο, η αμηχανία των αρχών θα είναι πολύ μεγάλη. Amnesty International collected reports of 41 cases of self-immolation from 2009 to 2011 alone due to forced evictions. That compares to fewer than 10 cases reported in the entire previous decade. (RFA)


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## Costas (Jan 30, 2013)

Στο νήμα της ποίησης έβαλα ένα ποίημα του σύγχρονου Κινέζου ποιητή Xue Ma. Ποίημα στοχαστικό, αν μη τι άλλο. Ψάχνοντας όμως στοιχεία για τον 33χρονο ποιητή, ανακάλυψα ότι το 2010, για να διαμαρτυρηθεί για τη στάση της Ιαπωνίας σχετικά με τα νησιά Senkaku/Diaoyu, που η Κίνα (αλλά και η Ταϊβάν) τα θεωρεί δικά της αλλά που η Ιαπωνία τα κατείχε (ακατοίκητα τότε) από τα τέλη του 19ου αι. έως το 1945 και μετά πάλι από το 1972, όταν οι ΗΠΑ της απέδωσαν την Οκινάουα, έως σήμερα (πρόσφατα μάλιστα το ιαπωνικό κράτος εθνικοποίησε τα τελευταία απ' αυτά αγοράζοντάς τα από τον ιδιώτη στον οποίον ανήκαν), για να διαμαρτυρηθεί λοιπόν αποφάσισε να πηδήξει στη θάλασσα κρατώντας ένα πανό, "μιμούμενος" τον αρχαίο ποιητή και λόγιο του 4ου-3ου αι. π.Χ. Qu Yuan (Τσϋ Γιουάν), ο οποίος αυτοκτόνησε για να διαμαρτυρηθεί για την ήττα και την καταισχύνη της χώρας του μπαίνοντας σ' ένα ποτάμι και κρατώντας μια μεγάλη πέτρα. Η πράξη του αυτή γέννησε την περίφημη και σήμερα γιορτή της δρακολεμβοδρομίας στην επέτειο του θανάτου του (δηλ. οι άνθρωποι ψάχνουν με τις βάρκες να τον βρουν στο ποτάμι και να διαφυλάξουν το σώμα του από τα ψάρια). Ο Τσϋ Γιουάν θεωρείται σύμβολο του κινέζικου πατριωτισμού. Έτσι λοιπόν ο συγκαιρινός μας Ξ(Σ)ϋέ Μα (Χιονάλογο, λογοτεχνικό ψευδώνυμο) δεν πήδηξε απλώς στη θάλασσα αλλά έγραψε κι ένα πατριωτικό ποίημα, "Η πατρίδα μου", που θα δείξω έλεος και σ' ετούτο το νήμα και στο ποιητικό και δεν θα το βάλω. Αρκεί να πω ότι τελειώνει με απειλές ότι "θα χυθεί αίμα"...


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## Costas (Jan 31, 2013)

Η πιο γαμάτη είναι η αρ. 30, όπου γράφει στο κάτω μέρος του κουτιού "αέρας φρέσκος"! （新鲜空气） [In Focus]


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## Costas (Feb 6, 2013)

Ένα νέο φαινόμενο και μια νέα λέξη για να το χαρακτηρίσει:

Original Copies: Architectural Mimicry in Contemporary China by Bianca Bosker

A 108-meter high Eiffel Tower rises above Champs Elysées Square in Hangzhou. A Chengdu residential complex for 200,000 recreates Dorchester, England. An ersatz Queen¹s Guard patrols Shanghai¹s Thames Town, where pubs and statues of Winston Churchill abound. Gleaming replicas of the White House dot Chinese cities from Fuyang to Shenzhen. These examples are but a sampling of China¹s most popular and startling architectural movement: the construction of monumental themed communities that replicate towns and cities in the West.

Original Copies presents the first definitive chronicle of this remarkable phenomenon in which entire townships appear to have been airlifted from their historic and geographic foundations in Europe and the Americas, and spot-welded to Chinese cities. These copycat constructions are not theme parks but thriving communities where Chinese families raise children, cook dinners, and simulate the experiences of a pseudo-Orange County or Oxford.

In recounting the untold and evolving story of China's predilection for replicating the greatest architectural hits of the West, Bianca Bosker explores what this unprecedented experiment in "*duplitecture*" implies for the social, political, architectural, and commercial landscape of contemporary China. With her lively, authoritative narrative, the author shows us how, in subtle but important ways, these homes and public spaces shape the behavior of their residents, as they reflect the achievements, dreams, and anxieties of those who inhabit them, as well as those of their developers and designers.

From Chinese philosophical perspectives on copying to twenty-first century market forces, Bosker details the factors giving rise to China¹s new breed of building. Her analysis draws on insights from the world¹s leading architects, critics and city planners, and on interviews with the residents of these developments.

For more information about the book:
http://www.uhpress.hawaii.edu/p-8759-9780824836061.aspx


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## Zazula (Feb 6, 2013)

Costas said:


> Ένα νέο φαινόμενο και μια νέα λέξη για να το χαρακτηρίσει:
> Original Copies: Architectural Mimicry in Contemporary China by Bianca Bosker


_Νέα _λέξη; Σίγουρα; http://lexilogia.gr/forum/showthread.php?3201-original-copy-πρωτότυπο-αντίτυπο :)


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## Costas (Feb 6, 2013)

Εννοούσα τη λέξη που έχω βάλει με έντονα γράμματα μέσα στο πιο πάνω κείμενο: duplitecture.


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## Zazula (Feb 6, 2013)

Σόρι, δεν τη ξεχώρισα μέσα στα μπλε.


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## Earion (Feb 7, 2013)

Το πρώτο που μου έρχεται στο μυαλό: *αρχιτεκτονικός αβδηριτισμός*.


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## bernardina (Feb 7, 2013)

Κοπιατεκτονική. Αντιγραφοικοδόμηση. Απομιμησχεδίαση. 
Λασβεγκαστηνκίνα. :twit:


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## Costas (Feb 7, 2013)

Πανομοιοτεκτονική.


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## drsiebenmal (Feb 7, 2013)

Αντιγραφοτεκτονική


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## daeman (Feb 7, 2013)

...
Αρχιτεκτονική - ανατεκτονική; Αντιτυποτεκτονική; Μιμητεκτονική;
Ξανατεκτονική, ξαναμανατεκτονική, ματαξαναμανατεκτονική. Δευτεροτεκτόνημα, τριτοτεκτόνημα, το παράκανα και ψόφησε: αρχήν κτείνον πόνημα.


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## Costas (Feb 8, 2013)

(Pen Atlas)
_*F: Hu Feng’s Prison Years*_ by Mei Zhi, translated by Gregor Benton received a Writers in Translation award for 2013 and will be published by Verso in April 2013.

Probably all revolutions in modern times have fallen out, sooner or later, with their intellectuals. Critical thinkers have been both the begetters of revolution, by articulating its ideologies, and its victims, for the same righteous indignation that fired them up enough to join it in the first place led many to denounce its abuses once the new freedoms vanished.

Hu Feng is an example. He became a revolutionary at Beijing University in the 1920s, secretly joined the Japanese Communist Party in Tokyo, worked for the resistance in wartime China, and led movements of leftwing writers in cities controlled by Chiang Kai-shek. He was one of China’s best-known leftwing editors before 1949 and a pupil of Lu Xun, the giant of China’s twentieth-century literature and its George Orwell. After Mao’s victory in 1949, Hu Feng worked for a while on the fringes of the Beijing regime, but after a couple of years he got into trouble with the literary and political establishment. This was partly because he belonged to a wrong faction, but mainly because of his liberal view of literature. He implicitly criticized Mao’s proposal that creative writing should serve the party, by extolling the masses and reflecting the ‘bright side’ of life rather than ‘exposing the darkness’. So he was denounced for ‘subjectivism’, i.e., exaggerating the role played by what he called the inner energy of the active subject. He was also a belligerent man. His short fuse made enemies, and he was not a party member, unlike his opponents. He had joined its youth section in 1923, lost touch during the civil war, and tried to rejoin after returning from Japan, but failed.

Hu Feng spent twenty-five years as a political prisoner starting in 1955, a record surpassed only by the Chinese Trotskyists’ thirty-odd years in gaol. (...)
(...)
It is a gripping story, climaxing in Hu’s madness and a redemption of sorts. It differs from similar accounts in that despite their calvary, Mei and Hu remained supporters of the revolution. It is also a love story – of her love for him, even in the years of his madness. It is also a love story – of her love for him, even in the years of his madness.

The book was first published in instalments, starting with Past Events Disperse like Smoke. I picked this up in Beijing in 1987 for Wang Fanxi, the exiled elderly Trotskyist leader who shared my house for several years. On my trips to China, I used to buy books I thought he’d like. It turned out he and Hu Feng had been class-mates at Beijing University, along with Wang Shiwei, Chinese communism’s first real dissident, murdered by the party near Yan’an in 1947 after arguing publicly that writing should be free to criticise party abuses and to talk about the soul. (...)
(...)

-------------------------
“What kind of people are those we don't execute? We don't execute people like Hu Feng ... not because their crimes don't deserve capital punishment but because such executions would yield no advantage ... Counterrevolutionaries are trash, they are vermin, but once in your hands, you can make them perform some kind of service for the people.”

– Mao Zedong


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## Costas (Feb 8, 2013)

Συνέχεια από το προηγούμενο:
Η καμπάνια του 1955 ενάντια στην "αντεπαναστατική κλίκα του Χου Φενγκ" δεν είναι τόσο γνωστή όσο το "Αντιδεξιό κίνημα" που ακολούθησε λίγα χρόνια μετά, μετά τα "Εκατό Λουλούδια". Φαίνεται όμως πως ήταν η πρώτη μεγάλη καμπάνια εξάλειψης διανοουμένων, ενορχηστρωμένη προσωπικά από τον Μάο και η οποία έδωσε τον τόνο στις κατοπινές επιχειρήσεις κονιορτοποίησης κάθε απλώς αποκλίνουσας φωνής (γιατί ο Χου Φενγκ ήταν μαρξιστής και θιασώτης της επανάστασης, μόνο που διεκδικούσε για την τέχνη έναν φιλεπαναστατικό μεν αλλά αυτόνομο ρόλο). Το 2009 οι σκηνοθέτιδες Peng Xiaolian και Louisa Wei γύρισαν ένα ντοκιμαντέρ, Storm under the Sun (κάτω από τον _Κόκκινο_ Ήλιο, προσθέτει ο κινέζικος τίτλος), που διηγείται την ιστορία αυτής της δίωξης και μιλά με τους (τότε) επιζώντες. Ο πατέρας της Peng ήταν από τους διωχθέντες και σκοτώθηκε από Κοκκινοφρουρούς το 1968. Στο σάιτ της εταιρείας που εκμεταλλεύεται αυτό και άλλα ντοκιμαντέρ υπάρχει αξιόλογο υλικό γι' αυτό το πρώτο, λιγότερο γνωστό επεισόδιο ομαδικής καταστολής διανοουμένων στην κομουνιστική Κίνα. (blue queen cultural communication)


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## Costas (Feb 9, 2013)

Many factories in China have long relied on high school students, vocational school students and temporary workers to cope with periodic surges in orders as factory labor becomes increasingly scarce. Students complain of being ordered by school administrators to put in very long hours on short notice at jobs with no relevance to their studies; local governments sometimes order schools to provide labor, and the factories pay school administrators a bonus.
(...)
“Often, they are forced to work in a factory like it’s an internship, and the schools may take a cut of the salary; often, they even send teachers to the factory to make sure the students are disciplined,” she said, adding that schools continue charging tuition while students are in factories.
Electronics companies have taken the position that students also do summer jobs in other countries, including the United States, and learn something just from being in a work setting.
(NYT)


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## Costas (Feb 9, 2013)

China unveils major tax reforms to make rich pay more
Sweeping tax changes will also cut power of state-owned firms and narrow gap between urban elite and rural poor
(The Guardian)


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## Costas (Feb 12, 2013)

Zhuang Zedong, Skilled in China Foreign Relations and Ping-Pong, Dies at 72 (NYT)
Ιστορίες τρέλας: “Regard a Ping-Pong ball as the head of your capitalist enemy,” the chairman was quoted as saying. “Hit it with your socialist bat, and you have won the point for the fatherland.”
“I only know how to play Ping-Pong, how to hit the ball from this side of the table to the other” [Zhuang] said.


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## Costas (Feb 13, 2013)

"This gotta be one of the most depressive places to spend an evening!" (3μερές)


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## Costas (Feb 15, 2013)

Στ' απόνερα του Γκουαντάναμο: από το Ξ(Σ)ιντζιάνγκ στο Αφγανιστάν, στην Κούβα, στο Παλάου. Χωρίς διαβατήριο, απάτριδες μπλεγμένοι στα γεωπολιτικά παιχνίδια. (Έχει πλάκα ότι 6 άνθρωποι --και οι οικογένειές τους-- αποτελούν δυσβάσταχτο οικονομικό φορτίο για μια μικρή, φτωχή χώρα...) (The Star)


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## Costas (Feb 17, 2013)

Ξεφυλλίζοντας το βιβλίο _Λέξεις που χάνονται_, του Νίκου Σαραντάκου, που διανεμήθηκε σήμερα μαζί με το _Βήμα της Κυριακής_, έφτασα (σελ. 21) στο λήμμα _αγκλιά_:

Αγκλιά είναι σκεύος με το οποίο αντλούμε νερό ή μεταγγίζουμε νερό ή άλλο υγρό από το ένα δοχείο στο άλλο· ειδικότερα, αντλιά [sic] είναι η κομμένη στα δυο ξερή νεροκολοκύθα που χρησίμευε παλιότερα σαν πρόχειρο αντλητήρι, π.χ. για κρασί ή άλλο ποτό· συνεκδοχικά, αγκλιά είναι η ποσότητα που αντλείται. Η λ. ετυμολογείται από το αρχαίο _αντλία_ > αντλιά > αγκλιά. (...)
(…) την ξερή κολοκύθα «την ανοίγουν και μοιάζει με μεγάλη κουτάλα, για να παίρνουν το νερό από τον κουβά».
Πολύ φυσικό ήταν και η ίδια η νεροκολοκύθα να ονομαστεί αγκλιά, ακόμα κι όταν δεν χρησιμοποιείται κομμένη στα δυο. Σε αναμνήσεις διάβασα ότι τα παιδιά μάθαιναν κολύμπι με «ένα ζευγάρι αγκλιές» – λύση πιο οικολογική από τα πλαστικά _μπρατσάκια_ που έχουμε σήμερα.

Διαβάζοντάς το αυτό, θυμήθηκα κάτι που είχα διαβάσει πριν από μια βδομάδα στο Zhuangzi:

Ο δάσκαλος Χούι είπε στο δάσκαλο Τζουάνγκ: «Ο βασιλιάς του Ουέι μου έδωσε σπόρους από μια μεγάλη νεροκολοκύθα. Τους φύτεψα και μου 'δωσαν μια κολοκύθα που χωρούσε πέντε μόδια. Τη γέμισα με υγρό, αλλά τα τοιχώματά της δεν ήταν αρκετά γερά ώστε να τη σηκώσω από κάτω. Την έκοψα και τη χώρισα σε αγκλιές, αλλά η καμπύλωσή τους ήταν τόσο ελαφριά που δεν κρατούσαν τίποτα. Κι έτσι, ενώ η κολοκύθα ήταν πράγματι τεράστιας χωρητικότητας, την έκανα κομμάτια γιατί ήταν άχρηστη.»
«Κύριε» είπε ο δάσκαλος Τζουάνγκ, «το μυαλό σου φταίει που δεν μπόρεσες να χρησιμοποιήσεις το μέγεθός της. (…) Είχες μια κολοκύθα που χωρούσε πέντε μόδια. Γιατί δε σκέφτηκες να τη δέσεις στη μέση σου σα μεγάλη κουλούρα ώστε να μπορείς να επιπλέεις στις λίμνες και στα ποτάμια, αντί να στενοχωριέσαι που δεν μπορούσε να κρατήσει τίποτα επειδή είχε ρηχή καμπύλωση; Αυτό δείχνει, κύριε, πως έχεις ακόμα βάτους αντί για μυαλό!»


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## Costas (Feb 18, 2013)

Η ρύπανση της ατμόσφαιρας του Πεκίνου, πολύ τοξική. Συμμετέχουν και τα τσιγαριστά! (Global Times)

Η κυβέρνηση αναλαμβάνει την υποχρέωση μέσα στα 7 επόμενα χρόνια (ως το τέλος του 2020) να χορηγεί άδειες μετ' αποδοχών, για τόνωση του τουρισμού. (BBC [κινέζικα])

Σύμφωνα με το CPJ (Committee to Protect Journalists), η Κίνα καταλαμβάνει για το 2012 (1η Δεκεμβρίου) την τρίτη θέση παγκοσμίως (σε απόλυτους αριθμούς) στη φυλάκιση δημοσιογράφων, μετά την Τουρκία και το Ιράν. Έχει αυξηθεί δε πολύ μεταξύ αυτών το ποσοστό των μειονοτικών Θιβετιανών και Ουιγούρων (από 3 στους 28 το 2008, έγινε 17 στους 27 το 2011), λόγω των εντάσεων στις αντίστοιχες περιοχές και της σκληρής καταστολής. Επίσης, το 2012 σημειώθηκε η πρώτη από το 1998 άρνηση ανανέωσης βίζας (=απέλαση) ξένου δημοσιογράφου.


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## Costas (Feb 19, 2013)

Αρχαιολογικού και ανθρωπολογικού ενδιαφέροντος:
The world's oldest pornography (slate.com)


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## Costas (Feb 20, 2013)

黑客 = μαύρος επισκέπτης = hei ke = ha-cker = hacker. Έτσι δουλεύει πολύ συχνά η απόδοση ξένων λέξεων στα κινέζικα, μ' ένα πάντρεμα ήχου και σημασίας που γίνεται εφικτό χάρη στο ότι κάθε συλλαβή είναι φορέας νοήματος. Και τώρα, στο ψητό:

Chinese Army Unit Is Seen as Tied to Hacking Against U.S. (ΝΥΤ)

Και η έκθεση του Mandiant Intelligence Center:
APT1: Exposing One of China's Cyber Espionage Units


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## Costas (Feb 20, 2013)

Το διαδίκτυο και ο ιστός έχουν την τιμητική τους σήμερα, με τους "μαύρους επισκέπτες" και τις "μαύρες εταιρείες δημόσιων σχέσεων":

*Dirty Business for China's Internet Scrubbers*
Deleting negative publicity from the Internet was a big moneymaker before authorities cracked down (Caixin)

A Baidu search for "Yage" still yields a list of websites that carry the company's advertisements and slogans such as "Yage Time professionals help you delete negative reports" and "key word filtering: a solution to anything negative."


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## Costas (Feb 21, 2013)

Το υπουργείο Περιβάλλοντος θέτει όρια στις εκπομπές βιομηχανικών ρύπων και...στα μπάρμπεκιου. (Caijing, The Edge)

Το γαλλικό πρακτορείο μιλά για διπλή αυτοπυρπόληση στο Θιβέτ, πράγμα σπάνιο. (France 24)


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## Costas (Feb 23, 2013)

Ο Eddie Huang τρώει στο καμπινεδοεστιατόριο (και προφέρει τo sausage "sauce_age"). (Vice)


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## Costas (Feb 23, 2013)

Υπάρχει το κόκκινο νερό, υπάρχει και το πράσινο. Αποτέλεσμα ρύπανσης και τα δύο. Και με 20000 δολάρια δόλωμα, πάλι δεν το αποφάσισε να βουτήξει! (Guardian και Today)


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## bernardina (Feb 23, 2013)

Εστιατόριο στην Κίνα. :)


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## Costas (Feb 23, 2013)

Ναι, από τις πιο δημοφιλείς φωτογραφίες της Λεξιλογίας [1][2][3] :)


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## bernardina (Feb 23, 2013)

Costas said:


> Ναι, από τις πιο δημοφιλείς φωτογραφίες της Λεξιλογίας [1][2][3] :)


:lol::clap:


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## Costas (Mar 3, 2013)

Ένα Τοπ Τεν του ανεξάρτητου κινέζικου σινεμά για το 2012. Το τέταρτο κλιπάκι έχει κι ένα ωραίο τραγούδι. (China File)


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## Costas (Mar 6, 2013)

Στην επαρχία Σανξί (Shanxi), καταδίκες για εκταφές νεκρών γυναικών προς πώληση για γάμο με άγαμους νεαρούς νεκρούς. Πειράξανε και τα χαρτιά για να εξαφανίσουν τις ασθένειές τους, μην κολλήσουν οι γαμπροί! (ιταλικά, Corriere della Sera)


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## bernardina (Mar 6, 2013)

Costas said:


> Στην επαρχία Σανξί (Shanxi), καταδίκες για εκταφές νεκρών γυναικών προς πώληση για γάμο με άγαμους νεαρούς *νεκρούς*. Πειράξανε και τα χαρτιά για να εξαφανίσουν τις ασθένειές τους, μην κολλήσουν οι γαμπροί! (ιταλικά, Corriere della Sera)



Στην αρχή μου ξέφυγε εκείνο το *νεκρούς *και φρίκαρα. :blink: Μου 'φερε κάτι τέτοιους συνειρμούς.


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## Zazula (Mar 10, 2013)

«Γιατί οι Κινέζοι θα κατακτήσουν τον κόσμο», μέρος 259ο: Επειδή είναι τόσο μπροστά, που επισήμως σου ζητούν να τους κατευθύνεις για το πώς ακριβώς θέλεις να ξεγελάσετε από κοινού τον παρωχημένο, αντιφιλελεύθερο και εμποριοκτόνο θεσμό του Τελωνείου.


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## Marinos (Mar 11, 2013)

Όχι ακριβώς «την ίδια ώρα, στην Κίνα...» αλλά ενδιαφέρον:
A review of From Bewitching Beauty to Effete King: Transgendering of King Peony in Medieval Chinese and Korean Literature, by Jeongsoo Shin


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## Costas (Mar 12, 2013)

Ενδιαφέρον, όντως! Timeo Sinos et dona ferentes:
In one narrative, Queen Sŏndŏk deciphers a set of gifts sent to Silla by Tang Taizong 唐太宗 (r. 627–649): seeds of a peony plant and a painting of the flower without butterflies, a representation of a scentless flower. The scentless flower and its seeds were perceived as veiled insult from the Chinese ruler. The flower’s sterility represented Queen Sŏndŏk, a woman ruler without a spouse. Queen Sŏndŏk’s femininity and the emperor’s offering of the “Chinese seeds” to be “sown in the soil of the queen’s land” was understood as a sexual metaphor for Tang aggression.

Η κατάρρευση ενός κατασκευασμένου αγίου; In China, Cinematic Flops Suggest Fading of an Icon (ΝΥΤ). Περί Lei Feng ο λόγος, αλλά υπάρχει μέσα στο άρθρο και το εξής ωραίο παρεμπίπτον:

Last month, a Beijing woman was caught using a silicone prosthesis to pretend she was pregnant and fool subway riders into giving her their seats.


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## Costas (Mar 12, 2013)

Το προξενειό (των ζάπλουτων και των φτωχών) στη σημερινή Κίνα. (ΝΥΤ)

Καθώς στο άρθρο γίνεται αναφορά σε μιαν όμορφη τηλεπαρουσιάστρια, την Τζόου Τάο, γουγλάρισα τ' όνομά της και τη βρήκα να προσέρχεται στην ετήσια σύνοδο της Συμβουλευτικής Πολιτικής Συνδιάσκεψης του Κινεζικού Λαού, όπως και άλλες διασημότητες, από τον μπασκετμπολίστα Yao Ming ως τον νομπελίστα συγγραφέα Mo Yan και τον...εγγονό του Μάο. Σχετικά λοιπόν με αυτόν το φορέα και την ετήσια σύναξή του, εδώ μια ανοιχτή επιστολή-καταγγελία ενός πρώην μέλους του. (Seeing Red in China).


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## oliver_twisted (Mar 13, 2013)

Κίνα: 6.000 νεκρά γουρούνια έχουν ανασυρθεί από τον ποταμό που διαρρέει τη Σανγκάη

Έδιτ: βέβαια η Ναυτεμπορική της 11/3 κάνει λόγο για 900, οπότε όρκο δεν παίρνω...


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## bernardina (Mar 13, 2013)

oliver_twisted said:


> Κίνα: 6.000 νεκρά γουρούνια έχουν ανασυρθεί από τον ποταμό που διαρρέει τη Σανγκάη
> 
> Έδιτ: βέβαια η Ναυτεμπορική της 11/3 κάνει λόγο για 900, οπότε όρκο δεν παίρνω...




Η Ναυτεμπορική μάλλον έχει μείνει πίσω στο μέτρημα.


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## oliver_twisted (Mar 13, 2013)

Πωω...τραγικό, απλά...


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## daeman (Mar 14, 2013)

...
Bureaucratics in China, by Jan Banning





China, bureaucracy, Shandong, 2005. China-06/2007 [Jin., QSF (b. 1964)]. Qu Shao Feng (b. 1964) is chief general of Jining Public Security Bureau Division of Aliens and Exit-Entry Administration in Jining City, Shandong province. Monthly salary: 3,100 renminbi (US$ 384, 286 euro).





China, bureaucracy, Shandong, 2007. China-09/2007 [GuL., WN (b. 1983)]. Wang Ning (b. 1983) works in the Economic Affairs office in Gu Lou community, Yanzhou city, Shandong province. She provides economic assistance to enterprises in her region and is the liaison officer between the government and local enterprises. Wang Ning is not married. She lives at home with her parents. Monthly salary: 2,100 renminbi (US$ 260, euro 228).





China, bureaucracy, Shandong, 2005. China-10/2007 [Cui, CW (b. 1943)/CG (b. 1969)]. Cui Weihang (left, b. 1943) is village chief of Cui, and Cui Gongli (b. 1969) is party secretary of the Chinese Communist Party in Cui (population 2,300), which is in Tuanli Town, Jiaxiang County, a part of Jining City, Shandong province. Monthly salary for the village chief: no payment. Monthly salary for the party secretary: 280 renminbi (US$ 35, 26 euro).





China, bureaucracy, Shandong, 2005. China-19/2007 [Tai., GSW (b. 1987)]. Guo Shao Wei (b. 1987) is doorman at the Taian Hi-Tech Zone and Economic Zone Building, Taian City, Shandong province. Monthly salary: 1,100 renminbi (US$ 136, 101 euro).





China, bureaucracy, Shandong, 2005. China-22/2007 [Tie.,ZMG (b. 1966)]. Zhang Mao Guo (b. 1966), employed by the Office of Justice, is an official teacher of Justice and Values to villagers in Tianping Town, Daiyue District, Taian City, Shandong province. Monthly salary: 1,500 renminbi (US$ 186, 138 euro).





China, bureaucracy, Shandong, 2005. China-23/2007 [Tai., JJY (b. 1958)]. Jiang Ji Yuan (b. 1958) is chairman of the Art and Literature Association of Taian, Taian City, Shandong province. Monthly salary: 4,000 renminbi (US$ 496, 368 euro).

Now that's what I'd call "_red_ tape".


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## Costas (Mar 15, 2013)

Ένα wiki για την...καθόλου κινεζική μουσική. Σε φάση στησίματος, θ' ανοίξει για τα καλά τον Απρίλη. Είχαν ξεκινήσει με τη ροκ στην Κίνα, τώρα το διευρύνουν. http://www.music-china.org/w/The_whole_of_Chinese_music


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## Costas (Mar 18, 2013)

Newspeak διατύπωση: “The National Soil Pollution survey data are *state secrets*, according to the provisions of Article 14 of the *Open Government* Information Regulations”. (Businessweek) Επ' ευκαιρία, το άρθρο έχει ένα smogosphere, και επίσης είδα στο πρόσφατο άρθρο του Krugman στην ΝΥΤ για την αφαίμαξη των καταθέσεων στην Κύπρο ένα beeznessmen (υποθέτω ότι κομίζω γλαύκες εις Αθήνας...)


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## nickel (Mar 18, 2013)

Costas said:


> ...επίσης είδα στο πρόσφατο άρθρο του Krugman στην ΝΥΤ για την αφαίμαξη των καταθέσεων στην Κύπρο ένα beeznessmen (υποθέτω ότι κομίζω γλαύκες εις Αθήνας...)



Αν το ήξερα, δεν το θυμόμουν.
Το πρόσφατο άρθρο είναι εδώ και λέει:
You can sort of see why they’re doing this: Cyprus is a money haven, especially for the assets of Russian beeznessmen [...]

Η γραφή αυτή φαίνεται να είναι κρουγκμανισμός.

Το είχε εξηγήσει παλιότερα (το καρκινικό 2002):

Business Versus Biznes
In the former Soviet Union, the term ''biznesmen'' (pronounced ''beeznessmen'') refers to the class of sudden new rich who emerged after the fall of Communism -- and who generally got rich by using their connections to strip away the assets of public enterprises.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/12/opinion/business-versus-biznes.html


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## Costas (Mar 18, 2013)

Α, εγώ υπέθεσα ότι θα είναι ευρύτερης εφαρμογής, αλλά φρονίμως ποιών το άφησα για τους σοφότερους!

Άρωμα αρχαίας Ελλάδας (μέσω Χόλλυγουντ, μάλλον):
Κάθε φορά που διοργανώνεται συνέδριο του ΚΚΚ ή σύνοδος των δύο Σωμάτων-μαριονετών, του Εθνικού Κογκρέσου του Λαού και της Πολιτικής Συμβουλευτικής Επιτροπής του Λαού, τα μέτρα εσωτερικής "ασφάλειας" (διατήρησης της σταθερότητας, όπως το ονομάζουν οι κομουνιστές) εντείνονται, με αστυνομική επιτήρηση και προειδοποιήσεις προς τους κάθε είδους ακτιβιστές και τους πολιτικά διαφωνούντες, ή με τον κατ' οίκον περιορισμό ή τη μυστική κράτησή τους, καθώς και με την αύξηση της λογοκρισίας στο διαδίκτυο. Το τελευταίο συνέδριο του ΚΚΚ το Νοέμβρη ήταν το 18ο, που στα κινέζικα λέγεται εν συντομία Δεκαοχτώ Μεγάλο, Shíbādà (十八大). Για λόγους αποφυγής της λογοκρισίας αλλά και κοροϊδίας, οι ιντερναύτες το λένε και Sībādá (斯巴达), που θα πει....Σπάρτη! (Έτσι όμως που έφαγαν το ρο της Σπάρτης, θα έχουν πρόβλημα να αποδώσουν ξεχωριστά τα Σπάτα!) Οπότε, επειδή τα μέτρα "ασφαλείας" στις αρχές του Μάρτη για τα δύο άλλα Σώματα-μαριονέτες ήταν εξίσου αυστηρά με τα αντίστοιχα για το 18ο Συνέδριο (τη "Σπάρτη"), καθώς και επειδή το όλο "γεγονός" είναι ένα σκέτο θέατρο που απλώς επικυρώνει τις αποφάσεις που είχαν ληφθεί στην "κυρίως Σπάρτη", το ονόμασαν "Σπάρτη β' προβολής"... (κινεζόφωνη Ντόυτσε Βέλλε)


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## Costas (Mar 18, 2013)

Οι πρώτες καμπάνες για παρασκευή και πώληση λαδιού αποβλήτων για κατανάλωση (gutter oil) έπεσαν στη Σαγκάη, με 3,5, πάλι 3,5, 1,25 και 1 χρόνο, καθώς και χρηματικά πρόστιμα. (sina.com [στα κινέζικα])


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## Costas (Mar 19, 2013)

Φιλοζωικός ακτιβισμός: China volunteers rescue 900 dogs likely headed for Guangdong restaurants (South China Morning Post)


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## Costas (Mar 19, 2013)

Για τέταρτη συνεχή χρονιά η ανισορροπία αγοριών-κοριτσιών έπεσε από το ρεκόρ του 121/100 του 2004 στο 117/100 το 2012. Ιδεώδες, λέει, θεωρείται το 103-107/100. (Shanghai Daily)

Η κυρία Σεν Τζιλάν εκλέγεται επί 12 συνεχείς πενταετίες μέλος του Εθνικού Κογκρέσου του Λαού (ο αριθμός 5*12=60 θεωρείται "χρυσός"), έχοντας πάντοτε ψηφίσει "ναι" στα πάντα... (VOA)

Σκέφτονται να αντικαταστήσουν το διαχωρισμό χωρικών-αστών μ' ένα εθνικό πιστοποιητικό, για να μπορέσει να προχωρήσει η αστικοποίηση του πληθυσμού ώστε να εκσυγχρονιστεί η οικονομία τους με το σχηματισμό μιας μεσαίας τάξης που θα έχει ομοιόμορφα δικαιώματα κοινωνικών παροχών και άρα διαθέσιμο εισόδημα προς κατανάλωση. Οι τοπικές όμως κυβερνήσεις αντιδρούν: ποιος θα πληρώσει τις δωρεάν παροχές για όλους αυτούς τους μουζίκους; Ενώ τώρα ζουν μεν στις πόλεις αλλά σαν παρίες. (Reuters)

Computer Scientists Measure the Speed of Censorship On China’s Twitter (MIT Technology Review)

Παγκοσμιοποίηση: στις τελευταίες εκλογές της Γροιλανδίας των 57000 κατοίκων για το 31μελές Κοινουβούλιο το καυτό θέμα ήταν το λιώσιμο των πάγων, βέβαια, αλλά κυριότατα η εξόρυξη σπάνιων γαιών και η εισροή Κινέζων εργατών κατά χιλιάδες για να χτίσουν τις εγκαταστάσεις. Κέρδισε η "αριστερή"...Αλέκα. (Reuters, Wikipedia)


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## Costas (Mar 19, 2013)

Πρόπερσι είχαν γίνει ταραχές στο Ουκάν, φέτος σε άλλο χωριό της επαρχίας Γκουανγκ-Ντόνγκ, το Σάνγκπου, πάντα επειδή ο τοπικός κομματάρχης πούλησε γη του χωριού προς ίδιον όφελος. Προς το παρόν η απόλυση του κομματάρχη συνδυάστηκε με αμιγή καταστολή, χωρίς εκλογικά πειράματα όπως στο Ουκάν. (The Guardian)

Η ναυαρχίδα της ηλιακής ενέργειας στην Κίνα χρεωκόπησε. Γενικώς, δεν είναι και πολύ καλά τα νέα του κλάδου. Έπαιξαν ρόλο και οι δασμοί των Δυτικών (είχε γίνει και καμπάνια στο Avax εναντίον των δασμών αυτών). (The Guardian)

Και ενώ τα ψόφια γουρούνια έφτασαν αισίως τις 13.000, η ΝΥΤ ισχυρίζεται πως αυτό είναι προς όφελος της ασφάλειας των τροφίμων, γιατί, λέει, ως τώρα πουλούσαν στους χασάπηδες ψόφια από αρρώστια γουρούνια, ενώ τώρα, μην μπορώντας να τα πουλήσουν, τα πέταξαν "απλώς" στο ποτάμι. Κάποια δε ίσως να ψοφάνε απλά λόγω συνθηκών μεταφοράς τύπου Θεσσαλονίκης-Άουσβιτς του 1943 (για να θυμηθώ και τον κ. Κατίδη). (ΝΥΤ)

Ο νεο"εκλεγείς" πρωθυπουργός Λι Κετζιάνγκ είπε ότι πιστεύει πως μέσα στο τρέχον έτος θα γίνει η μεταρρύθμιση του συστήματος της Αναμόρφωσης δια της Εργασίας, που αποτελεί μιαν εξωδικαστική κράτηση που την αποφασίζουν και την εκτελούν κατά το δοκούν οι διάφορες τοπικές αρχές. (Άλλο κεφάλαιο είναι τα καταναγκαστικά έργα ως μέρος δικαστικής ποινής). (BBC, του Δαμιανού Γραμμάτικα)

Όπως παντού, ακόμα περισσότερο στην Κίνα του ενός τέκνου ανά οικογένεια και της εσωτερικής μετανάστευσης σε χαώδεις κλίμακες αποστάσεων το βάρος της περίθαλψης των γέρων γονιών γίνεται ολοένα πιο δυσβάσταχτο, παρά τις κομφουκιανές εντολές. (Bloomberg) Ας αγνοήσουμε πάντως τον παραπλανητικό-προβοκατόρικο τίτλο του άρθρου.


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## Costas (Mar 19, 2013)

Και ολίγη πικρή σάτιρα στην ιστορία με τα γουρούνια: Life of Pig, του Τζάο Γϋκούν (China Digital Times).


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## Costas (Mar 19, 2013)

Οι περιπέτειες ενός πτώματος αυτοπυρπολημένου (όχι Θιβετιανού, παρά γιατί του κατεδάφισαν το σπίτι). (Radio Free Asia)

Υπάλληλος πλυντηρίου αυτοκινήτων κλώτσησε το σκυλί του ιδιοκτήτη ενός αυτοκινήτου και δάρθηκε μέχρι θανάτου. (Radio Free Asia)

Σύμφωνα με τις κινεζικές αρχές, μια αυτοπυρπόληση Θιβετιανής γυναίκας είναι στην πραγματικότητα φόνος από τον άντρα της, ο οποίος μετά την έκαψε και την παρουσίασε για αυτοπυρπολημένη για πολιτικούς λόγους διαμαρτυρίας. Οι οργανώσεις ανθρώπινων δικαιωμάτων όμως αμφιβάλλουν σφόδρα για την εκδοχή αυτή και σημειώνουν ότι πάει κάμποσος καιρός από τότε που οι αρχές έχουν αρχίσει μια προσπάθεια να μειώσουν την αξιοπρέπεια των αυτοπυρπολουμένων λέγοντας πως ο ένας ήταν μεθυσμένος, η άλλη τη σκότωσε ο άντρας της γιατί του την έπεσε που μπεκρούλιαζε κττ. (Voice of America)

Όσο για το γουρουνόμετρο, as of today κοντεύουν τις 15000. (South China Morning Post) Η οποία εφημερίδα έκανε δημοσκόπηση και λέει ότι η πλειοψηφία των πολιτών του Χονγκ Κονγκ θα επιθυμούσε την επιστροφή στη βρετανοκρατία. Χαστούκι κι αυτό! (μέσω BBC)


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## Costas (Mar 20, 2013)

Η αγανάχτηση για την άθλια κατάσταση του περιβάλλοντος (αέρας, νερό, γη...η φωτιά λείπει!) στο "εργοστάσιο του πλανήτη" έφτασε ως τις ψηφοφορίες του Εθνικού Κογκρέσου του Λαού: Deputies at the Great Hall of the People showed surprising enthusiasm for the result, and some even clapped their hands. This level of opposition has not been seen in the NPC since 177 delegates voted no and 644 abstained over the construction of the Three Gorges Dam in 1992. (...) "The environment has surpassed land seizures to become the biggest cause of mass incidents in China," said Chen Jiping, deputy director of the China Law Society. (Global Times [μισοκυβερνητική])


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## Costas (Mar 20, 2013)

The Time cover that wasn’t. (Danwei) Απίστευτο πώς μια τέτοια φωτοσοπιά έγινε δεκτή τοις μετρητοίς! Αλλά και ο Χρυσός Μόσχος αξίζει την προσοχή μας.


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## Costas (Mar 22, 2013)

Το αγόρασε 3 δολάρια, το είχε στο χολ του για χρόνια, κάποια στιγμή το έψαξε παραπάνω, διαπίστωσε ότι επρόκειτο για αντικείμενο 1000 ετών, και το πούλησε για 2,2 εκατομμύρια δολάρια! (The Guardian)


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## Costas (Mar 22, 2013)

Πόσο πιο μακριά μπορεί να είναι η γνώμη των τεχνοκριτικών από τη γνώμη του κοινού; "the most unpleasant work to be published in the 20th century. You've got flat form, hair that is not hair at all but is simply an opaque layer of dull and insipid paint. You have shoulders which have no substance, you have muzzy line work". Πουλήθηκε £982,050. (The Guardian)


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## SBE (Mar 22, 2013)

Το κιτς τερατούργημα κάθε σπιτιού νομίζω ότι δεν ήταν η Κινέζα αλλά αυτή εδώ η εξωτική ομορφιά που την πουλάγανε σε όλα τα πανηγύρια (κι ο κόσμος αγόραζε)


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## daeman (Mar 29, 2013)

..
Cost of Environmental Degradation in China Is Growing (NYTimes, March 29, 2013)

BEIJING — The cost of environmental degradation in China in 2010 was about $230 billion, or 3.5 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product, an official Chinese news report said this week.

The statistic came from a study by the Chinese Academy of Environmental Planning, which is part of the Ministry of Environmental Protection. So far, only partial results of the study are available. The 2010 figure was reported on Monday by a newspaper associated with the ministry. 

The estimated loss for that year was three times that for 2004, in local currency terms. The $230 billion figure, or 1.54 trillion renminbi, is based on costs rising from pollution and damage to the ecosystem, but the figure was incomplete because the researchers did not have a complete set of data. 

In 2006, the ministry began releasing an estimate of the cost of environmental degradation. But the ministry has issued statistics only intermittently, not on an annual basis, though its original goal was to do the calculation annually. 

Making such calculations is “notoriously difficult,” and the actual figure could even be higher than the ministry’s estimate, said Alistair Thornton, a China economist at the research firm IHS Global Insight. 

“This cuts to the heart of China’s economic challenge: how to transform from the explosive growth of the past 30 years to the sustainable growth of the next 30 years,” he said. “Digging a hole and filling it back in again gives you G.D.P. growth. It doesn’t give you economic value. A lot of the activity in China over the last few years has been digging holes to fill them back in again — anything from bailing out failing solar companies to ignoring the ‘externalities’ of economic growth.”
[...]

In 2006, the environmental ministry said the cost of environmental degradation in 2004 was more than $62 billion, or 3.05 percent of G.D.P. In 2010, it released partial results for 2008 that totaled about $185 billion, or 3.9 percent of G.D.P. Several foreign scholars have criticized the methods by which Chinese researchers have reached those numbers, saying some critical measures of environmental degradation are not included in the calculations. 

There is consensus now that China’s decades of double-digit economic growth exacted an enormous environmental cost. But growth remains the priority; the Communist Party’s legitimacy is based largely on rapidly expanding the economy, and China officially estimates that its G.D.P., which was $8.3 trillion in 2012, will grow at a rate of 7.5 percent this year and at an average of 7 percent in the five-year plan that runs to 2015. A Deutsche Bank report released last month said the current growth policies would lead to a continuing steep decline of the environment for the next decade, especially given the expected coal consumption and boom in automobile sales. 

Mr. Thornton, the economist, said the recent official estimates of the environmental cost “marries with our on-the-ground feeling that a lot of short-term positives over the past few years are turning into long-term negatives.”


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## Costas (Mar 29, 2013)

Το παρόν άρθρο της ΝΥΤ ασχολείται με τη χαμηλή ποιότητα των καυσίμων: the sulfur levels of diesel in China are at least 23 times that of the United States, και με το λόμπι των αντίστοιχων βιομηχανιών (υδρογονανθράκων και άνθρακα).


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## Costas (Mar 29, 2013)

Επί τρία χρόνια το 'παιζε υφυπουργός σε μια επαρχία, ώσπου έκανε το λάθος να αναγγείλει κάτι που έγινε πρωτοσέλιδο, και ξεσκεπάστηκε --τι το ήθελε; Ας έμενε στους δεκάρικους λόγους, κανείς δεν θα τον ξεχώριζε από κανονικό αξιωματούχο... [1][2] Σ' εμάς, λόγω της μικρότητας της χώρας, κάτι τέτοιο μπορεί να γίνει από επίπεδο τμηματάρχη και κάτω, να υποθέσω;


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## Costas (Mar 29, 2013)

Αντιχλιδική εκστρατεία από τον νέο πρόεδρο (ΝΥΤ):
Warning that graft and gluttony threaten to bring down the ruling Communists, Mr. Xi has ordered an end to boozy, taxpayer-financed banquets and the bribery that often takes the form of a gift-wrapped Louis Vuitton bag. (...) The crackdown appears to be real, as far as it goes, which may not be very far. (...) Mr. Xi’s campaign even has a new catchphrase, based on his vision of gastronomic self-restraint: “Four dishes and a soup.” (...) Yellow Pavilion cigarettes, the $300-a-carton brand (...) Moutai, the $600-a-bottle gut-searing grain alcohol that is an omnipresent intoxicant at official banquets, has also seen its growth slow recently. (...) sales of shark fins had dropped more than 70 percent, and sales of edible swallow nests, the main ingredient of a $100-a-bowl delicacy, were down 40 percent. (...) One entrepreneur, who dines almost nightly with government officials and business associates and did not want to be identified as a result, said such invitations had dropped by half. “The nightly drinking takes a serious toll,” the entrepreneur said, expressing no regret at forgoing the mandated Maotai toasts. (Moutai / Maotai το ίδιο συνδικάτο, 53%-35% σπίρτο· έως και θάνατοι έχουν συμβεί.)


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## Costas (Mar 30, 2013)

Έστειλε τη μάνα του στο απόσπασμα: "I warned her: 'If you go against our dear Chairman Mao I will smash your dog head'" (...) "I felt this wasn't my mother. This wasn't a person. She suddenly became a monster … She had become a class enemy and opened her bloody mouth." (...) Red Guards smashed heirlooms and burned books: "I thought it was great – an unprecedented moment in history" (...) "I wrote a big character poster about him [=my father]; I just wanted to follow Chairman Mao," said Zhang. "For a child to criticise their parents wasn't just our household. The whole country was doing it." (The Guardian)


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## Costas (Mar 30, 2013)

Κυκλοφόρησε φωτογραφία με την Πρώτη Κυρία, που ως γνωστόν είναι αντιστράτηγος-τραγουδίστρια του Λαϊκού Απελευθερωτικού Στρατού, όπου τραγουδά στους στρατιώτες που επέβαλαν το στρατιωτικό νόμο τον Ιούνιο του 1989 στο Πεκίνο. Δεν είναι βέβαια τίποτα το περίεργο, ούτε και φαίνεται να απασχολεί τους Κινέζους, στους οποίους η ΠΚ είναι πολύ δημοφιλής, απ' ό,τι λέγεται. Και άλλωστε τη δουλειά της έκανε...


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## Costas (Mar 30, 2013)

As hard as it is to believe, these are the lengths to which the Chinese government will go to persecute family members of dissidents, without any justification. They will go to your spouse, your children, your aging mother and father, your employer, your friends, your landlord, your girlfriend or boyfriend; they will go to everyone who is in any way related to you. And the world has to learn that, in the CCP’s book, this is nothing new. After all, the party owns China. (Για την αρχή της συλλογικής τιμωρίας στην αρχαία Κίνα, όπου για το έγκλημα της προδοσίας μπορούσε να θεωρηθεί υπεύθυνη όλη η οικογένεια του ανθρώπου που είχε καταδικαστεί ως προδότης, βλ. [1]). (Seeing Red in China)


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## Costas (Apr 1, 2013)

Οι χώρες BRICS ("Χρυσό Τούβλο" στα κινέζικα) συστήνουν ταμείο αντιμετώπισης κρίσεων 100 δις δολαρίων. (The Financial Express)

Η Κίνα έστειλε κυανόκρανους στην Κύπρο. (Reuters)
"When I was at the military academy, we were told we would never do U.N. peacekeeping," he told Reuters in his office at a largely abandoned former British aerodrome in the buffer zone. "But the changes of the 1970s and 1980s opened up new opportunities. Being involved in peacekeeping allows us to learn from the outside world and also to show the outside world who the PLA are."

Λαϊκή Κίνα: η μεγαλύτερη εξαγωγέας Βίβλων. (The Economist)

Ο μικρός αδελφός της Λίου Ξ(Σ)ιά κατηγορείται από τις αρχές για απάτη κλπ. ‘I’ll soon go mad’ έχει πει η όμηρος του κράτους. (NYT)

Η μαφιοποίηση της ζωής σε όλο της το μεγαλείο, και στο επίπεδο της ανώτατης ελίτ. Μοιάζει με ταινία Κουνγκ Φου (επεισόδιο του 2009 που βγήκε τώρα μόλις στη φόρα για συγκεκριμένους λόγους). (The World Age)

Κάποιος του προσωπικού ενός ιδιωτικού σχολείου έδειρε θανάσιμα δύο μαθητές 10-12 χρονών. (BBC)

Λίστα (διευρυμένη) απαγορευόμενων δραστηριοτήτων κυκλοφόρησε στο Θιβέτ. (Radio Free Asia)


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## drsiebenmal (Apr 1, 2013)

How important is the Chinese market to Apple? Enough to apologize to.


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## Costas (Apr 2, 2013)

Αν δεν είναι φόλα, πρόκειται για σπανιότατη προς το παρόν περίπτωση Χαν Κινέζου που προσχωρεί ένοπλα στην Αραβική Άνοιξη. (YouTube)

Έδιτ: νά και σχετικό άρθρο της NYT.


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## Costas (Apr 3, 2013)

Τον περασμένο Σεπτέμβρη είχε δημοσιευτεί η είδηση της κυκλοφορίας του πρώτου τόμου της κινέζικης μετάφρασης του Finnegans Wake, του Τζέιμς Τζόυς. Το πρώτο τιράζ των 8000 αντιτύπων εξαντλήθηκε κι έγινε ανατύπωση με 5000 αντίτυπα! (WSJ)

The book briefly rose to No. 2 on a bestseller list run by a Shanghai book industry group, just behind a biography of the late Deng Xiaoping. (...)
"I have to say it's less pleasant than I expected," said Nico Wu, a 23-year-old public-relations professional in Shanghai, who says he slogged through the first 30 of its 775 pages before giving up. "I thought at least I could get a sense of the plot," he said. "But now, I feel it is too hard to even do that." (...)
"I am so desperate to know how it feels to read the most complicated book in the world," said He Kuang, a 50-year-old civil servant in the coastal city Xiamen, who bought the translation. "It's like an IQ test." (...)
"The traditional writing style of Chinese literature needs to be changed after all these years," [Ms. Dai, the translator] said. "Someone needs to stand out and lead by his unique writing, like what James [Joyce] did in Western literature." (...)
To re-create some of the sounds of the novel, Ms. Dai had to create new Chinese characters [Πώς το έκανε, δηλαδή; Με γλωσσάρι για το πώς προφέρονται;] —a notable hoop to jump through considering Chinese already has tens of thousands of characters. (...)
Her publisher paid her 75 yuan ($12) per thousand English words translated (...)
(...) publisher Shanghai People's Publishing House gave the book market appeal with a slick billboard campaign in the downtown areas of major Chinese cities. A deluxe, 168 yuan version comes in a box with a slim Joyce biography and bookmark, and it shows a young Joyce standing head-cocked and confident with his hands in his pants pockets. The book was also advertised in in-flight magazines, online reading sites and stores. It got an additional boost from China's state-run media, (...)

Πάντως η παλιά είδηση έλεγε πως άφησε μόλις τις μισές λέξεις.


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## Costas (Apr 4, 2013)

A mainland court has jailed an elderly man for a murder committed during the tumultuous 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, officials said yesterday, after a trial that sparked anger over seemingly selective justice. Qiu Riren, who is in his eighties, was on Friday condemned to three-and-a-half years in jail for the 1967 killing (...) Qiu had belonged to an "armed group" and strangled his victim - a doctor thought to be a spy - before cutting off his legs and burying him, the state-run China News Service reported. Mainland social media users decried the trial when state media announced it in February, pointing out that senior officials who stirred up the social and political upheaval had never been held accountable. (...) The authorities have never publicly estimated how many died during the Cultural Revolution, but British historian Roderick MacFarquhar has estimated half a million deaths in 1967. (SCMP)

Those visiting tombs of relatives during today's Ching Ming grave-sweeping festival may be surprised to see others at nearby graves huddled around a mobile phone (...) With the space on most headstones limited, QR (quick-response) codes allow access to a vast databank of memories and information about loved ones, or even complete strangers, via a simple scan. (...) The matchbox-sized codes direct mobile phones to websites dedicated to the deceased. The sites are usually maintained by the cemetery for about 300 yuan (HK$370) a year. They can contain poetry, music, photos and videos, and may be accessed by the public or with a password. (SCMP)


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## Costas (Apr 6, 2013)

*Are iOS apps the next victims in China’s war on Apple?* (Quartz)
(επειδή δίνουν πρόσβαση σε βιβλία απαγορευμένα στην Κίνα που θίγουν θέματα Θιβέτ, Ξ(Σ)ιντζιάνγκ, κλπ.)


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## Costas (Apr 6, 2013)

Αναμνήσεις του Perry Link από τον αστροφυσικό και διαφωνούντα Fang Lizhi (NY Review of Books). Η αρ. 6 είναι πολύ ενδιαφέρουσα πολιτικά.


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## Costas (Apr 7, 2013)

*The Coming Information Totalitarianism in China*, άρθρο του Mo Zhixu (Seeing Red in China)


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## daeman (Apr 7, 2013)

...
Eastasia.


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## Costas (Apr 10, 2013)

daeman said:


> ...
> Eastasia.


?

Ο άνθρωπος έχει πουλήσει 100 εκατομμύρια νόμιμα αντίτυπα. (weekinchina)


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## daeman (Apr 10, 2013)

Costas said:


> *The Coming Information Totalitarianism in China*, άρθρο του Mo Zhixu (Seeing Red in China)


Eastasia. Ανατολασία. Σε μια φαντασία. :s


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## Costas (Apr 10, 2013)

Α, μάλιστα! το είχα ξεχάσει.


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## Costas (Apr 12, 2013)

Ο "Τζάνγκο" του Ταραντίνο, μετά από ένα saturation advertising εβδομάδων, τελικά αποσύρθηκε από τις κινεζικές αίθουσες την πρώτη μέρα της προβολής του. Στην Κίνα δεν υπάρχουν κατηγορίες κατάλληλο-ακατάλληλο, κι έτσι πρέπει όλες οι ταινίες να κριθούν κατάλληλες για παιδιά. (ΝΥΤ)


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## Costas (Apr 16, 2013)

Ένα παλιό βιβλίο του Μο Γιαν που πραγματεύεται τη νοθεία των τροφίμων, συγκεκριμένα του κρέατος, θέμα πολύ επίκαιρο λόγω της πρόσφατης ιστορίας με τα 15000 ψόφια γουρούνια. (Week in China)
We live in an age that scholars characterise as that of the primitive accumulation of capital. Just what does that mean? Simply that people will make money by any means necessary, and that everyone’s money is tainted by the blood of others. Once this phase has passed, moral behaviour will again be in fashion. But during times of immoral behaviour, if we persist in being moral, we might as well starve to death.”


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## Costas (Apr 16, 2013)

Το χρονικό του Λιάο Γι-Ού από τα χρόνια του στη φυλακή κυκλοφόρησε και στα αγγλικά. (ΝΥΤ)


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## Costas (Apr 19, 2013)

Οι εσωτερικοί μετανάστες στη Σαγκάη είναι....9,5 εκατομμύρια. Δουλειά ξεδουλειά, θέλουν να μείνουν στην πόλη, δε γουστάρουν χωριό. Σιγά-σιγά μπαίνουν και στον τομέα των υπηρεσιών. (Global Times)

Τα στρατόπεδα εργασίας χειρότερα, λέει μια έρευνα σ' ένα συγκεκριμένο για γυναίκες, κι από το Zhazidong. (South China Morning Post) Άντε να ευχηθούμε και στην Αμυγδαλέζα μας!...


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## Costas (Apr 20, 2013)

Οι μετακομίσεις ξένου κεφαλαίου από την Κίνα στην Καμπότζη, πάντα σε αναζήτηση χαμηλού κόστους, και τα προβλήματά τους. (ΝΥΤ)

H υποβάθμιση της ΛΔΚ από την Fitch από ΑΑ- σε Α+. (Financial Times)

Η αντιγνωμία στα ανώτερα κλιμάκια σε σχέση με τη μεταρρύθμιση της πολιτικής του ενός τέκνου. (Reuters) Εντωμεταξύ, σαν να μην έχουν τελειωμό τα βάσανα και οι καημοί του κόσμου. (Asia News)

Μίλησε ο Ξ(Σ)ι Τζινπίνγκ για China dream, του αντιτραγούδησε ο Θείος με τα Κόκκινα (το αφιέρωσε μάλιστα στην κα προέδρου Πενγκ Λιγιουάν!), τον κόψανε (You Tube). Η μουσική είναι άσ' τα να πάνε· οι στίχοι, άξεστοι αλλά σαφέστατοι:

Το κινέζικο όνειρο δεν είναι ένα όνειρο δεσποτισμού / ........διχτατορίας / ....απόκρυψης / .....λαμόγιων πολιτικών
Το κινέζικο όνειρο είναι ένα λαϊκό όνειρο / ......ένα όνειρο δημοκρατίας / .........συνταγματικής διακυβέρνησης / ........λαϊκής ευημερίας

Το κινέζικο όνειρο δεν είναι ένα όνειρο με μεγαλόσχημους / ....με γκαγκστεροσυμμορίες / ......λογοκρισίας / ....αναγκαστικών κατεδαφίσεων
Το κινέζικο όνειρο είναι ένα όνειρο για όλους μαζί / .....με την Ταϊβάν / ......με εκλογές / ......ελευθερίας!


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## Costas (Apr 20, 2013)

Είδα στην Καθημερινή ετούτη τη φωτογραφία του Mark Ralston που δείχνει νεονύμφους ντυμένους με στολές του Λαϊκού Απελευθερωτικού Στρατού:







και θυμήθηκα το ζωγράφο Qi Zhilong [1], που είχε εκθέσει μαζί με άλλους έργα του το 2008 στο Γκάζι:


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## Costas (Apr 20, 2013)

Καρκινοπαθής χάρισε τα όργανά του, αλλά ήρθαν πάνω απ' το κρεβάτι του δυο ομάδες γιατρών (η μία με λουλούδια) και κόντεψαν να έρθουν στα χέρια, οπότε αυτός αναθεώρησε! (The Telegraph)

Και μια και μιλάμε για τελειώματα του βίου, μια...προπτυχιακή εργολάβα κηδειών λανσάρισε ψεύτικες κηδείες για να ανακαλύψει κανείς πάλι την αξία της ζωής. (The Telegraph) Πολύ μπουνιουελικό!

Προσπαθώντας η Ιαπωνία να σπάσει την αντικειμενική συμμαχία ΛΔΚ-Ταϊβάν εναντίον της για τον έλεγχο της θαλάσσιας περιοχής των νησιών Σενκάκου/Ντιάογιου, παραχώρησε άνευ όρων αλιευτικά δικαιώματα στην Ταϊβάν σε επιπλέον έκταση τεσσεράμισι χιλιάδων τετραγωνικών χιλιομέτρων. Ανοίγουν σαμπάνιες στην Ταϊβάν. (Voice of America)

Σαμπάνιες ανοίγουν και οι εκπαιδευτικοί κύκλοι του Χονγκ Κονγκ, αφού περιλήφθηκε ερώτηση για την 4η Ιουνίου (1989) στις εξετάσεις για την είσοδο στα πανεπιστήμια (το περίφημο -και δαμόκλειο- γκάοκαο). (κινεζόφωνο BBC)


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## Costas (Apr 20, 2013)

Η ιστορία έχει καταγραφεί και παλιότερα. Βίασαν και εκπόρνευσαν με το ζόρι την κόρη της, ώσπου την ανακάλυψε και τη λευτέρωσε. Στη δίκη, από τους 7 οι 2 καταδικάστηκαν σε θάνατο, οι 4 σε ισόβια και ο ένας σε 15 χρόνια. Μετά την απόφαση, εκείνη άρχισε καμπάνια για να καταδικαστούν και οι άλλοι 5 σε θάνατο. Τη φυλάκισαν ως ενοχλητική για την κοινωνική γαλήνη στις ειδικές χωρίς δίκη φυλακές για 18 μήνες, αλλά η περίπτωσή της ξεσήκωσε θύελλα και την άφησαν σε 9 μέρες. Στη συνέχεια ζήτησε αποζημίωση από τη φυλακή, αλλά της την αρνήθηκαν. Τους έκανε αγωγή (για εκατόν τόσα δολάρια) κι έχασε την πρώτη δίκη. (BBC)

Προσοχή!! Το γιουτούμπι αυτό είναι ακατάλληλο για παιδιά, και σκληρό πολύ και για μεγάλους. Μεταξύ άλλων, ζώα που τα γδέρνουν ζωντανά για τη γούνα τους. Σπικάρει η όμορφη, Κινέζα από τη μεριά της μάνας της Olivia Munn, και προσπαθεί να περάσει το μήνυμα στις καταναλώτριες. (You Tube)


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## Costas (Apr 20, 2013)

Κίνα και Ισλανδία υπέγραψαν συμφωνία ελεύθερων συναλλαγών. (ΝΥΤ) Iceland had been negotiating [EU] membership but suspended talks in January amid widespread domestic opposition. John Clancy, a spokesman in Brussels for the European trade commissioner, Karel De Gucht, said Iceland would have to terminate all of its bilateral trade deals were it eventually to join the bloc.

Η Μυανμάρ, προς την οποία γλυκοκοιτάζουν οι πολυεθνικές (βλ. χτεσινό ποστ), κάνει γενικότερο άνοιγμα στη δυτική επιχειρηματικότητα, προσπαθεί να ξαναμοιράσει την τράπουλα, και με νέους όρους. Έτσι τουλάχιστον ισχυρίζονται οι Financial Times. Πολύ ενδιαφέρον.

Πολύ σφιχτά τα νέα γκέμια του ΚΚΚ στα μίντια. (The Economic Observer) And online news sites should not publish any reports from a news source, freelance writer or NGO before the facts are verified. Όλα στο όνομα του αγώνα κατά του κιτρινισμού.

Η Ericsson, η Alcatel και η Nokia Siemens (δεν το 'ξερα για το γάμο!) φοβούνται λέει να κάνουν καταγγελία για τις κρατικές χρηματοδοτήσεις της Κίνας προς την Huawei και την ΖΤΕ (το δεύτερο είναι μάπα· έχω ιδίαν πείραν), οπότε ανέλαβε ο προαναφερθείς Επίτροπος Ντε Χουχτ να ξεκινήσει έρευνα μόνος του. (Reuters) Μήπως να έκανε το ίδιο και η δική μας Επιθεώρηση Εργασίας, στον τομέα ευθύνης της;....

Τώρα άρχισαν να αυτοπυρπολούνται και τρίτεκνες μανάδες στο Θιβέτ; (Radio Free Asia)

Τσάι του βουνού: η μεγαλύτερη επιχείρηση χορήγησης πλασίμπο. (Worldcrunch)


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## Zazula (Apr 21, 2013)

Costas said:


> ...η Nokia Siemens (δεν το 'ξερα για το γάμο!)...


Μα, δεν είναι γάμος — joint venture είναι. Και δεν έχει να κάνει με τις συσκευές κινητής τηλεφωνίας.


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## Costas (Apr 21, 2013)

Α! ε, εσύ ξέρεις καλύτερα.


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## Zazula (Apr 21, 2013)

http://gr.nokiasiemensnetworks.com/ :)


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## Costas (Apr 21, 2013)

Οι Κινέζοι λένε πως ο ιός της γρίπης των πουλιών μεταλλάσσεται 8 φορές γρηγορότερα από τον ιό της κοινής γρίπης. (renminwang)

Όλο για ξέπλυμα βρόμικου χρήματος ακούμε τον τελευταίο καιρό. Οι κινεζικές τράπεζες θεωρούνται από τους Δυτικούς ως εκείνες που διακινούν τον μεγαλύτερο όγκο τέτοιου χρήματος παγκοσμίως (κάποια τρις δολάρια). Τέλος πάντων, αποφάσισαν να σουλουπώσουν τους κανονισμούς τους. (Reuters)


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## Costas (Apr 23, 2013)

Πανικός στην Γκάνα: 1 εκατομμ. καπότες made in China είναι τρύπιες και σπάνε. (The Guardian)


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## daeman (Apr 23, 2013)

Σε κάνα εννιάμηνο να δεις τι θα γίνεται. Πανσπερμία. Προφυλακτικά _O Πη_, made rent in China, sold in Ghana.
Ωχ, έχουν άλλα ζόρια, άσχημα.


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## Costas (Apr 23, 2013)

Το περσινό ρεπορτάζ του David Barboza της NYT για το πώς το σόι του πρώην πρωθυπουργού της ΛΔΚ Ουέν Τζιαμπάο έχει μαζέψει δισεκατομμύρια χωρίς ο ίδιος να τα 'χει αγγίξει κέρδισε ένα από τα βραβεία Πούλιτζερ (μου κάνει εντύπωση που δεν είναι ενημερωμένη η Wikipedia). (NYT)


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## Costas (Apr 23, 2013)

Η ενδέκατη πληγή: η ατμοσφαιρική ρύπανση. (ΝΥΤ)

Few developments have eroded trust in the Communist Party as quickly as the realization that the leaders have failed to rein in threats to children’s health and safety. There was national outrage in 2008 after more than 5,000 children were killed when their schools collapsed in an earthquake, and hundreds of thousands were sickened and six infants died in a tainted-formula (γάλα σκόνη) scandal. Officials tried to suppress angry parents, sometimes by force or with payoffs. But the fury over air pollution is much more widespread and is just beginning to gain momentum.

Και ακολουθούν τα εφιαλτικά δεδομένα. Επενδύστε στα φίλτρα αέρα!


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## Costas (Apr 23, 2013)

Ο νέος πρόεδρος υποσχέθηκε πόλεμο εναντίον της διαφθοράς, εκείνοι διαδήλωσαν για πόθεν έσχες, τους μπαγλάρωσαν. (NYT)

Η γυναίκα του Λίου Ξ(Σ)ιαομπό, Λίου Ξ(Σ)ιά, βγήκε απ' το σπίτι της για να πάει στη δίκη του αδερφού της, μετά από δυόμισι χρόνια κατ' οίκον περιορισμό. Φώναζε "πείτε σε όλους ότι δεν είμαι ελεύθερη!" (The Guardian)


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## Costas (Apr 26, 2013)

Chinese is filled with homonyms, making punning a popular pastime. Οπότε "τη γυναίκα στα αζήτητα, στο ράφι" (που μένει στο ράφι γιατί κάνει καριέρα και βγάζει λεφτά περισσότερα από τους πιθανούς γαμπρούς και αυτό δε λέει) άρχισε να τη χτυπά η "νικήτρια γυναίκα"· shengnü και οι δύο, αλλά με άλλο χαρακτήρα: 剩女 και 胜女。(NYT)


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## SBE (Apr 26, 2013)

Δεν είναι πολιτική είδηση, δεν είναι καν είδηση, και δεν είναι από την ΛΚΔ, αλλά δεν ξέρω πού αλλού να το βάλω. Είναι ένα best of ενός συμφοιτητή μου ο οποίος είναι τηλεπαρουσιαστής στην Ταϊβάν. Μπορεί να μην καταλαβαίνω τι λέει, αλλά είμαι περίεργη να μάθω τι κάνουνε στην Ταϊβάν για να μείνουν νέοι, γιατί έμοιαζε 18 όταν ήμασταν συμφοιτητές και τώρα μοιάζει 15.


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## Costas (Apr 27, 2013)

"He is not god, and he will be removed from the altar, divested of all the myth that used to shroud him and receive a just evaluation as an ordinary man." Ένας Μάο για τον άλλον Μάο, και η μάχη ανάμεσα στους οπαδούς του κομουνισμού και του καπιταλισμού, με το ΚομουνιστοΚαπιταλιστικό Κόμμα (ΚΚΚ) στη μέση να δρέπει the best of both worlds: την εξουσία και το χρήμα. (South China Morning Post)

Οδοστρωτήρας πάνω από σωρούς πειρατικών DVD γιορτάζει την Παγκόσμια Ημέρα Πνευματικών Δικαιωμάτων. (China Buzz)


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## Costas (May 4, 2013)

Φόλα σε κοριτσάκια, με δόλωμα άγραφα τετράδια. Ούτε ψύλλος στον κόρφο της γιαγιάς. Όσο για την "επιχειρηματία"... πολλή πόρωση. (people's daily online)

Οι Κύπριοι προσπαθούν να μαζέψουν χρήμα απ' τους Κινέζους πουλώντας σπίτια έναντι μακρόχρονης άδειας παραμονής, σαν γέφυρα προς τις δυτικές χώρες της ΕΕ. (Economic Observer)

Ένα κινεζικό άρθρο για τα προβλήματα (και διλήμματα) της γνωστής μας Cosco. (Caixin)


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## Costas (May 8, 2013)

Αυτό το είδα στις τουαλέτες της Ακρόπολης:




= Κάτω το ΚΚΚ (γραμμένο σε απλοποιημένη γραφή, αυτήν που χρησιμοποιείται στη ΛΔΚ)

China Manufacturers Survive by Moving to Asian Neighbors (WSJ)
Άρθρο μέρος σειράς για το κινέζικο εργατικό δυναμικό. Μια εικόνα αριστερά που συγκρίνει την κατάσταση των εργατών στα διάφορα εργοστάσια μιας εταιρείας μού θύμισε το επιτραπέζιο παιχνίδι γκο!

Το Πεντάγωνο μίσθωσε για τις ανάγκες του στην Αφρική τις υπηρεσίες ενός...κινέζικου δορυφόρου.


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## Costas (May 8, 2013)

Ο Wong Kar Wai χρίστηκε διοικητής του γαλλικού Τάγματος Γραμμάτων και Τεχνών. Οσονούπω καταφτάνει στη Δύση η τελευταία του ταινία, Ο Μεγάλος Δάσκαλος. Προσδεθείτε! (WSJ)

China Is Plundering the Planet's Seas ... by consuming over twelve times more fish than it's admitting to. (The Atlantic) (Chinese Statistics?)

*Chinese Text Project*
The Chinese Text Project is a web-based e-text system designed to present ancient Chinese texts, particularly those relating to Chinese philosophy, in a well-structured and properly cross-referenced manner, making the most of the electronic medium to aid in the study and understanding of these texts.


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## Costas (May 19, 2013)

Το 'διοικητής' παραπάνω πρέπει να γίνει 'ταξιάρχης', όπως είχε την καλοσύνη να μου επισημάνει ο φίλος Earion. Της νύχτας τα καμώματα...

Ο Σαμαράς πήγε στην Κίνα και είπε Ni hao· ψέλλισε κάτι ακόμη στα κινέζικα κι απ' το ακροατήριο ακούστηκε ένα 'ξεπνεομένο' (μου άρεσε αυτό!) χειροκρότημα. Μετά είπε τη γνωστή αρλούμπα ότι στα κινέζικα η λέξη για το crisis σημαίνει και opportunity. Καπάκι διέπραξε και αστεϊσμό με grexit και grecovery. Έξω πάμε...σκατά.
Ένα κανάλι (ίσως η ΝΕΤ), δείχνοντας πλάνα από την ξενάγησή του στο Σινικό Τείχος, έβαλε κάτω την εξής λεζάντα: "Το Σινικό Τείχος χτίστηκε για αμυντικούς σκοπούς". Για δες! τείχος να χτίζεται για αμυντικούς σκοπούς...


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## Costas (May 21, 2013)

Δεν κόβω και το...δάχτυλό μου, αλλά αυτή η Senjen Airports πρέπει να είναι κάποια Shenzhen Airports. Και σίγουρα η Huwaei είναι η Huawei. Ε ναι, και μέσα πάμε σκατά.

Μαζικός θρήνος στην Κίνα για την αναχώρηση Σαμαρά!
Με δάκρυα απόγνωσης μούσκεψαν τα πορτραίτα του Αντώνη Σαμαρά οι πολυάριθμοι θαυμαστές του, μόλις έμαθαν ότι το αεροπλάνο του Γητευτή των Κινέζικων κεφαλαίων (άλλη μια προσφώνηση του Έλληνα πρωθυπουργού...), απογειώθηκε.
Ήδη τα γιγαντιαία αυτόγραφα που ο ίδιος ο πρωθυπουργός είχε μοιράσει με την υπογραφή του, στον κόσμο που τον πολιορκούσε συνέχεια, φαίνεται ότι θα αποτελέσουν αντικείμενα πόθου για την κινεζική νεολαία.
Ευτυχώς που υπάρχει κι ο Ζαχαριάδης...

Στο φεστιβάλ Καννών θα παρουσιαστεί η νέα ταινία του πολύ αξιόλογου σκηνοθέτη Τζια Τζανγκ-Κε, A Touch of Sin. Ισχυρίζεται μάλιστα ο σκηνοθέτης ότι έχει ήδη λάβει την έγκριση της λογοκρισίας και ότι η βερσιόν που θα προβληθεί στις Κάννες θα είναι ίδια μ' εκείνην που θα προβληθεί στην Κίνα. Θα δούμε, γιατί η πληροφορία δεν κολλάει με τις γενικότερες τάσεις της περιόδου, που μαρτυρούν ένα στρίψιμο της βίδας στο χώρο της έκφρασης.


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## Zazula (May 23, 2013)




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## bernardina (May 23, 2013)

Αν _είναι_ δυνατόν!


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## Costas (May 25, 2013)

Πες μας τι πίνεις και δε μας δίνεις... Έχει πλάκα και ο πεζός που διασχίζει τη διασταύρωση!

Ανάρπαστες οι προβλέψεις για κατακλυσμιαίες εξελίξεις στη χώρα στο λίαν προσεχές μέλλον και η παραφιλολογία για τα άπλυτα της ελίτ (ΝΥΤ):
 “It’s like when your National Enquirer becomes your only form of political discussion,” said Geremie Barmé, a professor at the Australian National University in Canberra who studies Chinese culture and politics. “This is a tragedy that the party has generated for itself. Its processes are all cloaked from the public.”
Yet many readers of banned publications from Hong Kong are themselves Chinese officials, often eager for gossip that can help them navigate treacherous political shoals. The books and magazines are surviving the onslaught of online material in part because so many of their readers are officials who fear using the Internet to look at forbidden material or lack the skill to thwart censorship, said Mr. Tang.
“You don’t have to read the People’s Daily, because that won’t tell you what’s really going on, but you have to read these,” said Ho Pin, an exiled Chinese journalist who runs Mirror Books, a company based in New York that publishes muckraking books and magazines in Chinese. Chinese officials visiting Hong Kong often buy them as gifts for fellow officials, he said. “In the past, you’d give a mayor a bottle of liquor. But that’s nothing these days, and so is a carton of cigarettes,” Mr. Ho said. “But if you give him one of our books or magazines, he’ll be very happy.”
Να και μερικοί τίτλοι (σε παραδοσιακή γραφή), πάντα από την ΝΥΤ.


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## Costas (May 25, 2013)

Μετάφραση, ποίηση, εκσυγχρονισμός:

Gloria Bien, _Baudelaire in China: A Study in Literary Reception_ (MCLC - Modern Chinese Literature and Culture)

Lucas Klein, _Foreign Echoes and Discerning the Soil: Dual Translation, Historiography, and World Literature in Chinese Poetry_ (παρουσίαση διδακτ. διατριβής, Dissertation Reviews)

Τριήμερο διεθνές συμπόσιο του Κέντρου Μεταφραστικών Ερευνών του Κινεζικού Πανεπιστημίου του Χονγκ Κονγκ, με θέμα: _Μετάφραση και εκσυγχρονισμός στην Ανατολική Ασία στον 19ο και στις αρχές του 20ού αιώνα_. Ενδεικτικοί τίτλοι ανακοινώσεων:
The Post-Kantian “Subject” in Meiji Japan: Notes on the East Asian Translation of a Keyword of Modern Philosophical and Political Thought
Rendering the “Zeitgeist:” Poetics and Political Thematic in Guo Moruo’s Translation of Goethe’s _Faust_
‘Entering Into the Family of Nations’: Translation and the First Diplomatic Missions to the West, 1860s–1870s
Transmission of Modernity to China: On _English and Chinese Dictionary_ by W. Lobscheid
New and translated concepts of time and history in late Qing discourse
Revolution in the Realm of Translation: On the Transformation of Late Qing Translation Practice


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## Costas (May 25, 2013)

Το κλιπ (με τα λόγια) από το νέο σινγκλ του Ai Weiwei, από το κυκλοφορηθησόμενο  CD του "Θεία Κωμωδία", σε μουσική Zuoxiao Zuzhou:






Και δύο σχετικά άρθρα, το πρώτο διαφωτιστικό: ΝΥΤ και The Guardian.


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## Costas (May 25, 2013)

WORLDWIDE READING FOR LI BIFENG ON 4 JUNE 2013

By calling for a worldwide reading on 4 June 2013 for the Chinese underground poet, Li Bifeng, the international literature festival berlin is demanding that the Chinese government release him from prison.

The poet and campaigner for democracy, Li Bifeng, wrote a report in 1998 about a courageous group of textile workers who blockaded a Chinese motorway and sent a video recording of it to foreign human rights organisations. In 1989, after he had been involved in the protest on Tiananmen Square and on the run for six months, Li Bifeng was captured and sentenced to twelve years imprisonment for ³economic crimes². In November 2012, the 48-year-old was sentenced to another 12 years, with no good reason, without evidence and despite worldwide protests. The authorities suspect him of having helped his friend, the author Liao Yiwu and holder of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade 2012, to escape to Germany in 2011.

In the short phases in which Li Bifeng has been able to write, he has written numerous poems, prose texts and plays as well as a novel. On the anniversary of the massacre on Tiananmen Square in Beijing, which took place on 4 June 1989, the Peter-Weiss Foundation for Art and Politics e.V. and the international literature festival berlin have initiated a worldwide reading for Li Bifeng. After a brief introduction to Li¹s work and his biography, excerpts from his poems and prose texts will be read, as well as an interview with him carried out by Liao Yiwu in 2005 and published in the latter¹s book 'Die Kugel und das Opium' (En.: 'Bullets and Opium', German edition published by Fischer in 2005).


Worldwide reading for Li Bifeng in Berlin

4 June 2013 at 7 pm, Martin-Gropius-Bau / Cinema
Frank Arnold will read, Ulrich Schreiber will chair the discussion between Liao Yiwu and Peter Schneider

Admission free

The following, among others, have already joined the ilb¹s call for a reading: Ai Weiwei, Wolf and Pamela Biermann, Yasmine El Rashidi, Elfriede Jelinek, Liao Yiwu, Herta Müller, Salman Rushdie, Ha Jin and Peter Stephan Jungk. You can find the names of more supporters at www.worldwide-reading.com <http://www.worldwide-reading.com/>

13. internationales literaturfestival berlin | 04. - 14.09.2013 Chausseestraße 5, 10115 Berlin, Phone +49 (0) 30 - 27 87 86 65, Fax +49 (0) 30 - 27 87 86 85, [email protected] // www.literaturfestival.com <http://www.literaturfestival.com/>


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## Costas (May 25, 2013)

Δύο no-nonsense κείμενα από τον Xu Zhiyong [Ξ(Σ)ϋ Τζ-Γιόνγκ], δικηγόρο υπέρ των δικαιωμάτων του ανθρώπου, σχετικά με το Νέο Κίνημα Πολιτών που έχει συστήσει (China Digital Times).

Service, duty, and letting go; each is harder to accomplish than the last. Many can serve society, but as soon as they encounter resistance, they might retreat. This is understandable. Each person should take on responsibility according to his or her capacity. The most difficult of all is letting go. We all have our selfish instincts. But to fulfill our responsibility, we must let go of our egos as best we can. This is a continuous process of self-reflection and self-cultivation. Democratic elections and the system of checks and balances are of course more essential forces; but the strength of personal morality within the community of citizens will directly influence the progress of democratization and, in the long run, the quality of the newly-born democratic system. Service, duty, and letting go; this is a never-ending process of personal cultivation, and it is the continuous union and growth of the force for democracy and constitutional government.

Εν τω μεταξύ, τον τελευταίο καιρό πληθαίνουν τα άρθρα που κατακεραυνώνουν τον "συνταγματισμό" ως δυτικό αστικό μικρόβιο που δεν έχει θέση στο κινεζικό οικοσύστημα. Γενικά, παρατηρείται μια ιδεολογική σκλήρυνση παράλληλα με μια καμπάνια εναντίον της διαφθοράς και της σπατάλης στο κόμμα και στη διοίκηση. Πρώτα θύματα: το ακριβό αλκοόλ και τα εστιατόρια, και επίσης τα ακριβά ρολόγια.


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## Costas (May 25, 2013)

Για τους ρέκτες του Τελευταίου Αυτοκράτορα: Author unravels mystery of plot that toppled China's last emperor (The Telegraph)


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## Costas (May 25, 2013)

Αφιέρωμα του περιοδικού Dissent στο πώς βιώνουν και αντιδρούν στο σήμερα οι κινεζικές μάζες: China's 99% (Dissent)


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## Costas (May 25, 2013)

Απάνθισμα οικονομικών ειδήσεων:

Οι Αμερικανοί έσωσαν την General Motors και τώρα αυτή επενδύει περισσότερο στην Κίνα παρά στις ΗΠΑ, ετοιμάζεται δε να εξαγάγει αυτοκίνητα στις ΗΠΑ... (WSJ)

Η ίδια η κινεζική μεταποίηση, με τη σειρά της, μεταναστεύει προς φτηνότερες ασιατικές χώρες... (WSJ)

Σε λίγο θα φτιάχνουν και εξαιρετικό κρασί. (WSJ)

A provincial city’s ambitious plans for turning an ancient Buddhist temple near Xian into the world capital of Buddhism and listing it on a stock exchange have stagnated, leaving the temple surrounded by fake monks and sham Buddha statues. In an investigative report, the Guangzhou-based Southern Weekly documents how the project involving the 1,700-year-old Famen Temple in Shaanxi province – which boasts the ownership of Buddha’s finger bone – went horribly wrong. Now, fake monks from Hubei province roam a nearby scenic park that opened in 2009 and that tourists and pilgrims mistaken as part of the temple. The impostors get commission for collecting donations to the Shaanxi Famen Charitable Foundation. But clueless visitors do not know the foundation is a front for the operating company of the park, Shaanxi Famen Temple Scenic Park Cultural Industrial Group, and is not related to the temple, the weekly reported last week. (South China Morning Post) [Ils sont fous, ces chinois!]

Li [Keqiang] Signals Reluctance on Stimulus to Boost China Growth (Bloomberg)

Ο ίδιος φαίνεται να σταμάτησε τα σχέδια για ένα "νέο κύμα αστυφιλίας" (και τις συνακόλουθες γιγάντιες θαλασσοεπενδύσεις). (Reuters)

A more detailed look at China's economic performance in 2012 shows it tipped further off balance, relying more than ever on credit-fueled investment, a trend it had tried to rein in. A further tilt toward capital spending flies in the face of Beijing's goals to shift to a consumption-driven economic model and threatens to add to a mounting debt problem, exacerbate industrial overcapacity that is dragging down profits, and produce more empty "ghost cities." (WSJ)

Εγκρίθηκε περιβαλλοντικώς το ψηλότερο Υ/Η φράγμα, 314 μέτρα. (Reuters)


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## Costas (May 25, 2013)

...και περιβαλλοντική επιβάρυνση:

China Is Plundering the Planet's Seas... by consuming over twelve times more fish than it's admitting to. (The Atlantic)

Φωτορεπορτάζ του Lu Guang (με σπικάρισμα) για τις συνέπειες από την ανοιχτή εκμετάλλευση άνθρακα στην Εσωτερική Μογγολία, και άλλα πολλά. (The Guardian) Εντυπωσιακά τα μπάνια των πιτσιρικάδων στο πετρέλαιο!

Ένα παλιότερο (2011) φωτορεπορτάζ από την Greenpeace, για τη μόλυνση από τα απόβλητα της υφαντουργίας. (The Guardian)

Μετά το κρέας αρουραίου αντί για χοιρινό και τα ανακυκλωμένα μαγειρικά λάδια απόρριψης ("gutter oil"), ήρθε το κάδμιο στο ρύζι. Μετά το ρύζι, τα οστρακοειδή με κάδμιο 20 φορές απάνω από τα όρια σε καντονέζικο εστιατόριο, πόλη όπου καταναλώνονται 5 τόνοι την ημέρα απ' αυτά. (China Daily)


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## Costas (May 25, 2013)

O tempora, o mores:

China Officials Seek Career Shortcut With Feng Shui (NYT) (Πολύ ωραία φωτογραφία!)

Το χιούμορ στην Κίνα. Ωριαία ηχογραφημένη εκπομπή με συζήτηση εκπατρισμένων Αμερικανών, ειδικευμένων στο χιούμορ, για τις διαφορές ανάμεσα στο αμερικάνικο και στο κινέζικο χιούμορ. (popup chinese) Ανάμεσά τους και ο Jesse Appell, που γύρισε μια νέα εκδοχή του Gangnam Style, το Laowai Style, με μεγάλη επιτυχία στην Κίνα. Σχετικό επίσης το κείμενο του συμμετέχοντος στην εκπομπή David Moser, _Stifled Laughter: How the Communist Party Killed Chinese Humor_. (Danwei)

Φροντιστήρια για εισαγωγή στα περιζήτητα δημοτικά σχολεία! (ed news china)

Angry owner destroys Maserati Quattroporte in China (Car News China) Έχει παράπονα για τα ανταλλακτικά που του πούλησαν.

Ο σκηνοθέτης Τζανγκ Γιμόου έχει τουλάχιστον εφτά παιδιά, σε μια χώρα όπου επιτρέπεται μόνο ένα. (Marketplace)


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## Costas (May 25, 2013)

Ο νέος πρωθυπουργός της Ιαπωνίας θεωρεί ότι δεν υπήρξε aggression από τη μεριά της Ιαπωνίας στα χρόνια του Β' Π.Π., γιατί ο όρος aggression δεν έχει διευκρινιστεί αρκετά... (The Asahi Shimbun)

Στις 16 Μαΐου 1966 η ΚΕ του ΚΚΚ κυκλοφόρησε μια εγκύκλιο που θεωρείται η επίσημη έναρξη της Πολιτιστικής Επανάστασης. Το marxists.org έχει το κείμενο.

Ματιές στα κομμένα από τους λογοκριτές τιτιβίσματα στο Weibo. (Weibo Suite)


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## Costas (May 25, 2013)

Και μια και ο λόγος για την Ακατονόμαστη (που μπόλικους ετερόδοξους σταλινομαρξιστές ή οικτρά πλανεμένους επαναστάτες/τριες σαγήνεψε στη Δύση): βγήκαν σε δημοπρασία και μοσχοπουλήθηκαν πίνακες σπουδαίων Κινέζων ζωγράφων που είχε στην κατοχή του ο --μαντσουϊκής εθνικότητας-- μεγάλος Κινέζος συγγραφέας Λάο Σε, ο οποίος αυτοκτόνησε τον Αύγουστο του 1966, αφού
“On August 23, 1966, Lao She and 30 other intellectuals were seized by the Red Guards. He was made to kneel in front of the crowds with a plate hanging on his neck saying ‘active counterrevolutionary,’ and beaten cruelly.   On the early morning of the next day, after sitting by Taiping Lake for hours, he jumped into the water.”
The newspaper Global Times cited Lao She’s son, Mr. Shu, from the son’s memoir, “Father’s Last Two Days”: “When father was sitting by the lake, rather than physical pains and mental humiliations, what tormented him was that he wasn’t understood. In the morning, some paper was floating on the surface of the lake. On the paper were Chairman Mao’s poems, hand-written in father’s unique, neat calligraphy.” (IHT Rendezvous)

Η μαντεία με βάση τα κρακελαρίσματα πάνω στις φολίδες από τα καβούκια της χελώνας, στην οποία επιδίδονταν οι Κινέζοι της 2ης χιλιετίας π.Χ. και που μας έδωσε τα αρχαιότερα δείγματα της κινεζικής γραφής, μπορεί να ήταν και λίγο σικέ, λέει αρχαιολογική έρευνα, καθώς η παραγωγή συγκεκριμένου τύπου ρωγμών είναι, φαίνεται, ελέγξιμη. (xinhuanet)

*Chinese Text Project*
Welcome to the Chinese Text Project homepage. The Chinese Text Project is a web-based e-text system designed to present ancient Chinese texts, particularly those relating to Chinese philosophy, in a well-structured and properly cross-referenced manner, making the most of the electronic medium to aid in the study and understanding of these texts. (ctext.org) (μόνο στο πρωτότυπο)

Τέλος, άρθρο (με εικόνες) για τους Δέκα Ουράνιους Βλαστούς. (Sinoglot)


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## Costas (May 29, 2013)

Κυρίες και κύριοι, χειροκροτήστε την Κόκκινη Σημαία!


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## Costas (May 29, 2013)

In 2011, Mr. Zhang was the top-selling artist in the world at auction. Και χτες πουλήθηκε ένα έργο του του 1947 για 10,4 εκατομμ. γιουεσοδολάρια. (WSJ)


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## Costas (May 29, 2013)

*China’s WeChat Gaining Global Attention*

Move over WhatsApp, look out Facebook. China’s WeChat could become the world's most popular talk-and-text app. The WSJ’s Diana Jou explains how the Chinese-made app combined different social networking functions to build its 300 million user base. (κλιπ -WSJ)

Μοιάζει με διαφήμιση --στην κρίση σας.


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## Costas (May 31, 2013)

Ο βασιλιάς του χοιρινού στην Κίνα εξαγόρασε έναν βασιλιά του χοιρινού στις ΗΠΑ (Sinocism).

Από το ίδιο δελτίο του Sinocism, παρουσίαση των προσπαθειών για εξαγωγή του baijiu, της κινέζικης "βότκας", στις ξένες αγορές (και όχι μόνο για τους εκπατρισμένους Κινέζους): πώς έπιασε δηλαδή η τεκίλα και το σάκε; (Reuters)
"I thought it tasted like paint-thinner and felt like a liquid lobotomy," said Michael Pareles, manager at the U.S. Meat Export Federation in Beijing. "However, like many other things in China, I eventually grew to like it."
Baijiu's punch makes it a tough sell in Western bar culture where people drink on an empty stomach. So does its fuel-like odor and its aftertaste. But the history of alcoholic beverages shows that nearly any taste can be acquired. "Tequila has a very unusual flavor compared to more popular spirits," said Derek Sandhaus, industry consultant and author of a forthcoming book on baijiu appreciation. But through clever marketing, good cocktails, and good management, it's earned a place on the bar shelf. I see no reason why the world's most popular spirit can't do the same."
Με την εκστρατεία ενάντια στη χαλάρωση των ηθών των κρατικών λειτουργών, που εξαπέλυσε ο νέος πρόεδρος, οι πωλήσεις του ποτού έχουν πατώσει, γιατί σταμάτησαν οι "βασιλικοί πότοι". Εννοείται ότι δεν λείπουν και τα σκάνδαλα νοθείας (Asia Times). Ενδιαφέρον έχει, τέλος, η χημεία του ποτού: [1][2] (300 Shots at Greatness)


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## Costas (Jun 2, 2013)

Εκμάθηση μανταρίνικων για φιλογύνηδες/ισσες...
Κι ένα εύγλωττο για τους περίφημους τόνους!


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## Costas (Jun 3, 2013)

Εκανε το γύρο του κόσμου η περίπτωση του παιδιού που χάραξε χαρακτήρες πάνω σε αρχαίο γλυπτό στο Λούξορ, αλλά και το τι κάνουμε αν μας πιάσει χέσιμο μέσα στο μετρό έχει το ενδιαφέρον του ως λύση... (Off the Great Wall)
Μεγάλη επίσης η αγάπη των Κινέζων για τους αριθμούς. Εδώ, μηνύματα με αριθμούς αντί για τα δυτικά με γράμματα του τύπου lol κλπ. (Off the Great Wall)


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## Costas (Jun 4, 2013)

Επέτειος σήμερα, μόλις που προλαβαίνω: Elite in China Molded in Part by Tiananmen (ΝΥΤ), και Cui Jian, A piece of Red Cloth, με αγγλικό στίχο εδώ.


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## Costas (Jun 5, 2013)

Λινκ από το Sinocism:
China’s Prominent Weiborati Speak Out on Eve of Tiananmen Anniversary (""Don't worry about forgetfulness. At least the Sina censors remember.") (Tea Leaf Nation)
Witnesses to Tiananmen Square struggle with what to tell their children (The Washington Post)
The day that changed everything - June 4, 1989 (Purged officials and intellectuals recall devastating effect the crackdown of 24 years ago had on their own lives and their country's political future) (South China Morning Post)
Επισκόπηση του άρθρου “China’s Fear of Contagion. Tiananmen Square and the Power of the European Example.”

Λινκ από το Human Rights in China:
Chinese evade censors, as HK journalists stopped at Tiananmen (A call for unity in Hong Kong comes as many online are remembering the day in veiled references and by posting photos and memes) (SCMP)

Εδώ στην Ελλάδα ένα βραδινό δελτίο που είδα, του ΑΝΤ1, δεν είχε την παραμικρή αναφορά στο γεγονός (εκτός κι αν με πήρε ο ύπνος). Για τα άλλα κανάλια, δεν ξέρω. Αν δεν υπήρξε καμιά αναφορά στην επέτειο, λες να 'χει σχέση με τη θερμή πρόσκληση προς τους Κινέζους να επενδύσουν την Ελλάδα; λες;... Εντωμεταξύ, η ανακεφαλαιοποίηση των συστημικών τραπεζών συνεχίζεται. Αν κατάλαβα καλά, μια μετοχή σου της ΕΤΕ που άξιζε 10 ευρώ τώρα τιμάται 0,30. Διορθώστε με αν κατάλαβα λάθος.


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## Costas (Jun 7, 2013)

Ενημερωμένη λίστα "ευαίσθητων λέξεων" που κόβονται από το λογοκριτικό στρατό ο οποίος παρακολουθεί το μέσο κοινωνικής δικτύωσης Weibo, με λινκ προς τα αντίστοιχα αγγλόφωνα λήμματα. (China Digital Times)


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## Costas (Jun 7, 2013)

Spiritual-Religious Groups in the PRC after 1978, διατριβή της Kristin Kupfer. (Dissertation Reviews)


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## Costas (Jun 10, 2013)

Ο Λίου Χούι, αδερφός της Λίου Ξ(Σ)ια, γυναίκας του Λίου Ξ(Σ)ιαομπό, καταδικάστηκε σε 11 χρόνια φυλακή. (Reuters) 

In a rare statement to media, a weeping Liu Xia told reporters from the front passenger seat of her car as she drove away from the courthouse that she was extremely angry with the verdict and vowed to launch an appeal.
"I absolutely cannot accept this. This is simply persecution," she said. "This is completely an illegal verdict." Liu Xia said she had "completely lost hope" in the government. "I can't even leave my house." After about two minutes, security forced journalists away from the car, which moved off.
Liu Hui was out on bail last September, but then arrested again in January, after several rights activists and foreign reporters forced their way past security guards late last year to visit Liu Xia, one of his other lawyers, Shang Baojun, told Reuters before the verdict.

Από το Citizen Power for China: _Statement on China’s Further Persecution of Liu Xiaobo’s Extended Family_:
We also condemn the fact that the Chinese regime–in a further example of how much human rights has regressed in China–has once again begun to use the barbaric practice of “guilt by association,” and punishing political dissidents’ direct family members or even entire extended family, as was done in feudal China and under the dictator Mao Zedong’s rule. (Seeing Red in China)


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## Costas (Jun 10, 2013)

Edward Snowden and China


First, why Hong Kong?

My answer: Because he’s a spook.

(...)

Snowden, in addition to his career as an IT grunt, had worked on the covert operations side in Geneva.

When he thinks about what happens to him, he assumes his identity is going to be revealed. He looks at the situations of Bradley Manning and Julian Assange. Definitely doesn’t want to stay in the United States (Manning). Definitely doesn’t want to take up residence in a liberal democracy which happens to be a US security partner (Assange).

He wants to control the circumstances of his exposure and obtain maximum press exposure to shape international perceptions of him and rally support before the legal hammer comes down.

He doesn’t want to take the risk of getting quickly jacked up by a national legal system of a nation allied to the United States on any charge, trumped up, plausible, or genuine.

Iceland? Pretty, snowy, let-Internet-freedom-ring-a-ding-ding Iceland?

One more problem.

He doesn’t want the local authorities and local spooks working enthusiastically with the US authorities to make surveil him, harass him, help make a case against him, and button him up. He doesn’t want to get rendered. He would like not to get bumped off.

What countries would a CIA analyst believe to have the lowest level of cooperation with the CIA and the most pervasive counterintelligence capabilities? Russia maybe. China maybe. 

So he looks at a jurisdiction that a) has a liberal legal systems with good protections and process and b) keeps its US spooks on a short leash.

In other words, Hong Kong.
(....)
But I think Snowden knows he’s coming home, sooner or later.
(China Hand)


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## SBE (Jun 10, 2013)

Το ΧονγκΚονγκ έχει συμφωνία έκδοσης με τις ΗΠΑ και διάβαζα ότι η Κίνα μάλλον δεν θα ανακατευτεί καθόλου- εκτός αν έχει κάτι να προσφέρει ο Σνόουντεν που δεν το ξέρουμε.


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## Costas (Jun 15, 2013)

Ο Άι Ουέι-ουέι καταδίκασε το αμερικανικό πρόγραμμα παρακολούθησης Prism, της NSA: *NSA surveillance: the US is behaving like China* (the Guardian)

*Hong Kong Demonstrators Show Support for Snowden in N.S.A. Leak Case* (NYT)
In the last two days, the state news media in mainland China have embraced Mr. Snowden and confirmed details to The South China Morning Post, a Hong Kong newspaper, about how the United States monitors Internet traffic on the mainland and in Hong Kong. The official China Daily newspaper usually ignores pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong, or derides them. But the lead story on its front page on Saturday described calls by democracy advocates in the legislature that Mr. Snowden not be sent back to the United States, and it discussed the planned demonstration, too.
China Daily gave the most prominent position on its opinion page on Saturday to excerpts from a pro-Beijing newspaper in Hong Kong asserting that Mr. Snowden’s disclosures had damaged the standing of democracy advocates and their admiration for the United States. “The latest leaks have put the local rights politicians in a rather awkward position by exposing their idol’s true character,” the column said.
“Snowden is being persecuted by a huge institution,” said Marcus Ho, a retiree who said that he seldom attended rallies. “We must do something to help.”


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## Costas (Jun 16, 2013)

*Nicaragua fast-tracks Chinese plan to build canal to rival Panama*
Congressional committee gives go-ahead to project despite objections raised by opposition (The Guardian)


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## Costas (Jun 16, 2013)

Σε σχέση με το πλάνο για την ενίσχυση της αστυφιλίας (#793), που ακόμα δεν έχει πάρει το πράσινο φως, ένα άρθρο της ΝΥΤ συνοδεύεται από πολλές φωτογραφίες και επίσης από απάνθισμα τιτιβισμάτων στο Ουεϊμπό, το κινέζικο Τουίττερ, όπου Κινέζοι πολίτες εκφράζουν την οργή και τη θλίψη τους για τις εξώσεις με πενιχρή ή και χωρίς καθόλου αποζημίωση. Το άρθρο μιλά για στόχο 250 εκατομμυρίων απαλλοτριωμένων χωρικών ως το 2025. Στόχος: μια ανάπτυξη βασισμένη στη ζήτηση μιας εσωτερικής αγοράς ενισχυμένης από τους προλεταριοποιημένους αγρότες, οι οποίοι ως τώρα ζουν εν πολλοίς με αυτάρκεια και ιδιοκατανάλωση. (ΝΥΤ)


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## Costas (Jun 16, 2013)

Μετά τα ποντίκια που φάγανε τις αποταμιεύσεις, οι...τερμίτες. Βίντεο. (Reuters)


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## Costas (Jun 17, 2013)

Ανοιχτή επιστολή της Λίου Ξ(Σ)ιά στον Κινέζο πρόεδρο, μετά την καταδίκη του αδερφού της. (Initiatives for China)


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## Costas (Jun 19, 2013)

(Sinocism)
The official People’s Daily on Monday published a commentary on Mr. Snowden’s leaks under a pseudonym frequently used to express the paper’s foreign policy views. The author wrote that Mr. Snowden had helped to expose American hypocrisy and that America’s “exceptionalism is an impediment to the transformation of international relations.” 
The effect on American business in China from Mr. Snowden’s actions are unclear. Over the years, there have been occasional discussions in Chinese media about the risks to national security from a reliance on United States software, networking and telecommunications hardware.
Just as Huawei is now effectively blocked from selling its networking equipment in the United States, we should not be surprised to see more aggressive moves from Beijing to shut out American firms like Cisco Systems, which one Chinese news report on Monday noted had significant market share in core parts of Chinese networks.
Mr. Snowden’s disclosures may also explain why certain parts of the United States government have been so concerned about Huawei; they fear the Chinese government could use Huawei to do what the N.S.A. already does. Protests from Washington will be much harder to take seriously now if American technology firms start getting “Huawei’d” in Beijing on national security grounds.

Κάτι με αξιοσημείωτο γλωσσικό ενδιαφέρον:
To understand the process by which a rural entity becomes an urban one, we need to consider the institutional reforms that have facilitated this process of transformation. In the discussion below, the Chinese term chengzhenhua will be used to refer to the new policy as the English translation ‘urbanisation’ is misleading for two reasons. First, ‘urbanisation’ is already being used to translate dushihua 都市化, from which the new policy is intended to mark a departure. Secondly, ‘urbanisation’ evokes the image of an expansion of existing urban cores. As such, it forecloses possibilities of imagining the rural as a potentially urban site.

Εκβιασμοί με φότοσοπ:
Now, in addition to looking over their shoulders for antigraft inspectors, civil servants must contend with blackmailers armed with honey traps, video cameras or worse: Photoshop. Here in Shuangfeng, a rural county in Hunan Province, the authorities have arrested *dozens* of blackmailers, some of whom have used officials’ actual transgressions to demand payments and some of whom have simply used electronic manipulation to make misdeeds up.

Φωτογραφίες του Τζανγκ Υαξ(σ)ίν από τις Πρότυπες Όπερες της κας Μάο. (Time) 

Η διαχρονικά πανάθλια εθνική ομάδα ποδοσφαίρου της Κίνας έχασε εντός έδρας 5-1 από τη δεύτερη ομάδα της Ταϊλάνδης την ημέρα των γενεθλίων του Κινέζου προέδρου... (SCMP)

10 χιλιόμετρα έχει η θαλάσσια γέφυρα Jiaxing-Shaoxing, τύπου σαν εκείνη του Ρίου (2,2 χλμ.), σπάζοντας το παγκόσμιο ρεκόρ στον τύπο της. (xinhuanet)


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## Zazula (Jun 19, 2013)




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## Costas (Jun 19, 2013)

*An interview with Gady Epstein [The Economist] on China and the Internet* (fivebooks) (τα παχιά δικά μου)

(...) what’s different here in China - versus infringements on freedom in the West - is that the Chinese government has worked very hard to make its Internet particularly different and distinct.

(Q) Yes, I don’t think people overseas realize just how different the Internet is here, behind the Great Firewall. People send me YouTube videos, without even knowing it doesn’t exist here. There’s no Facebook, no Twitter, and Google search is so slow you basically can’t use it. I follow Harvard professor Greg Mankiw’s economics blog – he’d probably be surprised to learn that he is blocked in China because Blogspot is. What amazes me is how this has led to *this classic feature of East Asian industrialization, namely the creation of domestic national champions* in China who provide these services instead.

(Α) It has. I think those national champions would have arisen anyway, because as Chinese companies they have some advantages over foreigners - the Chinese language advantage, the Chinese market advantage. But obviously they’re being helped tremendously by what amounts, essentially, to political protectionism. I don’t think protectionism is the goal of the Great Firewall, but it is definitely a by-product.

(...)

(Q) Here’s a question I’ve been wanting to ask ever since arriving in Beijing and discovering another by-product of censorship which is that the Internet is painfully slow, sometimes to the point of not functioning at all. *If a large part of the Communist Party’s legitimacy comes from continuing to deliver economic growth – doesn’t a very slow and unwieldy Internet have economic implications?*

(A) There’s no question censorship slows the Internet in China down, though it does depend on what part of the Internet you’re using. If you’re using the Chinese Internet, and you’re not going to Western sites, it’s much faster. But if you’re going outside China to go online, it will be slower. And people who are working in information technology, say, and many other fields will often need to go outside of China. I think that does impact productivity both for foreigners and Chinese here. I also think not allowing a free-flow of ideas on the Internet impedes innovation. If you’re not allowing Facebook, and Twitter and YouTube and whatever chaos the world brings, then you have an environment that is stifling innovation.

(Q) Are people at all concerned about this or even talking about it or measuring the impact of these restrictions on the economy?

(A) People are concerned. You will hear people speak about this publicly. Kai-Fu Lee [a Beijing based Internet entrepreneur who was head of Google China] talks about it a bit. Whether the Communist Party is concerned, I’m not so sure. They see a lot of benefits to the way they manage the Internet, and of course Chinese Internet companies benefit to a great degree, because they don’t have as much competition from foreign Internet companies.

(...)

(Q) What’s your broader view of where China is heading politically? Even if you think the Internet has slowed things down, do you think we will end up with democracy à la Francis Fukuyama? *Or do you think China has shown there can be another way of organizing a country?* Because the government can be really responsive now. Say with the air pollution in Beijing. If people kicked up a huge fuss about it, the government could presumably clean it up very quickly. They’re a one party state so, unlike the US, *they wouldn’t have to spend years arguing in Congress about it, they can just do it*…

(A) They can fix the very visible cracks, the ones that get the most attention and that cause the public the most concern. They can patch those up. *The more fundamental problems - the deeper cracks in the foundation of the system - persist and get worse.* Down the road there could be some crisis or catastrophe or economic crash, that will lead to both social unrest and political uncertainty and quite dicey times for the Communist Party. I just think the Internet is not hastening that day. It may actually be delaying that day of reckoning. There is quite a strong potential for a political transformation. How that takes place, what form it takes, really remains unclear to me. I do think a multi-party system or a system where people can vote and actually participate in choosing their leaders is inherently more stable long-term. So that would seem to suggest that eventually one party rule won’t work. But it could be decades before we come to that day of reckoning. Or it could be a shorter time.


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## Costas (Jun 19, 2013)

Zazula said:


>


Μάλιστα! "It's a Greek man, or an Italian man", και μετά, αν άκουσα καλά, κάτι λέει για Κούρδους και Τούρκους; Ψιλοσχετικό:

Δημοσκόπηση στους νέους κολεγιόπαιδες: Do you pleasure yourself? (ministry of tofu), όπου μαθαίνουμε μεταξύ άλλων ότι το γιαπωνέζικο πορνό ονομάζεται Νησιωτικές Κινήσεις (το "νησιωτικό κουνγκ φού", που λέει το βίντεο, δεν ξέρω γιατί το λέει, αλλά βέβαια αυτοί ξέρουν καλύτερα). Σίγουρα, πάντως, δύσκολα με τέτοια πόδια...


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## Costas (Jun 19, 2013)

Μαθαίνουμε επίσης ότι το εκσπερματώνειν στον αέρα, κοινώς αυνανίζεσθαι, λέγεται και "χτυπάω αεροπλάνα"!


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## Zazula (Jun 19, 2013)

Costas said:


> Μαθαίνουμε επίσης ότι το εκσπερματώνειν στον αέρα, κοινώς αυνανίζεσθαι, λέγεται και "χτυπάω αεροπλάνα"!


Σαν πολύ αισιόδοξους τους βρίσκω — θέτουν ψηλούς στόχους· εδώ άντε να βαφτεί κάνας τοίχος.


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## Costas (Jun 19, 2013)

Ε, να το κάνουμε 'αεροπλανάκια', που θα τα πετάν από πάνω με το άλλο χέρι.


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## Costas (Jun 20, 2013)

Τέλος, εδώ [1][2] θα ανακαλύψετε πίσω από την έκφραση boys love (Yaoi) ένα αναπάντεχο αναγνωστικό κοινό!


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## Costas (Jun 20, 2013)

Απάνθισμα από το Sinocism:
(Bloomberg) “The PBOC [η κεντρική τράπεζα της ΛΔΚ] is doing the opposite of what the banks were hoping it would do,” said Ju Wang, a senior strategist at HSBC Holdings Plc in Hong Kong. “It is focusing on cleaning up the banks’ balance sheets and the financial system in spite of the liquidity squeeze.”
An inverted swap curve is a further sign of waning confidence about the prospects for the world’s second-largest economy, after Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Morgan Stanley and UBS AG cut their 2013 growth forecasts. A report yesterday showed property prices are defying government lending curbs and Fitch said the cash shortage reflects a crackdown on shadow banking that will slow expansion.
“We are going to have banking sector problems,” Charlene Chu, Fitch’s head of China financial institutions, said in a Bloomberg Television interview in Hong Kong yesterday. “Those can manifest either in a crisis or they can manifest in slow growth.”

*WikiLeaks Says It Is Working to Negotiate Asylum in Iceland for Snowden[/B] (ΝΥΤ)

Από τη μία οι αποκαλύψεις του Snowden προκάλεσαν τις δηλώσεις καταδίκης του Ai Weiwei για το πρόγραμμα Prism, από την άλλη ο τυφλός δικηγόρος Chen Guangcheng, που δραπέτευσε πέρσι από την παράνομη κατ' οίκον κράτησή του ρεζιλεύοντας τις κινεζικές αρχές (οι οποίες εκδικήθηκαν, όπως το συνηθίζουν, πάνω στον ανιψιό του), ένα χρόνο μετά την άφιξή του στις ΗΠΑ κατέφερε να τη σπάσει σε όλους όσοι τον υποστήριξαν, και πρώτα-πρώτα στο Πανεπιστήμιο της Νέας Υόρκης, ισχυριζόμενος ότι το Πανεπιστήμιο του κάνει έξωση έπειτα από πιέσεις των Κινέζων, οι οποίοι κατ' αυτόν έθεσαν την έξωση ως όρο για την ίδρυση κολεγίου του Πανεπιστημίου στη Σαγκάη. Κατά τα φαινόμενα, αυτό δεν ισχύει και φαίνεται πως ο Chen έχει τακιμιάσει με Κινέζους χριστιανούς των ΗΠΑ και με συντηρητικούς Ρεμπουμπλικάνους, οι οποίοι τον έχουν κάνει πιόνι τους. Και διωκόμενοι αγωνιστές των ανθρώπινων δικαιωμάτων λοιπόν, όσο είναι στη χώρα τους, και αμφίβολης αξίας (συντηρητικοί συνήθως) διανοούμενοι όταν φτάνουν στις ΗΠΑ. Βλ. και Σολζενίτσιν. (WSJ)*


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## Costas (Jun 21, 2013)

Καλπάζουσα (Μερσεντές) εναντίον Πολύτιμου Αλόγου (BMW) σε πολυσύχναστη διασταύρωση παίζουν συγκρουόμενα, πατέρας και γιος, ώσπου ο πατέρας βγάζει το λουρί και κυνηγάει το γιο! (Zhejiang Sat TV / v.ifeng.com)


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## Costas (Jun 21, 2013)

Η Liu Xia, γυναίκα του Liu Xiaobo, εξουσιοδότησε τους δικηγόρους της να μηνύσουν την αστυνομία του Πεκίνου για την παράνομη κατ' οίκον περιορισμό της από τότε που ο σύζυγός της κέρδισε το βραβείο Νόμπελ Ειρήνης, και επίσης να ετοιμάσουν μιαν αίτηση αναψηλάφησης της δίκης του αντρός της. Αναρωτιέμαι γιατί δεν το είχε κάνει ως τώρα. Ίσως να φοβόταν μήπως αυτό είχε συνέπειες για τον αδερφό της. Οπότε, τώρα που ο αδερφός της καταδικάστηκε σε 11 χρόνια φυλακή για απάτη, καταδίκη που θεωρήθηκε καθαρά οικογενειακά αντίποινα, ίσως να νιώθει ότι δεν έχει πια τίποτα να χάσει (εκτός ίσως από μια χειρότερη ακόμα τροπή για τον φυλακισμένο άντρα της;). Εικασίες δικές μου. (The Guardian)


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## bernardina (Jun 22, 2013)

Riot after Chinese teachers try to stop pupils cheating
What should have been a hushed scene of 800 Chinese students diligently sitting their university entrance exams erupted into siege warfare after invigilators tried to stop them from cheating.


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## Costas (Jun 22, 2013)

Ξεχωρίζω τα διαμαντάκια:

"We want fairness. There is no fairness if you do not let us cheat."
According to the protesters, cheating is endemic in China, so being forced to sit the exams without help put their children at a disadvantage. 
(...)
Another of the external invigilators, named Li Yong, was punched in the nose by an angry father. Mr Li had confiscated a mobile phone from his son and then refused a bribe to return the handset.
"I hoped my son would do well in the exams. This supervisor affected his performance, so I was angry"
(...)
the local government conceded that "exam supervision had been too strict and some students did not take it well".

Invigilators και vigilantes...


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## Costas (Jun 22, 2013)

Το παρακάτω είναι βιντεοκλίπ ενός από τα κομμάτια του δίσκου του Ai Weiwei Divine Comedy που κυκλοφορεί σήμερα, σε στίχους του ιδίου και μουσική του γνωστού μουσικού Zuoxiao Zuzhou [εδώ το Asma του], και λέγεται Laoma tihua (εκλεκτόν τοπικόν έδεσμα της πόλεως Chengdu της επαρχίας Sichuan, από υείους πόδας, σερβιριζόμενον εις τα εκεί εφθοπωλεία. Αλλά ας επανέλθω στο κυρίως θέμα...). Αναφέρεται σε εμπειρίες από τη δίκη του ακτιβιστή Tan Zuoren το 2008 (υπάρχει σχετικό ντοκιμαντέρ του Άι, σε 8 συνέχειες, αμετάφραστο).






Στο 2.18 του κλιπ ο Άι ανεβαίνει τρέχοντας τα σκαλοπάτια ενός χτιρίου (της αστυνομίας, να υποθέσω) όπου υπάρχει φαρδιά-πλατιά μια επιγραφή που λέει "να μελετήσουμε τον Ταν Ντονγκ, να θυσιαστούμε με όλη μας την καρδιά και ανιδιοτελώς για το λαό" (κάτι ανάλογο γράφει και η επιγραφή στο τέλος του κλιπ, εκεί που βλέπουμε σε γκρο πλαν ένα υψωμένο μεσαίο δάχτυλο).
Ποιος είναι αυτός ο Ταν Ντονγκ; σκέφτηκα. Κάνας τοπικός Λέι Φενγκ; κάνας αστυνομικός που έπεσε από σφαίρες κακοποιών στοιχείων ή τρομοκρατών; Ε, με βάση αυτό που βρήκα εδώ, ήταν ένας αστυνομικός που πέθανε το 2009 από...ένα συνδυασμό κρυολογήματος και ιογενούς μυοκαρδίτιδας, οφειλόμενης (;) όμως σε υπερκόπωση κατά την εργασία...


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## SBE (Jun 23, 2013)

Costas said:


> "We want fairness. There is no fairness if you do not let us cheat."


κλπ κλπ
Λοιπόν, αυτή η ιατορία επιβεβαιώνει για μια ακόμα φορά αυτό που μου έλεγε φίλη Κινέζα: ότι τελικά οι παλιοι πολιτισμοί (Κινέζοι Έλληνες κλπ) έχουν πολλά κοινά χαρακτηριστικά.


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## drsiebenmal (Jun 23, 2013)

SBE said:


> ότι τελικά οι παλιοι πολιτισμοί (Κινέζοι Έλληνες κλπ) έχουν πολλά κοινά χαρακτηριστικά.


Φυσικά και έχουν: Τεράστια (γονιδιακή θα έλεγε κανείς) συγκεντρωμένη πείρα για τη φύση του ανθρώπου...


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## Costas (Jun 23, 2013)

Ο Edward Snowed φέρεται να έφυγε από το Χονγκ Κονγκ, με τις αρχές του να δηλώνουν ότι δεν υπήρχε νομική βάση για μιαν απαγόρευση εξόδου του. (Il Fatto Quotidiano)


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## Zazula (Jun 25, 2013)

Βρε συ Κώστα, μπορείς σε παρακαλώ να μου πεις τι γίνεται εδώ; Δεν κατόρθωσα να βρω κάπου την είδηση, για να γκουγκλομεταφράσω κείμενο, οπότε έχω μόνο ήχο... (Άσε που τα σχόλια στο γιουτιουμπάκι είναι κορεάτικα!)


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## Zazula (Jun 25, 2013)

Το έχουμε βάλει αυτό με το τι σκαρφίστηκαν κάποιοι στην Κίνα για να βγάλουν λεφτά;
http://www.businessinsider.com/chinese-corpses-sold-for-ghost-marriages-2013-3


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## Costas (Jun 26, 2013)

Zazula said:


> Βρε συ Κώστα, μπορείς σε παρακαλώ να μου πεις τι γίνεται εδώ; Δεν κατόρθωσα να βρω κάπου την είδηση, για να γκουγκλομεταφράσω κείμενο, οπότε έχω μόνο ήχο... (Άσε που τα σχόλια στο γιουτιουμπάκι είναι κορεάτικα!)


Όχι, Ζαζ, δεν μπορώ. Δεν καταλαβαίνω γρυ. Ό,τι καταλαβαίνεις από την εικόνα. (Η δεσποινίς απαιτούσε να καταλαμβάνει δύο καθίσματα για την πάρτη της;) Έψαξα για το κλιπ στο πρωτότυπο σάιτ (youku.com), αλλά δεν το βρήκα.


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## Costas (Jun 26, 2013)

Σχόλιο του Bill Bishop του Sinocism:
State Council DRC researcher Li Zuojun wrote a report in 2011 predicting a possible debt crisis in July/August 2013. His report is getting lots of play after last week's events. Li has worked for "many" local governments as a consultant and studied under Wu Jinglian. *He wrote in his 2011 report that the next leadership could choose to maintain the bubble, in which case it could go until 2015/16 before a huge crash, or could try to prick it soon after taking power, leading to a crisis in the summer of 2013... *

Financial Times:
In a volte-face that bore more than a passing resemblance to Mario Draghi’s “unlimited” bond-buying pledge last year at the European Central Bank, the Chinese central bank promised to provide liquidity support to any financial institution strapped for cash. What is more, without naming any names, the central bank said it had already provided such support.
(...)
China Development Bank, a lender fully owned by the government, had to scrap a debt sale on Monday when it realised that it would not be able to sell its paper at a reasonable price.
There were also fears that China’s growth slowdown could prove much sharper than expected. Economists had previously forecast a gradual ebbing of Chinese growth towards 7.5 per cent over the next few years, down from the heady 10 per cent pace of the past decade. In the midst of the cash crunch, some analysts saw 6 per cent as a real possibility but that would have been tough to accept in Beijing.
(...)
The central bank’s decision to let interbank rates rise was in large part aimed at limiting the growth of shadow financing flows. By reining in credit growth, it hoped to curb banks’ use of off-balance-sheet lending vehicles.
However, its actions were beginning to produce the exact opposite of its intended effect. Strapped for cash, banks were pushing out huge numbers of risky, high-yielding “wealth management” investment products to attract depositors.

Επίσης μέσω του Sinocism (defencenews.com):
*Turkey* is strongly leaning toward adopting a Chinese long-range anti-missile and air defense system, Turkish procurement officials said, even though it may be impossible to integrate the system with its existing NATO architecture.
One senior procurement official familiar with the program said the Turkish government has concluded that the Chinese proposal was technologically satisfactory, allowed technology transfer and was much cheaper than rival proposals.
Αλλά αντιδρούν οι Αμερικανοί και επικαλούνται προβλήματα συμβατότητας (τεχνικής και γεωπολιτικής) με τον νατοϊκό εξοπλισμό.


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## Costas (Jun 26, 2013)

Την Παρασκευή ξεκινά το Φεστιβάλ σκυλίσιου κρέατος στην επαρχία Γκουανγκ-ξ(σ)ί και διάφοροι φιλόζωοι (Βουδιστές κυρίως, σύμφωνα με το άρθρο) έτρεξαν κι αγόρασαν διάφορα σκυλιά για να τα γλιτώσουν από το μαχαίρι. Θέτουν και θέμα ασφάλειας των καταναλωτών: “The dog meat is unhealthy and unsanitary. You can tell from their dark tongues. They have been poisoned. Most of them are abducted and taken to the market” (scmp)

Η παροχή υπηρεσιών αυνανισμού (με 3 τρόπους, χέρι, στήθη και...κάτι άλλο που δεν το κατάλαβα) στα μασαζάδικα και άλλα καταστήματα περιποίησης του σώματος όπως τα κουρεία δεν συνιστά το αδίκημα της πορνείας, σύμφωνα με ανώτερο δικαστήριο της επαρχίας Γκουανγκ-ντόνγκ που ανέτρεψε την πρωτόδικη καταδίκη των διαχειριστών του μαγαζιού, τουλάχιστον ώσπου ο νόμος να περιλάβει ρητά αυτή τη δραστηριότητα, καθώς δεν υπάρχει συνουσία. Η αστυνομία, αντιθέτως, επιμένει να την κατατάσσει μαζί με τον πεοθηλασμό και τη σοδομεία στις δραστηριότητες πορνείας. (news.ifeng – κινέζικα)


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## daeman (Jun 26, 2013)

...
α.






β. "No, officer, I did not have sex with those hands, breasts, or whatnots; just a relationship that was not appropriate. 
Please, have a cigar."


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## Costas (Jul 1, 2013)

Παίχτηκε και στα εδώ κανάλια η είδηση για τον Δυτικό επιχειρηματία που βρέθηκε αποκλεισμένος στο εργοστάσιό του από τους εργάτες. Να η γνώμη ενός δικηγόρου όχι για τη συγκεκριμένη περίπτωση αλλά για το ευρύτερο φαινόμενο (China Law Blog μέσω Sinocism):

Foreign company buys product from Chinese company. Chinese company shuts down and foreign company goes to Chinese factory to see what is going on and to see if its already paid for (or not) products may be sitting in inventory. Chinese workers learn of the foreigner in their midst and grab him or her (it is almost always a “him” but I am aware of at least two cases involving a “her”) and demand that the foreign company pay the outstanding wages. The foreigner explains how they too have been hurt by the shutdown and they certainly do not owe anyone in China any wages. The Chinese workers see things very differently. Their explanation is that they worked hard to make product for the foreigner and the foreigner got the product and the workers never got paid and so now the foreigner needs to pay the workers and if it does so, he or she will be freed and they can even leave with their product. The fact that the foreign company already paid once for the product is simply irrelevant.
(...)
Control Risks has seen a “sharp increase” in hostage situations in China in the past two years, Kedl said, and has seen an increase in threats and actions against company management and foreigners. Kedl attributes the change in part to China’s slowing economy, as companies reassess their businesses in China and in some cases start to restructure–news that often comes as “a shock” to workers. Restructuring “is an anathema to most Chinese employees,” said Kedl. “It’s been nothing but growth for the past 10 years. . . . In China, business hasn’t come and gone. It has only come.”


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## Earion (Jul 1, 2013)

Επιβράδυνση της ανάπτυξης λέγεται αυτό, ε; Χμμμ... Ανατριχιάζω και μόνο στη σκέψη ότι μπορεί να σκάσει η κινέζικη φούσκα. Και τότε θα θυμόμαστε την πλατεία Ταχρίρ και την πλατεία Ταξίμ σαν αθώα πυροτεχνήματα.


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## Costas (Jul 3, 2013)

Αλλαγή ηγεσίας στην COSCO, μετά τη 'συνταξιοδότηση' του 'κάπταιν' Ουέι Τζιαφού. (caixin)


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## Costas (Jul 6, 2013)

*A Western Detour for a Chinese Tale - Chen Shi-Zheng’s Road to ‘Monkey: Journey to the West’* (NYT)

Many in the Peking opera establishment condemned his take on “Farewell [ΣΣ: My Concubine],” and China Daily, an official English-language newspaper, ran a long article on the controversy with the headline “Innovation or Violation?”
“I still haven’t had anything produced for the public in China,” Mr. Chen said with a smile. “I hope one day that will change.”
(...)
In Peking opera, “I’m copying what the previous generation has left for us,” she said. “The way I’m judged is by the standard set by previous performers. This time, the previous generation didn’t help me.” The work “took me out of my comfort zone,” she added. “The director created a new language.”


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## Costas (Jul 7, 2013)

Τελευταίο άρθρο του Evan Osnos (του New Yorker) από την Κίνα: A generation ago, foreigners writing about China marvelled most at the sameness of it all. Chairman Mao was the “Emperor of the Blue Ants,” as a memorable book title had it. But in my years in China, I have been seized most of all by the sense that the national narrative, once an ensemble performance, is splintering into a billion stories. (...) never in modern history has China been more prosperous and functional and connected with the world—and yet, it is the only country in the world with a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in prison. Contradictions like that have been the essence of this moment.

“When I write, anything becomes material. In life, I must be practical, but when I write, it is up to me.” Δεν το λέει όμως ο ίδιος· κάποιος άλλος το λέει. (New Yorker)


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## Costas (Jul 7, 2013)

Ντοκιμαντέρ των Lynn Lee και James Leong για το δημοκρατικό πείραμα στο χωριό Wukan (Ουκάν), σε 4 επεισόδια. (Al Jazeera)


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## Costas (Jul 7, 2013)

Ένα έθνος γεννιέται; Ryukyu (aka Okinawa) (NYT)


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## Costas (Jul 10, 2013)

Τουρνέ κάνει το ντοκιουδράμα “Top Secret: The Battle for the Pentagon Papers” σε μεγάλες κινεζικές πόλεις:
It showed America in all of its complex messiness. It was not a pro-freedom-of-the-press, pro-America, anticensorship play. It showed just how complex that whole issue was, and it showed it very clearly. My hesitation was commercial. The venues need to make money. (Wall Street Journal)

Εδώ ένα πρόσφατο άρθρο για τα Pentagon Papers (τα πραγματικά, όχι το δράμα) (China Hand):

 *The Devil and Daniel Ellsberg*

In my most recent piece for Asia Times Online, I discussed calls for Edward Snowden to “do an Ellsberg” i.e. demonstrate his patriotic lovingkindness by surrendering to US authorities. 

In his memoir Secrets, Ellsberg details the dirty tricks projects the Nixon administration initiated against him and speculates their purpose was to blackmail him into shutting up, or drive him into exile or even suicide.

Ellsberg writes, “I feel sure, knowing myself at that time, that nothing could have induced me to do any of those things.” (pg. 443)

Nevertheless, as the ATOl piece points out, Ellsberg feels that Snowden is in a different situation:

_But meanwhile, the treatment of him, and the pronouncements by everybody here, like - I'm talking about Snowden now - have convinced Snowden, and I think very realistically, that if he wanted to be able to tell the public what he had done and why he had done it and what his motives were and what the patterns of criminality were in the material that he was releasing, it had to be outside the United States. Otherwise he would be in perhaps the same cell that Bradley Manning was, and that's a military cell._

Ellsberg returned to this issue on July 7 in an opinion piece for the Washington Post. He pointed out that he had, like Snowden, gone into hiding and accepted fugitive status in order to complete his distribution of the Pentagon Papers before surrendering.

Ellsberg also noted that while under indictment he was able to stay out of jail for two years to agitate for the end of the Vietnam War and, in the process, make the case for himself in the court of public opinion, on the strength of a less than backbreaking $50,000 bond—a luxury that Edward Snowden would be unlikely to enjoy:

_I hope Snowden’s revelations will spark a movement to rescue our democracy, but he could not be part of that movement had he stayed here. There is zero chance that he would be allowed out on bail if he returned now and close to no chance that, had he not left the country, he would have been granted bail. Instead, he would be in a prison cell like Bradley Manning, incommunicado._

Secrets also describes Ellsberg’s spiritual journey from parfait knight of the US foreign policy round table to anguished and increasingly indignant whistleblower. His privileged access to the government, think tank, and media elites is worlds away from Edward Snowden and his anonymous grubbing in the data mines of the post-9/11 security state.

While working on the Nixon transition in late 1968, Henry Kissinger asked RAND to review the Vietnam situation. RAND nominates Daniel Ellsberg:

_Kissinger approved, though with one reservation…Kissinger was happy to have me do the study, but he had one worry about me, my “discretion.”
I was astonished…My whole career was based on a well-founded trust in my discretion._ (_Secrets_, pg. 230).

A few pages later, Ellsberg completes a document framing the crucial Vietnam issues for comment by the various US executive branch stakeholders; it is circulated as “NSSM-1” i.e. National Security Study Memorandum 1, the first document of its series put out by Nixon’s National Security Administration. The various stakeholders provide 500 pages of extremely revealing responses.

Fast forward to pg. 241-2:

_[Mort Halperin, the DoD staffer responsible for assembling the Pentagon Papers] took me aside…one morning and said, “I’m going to ask you not to show any of this material to anybody at Rand or take any copies back with you.”…I took it for granted from Mort’s unemphatic, pro forma tone that what he meant was simply to go on record as telling me not to do this, thereby signaling that it should not get back to the White House that Rand had his material…if Mort had really been serious about keeping me from sending this back to Rand, he could have conveyed that very reliably…

So having registered Mort’s warning and agreeing with him, I took care to copy all the documents myself in the copying alcove of the NSCD, rather than hand them to a secretary to copy, as I would otherwise have done. When I took them back to Rand, I convened a rather large meeting…Having made and passed out a number of copies, I repeated the warning that Halperin had given to me…I said that this was presumably so he could disclaim responsibility…_

“Discrete” indeed. Not to worry:

_…Some months later…I asked [Halperin] if I had been right…Halperin said, “Of course.”_

In Daniel Ellsberg’s estimation his leak of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 did little, if anything to end the Vietnam War as conducted by Richard Nixon. The U.S. war only ended because of Nixon’s downfall soon after his re-election in 1972, thanks to the antics of his plumbers, the team of extra-legal leak-plugging zealots that Nixon’s coterie unleashed on his enemies.

The wonderful, ironic element is the role of Henry Kissinger—and Daniel Ellsberg--in Nixon’s fall.

According to Ellsberg, Kissinger had a low opinion of Nixon; on the occasion of RMN’s election, he told an audience at MIT that Nixon was “not fit to be president”. That was not the Kissinger line once Nixon appointed him as his National Security Advisor, but one can speculate that Kissinger’s doubts precluded a comfortable atmosphere of trust and understanding between Nixon and his national security Richelieu.

Nixon was not too disturbed by the leak of the Pentagon Papers at first.

The Papers concluded their narrative with the Johnson administration and painted a pleasing picture of Democratic duplicity and cluelessness under Kennedy and LBJ.

Nixon, eager to undercut the stature of Edward Kennedy, his expected Democratic challenger in the next election, instructed his minions to push out the Pentagon Papers story of the US role in the deposition and liquidation of South Vietnam’s President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963.

Diem, in addition to being an incapable president, was also an ardent Catholic who lived a virtually cloistered existence. Nixon felt that highlighting Kennedy betrayal of a fellow Catholic would weaken Edward Kennedy’s appeal to his core religious base. 

Doubt and anxiety pervaded Nixon’s mind, however, when a key document from his own administration, NSSM-1 , the memorandum referenced above, made its way into the hands of a Senatorial critic, Mark Mathias, and Mathias revealed some of its pessimistic conclusions.

The prospect of a leak in his own national security apparatus appalled Nixon, because he had hid the details of the secret bombing of Cambodia even from his own secretaries of state (William Smith) and defense (Melvin Laird).

The irony is that NSSM-1 leaked, not because the current denizens of the Nixon White House couldn’t keep a secret, but because Daniel Ellsberg had copied the document while he was working for Henry Kissinger.

Kissinger, the dissembling courtier (or, if you prefer, the terrified capo secretly writhing before Nixon’s Don Corleone) dared not short circuit the leak investigation by admitting that he had nourished the Ellsberg viper in the bosom of the new administration:

_…there was no awareness throughout that period that what I had given Mathias was (simply) NSSM-1. Moreover, it’s clear from numerous taped discussions that Kissinger never did reveal to Nixon the embarrassing information that I had worked directly for him in February and March of 1969…Since no one knew both those pieces of data, [Attorney General John] Mitchell’s conclusion…that there must be a conspiracy was inescapable…_[_Secrets_, pg. 435]

And so the operation to find the anti-war movement’s non-existent co-conspirators inside Nixon’s NSC—the march of folly of the plumbers who blundered through the Watergate operation and eventually brought down the Ellsberg case and the Nixon presidency—was born.


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## Costas (Jul 10, 2013)

Ανθολόγηση από το Sinocism:
Russia-China joint naval exercise begins in Sea of Japan - The Asahi Shimbun

Pollution leads to drop in Life Span in Northern China (NYT)

Liberal Peking University professor threatened with expulsion (South China Morning Post)

Chinese E-Books Platform Gets $110 Million in Funding From Goldman Sachs and Temasek (techinasia) -Άντε και στα δικά μας! mg:


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## Costas (Jul 12, 2013)

In Beijing, commie jungle where dreams are made of


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## Costas (Jul 14, 2013)

Ντοκιμαντέρ για το Ουκάν, μέρος 2ο (aljazeera)


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## Costas (Jul 16, 2013)

Από το Sinocism:

*UK retailers bemoan visas for damping Chinese spending* - FT.com At Heathrow airport, although Chinese shoppers account for less than 1 per cent of total traffic, they are responsible for nearly a quarter of all sales of luxury goods...In total, Chinese tourists spend nearly £300m per year in the UK, according to the Office of National Statistics

*China naval fleet seen sailing through Soya Strait off northern Japan* (South China Morning Post) A Chinese naval fleet was on Sunday spotted sailing for the first time through an international strait between northern Japan and Russia’s far east, the Japanese defence ministry said. The two missile destroyers, two frigates and a supply ship passed through the Soya Strait from the Sea of Japan to the Sea of Okhotsk early on Sunday, the ministry said. The channel, also known as La Perouse, separates the Russian island of Sakhalin and the northernmost Japanese island of Hokkaido. (Ρώσοι και Κινέζοι έχουν κοινά ναυτικά γυμνάσια φέτος)


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## Costas (Jul 16, 2013)

Επιλογή από το Sinocism:

*China’s Slowing Economy, An Illustrated Guide* (WSJ)

Drugs and sex and GlaxoKline (Telegraph). Και θαυμάστε contrition στην ανακοίνωση της πολυεθνικής. Τύφλα να 'χει ο τελώνης του Ευαγγελίου!

Πώς να μην το διασκεδάζεις, όταν το Ισραήλ πουλάει τις ΗΠΑ για τα μάτια της Κίνας!
Congress, White House angry at Israel for decision to back out of trial against Bank of China for involvement in laundering of money for Hamas, Islamic Jihad. The reason: China conditioned Netanyahu's state visit on Israeli promise not to testify in trial. Now, US threatening to subpoena Ambassador Oren. (ynetnews)

Και ένα φαιδρό: *Chinese bride brawls in French lavender field* (Global Times)
"It started because the young couple and their friends accidentally stepped into the newlyweds' photo. The women began to argue first, and then the boyfriend and the groom joined in," [the guide who posted pictures of the incident] said. "Most people there tried to drag them apart since it was quite embarrassing. The two young men fought shirtless, and the bride's dress was ripped off. Parts of the field were trampled," the guide said, adding that other onlookers in the field were very shocked by the incident.


*Rules for Drinking at a Chinese Business Dinner.* (WSJ) Οδηγίες για σύγχρονους Μαφφέο Πόλο.


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## Costas (Jul 16, 2013)

Ευκαιρία απασχόλησης για τις άνεργες Ελληνίδες στην Κίνα: βυζάστρες για ενήλικες. (South China Morning Post)
According to the newspaper report, a wet nurse who provides breast milk to adults can earn an average monthly wage of 16,000 yuan (HK$20,238). A healthy and attractive wet nurse can earn even more, the paper was told.
Είτε απευθείας είτε με αντλία θηλασμού.


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## Costas (Jul 17, 2013)

Ωραίο σχόλιο στην παραπάνω είδηση:

Just a word from a mom: I highly doubt that most adults even would be able to suck out anything much by themselves- the tongue must cover the lower teeth, and it's really a combination of rhythmic jaw pressure and sucking. Try it with your own finger and see how fast the muscles tire


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## Costas (Jul 20, 2013)

Ο Xu Zhiyong [Ξ(Σ)ϋ Τζ-Γιόνγκ] (#790) και άλλοι του "Νέου Κινήματος Πολιτών" συνελήφθησαν με διάφορες γελοίες κατηγορίες:

CHRD has confirmed that Xu Zhiyong （许志永）, a leading activist pushing for constitutional democracy and rule-of-law reform, was criminally detained on suspicion of “gathering a crowd to disrupt public order” by Beijing police on July 16. With Xu’s detention and the detentions of two other activists on July 12 in Beijing, China’s newest crackdown on freedom of assembly, association, and expression has seen a total of 24 activists and lawyers taken into custody since late March. As has become clear especially with Xu’s detention, the crackdown is targeting a loose grouping of activists involved in what has become known as the “New Citizens’ Movement,” who have peacefully advocated for democratic and rule-of-law reforms, constitutionalism, human rights, and social justice. The crackdown has initially responded to an anti-corruption campaign by Chinese citizens who have called for an end to official corruption, while some of the detained activists also demanded the government ratify the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). (Chinese Human Rights Defenders -CHRD)

Some have attended meetings referred to as “Dine and Get Drunk” parties (饭醉, which has the same pronunciation in Chinese as “commit a crime,” [ΣΣ. 犯罪] since such meetings may well constitute “unlawful assembly” in the eyes of authorities).


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## Costas (Jul 20, 2013)

*The Demanding Off-Hour Escapes of China's High-Tech Workers* (NYT)

Και μια και είμαστε στο ξέσκασμα, νά μια ενδιαφέρουσα ιστορία από το Chinese Law Prof Blog:

Half a year after getting out, he was allegedly involved in a gang rape at a Beijing hotel; formal charges were brought earlier this month. 

Apparently things have not been going well with the defense; two attorneys have resigned. His new attorneys have taken their case to the media, arguing that the complainant was a bar hostess. Apparently they plan to plead not guilty, presumably on the grounds that she consented, or perhaps that in the case of bar hostesses the law should presume consent. Obviously I have no inside information on what actually happened on the night in question, but the general tenor of netizen opinion is that this is a typical case of a spoiled rich kid who thinks he can get away with anything. He's become the Joffrey Baratheon of Chinese pop culture.

Into this mess stepped Yi Yanyou (易延友), a professor at Tsinghua Law School and the head of its Evidence Law Center. Yi declared on his microblog that "raping a bar hostess is less harmful than raping a woman of good family" (强奸陪酒女也比强奸良家妇女危害性要小). This led to an outpouring of harsh criticism among netizens. Ignoring the first rule of holes - when you're in one, stop digging - Prof. Yi then clarified his remarks by revising the above sentence to read, "It does more harm to rape a woman of good family than to rape a bargirl, a dancing girl, an escort or a prostitute" (强奸良家妇女比强奸陪酒女、陪舞女、三陪女、妓女危害性要大). Somehow the critics were not mollified. By last Wednesday Prof. Yi had had enough - he deleted his post and apologized.

Prof. Yi's remarks don't come out of nowhere - he is in fact channelling a distinction well known in traditional Chinese law (it is codified in the Qing Code) between woman of good family (良家妇女) and licentious women (犯奸妇女). If, for example, a man saw a women engaging in illicit sexual intercourse with another and then raped her afterward, then because she was a licentious woman it could not be called rape but should instead be classified as illicit intercourse by trickery ("又如见妇人与人通奸，见者因而用强奸之，已系犯奸之妇，难以强论，依刁奸律"). (I'm relying for my translation on the Grand Ricci dictionary, which translates 刁奸 as "seduire une femme par la ruse"; that may not be correct as a translation of the legal term.) For more on this, see Vivien Ng, "Ideology and Sexuality: Rape Laws in Qing China," Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 46, no. 1 (Feb. 1987), pp. 57-70. Although the distinction finds no formal expression in modern Chinese law (not to my knowledge, anyway), here we see it alive and well in legal culture, so to speak, and expressed in exactly the same words as it was centuries ago.


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## Costas (Jul 21, 2013)

Ένας ιστότοπος με οπτική μύηση στους χαρακτήρες της κινεζικής γραφής: chineasy.org (και με αντίστοιχη σελίδα στο FB).


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## Costas (Jul 24, 2013)

Σταχυολόγηση από το Sinocism:

China's income inequality slowly improving, survey finds | South China Morning Post China's Gini coefficient of income inequality was 0.49 last year, slightly down from 0.51 in 2010, according to the China Development Report on People's Livelihood 2013 based on the China Family Panel Studies. This is a research project of the Institute of Social Science Survey at Peking University. The study's researchers interviewed 14,960 households representing 57,155 people...Despite a softening Gini index, the China Family Panel Studies figure also confirmed a staggering income gap, with the top 5 per cent of households' income last year being 234 times that of the lowest 5 per cent, whose annual per capita income was about 1,000 yuan (HK$1,250).

Secret Codes of Political Propaganda: The Unknown System of Writing Teams (The China Quarterly) Within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), some Party units have established a largely unknown network of writing teams which propagate the policies or perspectives of a particular unit by publishing feature articles in Party journals. These writing teams often make use of a pseudonym in the form of a person’s name, leading outsiders to believe that the work is written by a journalist. In fact, the pseudonyms of the Party unit writing teams function as a form of secret code. Through this code, inner Party members can recognize which unit’s views an article reflects. In order to reveal exactly which units the codes represent, we have collated the names of over 20 writing teams. In addition, we provide an introduction to the functioning of the writing teams and the manner in which articles are produced. Finally, we propose that the CCP’s mechanism of “propaganda codes” is gradually undergoing the process of institutionalization.

Η υπόθεση βιασμού εργαζόμενης σε μπαρ από σεσημασμένο γιο ισχυρού ανδρός, εδώ. Και δείτε τον κατηγορούμενο ως βιαστή, αξίζει! (WSJ) Στη συνέχεια ο καθηγητής της Νομικής έδωσε διευκρινίσεις για τη "συνηγορία" του, προσπαθώντας να στρογγυλέψει τα πράματα με το να μεταφέρει τη συζήτηση σε ακαδημαϊκή σφαίρα: “I’m not saying that Li Tianyi didn’t commit rape, nor that prostitutes could be raped,” he said. Mr. Yi said each crime has a certain level of social harm, and the psychological harm is different on different victims. “The same curse words have different impacts on different people,” Mr. Yi said. “Chaste women and prostitutes have different views on chasteness,” he said, “so [rape has] a different impact on them.” Τελικά, μπροστά στο κράξιμο διέγραψε το σχόλιό του, λέγοντας ότι αποσύρεται από τη συζήτηση, χωρίς βέβαια αυτό να σημαίνει ότι άλλαξε γνώμη. Και το σχόλιο:

Tsinghua Law prof Yi Yanyou in hot water over rape comments Prof. Yi’s remarks don’t come out of nowhere – he is in fact channelling a distinction well known in traditional Chinese law (it is codified in the Qing Code) between woman of good family (良家妇女) and licentious women (犯奸妇女). If, for example, a man saw a woman engaging in illicit sexual intercourse with another and then raped her afterward, then because she was a licentious woman it could not be called rape but should instead be classified as illicit intercourse by trickery (“又如见妇人与人通奸，见者因而用强奸之，已系犯奸之妇，难以强论，依刁奸律”). (I’m relying for my translation on the Grand Ricci dictionary, which translates 刁奸 as “se'duire une femme par la ruse”; that may not be correct as a translation of the legal term.) For more on this, see Vivien Ng, “Ideology and Sexuality: Rape Laws in Qing China,” Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 46, no. 1 (Feb. 1987), pp. 57-70. Although the distinction finds no formal expression in modern Chinese law (not to my knowledge, anyway), here we see it alive and well in legal culture, so to speak, and expressed in exactly the same words as it was centuries ago.

Ο νέος Δρόμος του Μεταξιού πάνω σε ράγες, της Hewlett-Packard. (NYT)

A conversation with a gay activist lawyer in China
One discouraging part of our conversation: he noted that in general it was the house churches that were the most visible and outspoken homophobes in China. Generally Christian parents in the house churches, for example, have a much harder time accepting gay children than non-Christian Chinese parents (and you can imagine how hard it must be for them, in a culture that places such importance on transmission of the family name). This is truly unfortunate, because there doesn't seem to be anything about Christianity that requires homophobia of its adherents; many Christians manage to be so without obsessing over people's private sex lives. Unlike homosexuality, homophobia is a choice. I observed that many weiquan [defending human rights] lawyers had converted to Christianity and wondered whether they had adopted the antigay views of the house churches as well. Unfortunately, it appears that some of them have.

KFC Ice Cubes Found Dirtier than Toilet Water (Caijing) Και το κερασάκι: Ιt is not the first time for restaurant ice cubes at popular restaurants chains to be under scrutiny. A June study by the Daily Mail in Britain found higher bacterial levels in McDonald's, Burger King, KFC, Starbucks, and other fast food chains, than their toilet water.

Έκθεση αυτοκινήτου ή γυναικεία καλλιστεία;

Παλιοί Ινδουιστικοί ναοί στην Κίνα (The Hindu)


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## Costas (Jul 26, 2013)

Τέταρτο και τελευταίο επεισόδιο του ντοκιμαντέρ του Al Jazeera για το μετεκλογικό Ουκάν.


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## Costas (Aug 2, 2013)

*Bo Xilai to plead guilty, but maybe not to all charges: sources* (reuters)

*Multi-million dollar propaganda spectacle opens in a Lhasa under lockdown* (savetibet) Με ψεύτικη Ποτάλα όλα τα λεφτά

*Man goes on rampage over one child policy* (theage)
A man in China has killed two government employees who told him they couldn't register his fourth child because he didn't pay a penalty for breaking China's family planning laws.

*China’s New Leaders Advance Internet Control* (καλοί μαθητές των Αμερικάνων) (Freedom House)

Προσοχή στα έξοδα γάμου, εδώ φάγαν ολόκληρο Τσοχατζόπουλο: *Official sacked over daughter's expensive wedding* (xinhua)

Επαρχιώτικα ηλεψώνια (huxiu.me)
In 2012, the per-capita average spending on online shopping in county-level regions reached near 6000 yuan, compared with only 4700 yuan in first- and second-tier cities. People living in county-level regions, on average, bought 388 items of 54 times in a year, much more than 349 items of 39 times of the first- and second-tier city residents. They appeared to be a lot more crazy about major international brands, with women paying 765 yuan per person a year for products of Estee Lauder. Residents in first- and second-tier cities would spend only 652 yuan on them.

60-70% of honey in Jinan is fake (Danwei)
Tags: fructose syrup sugar syrup beetroot syrup rice syrup 
In 2006, a national food quality and safe market access system was implemented for honey and related products, meaning that only companies that obtain a QS authentication mark are allowed to sell honey for human consumption. Only two companies in Jinan (including Jiquan Huangshi) have obtained the QS mark, but many more companies still sell honey because honey is not exclusively classified as a foodstuff – it can also be sold as an agricultural by-product or medicine. If this is the case then relevant departments lack the legal basis to investigate honey companies without a QS mark.
 Άραγε τι ισχύει στα καθ' ημάς;

Ομολογιούχοι του δημοσίου, μέτοχοι του ΤΤ και της ProBank, παρηγορηθείτε:
*China Stocks World’s Worst Losing $748 Billion on Slump* (bloomberg)
The Shanghai Composite Index (SHCOMP), which doubled in 10 months through August 2009 as the government poured $652 billion of stimulus into building roads, railways and housing, has tumbled 43 percent from its high, destroying $748 billion in market value. Only *Greece*’s ASE Index (ASE) has fallen more in percentage terms.


Κάν' το όπως οι ναζί (Japan Times)
Outspoken Finance Minister Taro Aso has caused another international stir by urging Japanese politicians bent on revising the Constitution to learn from the way Germany under the Nazis amended the Weimar charter. (...) But Aso’s remark, reportedly made Monday in a speech in Tokyo, sounded ambiguous and may simply have been just more sarcasm over Japanese rushing to amend the Constitution.
“I don’t want (people) to make a decision in an uproar. . . . The Constitution should be revised based on public opinions that carefully examined the situation,” Aso reportedly said. “I don’t want (people) to discuss revising the Constitution in a frenzy.” (...) “[The Nazis] did it in a ‘let’s-keep-it-quiet’ manner, and the Weimar Constitution was changed almost before people realized it. Why don’t we learn from that method?”
[It] may have been a sarcastic comment against politicians bent on revision, since Aso often uses sarcastic, intricate rhetoric when he criticizes somebody.


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## Costas (Aug 2, 2013)

*Cash-strapped governments are slashing requirements for visas and citizenship to attract wealthy Chinese immigrants in the hope of drawing capital to their shores. 
* (WSJ)
While investor immigration programs are technically open to all, immigration lawyers say that governments are targeting anxious Chinese who are looking for potential escape plans for their families and protection for their assets in case of turmoil at home.

"There is an all-out immigration war emerging for the Chinese," said Jean-Francois Harvey, an immigration lawyer at Harvey Law Group in Hong Kong.

The best deals of the moment come from countries in the Caribbean and *Southern Europe* ... Η συνέχεια επί πληρωμή, ή επικοινωνήστε με το γραφείο του κ. Χατζηδάκη


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## Costas (Aug 4, 2013)

Εμπρός στο δρόμο που χάραξαν οι Κινέζοι (ή, όπως λένε οι Ιταλοί, tutto il mondo e` paese):

*Coin of Realm in China Graft: Phony Receipts* (NYT)

Signs posted throughout this city advertise all kinds of fake receipts: travel receipts, lease receipts, waste material receipts and value-added tax receipts. Promotions for counterfeit “fapiao” (the Chinese word for an official invoice) are sent by fax and through mobile phone text messages. On China’s popular e-commerce Web site, Taobao.com, sellers even promise special discounts and same-day delivery of forged receipts.

“We charge by percentage if you are looking for invoices written for a large amount of money,” said one seller in an interview, quoting 2 percent of the face value of the receipt as his fee. Another seller boasted, “I once printed invoices totaling $16 million for a construction project!” 

O συντάκτης του άρθρου (ο γνωστός David Barboza, που κέρδισε το Pulitzer ξεσκεπάζοντας τα χοντρά λεφτά που έβγαλε όλο το σόι του πρώην πρωθυπουργού Ουέν Τζιαμπάο επωφελούμενο από το αξίωμα του...σογιάρχη) υιοθετεί με την ευκαιρία τη θεωρία ότι τα κεντρικά της GlaxoKlineSmith, και ανάλογων πολυεθνικών φαρμακευτικών γιγάντων, δεν γνώριζαν την κομπίνα με τα πλαστά παραστατικά δαπανών που είχαν στήσει, λέει, τα ντόπια στελέχη της εταιρείας στην Κίνα, μολονότι τα λεφτά αυτά πήγαιναν για δωροδοκίες γιατρών και προμηθευτών...


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## Costas (Aug 5, 2013)

Επιλογή από το Sinocism:

Phonemica. A panorama of Chinese dialects, painted by speakers through their stories / Πολύ ωραία ιδέα· και στα δικά μας!

*Xiao Shu freed, releases statement * (China Media Project)
Veteran journalist and former CMP fellow Xiao Shu (笑蜀), who was detained by state security police on August 2 for his vocal support of rights activist Xu Zhiyong (许志永), was freed earlier today after being returned to his home in Guangdong province. Xiao, a key proponent of China’s so-called New Citizen’s Movement, a broad movement to promote greater citizen involvement in a range of social and political issues, posted the following statement shortly after his release: 

*Pollution blamed for Beijing tourism drop* (SBS)
The number of tourists visiting China's capital fell by more than 14 per cent in the first half of this year compared to 2012 with air pollution blamed for the decline.

Κίνα και εφοπλιστές / *China’s State Council Urges Credit Support for Shipbuilders* (Bloomberg)
China may have a third of its more than 1,600 yards shut down in about five years, according to Wang Jinlian, head of the industry association. The sector is among those including iron and steel, cement, electrolytic aluminum and flat glass that must accelerate the phasing out of overcapacity, according to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. (...) Thirty-eight percent of yards in China didn’t get contracts for new vessels last year, and 10 percent had no deliveries scheduled beyond the end of that year, the London-based ship-broking unit of ICAP Plc said in a report sent by e-mail on Dec. 24. (...) The combined profits of 80 major shipbuilders monitored by the Chinese Association of the National Shipbuilding Industry fell 54 percent in the first half of the year to 3.58 billion yuan ($584 million), the China Daily reported on July 24. About 464 shipyards in China won 18.7 million dead-weight tons of orders worth $14.3 billion last year, the lowest since 2004, according to Clarkson Plc (CKN), the world’s biggest shipbroker. That compares with contracts for 14.6 million tons worth $29.6 billion received by 88 yards in South Korea, the world’s second-biggest shipbuilding nation.

*China's Infamous 'One-Child Policy' Is About To Become A 'Two-Child Policy'* (Business Insider)
"According to the 21st Business Herald which cited sources close to the National Population and Family Planning Commission, China may significantly relax its one-child policy at end-2013 or early-2014 by allowing families to have two children if at least one parent is from a one-child family," writes BofA Merrill Lynch economist Ting Lu in a note to clients. "A plan for allowing all families to have two children after 2015 is also being reviewed. We believe the news to be reliable and is in line with our view."

Καλούσηδες / *Four senior Shanghai judges suspended for hiring prostitutes* (SCMP)

*China plans cross-strait highways with Taiwan.* Beijing drafts plan for symbolic bridge, but lacks approval from Taiwanese authorities (SCMP)


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## Costas (Aug 6, 2013)

Τα διαθέσιμα στους ερευνητές έγγραφα στα αρχεία του ΥΠΕΞ της ΛΔΚ (1949-1966) έπεσαν από τις 80000 στις...8000, και περιλαμβάνουν πια κυρίως ευχετήρια τηλεγραφήματα κττ. Τα αίτια αποτελούν αντικείμενο εικασιών:
The official reason given to us by archivists for the drastic reduction in access is that a system upgrade is in the works but it has been delayed because of technical problems (the server apparently crashed during the upgrade—make of that what you will). In general, however, this may be part of a larger nation-wide constriction of access. While at the archives, I also heard other more speculative theories but this is not the venue to detail them. (Dissertation Reviews)


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## Costas (Aug 6, 2013)

*Σαντορίνη, η νέα «σταρ» της Κινας*
Ο «Ερωτας στο Πεκίνο» είναι η πρώτη κινεζική ταινία που έχει για πρωταγωνίστρια την Ελλάδα και διαφηµίζει ένα από τα οµορφότερα νησιά µας στην πλέον αναπτυσσόμενη τουριστική αγορά του κόσμου.
(Καθημερινή)


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## Zazula (Aug 6, 2013)

Στην Ελλάδα έχουμε είχαμε τους γάμους, στην Ταϊβάν έχουν τις κηδείες: 20.000 USD για μια κηδεία, συμπεριλαμβανομένων και στριπτιζέζ! http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/taboo/videos/funeral-strippers/


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## Costas (Aug 6, 2013)

Ποιος τη χάρη του νεκρού!


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## Costas (Aug 9, 2013)

Ο Ξ(Σ)υ Τζ-γιόνγκ του Νέου Κινήματος Πολιτών κάνει μια δήλωση μέσα από το κέντρο κράτησης όπου βρίσκεται (βίντεο).

"I call on everyone to be a citizen, a forthright citizen who exercises their civil rights guaranteed under the Constitution and fulfills a citizen's civic duty, promotes educational equality so that children of migrants may take college entrance exams at locations other than their hometowns, and calls for disclosure of officials' assets. In this absurd era, these are the actions behind the three charges against me. Someone has to pay a price for social progress—I am willing to bear all the costs for freedom, social justice, love, and faith.

However defeated and absurd this society is, this country needs courageous citizens to stand up, to keep faith, and to take rights, responsibilities, and dreams seriously. I am proud to put the word "citizen" in front of my name. I hope everyone will do the same—to put the word "citizen" in front of your name. As long as we unite and strive together to take the rights of citizens seriously, take citizenship seriously, and jointly promote democracy, rule of law, equality, and justice in our country, we will be able to build a beautiful China of freedom, social justice, and love."

Κόλλημα αδερφάκι μου που έχει φάει με τη λέξη "πολίτης"! Χάθηκε το "υπήκοος";


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## Costas (Aug 9, 2013)

Συνέντευξη με τον Ουάνγκ Χούι, πανεπιστημιακό της "νέας αριστεράς". (Asia Times)

Η (εν εξελίξει) Οδύσσεια μιας γυναίκας που κλείστηκε σε ψυχιατρείο και έχει κερδίσει αρκετές δίκες εναντίον των υπευθύνων. Καρέ-καρέ, εκεί είναι το ενδιαφέρον. (Human Rights Journal)


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## Costas (Aug 9, 2013)

*The Urban Grid Management and Police State in China: A Brief Overview*
A model for a contemporary police state.
By Dr.sc.pol. Wu Qiang

Urban grid system is nothing new. In ancient Rome, the grid was the standard layout of military camps. Urban grid planning, from the very beginning, bore the marks of militarized management. In Beijing, the grid-like streets and alleys (hutongs) have a lot of to do with the layout of military installations in imperial China. To a great extent, today’s urban neighborhoods of Beijing have geographically inherited this traditional grid layout, although structurally the grid has been based on a social system of “work units” that was formed in the 1960s and 1970s and have served the purpose of social control as part of the country’s social system. In brief, this is the background for understanding how and why China has been implementing grid management for, among other things, social control. (China Change)


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## Costas (Aug 15, 2013)

*China's urbanisation push runs into trouble before its start*
It could backfire spectacularly if new urban residents are left deprived of their former ability to make a living from the land
(South China Morning Post)


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## Zazula (Aug 16, 2013)

Εφαρμογή του όρου «κινέζικα προϊόντα» σε ζωολογικό κήπο:
http://www.afp.com/en/node/1036749
http://www.ibtimes.com/barking-lion-china-zoo-passes-dog-african-lion-photos-1386813


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## Costas (Aug 16, 2013)

Ωραίο! Πάντως η κατάσταση της πινακίδας (στο δεύτερο λινκ) μιλάει και για το εν γένει επίπεδο του ζωολ. κήπου-φυλακή.


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## Costas (Aug 16, 2013)

Αρχιτεκτονικά στιγμιότυπα από την Κίνα, μερικά ιλαρά (Dezeen):

Man ordered to remove fake mountain villa on top of Chinese tower
Cave hotel underway in water-filled Chinese quarry
Galaxy Soho by Zaha Hadid Architects photographed by Hufton + Crow
Chinese newspaper headquarters compared to huge penis και (Huffington Post) Chinese Newspaper People's Daily Builds 'Giant Penis' Building; Censors Block Internet Sniggering (PHOTO)


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## nickel (Aug 16, 2013)

Zazula said:


> Εφαρμογή του όρου «κινέζικα προϊόντα» σε ζωολογικό κήπο:
> http://www.afp.com/en/node/1036749
> http://www.ibtimes.com/barking-lion-china-zoo-passes-dog-african-lion-photos-1386813



Μάθαμε Έμαθα και για το θιβετιανό μαστίφ έτσι. Που το 'χει το λιονταρέ του.

http://www.itabloid.gr/αυτός-ο-σκύλος-κοστίζει-15-εκατ-ευρώ/


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## Costas (Aug 17, 2013)

Σε παράσταση του Cirque du Soleil στο Πεκίνο προβλήθηκε στην οθόνη η γνωστή φωτογραφία του άντρα μπροστά στα τανκς (Πλατεία Τιενανμέν, 5/6/89). Αυτό γέννησε το παρακάτω άρθρο του Edward Wong (+Marc Santora και Mia Li) (ΝΥΤ), που έχει πολλά ενδιαφέροντα ιστορικά σημεία:

(...) the appearance during a Michael Jackson tribute concert of the famous “Tank Man” photograph of June 1989. (...)

In imperial times, China’s rulers tried to exercise strict control over what versions of history were fit for public consumption. “The punishment for bringing sensitive historical matters to light could be death” (...)

The Cirque du Soleil dance show used Mr. Jackson’s music, including “They Don’t Care About Us,” an overtly political song whose lyrics are full of rage. “Tell me what has become of my rights?/Am I invisible because you ignore me?/Your proclamation promised me free liberty, now/I’m tired of bein’ the victim of shame,” the song says. Along with the lyrics, Cirque du Soleil featured a montage of images showing civil rights abuses and protests, including that of the Tank Man. (...)

A tour spokeswoman, Laura Silverman, sent an e-mail this week to The South China Morning Post, a Hong Kong newspaper, that said “the image was removed immediately and is no longer shown.” She also said the full show had been submitted to the Chinese Ministry of Culture for approval before the first China concert. (...)

It could be, though, that blanket censorship of all things related to June 4, 1989, has resulted in such widespread amnesia about the episode that even some censors can no longer recognize the taboo material for what it is.
There have been past cases of this. In 2008, Beijing News ran a profile of the veteran photojournalist Liu Heung Shing, who covered China in the late 1970s and 1980s for Time magazine and The Associated Press. The article featured several of his photographs, including one of the injured and dead being taken from the scene of the June 4 killings by rickshaw drivers.
When officials realized what had happened, they ordered the newspaper pulled off the streets. Mr. Liu said he later asked employees at Beijing News what had taken place. It turned out there had been an empty space on the page before it went to press, and an editor with a keen interest in history pulled one of Mr. Liu’s photographs from the Internet to fill the hole. The editor apparently had no idea what the image represented.
“It’s ironic, because even the guy interested in history didn’t seem to know China’s modern history that well,” Mr. Liu said. “Otherwise, it wouldn’t have gotten through.” Officials made inquiries and determined the mistake had been a genuine one, Mr. Liu said.
Such mistakes are more likely to occur with younger Chinese. “You’d be surprised how those born in the late 1980s and 1990s, how ignorant they are,” said Mr. Liu. He was the A.P. chief photographer who pushed editors in 1989 to publish the Tank Man photograph, which was taken by Jeff Widener. (There are at least four versions of the famous scene, each captured by a photographer shooting from the Beijing Hotel.) (...)

There is another explanation for how Tank Man might have gotten past the censors screening Cirque du Soleil: the image might have flashed by too quickly for officials to notice. At least one person in the audience said she had missed it on Friday night. (...)


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## Costas (Aug 17, 2013)

Ένα άρθρο που συγκρίνει τη στάση της Δύσης απέναντι στο πραξικόπημα του στρατού στην Αίγυπτο και στην επέμβαση του στρατού το 1989 στο Πεκίνο. (China Matters)
* How Liberals Tolerate a Massacre in Egypt While Condemning a Massacre in China*


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## bernardina (Aug 23, 2013)

Τα μεταφραστικά λάθη είναι τόσο ξεκαρδιστικά που κυριολεκτικά κλαίω.
Βρε Κώστα, εξήγησέ μας πώς γίνεται τέτοιο μπέρδεμα, σε παρακαλώ.

υγ. Αν και η τελευταία εικόνα είναι τόσο ποιητική που μόνο ένας Κινέζος θα μπορούσε να τη σκεφτεί.


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## Palavra (Aug 23, 2013)

[Zazula mode]Μπέρνη, γκουχ, γκουχ, γκουχ  [/Zazula mode]

Αυτό το fuck the duck until exploded... ρεζίλι έγινα, για μια ακόμα φορά :blush:


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## bernardina (Aug 23, 2013)

Palavra said:


> [Zazula mode]Μπέρνη, γκουχ, γκουχ, γκουχ  [/Zazula mode]


Μα ναι, ναι... Απλώς ήθελα να ρωτήσω τον Κώστα πώς στην οργή καταντάνε έτσι τα αγγλικά όταν τα πιάνουν στα χέρια τους... στο στόμα τους... στο αυτόματο μεταφραστήρι τους στο γουατέβα τους τελοσπάντων οι Κινέζοι...


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## SBE (Aug 23, 2013)

Noμίζω ότι το πρόβλημα είναι ότι ανοίγουν το λεξικό και παίρνουν την πρώτη λέξη που βλέπουν στα αγγλικά, οπότε προκύπτουν εκφράσεις όπως το νέο κατσίκι στο μπλοκ ή _τα ζωντανά φώτα της μέρας_ (τίτλος ταινίας του 007, σε αντίθεση με τα ψόφια φώτα της μέρας).


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## bernardina (Aug 23, 2013)

SBE said:


> Noμίζω ότι το πρόβλημα είναι ότι ανοίγουν το λεξικό και παίρνουν την πρώτη λέξη που βλέπουν στα αγγλικά, οπότε προκύπτουν εκφράσεις όπως το νέο κατσίκι στο μπλοκ ή _τα ζωντανά φώτα της μέρας_ (τίτλος ταινίας του 007, σε αντίθεση με τα ψόφια φώτα της μέρας).


Πράγμα που με κάνει να αναρωτιέμαι τι λεξικό άνοιξαν και πού στην οργή βρήκαν εκείνο το* arrogant in vinegar * (sic!!!) που αντίκρισαν τα ωραία και μεγάλα μου μάτια στο μενού ενός ουζεριού ουζερί της Ραφήνας. 

Three guesses για το ποια ελληνική ντελικατέτσα "μετέφραζαν" μ' αυτό τον τρόπο! Ο ευρών αμειφθήσεται εις είδος.


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## Costas (Aug 23, 2013)

Εκτός από τις προφανείς περιπτώσεις, τα τυπογραφικά (crap αντί για carp, cock αντί για coke), μερικά είναι μυστήρια. Αυτό το hand grenade (灭火瓶), ας πούμε, δεν προκύπτει από πουθενά, τόσο που αναρωτιέμαι μήπως είναι πλαστό. Γιατί το κινέζικο λέει, σε μετάφραση, extinguish fire bottle/vase/pitcher. Πώς στο καλό από αυτές τις τρεις κινέζικες λέξεις μπορεί να προκύψει το hand grenade? Πρωτότυπο και μετάφρασμα δεν συναντιούνται πουθενά.

To Rape When Greenstuffs, επίσης, δεν αντιστοιχεί σε κανένα σημείο του κινέζικου κειμένου, τουλάχιστον όσου φαίνεται στη φωτογραφία.


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## SBE (Aug 24, 2013)

bernardina said:


> Three guesses για το ποια ελληνική ντελικατέτσα "μετέφραζαν" μ' αυτό τον τρόπο! Ο ευρών αμειφθήσεται εις είδος.



Σύμφωνα με αυτό εδώ,


Spoiler



ο γαύρος


 (πώς προέκυψε άραγε; )


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## nickel (Aug 24, 2013)

SBE said:


> (πώς προέκυψε άραγε; )





Spoiler



Τη σωστή μετάφραση του γαύρου / γάβρου την έχουμε εδώ.
http://lexilogia.gr/forum/showthread.php?2935-γαύρος-γάβρος-anchovy-hornbeam

Στα αρχαία ελληνικά _γαύρος_ ήταν ο περήφανος. Σε απόσπασμα που διασώθηκε από τον _Φιλοκτήτη_ του Ευριπίδη έχουμε «οὐδὲν γὰρ οὕτω γαῡρον ὡς ἀνὴρ ἔφυ» (=δεν υπάρχει τίποτα πιο αλαζονικό από τον άντρα). Στα σημερινά έχουμε το ρήμα _γαυριώ_ «καμαρώνω». Άνοιξαν λοιπόν κάποιο λεξικό, είδα *γαύρος* arrogant, και μας το σερβίρισαν.


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## bernardina (Aug 24, 2013)

Άντε, ελάτε. Κερνάω γαβράκι μαρινάτο.


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## drsiebenmal (Aug 24, 2013)

bernardina said:


> Άντε, ελάτε. Κερνάω γαβράκι μαρινάτο.


Ορίστε και παραλλαγές...


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## bernardina (Aug 24, 2013)

drsiebenmal said:


> Ορίστε και παραλλαγές...



Σε ένα *τάπερ,* κατά προτίμηση *γυάλινο*...

Σόρι για το οφτόπικ, αλλά το βρήκα πολύ χαριτωμένο.


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## Costas (Aug 25, 2013)

*An Anatomy of Chinese: Rhythm, Metaphor, Politics* (Perry Link) - Reviewed by David Porter
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright August 2013)

(...)
The puzzle that motivates the book’s first section has to do with the origins and purpose of characteristic rhythmic features of modern Chinese prose. We normally think of rhythmic patterning in language as belonging to the realm of poetry, where, like rhyme, it contributes to the experience of formal coherence and self-conscious artistry distinctive to this genre. Ordinary language we tend to imagine as being considerably less artful and more pragmatic, concerned, as it is, with the prosaic business of communicating ideas in a reasonably efficient and straightforward manner. Link offers dozens of examples, however, to demonstrate how even the most ordinary of ideas in modern Chinese very often find themselves expressed in phrases that adhere to deep-seated rhythmic rules and patterns. A sign urging pedestrians to look both ways before crossing a busy street takes a rhythmic form dating back to poetry of the Han dynasty (206 BC-220 AD). A standard list of kitchen staples—kindling, rice, oil, salt, soy sauce, vinegar, and tea—turns out to use exactly the same rhythm. The literary origins of such metrical patterns are easy to discern within China’s rich poetic heritage. Considerably more tangled are two questions Link dwells on at considerable length. Why, first of all, should these patterns have the staying power that they do, especially in a society whose revolutionary heritage has so often entailed an explicit repudiation of “traditional” or “feudal” cultural forms? And second, what does the invocation of such age-old poetic rhythms contribute to the meaning of a seemingly colloquial statement?
(...)
While the idea of passing from consciousness to unconsciousness is imagined in terms of spacial movement in both Chinese and English, for example, Chinese speakers are more inclined to think of this transition in terms of a coming or going across a divide, whereas English speakers speak of “falling asleep” or “sinking into a coma.” While similarities in basic conceptual metaphors in the two languages outnumber the differences, a number of distinctive metaphorical predilections in Chinese make good food for thought. Idiomatic uses of the verb chi ‘eat’ in Chinese, for example, are far more prevalent than in English, so that one can describe the enjoyment of popularity, for example, as “eating fragrance,” male flirtation as “eating tofu,” accepting blame as “eating crime,” or feeling jealous as “eating vinegar.”
(...)
(...) ontological metaphors—the abstract nouns we fashion out of verbs and adjectives in order to manipulate and express ideas at a remove from concrete experience. It turns out that speakers of European languages are far more inclined to rely on these second-order nominalizations than are speakers of Chinese, so that the former habitually speak of, say, “inflation,” “energy,” “existence,” “patience,” “confidence,” or “truth,” whereas Chinese renderings of corresponding ideas are more likely to rely on verb and adjective constructions. Whereas others who have noticed this difference have sometimes presented it as evidence of a structural lack in Chinese methods of reasoning, Link turns the tables to reflect on the possibility that habitual nominalization has tended to lead thinkers working in Indo-European languages down all manner of blind alleys that are, in reality, nothing more than metaphorical fictions. To what extent does our belief in the real existence of “government,” say, or “the good,” and our willingness to devote centuries of debate to their description and analysis, derive from the mere linguistic quirk underlying our propensity, as speakers of English, to traffic in nominalized abstractions?
While broad generalizations of this kind will no doubt raise red flags for some readers and bring to mind significant counter-examples for others, Link’s deployment of an observed cultural difference to invite linguistic self-consciousness and unsettle complacencies represents one of the more responsible and productive uses one can imagine for comparative work of this kind.
(...)
(...) the richly homophonic nature of spoken Chinese opens up endless possibilities for punning, which has often been used, along with parody and double entendre, to satirize the hypocrisy of official speech and to dodge the effects of widespread censorship. For all the comic relief offered by occasional acts of resistance, however, Link is understandably pre-occupied with what the long-term effects on public culture might be of several generations of Chinese living and breathing a language so severely twisted and constrained by the machinations of a repressive one-party state. While he does not underestimate the difficulty of recognizing, let alone breaking free of a tainted or impoverished language, he sees cause for guarded optimism in the opportunities for greater freedom of experimentation and self-expression that technology has made available in recent years.
(...)
The characteristic formulations he associates with Maoist propaganda, for example, would appear to share a common lineage and, presumably, common rhetorical strategies with moralizing tracts in the Buddhist and Confucian traditions. And surely the dangers of becoming trapped within the confines of a dominant ideology are not limited to authoritarian states, though they are obviously more pronounced there.

Το ζήτημα των οντολογικών μεταφορών, που θίγεται πιο πάνω, μου θύμισε ένα κείμενο που είχα διαβάσει παλιά, το οποίο έλεγε ότι οι αρχαίοι Έλληνες χρησιμοποιούσαν λίγα αφηρημένα ουσιαστικά· συνήθως χρησιμοποιούσαν έναρθρα επίθετα στο ουδέτερο γένος, το ελεύθερον κλπ. Και το κείμενο εκείνο έλεγε πως ο Κικέρωνας στάθηκε εκείνος που πήρε αυτά τα επίθετα και τους κόλλησε ένα -tas, ανοίγοντας το δρόμο για τις δικές μας -ότητες. (Πρέπει να το 'χω ξαναγράψει αυτό κάπου)


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## Costas (Aug 25, 2013)

*Translating the Ancient Classics in China and the West: 1950 and Beyond*
University of South Carolina - 16th Annual Comparative Literature Conference
February 26-March 2, 2014

Which type of appropriations/adaptations occur on the linguistic level during the translation of Hellenistic and Latin classics into the modern Chinese language? In which way do the translation and interpretation of Plato and Aristotle become a way to address various issues of modernity in China? Does the current reception of the Straussian reading of Plato go in line with the reading guidelines set in the May Fourth movement? What are the differences in the respective readings of Western classics in the West and in China?


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## Earion (Aug 25, 2013)

bernardina said:


> Σε ένα *τάπερ,* κατά προτίμηση *γυάλινο*...
> 
> Σόρι για το οφτόπικ, αλλά το βρήκα πολύ χαριτωμένο.



Εννοεί πιρέξ με πλαστικό κάλυμμα.

(Συγγνώμη κι από μένα).


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## Costas (Aug 25, 2013)

Πολλά λινκ για τη δίκη τού Μπο Ξ(Σ)ιλάι στο Sinocism.

---------------------------
*China’s two greatest Internet rumor mongers and “black PR” philanderers arrested* (Danwei)
Έχει μεγάλη πλάκα η ανάγνωση αυτού του άρθρου: Κατασκευή Φημών ΟΕ. Το ωραίο είναι ότι:
Most of these rumors are traceable back to their source, but water army companies [ΣΣ. βλ. σώμα άρθρου] operate openly on the Chinese Internet and seem to be tolerated if they keep out of political trouble. Indications are that Qin crossed the line in April this year when he published a much-forwarded post attacking Chinese Communist Party propaganda role model Lei Feng 雷锋 as being corrupt and profligate, with contentious if hilarious phrases as: “In 1959, Lei Feng would have needed 90 yuan to afford his high-grade leather jacket, woolen pants, and black leather boots, but his monthly pay was only 6 yuan!” Qin was apparently reported by netizens to the Beijing Public Security Bureau for “making rumors slanderous to the image of Lei Feng”.

Πάτησα και μερικά γαργαλιστικά λινκ του άρθρου· ωραίο μανατζάρισμα κάνει η μάνα στην κόρη! Αναφωνείς "μάνα μου!" και δεν ξέρεις σε ποιαν αναφέρεσαι...


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## nickel (Aug 25, 2013)

Πριν από τέσσερα χρόνια είχε ανακοινωθεί αυτό:



Katerina_A said:


> Ειδικά αυτό με τα ανοιχτά πόδια και το στριγκ, πολύ με άρεσε.
> 
> Διχάζει την Κίνα το «πάρκο
> του Σεξ»
> ...










Αν βγάλατε εισιτήρια να επισκεφτείτε το πάρκο και ακυρώθηκαν, εδώ είναι η εξήγηση:

Love Land would have been the first sex theme park in China; the PRC Government suspended its construction in Chongqing in May 2009 and ordered it demolished. The park was to include displays of giant genitalia and naked bodies, and host an exhibition on the history of human sexuality along with sex technique workshops. It was originally due to be opened in October 2009, but was demolished in May 2009, as it was deemed to be a negative influence on Chinese society.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Land_(China)


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## Costas (Aug 27, 2013)

Fish Habitat Near Collapse on China’s Upper Yangtze, Study Says (Bloomberg)

“We now use 60 percent less energy per unit of G.D.P. than we did in 1973,” explained the energy economist Philip Verleger. “If the trend continues, we will use half the energy per unit of G.D.P. in 2020 that we used in 2012. To make matters better, a large part of the energy used will be renewable. Then there is the increase in oil and gas production.” In 2006, the United States depended on foreign oil for 60 percent of its consumption. Today it’s about 36 percent. True, oil is a global market, so what happens in the Middle East can still impact us and our allies. But the urgency is gone. “The Middle East is China’s problem,” added Verleger. (NYT)

The death of independent cinema in China - Chinese independent cinema: an obituary (Time Out Beijing)


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## Costas (Aug 27, 2013)

The Chinese Migrants Who Shocked Singapore: A WSJ Investigation (WSJ)
_This story of a strike by Chinese bus drivers in Singapore offers a close-up look at a major issue facing the Southeast Asian city-state today: The growing number of migrant workers who underpin Singapore’s economy and the social tensions that their presence can generate. 
What happened over two days in late November 2012 rattled the foundations of Singapore’s economic success – its business-friendly governance and industrial harmony – and prompted a robust response from the government.
The strike, a rarity in Singapore, resonated across Asia, where other countries are grappling with a growing dependence on foreign labor, too. And it provided a window into ordinary lives seldom-seen: the migrants who fan out from China in search of a fatter paycheck abroad._


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## Costas (Aug 27, 2013)

*Law Professor Suspended from Teaching for Pro-Constitutionalism Expressions* (China Change)

Last September, Dr. Zhang was temporarily suspended from teaching his undergraduate courses for his support of Hong Kong students and parents fighting the implementation of the so-called “national education” course in Hong Kong schools. Subsequently, Dr. Zhang issued a statement withdrawing his CCP membership, saying that “due to differences in principles between myself and the Chinese Communist Party over the treatment of Marxism and the political future of China, I would be conflicted between my loyalty to the country and my loyalty to the Party if I continue to stay in the organization.”

Earlier this year, Dr. Zhang was among the first college professors to reveal “Seven No Mentions” (“七不讲”), instructions banning the teaching of universal values, press freedom, civil society, civil rights, CCP’s historical mistakes, oligarchical capitalism, and judiciary independence on college campuses.


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## drsiebenmal (Aug 27, 2013)

Μεγάλης κλίμακας επίθεση κατά του κινεζικού Ίντερνετ


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## Costas (Aug 27, 2013)

*Αφαίρεσαν τα μάτια του μικρού - Έμποροι ανθρωπίνων οργάνων απήγαγαν εξάχρονο αγοράκι στην Κίνα* (in.gr)

Στο ρεπορτάζ της τηλεόρασης μίλησαν και οι γονείς του παιδιού, που κατάγονται από φτωχή, αγροτική περιοχή. Αφηγήθηκαν ότι αρχικά νόμιζαν ότι το παιδί τους έπεσε και χτύπησε — μέχρι που αντιλήφθηκαν ότι του είχαν αφαιρεθεί και τα δύο μάτια. «Είχε αίματα σε όλο το πρόσωπο, τα βλέφαρά του ήταν γυρισμένα και από κάτω έλειπαν τα μάτια του», είπε ο πατέρας.
Αστυνομικοί εντόπισαν τους δύο οφθαλμούς από τους οποίους είχε αφαιρεθεί ο κερατοειδής χιτώνας. Η αστυνομία ανακοίνωσε ότι προσφέρει αμοιβή 100.000 γουάν (περίπου 12.200 ευρώ) σε όποιον μπορεί να βοηθήσει στον εντοπισμό μιας γυναίκας που θεωρείται βασική ύποπτη στην υπόθεση. Το παιδί έπασχε εκ γενετής από λαγωχειλία και ενδεχομένως αυτός να ήταν ο λόγος που το επέλεξαν οι απαγωγείς του.


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## Costas (Aug 27, 2013)

Γενική σούμα της δίκης του Μπο Ξ(Σ)ιλάι, από τους δημοσιογράφους της Νew Υork Τimes: *Political Staging in Trial of Fallen China Official*


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## Costas (Aug 27, 2013)

Άλλο ένα άρθρο για τη ματαίωση του Φεστιβάλ Ανεξάρτητου Σινεμά του Πεκίνου (το άλλο είναι στο νήμα για τον κινηματογράφο) (China Digital Times)


*Police Break Up Beijing Independent Film Festival*

The 10th Beijing Independent Film Festival (BIFF) was effectively cancelled on Friday according to Time Out Beijing’s Simon Zhou, who reported that police eventually made a deal with pleading festival director Wang Hongwei:

A deal had been struck. The directors, jury, and invited guests of the festival, among them those who had taken the train from Xinjiang or been flown in all the way from Sweden and Iran, would be handed out DVDs containing the entire programme of films. We would be permitted to watch them, on computer screens or televisions, in groups of two or three, but no more than five.

We would have to sign contracts promising to abide by these conditions, or face the consequences. If the organisers didn’t agree these conditions, and tried to go ahead with the festival anyway, the electricity from the entire village of Songzhuang would be cut, and Wang Hongwei would be put in prison. Fifteen years ago, Wang played the eponymous role in Jia Zhangke’s seminal film The Pickpocket (pictured). [Source]

Time Out Beijing added that festival goers experienced a similar disruption last year due to a sudden power outage:

This is, of course, a triumph for the authorities, for whom BIFF always looked too much like an uncontrollable hotbed of potential sedition: unapproved talk about unapproved films by unapproved persons. Last year’s mysterious power cut could theoretically have had the double result of breaking up the community while – being an act of god – ensuring that nobody could be blamed. The result, however, was that that same community pulled together, spreading the weight of the festival by screening films in homes, studios and other private spaces. [Source]

See netizen comments on last year’s power cut and Austin Ramzy’s report from 2011′s event via CDT.

At P.I.G. China, Samantha Culp outlined the careful preparations that had been taken in the hope that this year’s festival, unlike the last two, would be left alone:

This time around, the organizers have purchased an electric generator, but are also trying other strategies to help the events run smoothly. Screenings have been scheduled not only in Songzhuang, but in more central Beijing venues ranging from a hip Gulou cafe to 798’s Ullens Center for Contemporary Art. With a wider geographic scope, artistic director Dong Bingfeng hopes the festival can be protected from interference and “can attract audiences of different backgrounds”. The programmers have included two programs of films from outside China, namely Iran and Indonesia, to drive more international discourse, and the festival will also emphasize the importance of a counterintuitive platform for cinema – books. Several forums will center on the Li Xianting Film Foundation’s new publication initiative. “Over the past 20 years, mainland China has generated a lot of independent films, but there’s still a lack of theory and criticism about them,” says Dong. “This year we’ll premiere three new books as case-studies on the international film artists Yang Fudong, Tsai Ming-Liang and Raqs Media Collective.” [Source]

Art critic and BIFF funder Li Xianting had his film school, the Li Xianting film school, shut down by authorities earlier last month.
(...)


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## Costas (Aug 29, 2013)

*China orders nation’s journalists to take Marxism classes *
China has ordered its entire press corps back to school in an effort to shore up ideological unity. The nation’s 307,000 reporters, producers and editors will soon have to sit through at least two days of Marxism classes, the Communist Party’s Propaganda Department has announced along with the press association and the state press regulator.
The announcement comes a week after Xi Jinping called for increased unity in a much publicised speech and amid a widening crackdown on online dissent. (South China Morning Post)

*China sets down standards for Chinese characters*
An official list standardizing the appearance of commonly used Chinese language characters has been published, the Ministry of Education revealed Tuesday.
The 8,105 characters included in the list were chosen based on their frequency of use from hundreds of thousands of characters that have emerged since ancient times, according to the expert team that compiled the list. (xinhua)

*China’s Original Social Media: Bathroom Graffiti* (Tea Leaf Nation)
The list, which took a decade to compile, aims to regulate the appearance of these characters, most notably in print form, and also adopts many rare characters that occasionally appear in names.


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## Costas (Aug 29, 2013)

*CDT eBook: Grass-Mud Horse Lexicon Classics — USD 2.99*

Over the years, China Digital Times has collected, translated, and defined Chinese netizen language in our Grass-Mud Horse Lexicon. With 273 entries and counting, this wiki contains words, nicknames, and phrases netizens use to evade censorship and lampoon the political system. Epitomized by the grass-mud horse, a creature whose name becomes a vulgarity with a change of tone, these terms form a “resistance discourse” to propaganda and the status quo.

CDT now presents its first eBook, a collection of 71 must-know terms from the Grass-Mud Horse Lexicon. The Grass-Mud Horse Lexicon: Classic Netizen Language is now available in PDF and in the Amazon Kindle store. Organized by category and indexed in both English and pinyin, the eBook offers China-watchers and students of Mandarin a key to the Internet neologisms which have endured long beyond the particular circumstances which inspired them.

All proceeds from the sale of this eBook support China Digital Times.


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## Costas (Aug 30, 2013)

Ωραία λινκ από το Sinocism:

Η πρόσφατη εν εξελίξει καταστολή στο ίντερνετ αποτελεί υλοποίηση απόφασης που είχε παρθεί πριν από μερικά χρόνια. Ας απολαύσουμε γλώσσα:

(1) Persisting in the guiding position of Marxism. Marxism has deeply revealed the social development rules of humanity, steadfastly safeguarded and developed the basic rights and interests of the broad people, and is a scientific theory guiding the people, promoting social progress and creating a happy life.

(5) Developing healthy and upward network culture. Strengthening online ideological and cultural battlefield construction is an urgent task in Socialist culture construction. It is necessary to earnestly implement and vigorously use, scientifically develop, and manage according to the law policies guaranteeing security, strengthen and improve network culture and management, strengthen online public opinion guidance, sing the online ideology and culture main melody. Implementing network construction projects, promoting excellent traditional cultural treasures and contemporary excellent cultural product network dissemination, producing excellent works and masterpieces suited to burgeoning media dissemination such as the Internet and mobile telephones, etc., encouraging netizens to create network cultural works with a healthy style. Supporting focus news websites in accelerating development, forging a batch of comprehensive websites and specialist websites having relatively strong influence at home and abroad, giving rein to the constructive function of main commercial websites, fostering a batch of network content production and service backbone enterprises. Developing new network technology and new business models, occupying the high ground of network information dissemination. Broadly developing civilized website construction, promoting civilized web business and civilized web use, supervising and urging network operators and service enterprises to implement legal duties and social responsibilities, not providing dissemination channels to harmful information. Strengthening network legal structure construction, accelerating the shaping of an Internet management system combining standardized laws and regulations, administrative supervision and management, sectoral self-regulation, technological guarantees, public supervision and social education. Strengthening guidance and management over social networks and instant communication tools, etc., standardizing online information dissemination procedures, cultivating a civilized and rational network environment. Punishing activities of disseminating harmful information according to the law, deeply moving forward the special campaign to clean up network obscenity and pornography and resist vulgar information, strictly strike network illegality and crime. Expanding online personal information protection strength, establishing network security appraisal mechanisms, safeguarding the public interest and national information security.
(από το China Copyright and Media)

-----------
China’s e-commerce market is expected to leapfrog that of the United States this year to become the world’s largest by total customer spending, management consultancy firm Bain & Company says.

-----------
China must spend at least 41.6 trillion yuan ($6.8 trillion) over two decades to integrate rural workers living in cities and towns so the country realizes benefits of urbanization, a United Nations report said. Spending may exceed 75 trillion yuan in a scenario with a higher rate of investment to improve living conditions and housing quality, according to the report released yesterday in Beijing. The study’s baseline assumptions are for the urban population to rise to 976 million in 2030 from 666 million in 2010 and integrate about 210 million migrant workers.

-----------
Γραμμένο με σοφία: 
On Being African in China
When a student from Ghana arrived in Beijing, she hoped to serve as a cultural ambassador -- but instead became an unwitting spectacle. (Zahra Baitie - The Atlantic)


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## Zazula (Aug 31, 2013)

Κανείς δεν παραυγαίνει (sic) τον Wen Fu Liang και τα eggξαιρετικά του αυγλαΐσματα:


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## Costas (Aug 31, 2013)

Να του πούμε να φτιάξει κι ένα να βγαίνει από μέσα η Ωραία Ελένη!


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## Costas (Aug 31, 2013)

*Confessions of a Reactionary*, του ακτιβιστή (αγωνιστές τους λέγαμε παλιά) Teng Biao:
(The article first appeared in Life and Death in China (a multi-volume anthology of 50+ witness accounts of Chinese government persecution and 30+ essays by experts in human rights in China). When I wrote it, Xu Zhiyong was under house arrest; when it was published, he had already moved to the Beijing Third Detention Center. I dedicate this little essay to Xu Zhiyong and all those reactionaries whose homes have become prisons or who have made prisons their homes. – Teng Biao) (China Change)
Δυνατό κείμενο.

Από Sinocism
Η εκστρατεία εναντίον της διαφθοράς συνεχίζεται (σε συνδυασμό με μια εκστρατεία εναντίον των θυλάκων έκφρασης γνώμης):

*Zhou Yongkang, former security tsar linked to Bo Xilai, faces corruption probe* (South China Morning Post)
Current and retired top leaders endorsed the decision earlier this month during the secretive annual party meeting at the resort of Beidaihe in Hebei province. According to sources familiar with the leadership’s thinking, President Xi Jinping and his administration are determined to use the case to galvanise the anti-graft campaign. No Politburo Standing Committee member – retired or sitting – has been investigated for economic crimes since the end of the Cultural Revolution nearly 40 years ago. Sources said top leaders made the decision in view of the rising anger inside the party at the scale of the corruption problem and the vast fortune that Zhou’s family has amassed. Xi ordered officials in charge of the case to “get to the bottom of it”.

*Teams from Gov't, Party Investigate China National Petroleum Company Executives* (Caixin)Several teams from the central government's audit czar and Communist Party discipline watchdog are investigating executives at China National Petroleum Corp., sources close to the matter say.
The dispatching of investigators from both the party and the government parallels the downfall of four high-level executives in the country's largest oil company over two days.
Part of the teams' job is a routine, post-promotion check regarding Jiang Jiemin, former general manager of China National Petroleum Corp. (CNPC), after he was elevated to the helm of State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission. But sources say the teams are also investigating other executives at the oil giant.
On August 26, party officials said that Wang Yongchun, deputy general manager of CNPC group, was being investigated for "severe discipline violations."
A day later, SASAC said on its website that three more executives from CNPC were the subject of inquiries: Li Hualin, deputy general manager of CNPC Group and chairman of Kunlun Energy; Ran Xinquan, vice president of PetroChina and head of the Changqing oil fields; and Wang Daofu, the chief geologist at PetroChina and president of the Research Institute of Petroleum Exploration & Development. CNPC issued a statement saying all four have resigned for personal reasons and have been replaced.

--------------------------------------
*Beijing Water Shortage Worse Than the Middle East* (China File)
Beijing’s annual water consumption has reached 3.6 billion cubic meters, according to statistics released by the Beijing Water Authority, far more than the 2.1 billion cubic meters locally available. The per capita annual water availability is now around 120 cubic meters, well below the United Nations absolute water scarcity threshold, and puts China’s capital city in a position of more severe water scarcity than some countries in the arid Middle-East.
Statistics from Beijing Water Resources Bulletin shows that the decrease in the capital’s water supplies results mainly from the rapid decline in surface and underground water resources. In recent years, water supplies from these two sources have decreased by 38%.

*Chinese researchers identify key protein behind depression* (xinhua)
Chinese researchers said Thursday that they have identified a key protein in the brain responsible for the development of depression, offering a fresh avenue in the search for therapies to treat depression.
Previous studies have found that cells in a brain region called lateral habenula (LHB) are hyperactive in depressed individuals, but scientists haven't known what triggers them.
Curious about molecular-scale activity in the LHB of depressed people, the researchers from the Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, used a technique called quantitative proteomic screening to examine the proteins in the LHB tissue of regular rats and rats that had been depressed since birth.
The researchers reported in the U.S. journal Science that a protein called CaM was nearly twice as abundant in the depressed rats.


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## Costas (Aug 31, 2013)

Σε σχέση με την εκστρατεία συλλήψεων:
*China: Nationwide Arrests of Activists, Critics Multiply*
Drive to Strengthen One-Party Rule Unhindered by Upcoming UN Rights Council Election (Human Rights Watch)
Since February 2013 the government has arbitrarily detained at least 55 activists, taken into custody critics and online opinion leaders, and increased controls on social media, online expression, and public activism, rolling back the hard-won space China’s civil society has gained in recent years.
The crackdown is unfolding as China campaigns to be elected to the United Nations Human Rights Council, the UN’s preeminent human rights body, in November 2013, and prepares for the review of its human rights record before the council in October 2013. Και ακολουθεί ο κατάλογος.


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## Costas (Sep 8, 2013)

Ρετροσπεκτίβα Yang Fudong στο Berkeley Art Museum. (NYT) [Έχει κάμποσα στο Γιουτούμπ]


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## Costas (Sep 8, 2013)

(Xinhua) -- About 30 percent of the Chinese population, or 400 million people, can not speak mandarin, said the Ministry of Education here Thursday.
Although the remainder of 1.3 billion Chinese can communicate in mandarin, also known as "putonghua," a large number of them do not speak it well, and the country still needs to invest in promoting mandarin, said Xu Mei, the ministry's spokeswoman, at a press conference.
The government has held a campaign to promote mandarin in the third week of September every year since 1998. This year the ministry will focus on the remote countryside and areas inhabited by ethnic minorities, Xu said.


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## Costas (Sep 8, 2013)

Κείμενα του Rudolf Wagner για την κινέζικη λογοτεχνία:

The contemporary Chinese Historical Drama. Four Studies (UC Press, 1990)

και

*Literatur und Politik in der Volksrepublik China* (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983):
Vorwort
Einleitung: Literatur als regulierte Selbstaufklaerung
Epilog: Der Funktionaer als Gaertner


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## Costas (Sep 8, 2013)

“Upholding the principle of ‘strike, investigate and punish group by group’, this round of special operation further traces the clue, deepens the investigation, digs deeper to unearth organized rumor networks, accurately strikes the major targets, strikes hard and deters these criminal activities in order to protect the legal rights of the broad masses.”

“Some [of the 52 "criminal suspects"] even sensationalized the conflicts that occurred during the development process in Inner Mongolia, deliberately stirring up ethnic relations, encouraging the masses to appeal for their interests in a radical way such as student strikes and protest demonstrations.”

(Southern Mongolian Human Rights Information Center) [Southern, όχι Inner...]


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## Costas (Sep 11, 2013)

Αποφυλακίστηκε 15 μήνες νωρίτερα ο δημοσιογράφος που είχε καταδικαστεί σε 10 χρόνια φυλάκιση όταν η Yahoo είχε δώσει το όνομά του στις αρχές: China has released from prison early a prominent dissident and journalist who was jailed in 2005 for leaking state secrets abroad after Yahoo helped authorities identify him, a rights group said. Shi Tao was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Yahoo defended itself at the time, saying it had to abide by local laws. (SCMP)

Μεταφραστικές γκάφες και λαθάκια:
New York Times apologises to tennis superstar Li Na for steroid use allegation News of the alleged steroid pill use spread throughout Chinese media shortly after The New York Times piece was published, and after looking into the matter, officials from the Tennis Management Centre of China’s State General Administration of Sports denied that Li had ever taken steroids. Reporter Larmer later revealed that the article's background information had been pieced together from interviews with Li and parts of her Chinese-language biography Fighting Alone. The term “steroid pills” had been a mis-translation of the Chinese term for “hormone medication,” and The New York Times issued an official apology to Li’s agent Max Eisenbud. (SCMP)


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## Costas (Sep 11, 2013)

Νέες αυστηρότερες προδιαγραφές για την εκπομπή καυσαερίων από τα οχήματα στο Πεκίνο (πρώτη πηγή μόλυνσης πια στην πόλη, μπροστά από τις βιομηχανίες). (live from beijing)

Smithfield Foods Inc. (SFD), the world’s largest hog and pork producer, said U.S. regulators will allow the company to be bought by China’s Shuanghui International Holdings Ltd. in what would be the biggest Chinese purchase of a U.S. firm.  (Bloomberg)

(Reuters) - The U.S. government allegedly spied on Brazilian state-run oil company Petroleo Brasileiro SA, known as Petrobras, according to the web site of Globo, Brazil's biggest television network. Κατά τα άλλα, η NSA ψάχνει μόνο για "τρομοκράτες".

Behind China’s Spree Killers (The Economic Observer) (μόλις προ ημερών, πάλι, ένας εσωτερικός μετανάστης επιτέθηκε σε δημοτικό σχολείο γιατί δεν ενέγραφαν το δικό του παιδί. Σκοτώθηκε ο ίδιος μαζί με κάποια παιδιά κι άλλα είναι σε κρίσιμη κατάσταση στο νοσοκομείο).

Καλή είδηση:
Taiwan has gone high-tech in its efforts to crack down on dolphin and whale poaching. Last week, police and other officials completed training for a new litmus-paper test that speeds up the process for identifying dolphin or whale meat, with conclusive identification available within 10 minutes, versus four to five days through DNA testing, said Taiwan’s Forestry Bureau conservation section head Kuan Li-Hao. (WSJ-CRR)


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## Costas (Sep 11, 2013)

Το φιδάκι ο Διαμαντής στο μπουκάλι δεν είχε ψοφήσει, μετά από τόσους μήνες. Της επιτέθηκε και τη δάγκωσε! (κινέζ., φωτό)


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## Costas (Sep 11, 2013)

*An Inside Look at China’s Censorship Tools*
The team’s research also helps shed light on a persistent question in China—namely, just how many censors are employed in the country. In Mr. King’s experience, the company recommended that his team hire two to three full-time censors for every 50,000 users. If that same formula was used at Sina Weibo, China’s most popular microblogging platform, the company would employ somewhere between 2,160 and 3,240 censors to cover its 54 million daily active users. (WSJ)

(China Daily)
Internet users who share false information that is defamatory or harms the national interest face up to three years in prison if their posts are viewed 5,000 times or forwarded 500 times, under a judicial interpretation released on Monday. The new guideline, issued by the Supreme People's Court and the Supreme People's Procuratorate, defines the criteria for convicting and sentencing offenders who spread rumors online that defame, blackmail or provoke. Those who concoct or edit information that damages an individual's or organization's reputation and share this directly or through others can be charged with libel, a criminal offense in China, under the interpretation. Όχι παίζουμε!

Υπάρχει και η ποινική πλευρά του ζητήματος:
The judicial interpretation, to be effective on Tuesday, is the first of its kind to regulate online rumors in China. It metes out punishment for companies and individuals paid to delete online messages or intentionally post false information. If a company's illegal gross revenues exceed 150,000 yuan (24,500 U.S. dollars) or its illegal gains surpass 50,000 yuan, it will face illegal business operations charges deemed "serious," according to the judicial interpretation. The illegal gross revenue and gains amounts for individuals was set at 50,000 yuan and 20,000 yuan, respectively. (xinhua)

The new rules could serve as a warning to malicious Internet users that they should not break a legal “bottom line” when posting online. However, the top court’s spokesman, Sun Jungong, stressed that Internet users are still encouraged to expose corruption and other violations despite the new rules, adding that as long as web users are not fabricating information to slander others, they will not face criminal charges. (xinhua) Και ποιος το αποφασίζει, τι είναι τι; Πεδίον δόξης λαμπρόν για τσουβάλιασμα.

Καλή είδηση:
*Guangzhou to end controversial labor camps*
"The police and many legal experts have realized the drawbacks of laojiao and called to abolish the system, which has become outdated" (China Daily)

Πύραυλοι κατά πλοίων (αμερικανικών αεροπλανοφόρων) (medium), με βεληνεκές 1500 χλμ.

*New nano-tech could treat China's lake pollution*
...a single gram of the new nanomaterial that can kill algae floating in an area equal in size to a basketball court. (xinhua)


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## Costas (Sep 11, 2013)

Is Cantonese in Danger of Extinction? The Politics and Culture of Language Policy in China (China Notes) Χορταστικό άρθρο.


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## nickel (Sep 11, 2013)

Costas said:


> Το φιδάκι ο Διαμαντής στο μπουκάλι δεν είχε ψοφήσει, μετά από τόσους μήνες. Της επιτέθηκε και τη δάγκωσε! (κινέζ., φωτό)


Και έτσι ανακάλυψα ότι η γκουγκλομετάφραση από τα κινεζικά είναι υποφερτή, αν και δεν είμαι σίγουρος ότι θα καταλάβαινα χωρίς να έχω για βοήθεια την κεντρική ιδέα, όπως την έδωσες.


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## Costas (Sep 11, 2013)

Το China Copyright and Media συνεχίζει τις μεταφράσεις:
The Party manages propaganda, the Party manages ideology, this is decided by the fundamental essence of our Party and country, it is an important principle and system shaped through a long time of practice by the Party, and is an important aspect of persisting in the leadership of the Party. We must realistically and satisfactorily implement the requirement that the Party manages propaganda and the Party manages ideology, we must fully understand the long-term nature, complexity and acuity of struggle in the ideological area, incessantly strengthen as sense of politics, a sense of the larger picture, a sense of responsibility and a sense of worry, we can absolutely not let the leadership power fall to others.

Strengthen online social management according to the law. Strengthen the management of new technologies and new applications, all sorts of forums, blogs, microblogs, micromessaging services, search engines mobile telephone newspapers, mobile news clients and other businesses that have news, public opinion and social mobilization functions, must be brought under licensing management. We must, through strengthening online topical propaganda, improve online criticism work, optimize the online environment, and forge an online positive public opinion atmosphere; through strengthening Internet propaganda management organ construction and team construction, forge systems and mechanisms where the various departments mutually cooperate, and all areas of society vigorously participate, and constitute a nationwide “one network” management structure; through deeply launching online public opinion struggles and tightly preventing and restraining online attacks and acts of infiltration, organize forces to refute mistaken ideologies and viewpoints.

Strengthen management of the cultural market, social and cultural activities. Persist in deeply launching activities to sweep pornography and strike illegality, investigate and prosecute unlawful activities in performance and entertainment, Internet cafés and Internet surfing services, electronic games, fine art sales, cultural trading and other activities. Strengthen management over all sorts of lectures, forums, seminars and public report meetings, strengthen management over people-run social science research organs, non-governmental cultural work rooms, and people-run cultural organs, strengthen management over higher education school journals, intra-school organizations, intra-school broadcasting and campus networks, do not provide dissemination channels for mistaken ideologies.


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## Costas (Sep 12, 2013)

"Πριγκιπικός" κοκκινοφρουρός (γιος στρατηγού) ζητά συγνώμη από το δάσκαλό του για τα μαρτύρια που του έκανε κατά την Πολιτιστική Επανάσταση (φωτό). (Αυτός έζησε, άλλοι/ες ξυλοκοπήθηκαν μέχρι θανάτου)

Ο Τζανγκ Γιμόου θα ανεβάσει Όπερα του Πεκίνου. (xinhua) "Its *atheistic* value lies in symbolization and conception. It just like, three or five paces can stand for the traveling around the world. Six or seven people can stand for an army. I hope to present the opera from such an *atheistic* perspective." Γκουγκλομετάφραση;


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## Costas (Sep 12, 2013)

Κοιτάχτε ένα όμορφο χέλι...μανούλα μου!

Όλο το σημερινό πρόγραμμα (με εξαίρεση το άρθρο για τα καντονέζικα) ήταν αντλημένο από το Ενημερωτικό Δελτίο Sinocism.


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## Costas (Sep 13, 2013)

Φωτογραφικό λεύκωμα με τον Λιν Πιάο.

When I moved to Beijing from New York in February to study Chinese, a question began to haunt me: Could Beijing’s air in 2013 be more dangerous than the toxic brew produced by the 9/11 attacks on New York City’s World Trade Center, which hung over Lower Manhattan for months, sickening thousands of firefighters, recovery workers, and ordinary New York residents?  (The Atlantic)

On an average day, about 40 censors work 12-hour shifts. Each worker must sift through at least 3,000 posts an hour, the former censors said. (Reuters)


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## nickel (Sep 13, 2013)

Costas said:


> When I moved to Beijing from New York in February to study Chinese, a question began to haunt me: Could Beijing’s air in 2013 be more dangerous than the toxic brew produced by the 9/11 attacks on New York City’s World Trade Center, which hung over Lower Manhattan for months, sickening thousands of firefighters, recovery workers, and ordinary New York residents?  (The Atlantic)


Και καλώς αναφέρει το λονδρέζικο σμογκ του 1952, αφού είχε περισσότερα θύματα από τις επιθέσεις της 11/9.


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## Costas (Sep 14, 2013)

A Postcard from Bo Xilai’s Chongqing: Working and Singing Red Songs at a Chinese Company (Tea Leaf Nation, by Warner Brown)

China to protect online whistleblowers, but only via official site (Reuters).

(John Ikenberry) And I have a very strong view that, over the long term, authoritarian states are less legitimate and less effective in mobilizing and modernizing, even though China has shown us that a single party state that is growing quickly can throw resources at problems and can build great buildings and do impressive infrastructure projects.

Podcasts offer lessons in Chinese history - and American slang (Life)

Chinese forgers suspected in Louvre Museum ticket scam απλό: τυπώνεις πλαστά!


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## Costas (Sep 15, 2013)

Ο νόμος για την τιμωρία όσων διασπείρουν φήμες μπήκε σε εφαρμογή:

August 28th, media reports claimed that Heibei province Qinghe county police authorities discovered a message posted by a netizen named “宁05021″ on the Baidu Post Bar [discussion forum] “Qinghe Bar” [subforum] claiming: “I heard a murder happened in Louzhuang, does anyone know the facts [of what happened]?” This message was quickly clicked on [viewed] about 1000 times and was spread by some of people in the county, seriously disturbing society’s public order, inciting panic among the people. Police quickly confirmed the identity of the rumor-started and placed her in administrative detention. (...) After police discovered the message, it was verified as an internet rumor, the rumor having severely disturb the local public order, causing panic amongst the masses, and so the police acted in accordance with the relevant laws and regulations in administratively detaining the rumor-starting netizen Zhao X (female, 20 years old) for 5 days. (China Smack)


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## Costas (Sep 22, 2013)

Ο κόσμος αλλάζει: στο Ακρωτήρι της Σαντορίνης, στον αρχαιολογικό χώρο, μια από τις τέσσερις γλώσσες της γενικής κάτοψης του χώρου είναι τα κινέζικα. Αμέσως-αμέσως όμως, το "άνδηρο κλινών" αποδίδεται ανάποδα, πλατφορμοκρέβατο (台床）.


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## daeman (Sep 22, 2013)

...
Πάλι καλά, γιατί υπάρχουν και χειρότερα:







και πολύ χειρότερα:


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## Costas (Sep 22, 2013)

Τι σε πειράζει ο "δρόμος του γιν"; :twit:
Το whatever νομίζω το 'χουμε ξανασυναντήσει και δεν είναι λάθος, απλώς έπρεπε να μεταφράσουν και την αποκάτω γραμμή (ανάμικτος χυμός)


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## daeman (Sep 22, 2013)

Costas said:


> Το whatever νομίζω το 'χουμε ξανασυναντήσει και δεν είναι λάθος, απλώς έπρεπε να μεταφράσουν και την αποκάτω γραμμή (ανάμικτος χυμός)



Τόσο απλό, ε; Πού να το φανταστώ;  

Από την άλλη, no discunts :








Costas said:


> Τι σε πειράζει ο "δρόμος του γιν"; :twit:



ΟΚ, let's see some yang then. Doesn't get much yanger :inno::


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## Costas (Sep 22, 2013)

Εκεί στα παπούτσια λέει για την ακρίβεια "παρακαλώ όχι παζάρια".


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## Costas (Sep 28, 2013)

*Κίνα: Διάσωση 92 παιδιών και 2 γυναικών πριν πουληθούν από συμμορία* (Καθημερινή)

Η κινεζική αστυνομία διέσωσε 92 παιδιά και 2 γυναίκες που είχαν απαχθεί από μια συμμορία με σκοπό να πουληθούν και συνέλαβε 301 υπόπτους, μετέδωσαν σήμερα κρατικά μέσα ενημέρωσης της Κίνας.
Πρόσφατα η αστυνομία πραγματοποίησε ταυτοχρόνως έφοδο σε διάφορες τοποθεσίες σε 11 επαρχίες έπειτα από μια εξάμηνη έρευνα που είχε πραγματοποιήσει, μετέδωσαν η κρατική τηλεόραση της Κίνας και το κρατικό πρακτορείο ειδήσεων Νέα Κίνα, επικαλούμενα το υπουργείο Δημόσιας Ασφάλειας.
Τα δύο μέσα ενημέρωσης δεν διευκρίνισαν πότε διεσώθησαν τα παιδιά, ούτε πότε έγιναν οι συλλήψεις. Επίσης δεν διευκρίνισαν πόσα ήταν τα αγόρια και πόσα τα κορίτσια που είχαν απαχθεί.
Η προτίμηση λόγω παράδοσης των αγοριών, ιδιαίτερα στις αγροτικές περιοχές, και η αυστηρή πολιτική του ενός μόνο παιδιού έχει συμβάλει σε μια αύξηση των απαγωγών και της παράνομης διακίνησης παιδιών και γυναικών τα τελευταία χρόνια.
Οι γυναίκες που έχουν πέσει θύματα απαγωγής πωλούνται σε άνδρες σε απομακρυσμένες περιοχές, οι οποίοι δεν μπορούν να βρουν νύφες λόγω της έλλειψης ισορροπίας που έχει προκληθεί στον αριθμό των γυναικών και των ανδρών και πάλι από την πολιτική αυτή που επιτρέπει στα ζευγάρια να αποκτούν μόνον ένα παιδί, η οποία ενθάρρυνε τις επιλεκτικές αμβλώσεις ανάλογα με το φύλο του παιδιού.
Η κυβέρνηση θα επιβάλει αυστηρότερες ποινές σε αυτούς που αγοράζουν παιδιά τα οποία έχουν απαχθεί, μετέδωσε η κρατική τηλεόραση, ενώ το Νέα Κίνα υπογράμμισε ότι η κυβέρνηση θα τιμωρεί επίσης τους γονείς που πωλούν τα παιδιά τους.
Το 2011 η αστυνομία είχε ανακοινώσει ότι είχε διασώσει περισσότερα από 13.000 παιδιά που είχαν απαχθεί όπως και 23.000 γυναίκες κατά την διάρκεια περίπου των δύο περασμένων ετών.

Υπάρχει και σχετική ταινία, το Τυφλό Βουνό, του 2007 (είχε παιχτεί στην Ελλάδα).

Για καλύτερη κατανόηση των πτυχών του ζητήματος, ιδού ένας τίτλος της ΝΥΤ: Population Control Is Called Big Revenue Source in China (By EDWARD WONG).
Nineteen province-level governments in China collected a total of $2.7 billion in fines last year from parents who had violated family planning laws, which usually limit couples to one child, a lawyer who had requested the data said Thursday.


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## Costas (Sep 28, 2013)

*Mao's Little Red Book to get revamp*
By Tania Branigan (The Guardian)

It will not be especially little, and the cover will be only partly red. But a new version of the world's second most published book is due to appear on Chinese shelves, decades after it fell from favour with the end of Maoism.

The re-emergence of Quotations from Chairman Mao – better known as the Little Red Book – comes amid an official revival of the era's rhetoric. China's leader, Xi Jinping, has embraced Maoist terminology and concepts, launching a "mass line rectification campaign" and this week even presiding over a televised self-criticism session.

Only the Bible has been printed more often than the Quotations, which was a keystone of Mao's personality cult. A billion copies circulated in the Cultural Revolution – the population pored over it in daily study sessions; illiterate farmers memorised chunks by heart. In the west, translations were brandished by radicals.


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## Costas (Sep 28, 2013)

Το γνωστό ερώτημα:
How long can the Communist party survive in China?
By Jamil Anderlini (Financial Times)
Πλούσιο άρθρο, συνοψίζει ωραία τα διλήμματα και τις απόψεις. Εννοείται ότι κλίνει υπέρ της διάλυσης.


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## Costas (Sep 28, 2013)

Ιδιαιτέρως ενδιαφέρον άρθρο με τίτλο
*“Reverse-Engineering Chinese Censorship” * (Harvard Magazine)

the “largest selective suppression of human expression in history”: the Chinese government’s censorship of social media.

the Chinese government is not interested in stifling opinion, but in suppressing collective action. Words alone are permitted, no matter how critical and vitriolic. But mere mentions of collective action—of any large gathering not sponsored by the state, whether peaceful or in protest—are censored immediately.

(King’s team found just two topics—pornography and criticism of the censors—that were subject to constant, high levels of censorship, irrespective of volume.)


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## Costas (Sep 28, 2013)

Βορειοκορεάτικα νέα (έτσι, για να ξεδώσω...) (Asahi Shimbun):

North Korea executed nine music group performers in an apparent attempt to squelch rumors leaking that the wife of leader Kim Jong Un might once have led a provocative lifestyle.
The information comes from a high-ranking North Korean government official who recently defected. According to sources, both the Japanese and South Korean governments have confirmed the veracity of the report.
Kim's wife, Ri Sol Ju, was a singer with the Unhasu Orchestra before she married him in June 2012.
The scandal involves members of the orchestra and the Wangjaesan Art Troupe. The nine were suspected of producing and appearing in a pornographic video. Officials of the Ministry of People's Security wiretapped conversations among the nine individuals and overheard one say, "In the past, Ri Sol Ju used to play around in the same manner as we did." Kim became concerned that rumors about his wife might spread. On Aug. 17, the nine were arrested. Three days later, they were executed by firing squad at a training ground of the Kang Gon Military Academy on the outskirts of Pyongyang.
High-ranking officials of the military, the ruling Workers' Party of Korea, as well as other members of the two music groups, witnessed the executions.
Family members of the nine individuals were sent to political prison camps and the two music groups were disbanded.
The scandal apparently stems from an order given by Kim on June 4 that banned the viewing of obscene materials. The two music groups were established under orders of the late Kim Jong Il, Kim Jong Un's father. The groups mainly performed at meetings attended by the North Korean elite.
The two musical groups have not appeared in official North Korean media since early August. Downloading of music by the two groups from a video company that uses a computer server outside of North Korea has been blocked.
Former NBA star Dennis Rodman, who visited North Korea earlier in September, revealed that he held the baby daughter of Kim Jong Un and Ri Sol Ju. Rodman said the baby's name was "Ju-ae."

Λες να την εκτελέσει κι αυτήν (τη γυναίκα του, εννοώ), αν δεν του κάνει γιο;


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## Costas (Sep 29, 2013)

Από τη χώρα των Ουιγούρων (το Ξ[Σ]ιντσιάνγκ):
*Uighurs at Xinjiang mosque have to face China flag when praying * (Al Jazeera)
The local government in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region’s Aksu area placed the flag over the mihrab -- the traditional prayer niche that points the direction to Mecca (έχει και φωτογραφία)


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## Costas (Sep 29, 2013)

ANKARA — In a multibillion-dollar deal, Turkey agreed Thursday to buy a Chinese-made long-range air- and missile-defense system — a move that could prevent the system from being integrated with Turkey’s existing NATO architecture.
(...)
CPMEIC said it will co-produce the system with Turkish prime and subcontractors. But diplomats and analysts warn that Turkey may not be allowed to integrate the Chinese-Turkish system into its mostly NATO-owned early warning assets.
Other contenders for the contract were a US partnership of Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, offering the Patriot air defense system; Russia’s Rosoboronexport, marketing the S-300; and the Italian-French consortium Eurosam, maker of the SAMP/T Aster 30.
(Defense News)
Μ' αρέσουν οι Τούρκοι· γράψαν τους νταβατζήδες στα τέτοια τους.


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## Costas (Sep 29, 2013)

Ως γνωστόν, ο Μπο Ξ(Σ)ιλάι έφαγε ισόβια. Εδώ μια καλή σύνοψη της υπόθεσης και σχολιασμός της ποινής. (ΝΥΤ)


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## Costas (Sep 29, 2013)

*What Is a “Same-city Dinner Gathering?”* (China Change, της Xiao Guozhen)

“Same-city dinner gatherings” are also called “citizen banquets.” In Chinese, “dinner gathering”(fan – food, zui – drunk) is homonymous with “committing a crime” (fanzui). China’s police see gatherings of people as “illegal,” as a “crime,” but the police have no legitimate reason to prohibit citizens living in the same city from going to a restaurant to eat and drink together, so people call this this kind of gathering a “same-city dinner gathering.”

These “same-city dinner gatherings” started to spring up in 2011. Xiao Guozhen said, “At first they were small in scope and were mostly comprised of legal professionals. At the gatherings, they would discuss individual cases as well as current events. Later, more and more citizens started participating in these gatherings. We advocated that each participant bring a new friend each month so as to expand the numbers of people attending. We were totally open; even if state security agents wanted to participate, we would welcome them.”

Now “same-city dinner gatherings” are prevalent in more than 30 cities. The time for these “dinner gatherings” is set on the last Saturday of the month. There can be as many as one or two hundred participants in a given “dinner gathering.”


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## Earion (Sep 29, 2013)

Κάπως έτσι, αν θυμάμαι καλά, άρχισε η επανάσταση του 1848 στη Γαλλία, με Επαναστατικά Δείπνα.


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## Costas (Sep 29, 2013)

Ναι, τα έχει γελοιογραφήσει ο (συντηρητικός) Φλωμπέρ στην Αισθηματική Αγωγή.


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## Costas (Oct 14, 2013)

Βιβλιοκριτική από τον Howard W. French του τελευταίου, αυτοβιογραφικού βιβλίου του Λιάο Γι-Ού. (The Caravan)


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## Costas (Oct 14, 2013)

Απονομή του Βραβείου Λέμκιν στον Yang Jisheng (Γιανγκ Τζισένγκ), συγγραφέα του βιβλίου _Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine 1958-1962_, και η σχετική διάλεξη του Guo Jian (University of Wisconsin-Whitewater), _China’s Gulag Archipelago: Yang Jisheng’s Investigative Study of the Great Leap Forward Famine, 1958-1962_. Αν είστε στη Νέα Υόρκη, πεταχτείτε! :)

The Institute for the Study of Genocide and the Cardozo School of Law Program in Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights at Yeshiva University invite the public to attend:

2013 Lemkin Award and Lecture:
Yang Jisheng, the author of Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine 1958-1962

Lecture: Guo Jian (University of Wisconsin-Whitewater)
China’s Gulag Archipelago: Yang Jisheng’s Investigative Study of the Great Leap Forward Famine, 1958-1962

Presentation and comments:

Joyce Apsel (New York University)
Sheri P. Rosenberg (Cardozo Law School)
Ernesto Verdeja (University of Notre Dame)

Location: Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law
55 Fifth Avenue, Third Floor Lounge, New York, NY
Time: Thursday, October 24; 6:00 PM-
Please RSVP to [email protected]


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## Costas (Oct 21, 2013)

(China change)
Dr. Wang Bingzhang (王炳章) was among the first Chinese sent overseas by the Chinese government to study science and technology in late 1970s when Deng Xiaoping opened up China. He was the very first Chinese to obtain a PhD (in medicine) when he graduated from McGill University in Canada in 1982. Upon graduation, he announced that he would devote himself to a democratic movement to change China. He founded the first overseas democratic league, and worked with activists overseas as well as inside China in the pre-Internet era. In 2002, he was kidnapped in Vietnam by the Chinese government, and in 2003, he was sentenced to life in prison (New York Times‘ coverage). He has been kept in solitary confinement since. On June 27, the 11th anniversary of his kidnapping, his family launched a global campaign to free him. As part of the campaign, Dr. Wang Juntao (王军涛), a leader of Chinese democratic movement overseas and a leader of the 1989 democratic movement in Beijing, has staged a protest called “In Prison with Dr. Wang Bingzhang” to demand the release of Dr. Wang. On September 15, the International Democracy Day, a large demonstration will be held in front of the Chinese Consulate in New York. On October 7, a 7-day hunger strike will commence in front of the UN to demand investigation into Chinese government’s inhumane treatment of Dr. Wang.

Contact information:
Wang Mei, sister of Dr. Wang Bingzhang: 1-650-521-1774, Dr. Wang Juntao: 1-347-705-3789.
To learn more about Dr. Wang Bingzhang, visit wangbingzhang.org, website maintained by his youngest child Ti-Anna Wang (王天安).


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## Costas (Oct 21, 2013)

Afterlives of Demolished Buildings in Beijing. A review of The City Recycled: _The Afterlives of Demolished Buildings in Post-war Beijing_, by Shih-yang Kao. (Max Liboiron) (dissertation reviews)


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## Costas (Oct 21, 2013)

(WSJ)
*Peking University's Purge
Western partners of China's top university ignore its persecution of a political professor.*

Chinese democracy advocate Xia Yeliang has suffered police interrogations, detentions, a period of house arrest, even harassment by as many as 50 silent phone calls in the middle of the night. Now the professor of economics at the country's most prestigious school, Peking University, may lose his job. This summer Prof. Xia learned that administrators planned a vote of the faculty to revoke his
tenure.

Meanwhile a growing list of Western universities have lined up joint degree programs, research centers and teaching exchanges at Peking University. Those institutions are keeping mum on Prof. Xia's case.

One exception is Wellesley College in Massachusetts, where last month more than 130 professors (40% of the faculty) criticized Peking University for targeting the professor "based solely on his political and philosophical views." In June, Wellesley formally partnered with Peking University, announcing plans for research collaboration and exchanges of faculty and students. The protesting Wellesley profs consider Prof. Xia a colleague and argue that his fair treatment should be a condition of continued cooperation.

In 2008 Prof. Xia was among the first signatories of Charter 08, the democracy manifesto for which his friend Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace laureate, now sits in prison. In 2009 he called for the end of government censorship in an open letter to Communist Party propaganda chief Liu Yunshan, now one of seven Politburo Standing Committee members who call the shots in Beijing. And more recently he has used his microblog to criticize President Xi Jinping's campaign against constitutional government.

The good sense of the Wellesley faculty is particularly notable next to the silence of other schools with significant Peking University partnerships. They include the University of California, Penn State, the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, Cornell University, the University of Michigan, the University of Toronto, the London School of Economics, Seoul National University, Waseda University and the University of Tokyo.

Stanford University is an especially interesting case: It hosted Prof. Xia as a visiting fellow this summer and operates the Stanford Center at Peking University. Stanford's website brags that the research and teaching facility "breaks new ground in U.S.-Sino cooperation."

Stanford would break more ground if it joined with Wellesley in denouncing the treatment of their Chinese colleague.


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## Costas (Oct 21, 2013)

Authors Accept Censors’ Rules to Sell in China


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## Costas (Oct 21, 2013)

(NYT)
*Busting China’s Bloggers*
Murong Xuecun

BEIJING — A frequent topic of conversation among my friends here has been: Who will be arrested next?

Some of us met recently for dinner and started a list of potential candidates. We included outspoken scholars, writers and lawyers who have discussed democracy and freedom, criticized the government and spoken out for the disadvantaged.

Some of my dinner companions nominated themselves for the list. We agreed that the social critic Xiao Shu (the pen name of Chen Min) and Guo Yushan, a friend of the blind lawyer Chen Guangcheng (now in the United States), should top the list. I’m right behind them.

Almost of all of us are active microbloggers. Some of us qualify as Big V, the widely used label for influential bloggers with millions of followers. (V stands for “verified account.”) It is our online activism that makes us prime targets of the government.

In August, the authorities launched the most severe round yet in their “campaign against cybercrime.” Ostensibly to curtail online “rumors,” they are rounding up and jailing outspoken netizens across the country. Judging from official media accounts and police reports, the number of arrests is in the hundreds, and many of us believe it may be in the thousands.

Charles Xue, a government critic and a Big V blogger with 12 million followers, who writes under the name Xue Manzi, was arrested as an early high-profile example. He was detained in August for allegedly hiring prostitutes, but the state-run news agency, Xinhua, made clear the true reason: “This has sounded a warning bell about the law to all Big V’s on the Internet.” The most infamous case was the arrest of a 16-year-old boy in Gansu Province. In early September, he posted two short messages commenting on the police’s handling of a mysterious death. His message included the phrase: “All officials shield one another.” He was arrested a few days later.

Meanwhile, the state media have published a steady flow of articles warning microbloggers to tone down their commentaries. An Aug. 24 editorial on Xinhua’s Web site said that popular bloggers who “poison the online environment” should be “dealt with like rats scurrying across the street that everyone wants to kill.”

It’s easy to see why the government feels threatened. The most popular microblogging service, Sina’s Weibo, has more than 500 million registered members and 54 million daily users, and has become the most important space for citizens to participate in public life — and expose government lies. Microbloggers dare to question the legitimacy of the one-party state. They expose corruption. They shame criminals.

And Big V bloggers don’t just express opinions; we act as information hubs. When we discuss issues online, people take notice. In 2010, I re-posted a news item about a protest against a forced eviction in Jiangxi Province in which three people resorted to self-immolation. The story was re-posted thousands of times and became one of the hottest news items of the year.

The vast state censorship apparatus works hard to keep us down. But posts race through Weibo so quickly that it’s difficult to control them with technology. Hence, the government is resorting to detainment.

The effect has been chilling. Since August, the Weibo community has collectively cooled down the political speech. The historian Zhang Lifan and others have dubbed the crackdown the “Internet anti-rightist campaign,” an echo of the anti-rightist campaign instigated by Mao in the late 1950s to crush dissent. Nearly 550,000 people were arrested or sent into exile. Just over a half-century later, the term “anti-rightist” still triggers fears that Chinese people have been trying to forget. And that is one of the government’s aims: to instil fear.

But these are different times. In 1957, Chinese intellectuals were on their own. They were defenseless and received no public support. In 2013, the Internet is like a giant public square where citizens can hear and support one another. Otherwise powerless people join together. When a courageous person steps forward, others follow.

I have been asked if I’m afraid. A couple of years ago, in the early days of my blogging, I was scared. Now I am not. I think my shift is representative of that of many popular bloggers, who have been emboldened by the freedom we’ve found online, as my friends have.

My friends and I channel our lingering anxiety into jokes about being on a government hit list. But of course this is a serious matter — and really all we can do is prepare for the inevitable.

For example, Xiao Han, a legal scholar in Beijing, has prepared a statement to be released in the event of his arrest, and sent a copy to his friends overseas. And he has preemptively decided on a courtroom strategy: If he is charged with disturbing public order or manufacturing rumors, he says he will counter-sue the government for its crimes and declare, “This is my court, too.”

The most I’ve done in preparation for arrest is to back up all my writing and give a copy to friends overseas.

As we contemplate the government’s next target, I keep my fear in check. I understand that for China to change, some people will have to pay a price. Wang Xiaoshan, a publisher who was among my friends at the dinner, put it best when he said: Start with me.

_Murong Xuecun, the pen name of Hao Qun, is a novelist whose books include “Leave Me Alone: A Novel of Chengdu” and “Dancing Through Red Dust.” This article was translated by Jane Weizhen Pan and Martin Merz from the Chinese._


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## Costas (Oct 21, 2013)

(South China Morning Post)
*Peking University expels liberal economist Xia Yeliang*

An elite Chinese university has decided to expel an outspoken economist who champions free speech and the rule of law, a move critics say underscores the Communist Party’s intolerance for discussion of democratic values that it believes threatens its legitimacy.

A 34-member faculty at Peking University’s School of Economics voted last week to dismiss Professor Xia Yeliang by a 30-3 vote, with one abstention, in a closed session from which he was excluded, Xia said on Friday after being notified of the decision. Calls to the university rang unanswered.

“I am angry inside, but I must face it with composure,” said Xia, who will remain employed by the university until his contract expires Jan. 31, more than 13 years after he started teaching there.

Rumours that Xia was facing expulsion had swirled in academic circles and on discussions on China’s popular microblogs for months, with many commentators saying such a move would be an assault on already limited academic freedoms in China.

Xia’s expulsion comes as China’s recently installed leadership has further tightened controls on public discourse, arresting popular bloggers for spreading so-called rumours and activists who have called for anti-corruption measures. Communist Party authorities reportedly issued a directive to some college campuses that certain topics are now barred from class discussions, including press freedom, judicial independence and civil society.

In August, East China University of Political Science and Law in Shanghai banned Zhang Xuezhong, also an outspoken professor, from teaching any course at the school.

Xia has been a vocal advocate for democracy in recent years. In 2008, he helped draft Charter 08, a bold call for sweeping changes to China’s one-party political system that landed its main champion, Liu Xiaobo, in prison.

Xia wrote an open letter in 2009 addressed to a senior Chinese leader criticising him for imposing tight controls on expression.

He said he was notified of his dismissal by school officials, who told him that the faculty committee – which had earlier approved of his academic performance – was not pleased with remarks he made against the university. Xia, however, has generally been critical of the government’s politics and its interference with the academic world.

Xia said the officials insisted that the dismissal was nonpolitical, although they also told him that the support he had received in the last several months did not do him any good.

Overseas, Xia has gained support among academia from Wellesley College in Massachusetts, the Committee of Concerned Scientists and, according to Xia, two foreign professors at the Shenzhen campus of Peking University.

A group of Wellesley professors had signed an open letter urging the school to reconsider an academic partnership with Peking University, in a high-profile case of US professors pushing a Chinese university to hold up the principle of academic freedom at a time when educational partnerships between the two countries are proliferating.

An open letter from the Committee of Concerned Scientists also urged Peking University’s president to consider the institution’s ambitions of making itself a “world-class seat of learning and research.”

“We therefore urge you to prevent a vote by your faculty that would punish Professor Xia, one of your respected academic colleagues, for his opinions, and deprive Peking University of his expertise,” the committee wrote in the July 31 letter.

But in September, China’s state-run nationalist newspaper Global Times criticised Xia for using social media to attack Peking University and urged the school not to yield to outside pressure.

“Only Peking University can decide whether it would keep Xia,” the Global Times editorial read. “After all, Peking University is a venue of teaching, not a place for political fighting.”


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## Costas (Oct 21, 2013)

*Current Rumor Crackdown in China a Tip of a Large Policy Iceberg*
By Rogier Creemers (China Change)

(...)
This leads us to a third factor, the nature of the Party itself. The Party isn’t just there to attend to some of the arrangements underpinning Chinese society. Its program and its legitimacy rest on the delivery of a comprehensive modernization plan that improves everyone’s livelihoods. The CCP claims that only it has the means and the capacity to lead this process, and consequently claims a monopoly on political leadership. That puts it in a difficult position when it has to deal with social problems and tensions. If something goes wrong, the Party, in its own mind, must respond to alleviate the tension; it cannot stand aside and wash its hands of whichever hiccup occurs. Now, perhaps the Internet is not the most heartening lens into the workings of a society, as anyone who has ever read the comments posted to news websites or YouTube will know. However, to the Party, such online activity is an indication of profound disharmony, and must be replaced by “responsible, healthy and upward behavior.” Rather a huge and frustrating task, in my view.

Fourth, there is the current state of Chinese politics more generally. We still see the aftershocks of the leadership transition, which historically always have come together with political tensions and high-profile arrests, as well as the necessity to establish a new guiding ideology. Also, a lot of the low-hanging fruits for Chinese development have been picked, and its further trajectory will run into the law of decreasing marginal benefit. As always, it is attractive to deal with such anxieties by focusing on a superficial phenomenon, rather than have to face up to the fundamental structural weaknesses that generate those. It is much easier to say that everything that goes wrong in Chinese society is caused by a few louts spouting whatever on the Internet, than to admit that a number of fundamental ideas in CCP political thinking no longer are purpose-fit and may need to be abandoned. It is more comforting to reach back to slogans and methods from the past than to confront real and profound challenges thrown up in the present.


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## Costas (Oct 21, 2013)

*The Southern Street Movement*
(China Change)

(...)
Up until the Southern Weekend Incident at the beginning of this year, according to Wang Aizhong, the Guangdong authorities had been relatively tolerant. When three or four people held up signs on the street, or in the park, the police would intervene but were by and large lenient. They seldom took the participants into custody, let alone criminally detained them. Even administrative detentions were used sparsely. At most the authorities would summon the participants “to drink tea”, or make a record of the event.
(...)
Since the Southern Weekend Incident at the beginning of this year, Mr. Wang told RFI , criminal detention has been directly applied to people who have participated in street demonstrations. In February, biologist and businessman Liu Yuandong (刘远东), an important player in the Southern Street Movement, was arrested. He has been held without a trial ever since, far beyond the legally prescribed time limit. Recent reports said Mr. Liu has been mistreated in jail.

In May, Huang Wenxun, Yuan Fengchu and a number of others, all of them regular participants in the Southern Street Movement, were detained in Chibi, Hubei. They were all beaten up by the police, and Huang Wenxun was tortured with electrical shocks. Other participants were also detained. After Shenzhen resident Yang Lin (杨林) had been missing for a month, his family received a notice of his arrest and learned that he had been accused of “inciting subversion of state power.”

The crackdown is clearly nationwide. Since April, China has detained close to 200 dissidents and activists, including Dr. Xu Zhiyong, billionaire investor Wang Gongquan (王功权) in its crackdown on the New Citizens Movement and the prominent Guangzhou-based dissident Guo Feixiong (郭飞雄).

Right now the situation is severe, but the Southern Street Movement participants have not backed down from their aspirations. Wang Aizhong said, “We must unwaveringly continue on with the street movement, influencing more people through our actions, and making the street movement bigger and bigger. Of course, facing the current suppression, we do our very best to avoid unnecessary losses. Our consensus is that we need to lie low for the time being, suspending our street activities for a while and focusing instead on developing strength. Our ultimate goal is to build a China that is democratic, constitutional, and that conforms to modern political civilization.”


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## Costas (Nov 1, 2013)

Ακούγοντας σύγχρονο indie κινεζικό τραγούδι: Low Wormwood (The Watcher, Lanzhou Lanzhou), PK 14 (1984)... (Maybe Mars)


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## Costas (Nov 1, 2013)

Χέλλο! πάλι μαζί σας με το Thugs in the Scallop Industry, των Hu Jia Hu Wei.


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## Costas (Nov 1, 2013)

Βαρυσήμαντο άρθρο του γνωστού κοινωνικού ανθρωπολόγου Marshall Sahlins, με θέμα:

*China U.
Confucius Institutes censor political discussions and restrain the free exchange of ideas. Why, then, do American universities sponsor them?*
(...)
The CI at Chicago presents the risible spectacle of Chinese Communists using Confucius’ name to channel Gary Becker’s über-capitalist ideology of rational choice.
The still-greater contradiction is that the Confucius Institute engaged the university’s cherished traditions of laissez-faire, both as a matter of academic freedom and as an economic philosophy, in a global project designed to increase the political influence of the People’s Republic of China. 
(The Nation)


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## Costas (Nov 5, 2013)

China’s Touchy Luxury Love Affair
By Roseann Lake
(The Diplomat)

BEIJING – On November 29, 2012, soon-to-be Chinese president Xi Jinping visited the National Museum of China and made a speech that was hailed as a coup in the State-sponsored “war against formalism and bureaucracy.” After touring the museum’s famed “Road to Renewal” exhibition, Xi spoke to the press casually and in a very informal setting, a move that earned him praise for abandoning the more stilted socialist jargon of his predecessor. The content of his speech, which has since become known as the “China Dream,” also won him accolades. Seemingly inspired by the exhibition, which houses historical elements dating back to the First Opium War and emphasizes China’s victimization by imperial forces, Xi offered up heaping spoons of nationalism while urging his comrades to unite in fostering “the great renewal of the Chinese nation.”

As he delivered these lines – dressed in a black windbreaker and dress shirt with the top few buttons undone – on the second floor of the same museum, 100 mannequins dressed in couture Christian Dior gowns, silently awaited their unveiling.

Slated to open at the National Museum of China on November 13 – just two weeks before Xi’s speech – “Esprit Dior,” was billed as an exhibition of Dior gowns, perfumes, accessories, photography and accompanying artwork by contemporary Chinese artists. In late November, various international media outlets reported that its opening had been delayed because the accompanying works by Chinese artists had not yet been completed. In early December, shortly after Xi’s speech, luxury conglomerate CEO Bernard Arnault of LVMH visited Beijing hoping to attend the opening of the exhibition, but the champagne flown in for the occasion remained in its bottles and the doors to the exhibition, closed.

A technician associated with the exhibition confirms that everything was vernissage ready by the time of Arnault’s visit, and that the only thing delaying a grand opening seemed to be mysterious resistance from the museum itself. On a regular basis, the technician, who prefers to remain anonymous due to the sensitive nature of the subject, tells The Diplomat that the exhibition would receive “visits.” These included various delegations from the museum, but also from the Chinese Vice-Minister of Culture, and two days later, from the Minister of Culture, himself. As a result of these “visits,” which lasted anywhere from an hour (the Vice-Minister of Culture was enraptured) to a few minutes (her superior, the Minister of Culture, was far less captivated), small changes were made to the exhibition.

The first was rather foreboding. At the entrance to the exhibition, which was the replica of the original Dior storefront on Avenue Montaigne in Paris, the name “Christian Dior,” which appeared etched into the stone of the storefront, was retouched, so that it was no longer visible. New insoles were also made for the 10 pairs of couture Dior shoes on display, masking their iconic Christian Dior label visible in the instep. The plaques which accompanied the items on display – indicating their year of creation and materials used to make them – were also edited so that “Christian Dior” was no longer visible on them. Videos of Dior fashion shows scheduled to play during the exhibition were frozen on frames with images where there was no detectable representation of the Dior label. Even the very name of the exhibition, which publications as mainstream as Vogue had been referring to for months as “Esprit Dior,” was changed to the rather cryptic, “La Beauté de l’Allure.”

Exactly why these changes were made is a subject neither the Museum nor Dior headquarters wish to comment on, but the mystery of why, on December 21, Dior staff in Beijing received a call from their superiors with instructions to pack everything up and repatriate it to France – before the Chinese public could get a glimpse of any of it – is a larger intrigue that has been delicately unraveling itself over the course of the last several months.

The day following Xi Jinping’s “China Dream” speech, his chief appointed corruption-buster, Wang Qishan, met with a committee of corruption fighting experts to stress the importance of cracking down on graft. The meeting marked the start of an anti-corruption campaign, which launched with a flurry of articles in Chinese media cheering the comeuppance of various party miscreants; the former district legislator who fathered 10 children with four different women, the prefecture chief who was revealed to own 23 homes, and the bureaucrat with $19 million in unexplained assets, among others. These types of strategically penned news stories have continued over the following months, with reports of corrupt officials embroiled in sex tape scandals and mistresses avenging and outing corrupt lovers, among the most popular.

Rod Wye, an associate fellow at the London-based think-tank Chatham House, attributes the persistence of salacious news stories to the new regime’s attempt to distinguish itself from the former administration; and particularly, from some of the more egregious problems that have plagued it. “Anti-corruption is the headline they’ve chosen, because it goes down well with the people. It shows the party is self-policing and self-cleansing,” he says, though he warns that there may be more rotten eggs than the party is willing or able to eradicate.

To Wye, the entire anti-corruption movement smacks of the strategy used by the party when handling cases of social unrest. “The narrative is that it’s all the fault of the corrupt, inefficient local officials who have brought this bad state of affairs about,” he explains. “They like to make it seem that a deus ex machina from the center swoops in and waves his magic wand, the corrupt inefficient official is dealt with, and everyone lives happily ever after.” The danger with this approach is that it only deals with the problem in a very isolated, superficial way, and allows the central governing force to put a distance between itself and the mal-administrations of its system. The local administrations are turned into the scapegoats, and the central powers who discipline them are reinforced in their role as the ultimate source of power and salvation of the people.

But what might all of this have to do with a 67-year old French luxury label?

As one of the only museums in China to operate under the direct jurisdiction of the Chinese Ministry of Culture, the National Museum of China is one of the Party’s prime means of showcasing and shaping the narrative of history. While this may sound rudimentary in a country where State-controlled media confections the news on a daily basis, it’s more complicated than it sounds. The governing elite tasked with writing this narrative are often in disaccord on how they’d like it to be presented. A statue of Confucius, for instance, once stood prominently at the front of the museum, until one night when it was quietly relegated to a remote internal courtyard because certain members of the elite decided that China’s revival would not benefit from a reminder of the strictly hierarchical relationships enforced by Confucianism.

These types of internal tiffs and changes, Dior employees may be unsurprised to learn, have resulted in the museum spending more time closed, than open, in the 50-odd years of its existence. Built in 1959 as one of the Ten Great Buildings commissioned to celebrate the ten-year anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the museum occupies an honorary place overlooking Tiananmen Square (where, ironically, some of China’s most violent manifestations against government corruption have taken place). When it was first scheduled to open, Prime Minister Zhou Enlai is said to have visited and objected that it did not sufficiently emphasize the “red line,” or the spirit of the country’s supreme leader, Mao Zedong.

The museum officially opened in 1961, closed a few years later in 1966 with the onset of the Cultural Revolution, and didn’t open again until 1979. It continued to erratically open and close until 2001, when Beijing won the bid to host the 2008 Olympics. At this time, it was decided that China needed a world-class museum to spruce up its capital. In an attempt to make it the largest in the world, what were formerly known as the Museum of Chinese History and the Museum of the Chinese Revolution were combined in 2003 and renamed the National Museum of China. Then, in 2005, a German architectural firm was enlisted, and renovations were set to be completed in time for the Games in 2008, but the museum’s opening was postponed again to October 1, 2009, or the 60th anniversary of Communist Party rule. That deadline wasn’t met either, but in March 2011, after a decade of renovations worth $400 million, and more than 50 years of spotty operation, the National Museum of China once again opened its doors.

As noted by Kirk Denton, China historian and author of Exhibiting the Past: Historical Memory and the Politics of Museums in Postsocialist China, the museum reopened with a selection of three very telling marquee exhibitions. The first was the previously mentioned “Road to Renewal” exhibition, which Denton notes, plays to the glorious socialist legacy which the Party would like to keep fresh in the minds of its people. Next, there was the exhibition on the Chinese Enlightenment, which traced the Party’s origins to the May 4th Movement, highlighting a move towards anti-imperialism and an upsurge in Chinese nationalism. The third exhibition, opening just two months later in May of 2011, was “Louis Vuitton Voyages,” an spread of luxurious LV suitcases and travel accessories.

“It was very odd that a museum meant to represent China’s tradition, history and revolution reopen with an LV exhibition,” notes Denton, “though it is completely representative of the post-socialist consumerist society supported by the Party.”

And indeed, the Party’s relationship to luxury is deeper than it might like to admit.

Luxury brands began their foray into China in the early 1990s, with Louis Vuitton at the helm. Former Chairman and CEO of LV Yves Carcelle is largely credited with making LV the luxury retail giant that it has become, as a result of his foresight and determination to make LV the first major luxury house with a store in China. It is also no secret that the early days of the luxury industry in China were fueled by the purchases of Party officials; either in the form of lavish gifts to grease their “guanxi;” the system of backdoor favors and exchanges on which China runs, or in the form of lavish gifts to mistresses, in exchange for favors of another variety.

As might be expected, the “Louis Vuitton Voyages” exhibition was met with a fair degree of ire <http://www.china.org.cn/china/2011-06/01/content_22689523.htm>. Yet while Peking University professor Xia Xueluan won support for his critique that the exhibition was ill-suited to a state-level public museum – would should instead restrict itself to non-profit cultural promotion – the general response to the museum was positive. Lines for the exhibition extended for hours, and netizens rejoiced at their opportunity to see craftsmanship mixed with commercial success; something rarely reflected in the “made in China” label. On the heels of LV, the Italian luxury giant, Bvlgari hosted “125 Years of Italian Magnificence” at the National Museum of China that following September, and Chanel showcased more than 400 articles in “Culture Chanel,” at the National Art Museum in November of 2011.

Dior’s experience at the Museum, however, was less fortunate. Before it could open, the luxury label had to scotch an exhibition that had been several months and millions in the making. All 100 gowns and accompanying elements were sent back to France, denying the Chinese public of an exhibition which otherwise promised to be both exquisite and edifying. Prior to its original opening date, a Dior team had spent over a month inside the National Museum of China, custom-building a set tgar included a sprawling atelier where an artisan leather-worker, flown in from France, would be cutting and stitching together Dior bags. A brodeuse would also be on site, hand-embroidering gowns as visitors made their way through the exhibition, which was designed to educate visitors about the artistry and artisanship that define the luxury of the label. Several elements featured in the exhibition were also historical, including a perfume coffret that had belonged to Grace Kelly, and was on special loan from the Principality of Monaco. Accompanying artworks by Chinese artists were also plentiful, among them, Zhang Huan’s stunningly realistic oversized portrait of Dior, made from the ashes of a Chinese temple.

Though considerable time, money, and opportunity to increase brand awareness was lost, as of September 13, 2013, the Dior exhibition is now back in China. Nearly one year later, it enjoyed a much warmer reception at the privately owned Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) in Shanghai, which has previously hosted other luxury giants such as Chanel, Ferragamo and Van Cleef & Arpels. “We’re getting over 1,200 visitors per day, and the weekends are crazy,” explains the MoCA Marketing Manager, who preferred not to be mentioned by name. The 1,800-square-meter exhibition space contains a similarly spectacular display of couture and art intended for the National Museum of China, but with none of the imposed subtlety or label masking. Advertisements for the exhibition, which has been restored to its original name, “Esprit Dior,” abound in People’s Park, and even the museum café has paid its homage to haute couture, allowing diners to eat in a garden of topiaries shaped like Dior handbags and J’adore perfume bottles.

With the exhibition at MoCA, Dior has recovered a tremendous opportunity to connect with the Chinese market, which already appears geared in its favor. Dior currently has more than 40 stores on the Mainland, and according to reports by Bain Capital, in 2012, it surpassed Burberry as the second most popular brand of womenswear, after Chanel. As the top five luxury brands are reported to account for 50 percent of luxury goods sales in China, in a luxury market worth an estimated 115 billion RMB ($18.9 billion), this is a significant accomplishment. Though Dior’s rise may have more to do with the increased buying power of young Chinese women than the purchases of profligate party officials, Bain reports that 35 percent of luxury purchases made in China are still for gifting purposes.

“The bottom line is, luxury brands in China are not going to go away,” says Radha Chada, a leading marketing and consumer insights expert, and co-author of The Cult of the Luxury Brand: Inside Asia’s Love Affair with Luxury. “They’re now so much a part of Chinese culture, they’ve become the very ecosystem that guanxi puts into place.” She suspects the Dior debacle at the National Museum was just a matter of extremely unfortunate timing; evidence of the far-reaching ramifications of sudden changes in the Chinese political climate, a testament to how meticulously orchestrated these changes can be, and a shallow, temporary attempt at feigning thrift.

“The Party’s strong link to luxury will persist until there’s a more proper legal system that enforces transparency, accountability and justice in China,” says Chada. “Until then, if you’re in trouble, you reach out to your internal relations, and in order to be able to count on them when needed, you must nurture them.”

_Roseann Lake is a Beijing-based journalist._


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## Costas (Nov 10, 2013)

SimCity σ' Ανατολή και Δύση σε συνδυασμό με αναγκαστικό συνοικισμό with Chinese characteristics. (NYT)

Leaving the Land (Articles in this series are looking at how China’s government-driven effort to push the population to towns and cities is reshaping a nation that for millenniums has been defined by its rural life.)
New China Cities: Shoddy Homes, Broken Hope

SimCity σ' Ανατολή και Δύση:
As China pushes ahead with government-led urbanization, a program expected to be endorsed at a Communist Party Central Committee meeting that began Saturday, many worry that the scores of new housing developments here may face the same plight as postwar housing projects in Western countries. Meant to solve one problem, they may be creating a new set of troubles that could plague Chinese cities for generations. 
(...)
Και τα Chinese characteristics:
But many others did not want to leave their land. By 2008, the government’s offer had met limited success, with only half the population choosing to move. Already, though, government propaganda was extolling Huaming as a success, and officials planned to feature it at the world’s fair in two years’ time.
“They said if we didn’t move, it would affect the World Expo,” said Jia Qiufu, 69, a former resident of Guanzhuang Village. “They said it had to happen by 2009 because the Expo was the next year.”
The local government used intense pressure to force farmers out of their villages. It tore up roads and cut electricity and water. Even so, thousands stayed on. As a final measure, the schoolhouses — one in each village — were demolished. With no utilities and no way to educate their children, most farmers capitulated and moved to town. 

Κάτι γλωσσικό· αγνοούσα την ύπαρξη του επιθέτου Potemkin:
Two greenhouses seemed to be functioning; local residents said they were used to make gifts of produce to visiting leaders as Potemkin-like proof of the still-vibrant agricultural sector.
Oxford Dictionaries:
_ adjective
informal_
having a false or deceptive appearance, especially one presented for the purpose of propaganda: _it is a Potemkin party; there is little behind the impressive parliamentary group seen on television_

Origin:
1930s: from Grigori Aleksandrovich Potyomkin (often transliterated _Potemkin_), a favourite of Empress Catherine II of Russia, who reputedly gave the order for sham villages to be built for the empress's tour of the Crimea in 1787


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## Earion (Nov 10, 2013)

Χωριό Ποτέμκιν:



drsiebenmal said:


> Και η αλήθεια είναι (όχι ότι δεν το ξέραμε) ότι η Ελλάδα ήταν (και παραμένει) ένα τεράστιο χωριό Ποτέμκιν.


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## Costas (Nov 12, 2013)

"Η οδός του Γιν μου λέει: αφήνω να μπει όποιον θέλω / έχω δικαίωμα να φλερτάρω αλλά δεν μπορείτε να με παρενοχλείτε." Για δεύτερη φορά, οι Μονόλογοι του Αιδοίου στην Κίνα. (Le Figaro)


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## Costas (Nov 12, 2013)

Φοιτητές ντύθηκαν αστυνομικοί από τις αρχές, έναντι ποσού μεγαλύτερου από αυτό που βγάζουν μοιράζοντας π.χ. προσπέκτους, ώστε η αστυνομική δύναμη να φαντάζει μεγαλύτερη στη διάρκεια αναγκαστικής κατεδάφισης σπιτιών. Επίσης, η Φόξκον ανάγκασε άλλους φοιτητές που παρακολουθούσαν σεμινάριο στο εργοστάσιό της να κατασκευάζουν κονσόλες, απειλώντας τους ότι αν δυστροπούσαν δεν θα τους έδινε τα μόρια που έχουν ανάγκη για να πάρουν το πτυχίο τους. (Le Figaro)


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## Costas (Nov 12, 2013)

Αυτό κι αν είναι πονοκέφαλος!

Exclusive: Supporters of China's disgraced Bo Xilai set up political party
By Benjamin Kang Lim and Ben Blanchard

(Reuters) - Supporters of China's disgraced senior politician Bo Xilai, who has been jailed for corruption, have set up a political party, two separate sources said, in a direct challenge to the ruling Communist Party's de facto ban on new political groups.
The Zhi Xian Party, literally "the constitution is the supreme authority" party, was formed on November 6, three days before the opening on Saturday of a key conclave of top Communist Party leaders to discuss much-needed economic reforms, the sources said.
It named Bo as "chairman for life", Wang Zheng, one of the party's founders and an associate professor of international trade at the Beijing Institute of Economics and Management, told Reuters by telephone.

"This is not illegal under Chinese law. It is legal and reasonable," Wang said.

A second source, who asked not to be identified but who has direct knowledge of the party's founding, confirmed the news. Calls to the Communist Party's propaganda department seeking comment went unanswered.

The Communist Party has not allowed any opposition parties to be established since it came to power following the 1949 revolution, so history suggests it will not look kindly on this new party, even more so because its titular head is a former member of its top ranks.
Activists have been jailed in the past for setting up political parties, although parties have never before coalesced around fallen top political figures.
Asked if she was worried she would be arrested, Wang said: "We are not afraid. I don't think we will be arrested." The new party announced its establishment by sending letters to the Communist Party, China's eight other political parties, parliament and the top advisory body to parliament, Wang said, adding that no ceremony was held.
It also sent a letter to Bo on Friday via the warden of his prison informing him that he would be their "chairman for life", she said. It was not immediately clear if Bo would agree.
The party was set up because it "fully agrees with Mr Bo Xilai's common prosperity" policy, according to a party document seen by Reuters, a reference to Bo's leftist egalitarian policies that won him so many supporters.
Asked if party members included Communists, government officials or People's Liberation Army officers, Wang said she could not discuss the matter to protect them because it was politically "sensitive".

HISTORY LESSON

China's constitution guarantees freedom of association, along with freedom of speech and assembly, but all are banned in practice. The constitution does not explicitly allow or ban the establishment of political parties. Wang said school authorities asked her not to go ahead with her plans to form the party, but added that she was not doing anything illegal. She said she had not been approached by the government. The school could not be reached for comment on a weekend.
Bo, once a rising star in China's leadership circles who had cultivated a following through his populist, quasi-Maoist policies, was jailed for life in September on charges of corruption and abuse of power after a dramatic fall from grace that shook the Communist Party ahead of a once-in-a-decade generational leadership change.
Many of his supporters viewed his fall and the trial as a political plot against him, rather than the consequence of any wrongdoing, and the Communist Party remains worried about his influence.
A Communist Party document circulated this month urged officials to toe the line and learn from Bo's mistakes, sources said. They were told to fully conform with the party's decision to expel and prosecute Bo.
Senior party leaders had pushed for Bo to get a long sentence, fearing he could stage a political comeback one day if not dealt with harshly.
China's Communist rulers have held an iron grip on power since the 1949 revolution, though they allow the existence of eight government-sanctioned non-Communist parties, which were founded pre-1949. Technically, their role is to advise rather than serve as a functioning opposition, ostensibly to give a veneer of democracy. The Communist Party views the founding of opposition parties as subversion.
One of China's most prominent dissidents, Xu Wenli, was sentenced to 13 years in prison in 1998 for helping to organize an opposition party, the China Democracy Party. Xu and other activists set up the party that year, but the government took a dim view and by 2000 Beijing had effectively crushed the nascent movement and locked up its founders and members. Xu was forced into exile in the United States in December 2002.

Bo is imprisoned at the Qincheng penitentiary, just north of Beijing, where fallen members of the elite are incarcerated. He was expelled from the Communist Party last year ahead of his trial.

(Editing by Neil Fullick)


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## Costas (Nov 12, 2013)

(ΝΥΤ)
Reporter for Reuters Won’t Receive China Visa
By ANDREW JACOBS

The websites for Bloomberg News and The New York Times have been blocked in China for more than a year following the publication of investigative articles by both news organizations that detailed the wealth accumulated by relatives of top Chinese leaders. Since then, employees for both Bloomberg and The Times have been awaiting residency visas that would allow them to report from China.

Such tactics appear to have had an impact. On Saturday, The Times detailed a decision late last month by Bloomberg to withhold publication of an investigative report, more than a year in the works, that explored hidden financial ties between one of China’s wealthiest men and the families of senior Chinese leaders. Company employees said the editor in chief, Matthew Winkler, defended the decision by comparing it to the self-censorship by foreign news bureaus that sought to remain working inside Nazi Germany.

Mr. Winkler and a senior editor denied that the articles had been killed and said they would eventually be published.

The Chinese government’s rejection of Mr. Mooney’s visa request will certainly add to the anxieties of foreign reporters in China, many of whom complain of cyberattacks, police interference and intimidation, especially during the annual visa renewal process, currently underway, which sometimes involves interviews with Foreign Ministry officials or public security personnel.

In a statement, the Foreign Correspondents Club of China said, “Such delays and lack of transparency merely add to the impression that the visa process is being used by the authorities to intimidate journalists and media organizations.”

Last year, Al Jazeera English shut its Beijing bureau after the authorities refused to renew press credentials and the visa of its China correspondent, Melissa Chan. Although they did not explain the reasons behind Ms. Chan’s expulsion, the first from China in 14 years, it was widely seen as retaliation for her hard-hitting coverage of Chinese society.

An American currently based in San Francisco, Ms. Chan said the Chinese government’s recent efforts to bully some of the largest foreign news organizations would have an insidious trickle-down effect on smaller media outlets, especially those from Southeast Asia and Africa that cannot afford to lose what may be their sole correspondent in China. “It’s got to have a chilling effect that leads to some level of self-censorship,” she said in a phone interview on Saturday.

Mr. Mooney said he suspected that the government’s decision to deny him a visa was punishment for his persistent coverage of human rights abuses in China. In April, after submitting his visa application to the Chinese Consulate in San Francisco, he was summoned for an interview, where he was questioned about previous articles and asked to explain his position on delicate issues like Tibet. The interview ended with a barely veiled threat. “They said, ‘If we give you a visa, we hope you’ll be more balanced with your coverage,’ ” he said he was told.


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## Costas (Nov 16, 2013)

Σημαντικές αποφάσεις από την 3η Ολομέλεια της 18ης ΚΕ του ΚΚΚ, που τερμάτισε τις εργασίες της την εβδομάδα που μας πέρασε. Πέρα από τα οικονομικά, υπήρξαν και ανακοινώσεις για την πολιτική του ενός παιδιού (για να εξαιρεθεί ένα ζευγάρι από τον περιορισμό θα αρκεί τώρα ένας από τους δύο γονείς να είναι μοναχοπαίδι, ενώ ως τώρα έπρεπε να είναι και οι δύο) και για τα στρατόπεδα αναμόρφωσης μέσω της εργασίας, όπου μπορεί να εγκλειστεί κάποιος χωρίς δίκη, απλά με απόφαση της αστυνομίας:

The party leaders also confirmed an announcement made earlier this year, and then abruptly retracted, that they intend to abolish re-education through labor, which since the 1950s has empowered police authorities to imprison people without any real judicial review. Experts and officials have debated whether to adjust or abolish the system of camps since the 1980s. Now abolition is closer.

“Abolish the system of re-education through labor,” said the decision, which proposed expanding community corrections to partly replace the system.

“This is a significant step forward,” said Nicholas Bequelin, a senior researcher who specializes in China with Human Rights Watch, an advocacy organization based in New York.

“It doesn’t mean that China is going to be kinder to dissent and to its critics,” Mr. Bequelin said. “But it’s an important step to do away with a system that not only profoundly violated human rights, but was also standing in the way of any further legal reform.”

Re-education through labor was introduced under Mao Zedong to lock away those considered political opponents, and it expanded into a system of incarceration holding more than 100,000 people, many of them working in prison factories and on farms. Sentences are determined by the police, and defendants have scant chance to appeal imprisonment that can last up to four years.

The document gives no date for bringing labor re-education to an end, or for introducing the changes to family planning policy. And there is the possibility that the government will delay or dilute the changes, or introduce similar restrictions under another name, Mr. Bequelin said. The decision also leaves in place labor camps that are part of the general penal system for those convicted in court.

Και επίσης:

Under Mr. Xi, the government has pursued a broad crackdown on political dissent, critical opinion and rumors on the Internet, and perceived ideological threats. But the decision promised fairer and more predictable treatment from the police and the courts, hinting at support for long-discussed measures intended to make judges more independent of the local officials in their jurisdictions.

“Improve the transparency and public credibility of the judiciary,” Mr. Xi said in his statement. But he also promised more stringent controls on the Internet: “Ensuring order, national security and social stability in the dissemination of information on the Internet has become a real and pressing problem facing us.” (NYT)


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## Costas (Nov 19, 2013)

*An Old Chinese Novel Is Racy Reading Still*
David Tod Roy Completes His Translation of ‘Chin P’ing Mei’
By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER
Published: November 18, 2013
(The New York Times)

When David Tod Roy entered a used-book shop in the Chinese city of Nanjing in 1950, he was a 16-year-old American missionary kid looking for a dirty book.

His quarry was an unexpurgated copy of “The Plum in the Golden Vase,” an infamously pornographic tale of the rise and fall of a corrupt merchant, written by an anonymous author in the late 16th century.

Mr. Roy had previously encountered only an incomplete English translation, which switched decorously into Latin when things got too raunchy. But there it was — an old Chinese edition of the whole thing — amid other morally and politically suspect items discarded by nervous owners after Mao Zedong’s takeover the previous year.

“As a teenage boy, I was excited by the prospect of reading something pornographic,” Mr. Roy, now 80 and an emeritus professor of Chinese literature at the University of Chicago, recalled recently by telephone. “But I found it fascinating in other ways as well.”

So have readers who have followed Mr. Roy’s nearly 40-year effort to bring the complete text into English, which has just reached its conclusion with the publication by Princeton University Press of the fifth and final volume, “The Dissolution.”

The novelist Stephen Marche, writing last month in The Los Angeles Review of Books, praised Mr. Roy’s masterly rendering of a richly encyclopedic novel of Ming dynasty manners, which Mr. Marche summed up, Hollywood-pitch style, as “Jane Austen meets hard-core pornography.” And Mr. Roy’s scholarly colleagues are no less awe-struck at his erudition, which seemingly leaves no literary allusion or cultural detail unannotated.

“He is someone who believes it’s his obligation to know absolutely everything about this book, even things that are only mentioned passingly,” said Wei Shang, a professor of Chinese literature at Columbia University. “It takes a certain kind of stubbornness to complete this kind of project.”

It also may take a certain stubbornness on the part of ordinary readers to make it all the way through this five-volume work, given its Proustian length (nearly 3,000 pages), DeMille-worthy cast (more than 800 named characters) and “Ulysses”-like level of quotidian detail — to say nothing of Mr. Roy’s 4,400-plus endnotes, whose range and precision would give one of Nabokov’s obsessive fictional scholars a run for his money.

They touch on subjects ranging from the novel’s often obscure literary references and suggested further reading on “the use of impatiens blossoms and garlic juice to dye women’s fingernails” to obscure Ming-era slang whose meaning, Mr. Roy notes with pride, had long eluded even native Chinese-speaking scholars.

“It’s not just a translation, it’s also a reference book,” said Yihong Zhang, a visiting scholar at the University of Pittsburgh who is translating some of Mr. Roy’s notes into Chinese as part of his doctoral dissertation at Beijing Foreign Studies University. “It opens a window onto Chinese literature and culture.”

And then there is the sex, which has fed fascination with the book, even though few people could actually read it. In Mao’s China, access to the unexpurgated edition was restricted to government high officials (who were urged to study its depiction of imperial corruption) and select academics. Today, complete versions remain hard to find in China, though it is easily downloadable on Chinese Internet sites.

The level of raunch remains startling even to some Western literary scholars — particularly the infamous Chapter 27, in which the merchant, named Ximen Qing, puts his most depraved concubine to particularly prolonged and imaginative use.

“When I taught it, my students were flabbergasted, even though they knew about the novel’s reputation,” said Patricia Sieber, a professor of Chinese literature at Ohio State University. “S-and-M, the use of unusual objects as sex toys, excessive use of aphrodisiacs, sex under all kinds of nefarious circumstances — you name it, it’s all there.”

The novel’s sex has also inspired some modern reconsiderations. Amy Tan’s new novel, “The Valley of Amazement,” features a scene in which an aging courtesan in early-20th-century Shanghai is asked to re-enact a particularly degrading sex scene from this classic.

“I can’t say any of the characters are likable,” Ms. Tan said of the older novel. “But it’s a literary masterpiece.”

But the “Chin P’ing Mei,” as the novel is known in Chinese, is about far more than just sex, scholars hasten to add. It was the first long Chinese narrative to focus not on mythical heroes or military adventures, but on ordinary people and everyday life, chronicled down to the minutest details of food, clothing, household customs, medicine, games and funeral rites, with exact prices given for just about everything, including the favor of bribe-hungry officials up and down the hierarchy.

“It’s an extraordinarily detailed description of a morally derelict and corrupt society,” Mr. Roy said.

Mr. Roy dates the beginning of his work on the translation to the 1970s. By then, a revision of Clement Egerton’s 1939 English translation had put the Latinized dirty bits into English. But that edition still omitted the many quotations from earlier Chinese poetry and prose, along with, Mr. Roy said, much of the authentic flavor.

So he began copying every line borrowed from earlier Chinese literature onto notecards, which eventually numbered in the thousands, and reading every literary work known to have circulated in the late 16th century, to identify the allusions.

The first volume appeared in 1993 to rave reviews; the next came a long eight years later. Some colleagues urged him to go faster and scale back the notes. At one point, a Chinese website even reported that he had died amid his labors.

Just as Mr. Roy was completing the final volume, he received a diagnosis of Lou Gehrig’s disease, which ruled out any prospect of preparing a condensed edition, as his Chicago colleague Anthony Yu did with his acclaimed translation of “Journey to the West,” another marathon-length Ming classic.

“I miss having something to concentrate on,” Mr. Roy said. “But unfortunately, I’m suffering from virtually constant fatigue.”

Scholars credit Mr. Roy (whose brother, J. Stapleton Roy, was United States ambassador to China from 1991 to 1995) with rescuing “The Plum in the Golden Vase” from its reputation in the West as merely exotic pornography and opening the door to a more political reading of the book.

It’s one that already comes easily to commentators in China, where the novel is seen as holding up a mirror to the tales of political and social corruption that fill newspapers now.

“You can find people like Ximen Qing easily today,” said Mr. Zhang in Pittsburgh. “Not just in China, but everywhere.”


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## Earion (Nov 20, 2013)

Jane Austen meets hard-core pornography … 
Proustian length (nearly 3,000 pages), 
DeMille-worthy cast (more than 800 named characters)
“Ulysses”-like level of quotidian detail
to say nothing of Mr. Roy’s 4,400-plus endnotes ..

Άλλος ένας ογκόλιθος προστίθεται στην παγκόμια λογοτεχνία. 
Πόσοι θα βρεθούν να μας παραμυθιάσουν ότι το διάβασαν ολόκληρο;


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## Costas (Nov 20, 2013)

*Μαθήματα κινεζικής γλώσσας σε ελληνικά σχολεία*
Αποτελεί μια από τις 5 εργασιακές γλώσσες του ΟΗΕ
ΔΗΜΟΣΙΕΥΣΗ: 19/11/2013 19:11
(Το Βήμα)
Κινεζικά θα διδάσκονται σε Πρότυπα Πειραματικά Σχολεία της χώρας στα πλαίσια του προγράμματος Μαθητικών Ομίλων και σε συνεργασία με το υπουργείο Παιδείας.

Μεταξύ των σχολείων που θα θα διδάσκονται τα κινεζικά είναι το Πρότυπο Πειραματικό Σχολείο του Πανεπιστημίου Αθηνών και το 2ο Πρότυπο Πειραματικό Γυμνάσιο της Αθήνας.

Όπως ανέφερε ο πρέσβης της Κίνας στην Ελλάδα, κ. Ντου Τσι Γουέν σε εκδήλωση που έγινε σήμερα στο υπουργείο Παιδείας «η Κίνα και η Ελλάδα έχουν παραδοσιακά καλές σχέσεις συνεργασίας, οι οποίες εντατικοποιούνται ολοένα και περισσότερο».

«Ο καλύτερος τρόπος για να μάθεις ένα λαό και να συνεργαστείς μαζί του, είναι να μιλάς τη γλώσσα του. Η κινεζική γλώσσα αποτελεί μια από τις 5 εργασιακές γλώσσες του ΟΗΕ, ενώ παράλληλα ομιλείται από το 1/5 του παγκόσμιου πληθυσμού. Σχεδόν 30 εκατομμύρια άνθρωποι σπουδάζουν την κινέζικη γλώσσα», συμπλήρωσε ο πρέσβης. 

«Από σήμερα θα αρχίσετε να μαθαίνετε την Κινέζικη γλώσσα στα σχολεία σας. Είστε οι μελλοντικοί πρέσβεις του ελληνικού πολιτισμού στη Κίνα. Καλή μας επιτυχία», πρόσθεσε απευθυνόμενος στους μαθητές των Πρότυπων Πειραματικών Σχολείων, στα οποία εντάσσεται απο εφέτος η κινεζική γλώσσα.

Από την πλευρά του ο υπουργός Παιδείας κ. Κ. Αρβανιτόπουλος, δήλωσε χαρακτηριστικά ότι «Η διδασκαλία αυτή εντάσσεται στο πρόγραμμα των Μαθητικών Ομίλων των σχολείων, που έχουν το σκοπό, την αξιοποίηση των ιδιαίτερων κλίσεων και ενδιαφερόντων των μαθητών, αλλά και τη δημιουργία πυρήνων δημιουργίας και αριστείας. Θέλω να ευχαριστήσω ιδιαίτερα την Κινεζική Κυβέρνηση, γιατί διαθέτει εκπαιδευτικούς για τη διδασκαλία της κινεζικής γλώσσας, χωρίς να επιβαρύνεται το Ελληνικό Δημόσιο».

Ο υπουργός Παιδείας σημείωσε τέλος πως «οι δυνατότητες της συνεργασίας των δυο χωρών, που αποτελούν τους φορείς δυο εκ των αρχαιοτέρων και σημαντικότερων πολιτισμών, είναι απεριόριστες».


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## Costas (Nov 21, 2013)

*Lu Xun Letter Sold for More Than $1 Million*
By DIDI KIRSTEN TATLOW
(NYT, Sinosphere Blog)
China is flush with cash, but even so, some Chinese are marveling at the price of a letter auctioned in Beijing this week at the China Guardian fall auctions: a 220-character missive by Lu Xun, one of the country’s most venerated writers.

The letter, dated June 8, 1934 and on the subject of learning Japanese, was written to Tao Kangde, a magazine publisher who, like Lu Xun, was part of a vibrant intellectual scene in pre-Communist, Republican China that included the scholar Lin Yutang and many others.

Lot 2257 was written on a single piece of paper and sold on Monday for more than 6.5 million renminbi, or over $1 million, about three times its asking price.

“Can you believe that each character by the modern Chinese writer Lu Xun could fetch almost 30,000 renminbi?” or $4,907, the Chengdu Commercial News marveled on Wednesday.

Lu Xun, of course, was not just any writer. The author of modern classics that examined China’s soul, such as “Diary of a Madman” and “The True Story of Ah Q,” he came from an educated family and was a liberal leftist who had a complicated relationship with the Communist Party. He spoke Japanese and German, and studied medicine in Japan in 1904. He later switched to writing, saying he wanted to help cure China’s soul, which he saw as beset with self-defeating traditions.

“It was a reasonable price,” Song Hao, a senior manager in the rare books department of China Guardian, said in a telephone interview. The letter had been acquired — with difficulty, she said — from a private collector in China whom she declined to name. The auction house sold another item written by Lu Xun’s last spring, also fetching over 6 million renminbi, she said, but artifacts related to Lu Xun are rare.

“There is very little of Lu Xun’s circulating in the market,” said Ms. Song, explaining the price.

And its provenance is solid. “Add on to that the fact that this letter is in his published collections, so it is very reliable,” she said. “And its contents are good. His advice on learning Japanese is of use today for people learning foreign languages.”

In the letter, Lu Xun is responding to Mr. Tao, who had asked him if he should study Japanese. Lu Xun advises him to learn a European language instead, saying there were more important literary works there than in Japan.

The full text, in translation, reads:

“Mr. Kangde,

About long-term study at a Japanese language school, I don’t know. My suggestion is, it’s all right if your Japanese is good enough to read scholarly treatises, since these can be picked up quickly. However, when it comes to reading literature, the loss outweighs the gain. New words and dialect frequently show up in novels, but there is no comprehensive dictionary. You have to ask the Japanese. That’s a lot of trouble. And then there are no great works to make the labor of foreign readers worthwhile.

The time and effort needed to learn Japanese to the point that you can read a novel — and not just half-understand it –would be no less, I think, than to master a European language. And there are great European works. Why don’t you, sir, use the energy that would be spent learning Japanese to learn a Western language instead?

As for the submissions for publication under various pen names, if I resend them, please use them as you see fit, sir. This person doesn’t care about payment.

Let this be the reply,

Best wishes for your writing,

Xun,
I bow to you,

June 8

Over all, the item that went for the highest price at the auction, which China Guardian said netted total sales of 2.35 billion renminbi, or $384 million, was “Tajik Bride,” an oil painting by Jin Shangyi that sold for more than 85 million renminbi, nearly $14 million, against a presale estimate of 16 million renminbi.

The painting, which depicts a young Tajik woman, dates from 1983, a few years after China began to shed its isolation under Mao Zedong, and “shocked” the art community, China Guardian wrote, for its use of “Western classicism techniques to depict a beautiful and elegant bride.”

ΣΣ. Φαρμάκι σκέτο η παρατήρηση της υπεύθυνης των δημοπρασιών, αν σκεφτεί κανείς την άποψη του Λου Ξ(Σ)υν.


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## Palavra (Nov 21, 2013)

Costas said:


> *Μαθήματα κινεζικής γλώσσας σε ελληνικά σχολεία*
> Αποτελεί μια από τις 5 εργασιακές γλώσσες του ΟΗΕ


Νομίζω λάθος έχουν κάνει εκεί στο Βήμα, οι γλώσσες εργασίας του ΟΗΕ είναι 6: αγγλικά, κινέζικα, αραβικά, ισπανικά, γαλλικά, και ρωσικά.


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## Zazula (Nov 21, 2013)

Για το «εργασιακός» στη συγκεκριμένη χρήση, δηλαδή, δεν έχεις να πεις τίποτα;


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## Palavra (Nov 21, 2013)

Μα όλα εγώ θα τα λέω;


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## Costas (Nov 21, 2013)

Αυτό το έρμο το Τμήμα Ασιατικών Γλωσσών του ΕΚΠΑ...


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## bernardina (Nov 22, 2013)

You may never eat street food in China again after watching this video

China's food safety problems have no better symbol than the illegal and utterly disgusting problem of gutter oil. Cooking oil is used heavily in Chinese food, so some street vendors and hole-in-the-wall restaurants buy cheap, black market oil that's been recycled from garbage. You read that correctly. Enterprising men and women will go through dumpsters, trash bins, gutters and even sewers, scooping out liquid or solid refuse that contains used oil or animal parts. Then they process that into cooking oil, which they sell at below-market rates to food vendors who use it to cook food that can make you extremely sick.
This video, produced by Radio Free Asia, shows in excruciating detail how a couple of gutter oil vendors go about their work. It starts with the couple scooping sewage out of the ground, and it ends with unwitting Chinese consumers chowing down on the end product:


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## Zazula (Dec 10, 2013)

Απ' το Σάββατο όλοι οι άντρες είμαστε Κινέζοι: http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/390...icide-in-mall-after-argument-with-girlfriend/...


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## SBE (Dec 12, 2013)

Έχω περάσει ατέλειωτες βαρετές ώρες να ακολουθώ το εκάστοτε έτερον ήμισι που παίρνει σβάρνα τα δισκάδικα, τα βιβλιοπωλεία και τα βιντεάδικα και πρέπει:
α. να περιεργαστεί όλο το εμπόρευμα σε κάθε μαγαζί
β. να αγοράσει ακόμα ένα DVD κάποιας ανθυποταινίας που την έχει δει εκατό φορές, γιατί έχει τρία δευτερόλεπτα έξτρα
γ. να πάει στο απέναντι μαγαζί, που έχει ακριβώς το ίδιο εμπόρευμα, και να το περιεργαστεί πάλι όλο από την αρχή

ΥΓ Πληροφοριακά: προτιμώ να πηγαίνω για ψώνια μόνη μου, οπότε συμπάσχω με τον Κινέζο μάρτυρα της κατανάλωσης


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## Costas (Dec 15, 2013)

(NYT)
*Mao’s Birth Commemorated in Gold and Gem-Encrusted Statue*
By CHRIS BUCKLEY

Mao Zedong, the Communist revolutionary who rhapsodized the Chinese people as “poor and blank” has received the birthday present he probably never dreamed of. He has been commemorated in a manner befitting the excesses of modern-day capitalist China: a statue covered in gold and inlaid with gems that is said to be worth about 100 million renminbi, or $16.5 million.

The 120th anniversary of Mao’s birth takes place on Dec. 26, and the present leader of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping, has said the commemorations should be “solemn, austere and practical.” Mao himself famously said: “A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery.”

But apparently China’s foremost revolutionary can be a spectacle of bling. The statue of a seated Mao went on display on Friday in Shenzhen, a commercial city in southern China better known for its raucous nightlife than its spartan revolutionary spirit.

China National Radio said on its website that the figure of Mao — appearing unnervingly slim — was covered in gold, jade and other gemstones, and was the work of more than 20 master craftsmen over eight months. The whole ensemble, including the 110-pound statue of the man and a white marble base, cost about 100 million renminbi to make, according to the craftsmen. The report did not say who sponsored or paid for the work.

“When the gold flashes, it captures the intense interest of the public,” noted the report. No doubt.

The statue went on display at an art and handicrafts show in Shenzhen, but will find a permanent home in Mao’s birthplace, Shaoshan, in Hunan Province.


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## Costas (Dec 15, 2013)

(NYT)
Lunar New Year’s Eve, the most important day in the traditional Chinese calendar, has been excluded from the official holiday schedule for 2014, a change that has been met with outrage by many Chinese.
(...)
Another user made reference to a law passed earlier this year requiring adults to visit their elderly relatives, writing: “The government is just ridiculous. And they want us to go home and visit our parents more. Migrant workers have to work. For some the journey can take as long as 4 or 5 days and even then you can only have a few days with the elderly parents and grandparents.”

The Lunar New Year holiday is typically the busiest travel season of the year in China and has been called the largest annual mass migration of humans in the world. This year, a record 3.42 billion trips were made using public transport, according to Xinhua, as many of the nation’s more than 260 million migrant workers traveled home via plane, train, cars and buses, rushing to make it in time for the traditional reunion dinner. For many, it is the one time of the year they are able to visit their family.


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## Costas (Dec 16, 2013)

Όπως είχε αρχίσει να διαφαίνεται από τον Αύγουστο του 2012 και πολύ περισσότερο από τον περασμένο Αύγουστο, ο Τζόου Γιονγκ-κάνγκ (Zhou Yongkang) έχει πέσει θύμα της προσπάθειας του νέου αφεντικού της Κίνας να χτυπήσει τη διαφθορά σε όλα τα επίπεδα, όχι μόνο στην κατηγορία της "μύγας" αλλά και της "τίγρης":
(ΝΥΤ)

*China Focusing Graft Inquiry on Ex-Official*

BEIJING — Sending tremors across China’s political landscape, President Xi Jinping and other party leaders have authorized a corruption inquiry against the powerful former head of the domestic security apparatus, Zhou Yongkang, according to sources with elite political ties. 

It is the first time since the founding of the People’s Republic of China that an official who has held such high office has been the focus of a formal corruption investigation, and in pressing his antigraft crusade to new levels, Mr. Xi has broken a longstanding taboo. Mr. Zhou was once a member of the Communist Party’s top rung of power, the Politburo Standing Committee, and even retired members of that body have always been spared such scrutiny.

The principal allegations against Mr. Zhou emerged from investigations over the past year into accusations of abuse of power and corruption by officials and oil company executives associated with him. Those inquiries have already encircled his son, Zhou Bin, and other family members, the sources said.

Mr. Xi and other leaders agreed by early December to put the elder Mr. Zhou directly under formal investigation by the party’s commission for rooting out corruption and abuses of power, the sources said. They said a senior official went to Mr. Zhou’s home in central Beijing to inform him about the inquiry, and Mr. Zhou and his wife, Jia Xiaoye, have since been held under constant guard.

The people who gave the account were an official with a state broadcaster, a former province-level party corruption investigator, a lawyer with family connections to the party elite, a businesswoman with similar ties and a businesswoman who is the granddaughter of a late leader. They all spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing the risk of recriminations for discussing sensitive politics.

“It’s not like in the past few months, when he was being secretly investigated and more softly restricted,” the lawyer said. “Now it’s official.”

Mr. Xi has amassed imposing power since taking leadership of the party in November 2012, and appears to be pressing the case to bolster his leverage over possible challengers.

But even in retirement, Mr. Zhou is a potentially formidable adversary.

He occupied an extraordinary nexus of state-blessed money and power, even by the standards of Chinese politics. Educated in oil-field exploration, he spent much of his career in the state oil industry and wielded considerable influence over the sector, which expanded rapidly at home and abroad as demand for energy surged with China’s booming economy.

Later, while a member of the Politburo Standing Committee, he oversaw the party’s sprawling security apparatus, with control over the police, prosecutors, courts and the main intelligence service. During his watch, the party leadership stressed “stability maintenance” as vital to its survival, and the domestic security budget expanded to overshadow even the military’s. Mr. Zhou’s grim, rough-hewed features added to his image as a politician not to be trifled with.

In taking on Mr. Zhou, Mr. Xi could jeopardize elite unity if the case falters or ignites dissension among party officials and elders, including the retired president, Jiang Zemin, under whose tenure Mr. Zhou became a minister for land and then a province party secretary.

“On the one hand, this would be such a dramatic change from previous practice, and risks generating pushback,” said Christopher K. Johnson, an expert on Chinese politics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “On the other hand, this is a guy who likes to send messages and who has been consistently defying longstanding regime rules of physics now for some time.”

Until now, the highest-ranking politicians subjected to corruption inquiries were serving members of the Politburo, a rung lower than the Standing Committee in the party hierarchy. They included Bo Xilai, an ally of Mr. Zhou’s who was sentenced to life in prison in September for taking bribes, embezzlement and abuse of power.

It is not yet clear whether Mr. Zhou will be prosecuted and punished; internal party inquiries do not necessarily end in criminal charges, even when culpability is found. The government has not made any public announcement about the case, nor has Mr. Zhou, who like other senior Chinese politicians is inaccessible to reporters. The decision to investigate Mr. Zhou was first reported by overseas Chinese news sites, including Mingjing and Boxun, and later by Reuters.

After Mr. Xi took leadership of the Communist Party, he vowed to take on corruption both low and high in party ranks — both “flies and tigers.”

Mr. Zhou, who turns 71 this month, is undoubtedly a tiger. But his power and reputation for highhanded ruthlessness also brought critics, and he appeared diminished after Mr. Bo was detained last year. 

After Mr. Zhou retired in November 2012, his successor in charge of domestic security was not given a place on the Standing Committee, a move that party insiders said reflected disquiet in the elite over the influence that the position had accumulated under Mr. Zhou. 

Soon afterward, party anticorruption officials also began removing and investigating a succession of officials and company executives who had career links with Mr. Zhou. The first senior official to fall in these investigations was Li Chuncheng, a deputy party chief of Sichuan Province, where he had risen through the ranks while Mr. Zhou was party secretary from 1999 to 2002.

In the following months, investigators from the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the party agency responsible for investigating major corruption cases, detained other officials and businessmen from Sichuan. They also opened an investigation into current and former executives of the China National Petroleum Corporation, where Mr. Zhou had risen up the party hierarchy. In some cases, they had ties to Mr. Zhou’s son, Zhou Bin, who has been questioned in the last months and was detained in recent weeks, according to the sources close to leaders.

The older Mr. Zhou’s “real problem is the corruption claims involving his wife and son,” said the former corruption investigator. “Zhou could also be held responsible, even if he didn’t directly participate.”

The Zhou family’s sway within the oil sector could offer many potential sources of illicit wealth, including acquiring rights to operate fields, service contracts, equipment sales and distribution of oil, the former corruption investigator said.

Other critics, including human rights advocates, have said that Mr. Zhou’s influence over courts and law-and-order issues was also ripe for abuse. But any inquiry there could be politically volatile, and there has been no string of telltale detentions and investigations in that area that would point to Mr. Zhou’s being targeted there.

So far, no formal criminal charges have been announced against any key figures in the allegations. Party discipline investigations can be more wide-ranging than police investigations, and the results need not be made public.

The sources said Mr. Zhou was under investigation by a special unit of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection. Senior police officers were also helping, they said. Usually in China, criminal charges against senior officials are considered only after a party inquiry has recommended legal action.

“They’ve handpicked a number of officials in Beijing to take charge of the case, in order to keep firm control over it,” said the businesswoman who is the granddaughter of a late party leader. 

_Jonathan Ansfield reported from Beijing, and Chris Buckley from Hong Kong._


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## Costas (Dec 17, 2013)

Το ημερήσιο Sinocism China Newsletter έγινε εβδομαδιαίο. Νά το εισαγωγικό σχόλιο του εκδότη του, Bill Bishop (τα έντονα δικά μου):

Policymakers were busy with two important conferences in the last week. The Central Economic Work Conference (CEWK) concluded Friday and the Central Urbanization Work Conference ended Saturday. 

The CEWK made no mention of a 2014 GDP target but did lay out six tasks for 2014: 

"guaranteeing food safety, *reducing industrial overcapacity, containing local government debt*, enhancing coordination of regional development, improving people’s livelihoods and promoting further opening up"

The focus on *local debt* is another obvious sign of leadership concerns about the issue, as is the delay in releasing the results of the Q3 2013 local debt audit. Perhaps we will have to wait for the March NPC meeting and Premier Li's work report for the 2014 GDP target? 

The urbanization conference appears to have concluded without approval of the long awaited urbanization plan but with top-level agreement on the direction of urbanization. Expect less focus on "build it and they will come" local government infrastructure binges and more on limited hukou reform and what the leadership calls *"human-centered urbanization"*. Local officials and their cronies may not like it but Beijing has been signaling this for a while, with official media also running several stories on *"ghost cities"* and urbanization white elephants over the last few months. Implementation will of course be messy but when is anything not here?

The Third Plenum ended a month ago and there has been no official release of the composition of the Central Party Leading Group on Comprehensively Deepening of Reform or the National Security Commission. It is unclear if this is a sign something is amiss, the membership lists were never intended to be made public, or is it too soon to tell.

*The US-China relationship* is not ending 2012 on a positive footing. The White House was apparently given five minutes advance notice of the new air defensive identification zone, exactly the kind of surprise Obama supposedly asked Xi Jinping to avoid in the relationship. And on December 5 a PLA Navy ship attached to the Liaoning aircraft carrier group forced a US Navy vessel to take evasive maneuvers in the South China Sea. 

This week we should learn whether or not China will begin effectively *expelling reporters from The New York Times and Bloomberg* by not renewing their visas, a move that is sure to provoke a reaction in DC. Vice President Biden raised this issue with President Xi Jinping, so if the visas are not renewed expect it to be viewed as a direct rebuke of the VP and his attempts at diplomacy. I expect some to be renewed and some to not, and for Bloomberg to come out better than the New York Times. Otherwise why would any foreign media organization believe Bloomberg-style appeasement is the right approach given the reputational risk?

2013 will be the Year of the Horse, so let's hope a horse year is better than a snake year for relations between eagles and pandas. Then again, hope is never a responsible strategy...

Rumors about the *imminent arrest of* former Politburo Standing Committee member *Zhou Yongkang* continue to swirl. Two Sundays ago the rumor was he was under house arrest and that an official announcement would be made Monday. That obviously didn't happen, and while where there is smoke there is likely fire so far there has not been a conclusive report on is status. I have no idea what is going on but I can not find any Beijing friend who does not think the rumors are true. 

A move against a PBSC member would be both unprecedented and risky, though if Xi pulls it off then he would appear to have control over both the military and security services, making him probably the most powerful leader since Mao. But given the rumors and now the expectations, if he is not taken down then all the tiger talk in the anti-corruption campaign will be seen as just that and Xi's prestige may take a hit. 

Xi issued his "Eight Guidelines" to rein in extravagance just over a year ago and the campaign has been harsher and better enforced than many expected. Businesses and investors still hoping for any near-term rebound in luxury or high-end food and beverage spending will likely be very disappointed by the *newly released guidelines to rein in official spending*. 

Ωραία και αυτή η φωτογραφία του από το μετρό του Πεκίνου στις 8 το πρωί εργάσιμης ημέρας...(κάποιος σχολιαστής λέει πως έτσι είναι και στο Σάο Πάολο)


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## Zazula (Dec 17, 2013)

Hellegennes said:


> Η Κίνα πάει φεγγάρι. Προχθές εκτοξεύτηκε ο Chang'e 3 (Τσάνγκου), που θα αφήσει στην Σελήνη το όχημα Jade Rabbit, μετά από μια εβδομάδα σε τροχιά.





drsiebenmal said:


> Το οποίο αναφέρεται στην ειδησεογραφία και ως _Κουνέλι από νεφρίτη_, κάτι που μας θυμίζει ότι η αγγλική γλώσσα κινδυνεύει να χάσει την παντοκρατορία σε κάποια πράγματα στον κόσμο.





Earion said:


> Εμένα μ' αρέσει που βρέθηκε κάποιος με καλό γούστο στο Αθηναϊκό-Μακεδονικό Πρακτορείο Ειδήσεων (ΑΜΠΕ), απ' όπου διανεμήθηκε η είδηση.





nickel said:


> Και αν το _jade_ φαίνεται πιο ποιητικό από τον _νεφρίτη_ (επειδή πιστευόταν ότι θεράπευε ασθένειες των νεφρών, ένας θεός ξέρει πώς), κοιτώντας την ετυμολογία βλέπουμε ότι η σημασία παραμένει η ίδια:
> 
> *jade*
> ornamental stone, 1721, earlier _iada_ (1590s), from French _le jade_, error for earlier _l'ejade_, from Spanish _piedra de (la) ijada_ (1560s), “stone of colic, pain in the side” (jade was thought to cure this), from Vulgar Latin _*iliata_, from Latin _ilia_ (plural) "flanks, kidney area".
> ...



Και τα σχετικά βιντεάκια απ' την προσσελήνωση: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/...the-Moon-as-space-programme-gathers-pace.html.


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## Costas (Dec 17, 2013)

Metropolitan Museum of Art: Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China - December 11, 2013–April 6, 2014


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## Costas (Dec 19, 2013)

ΓΙΑ ΝΑ ΤΟ ΣΩΣΟΥΝ
Κίνα: Μεταμόσχευσαν το χέρι ενός άνδρα στον αστράγαλό του! (Ημερησία)


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## Palavra (Dec 19, 2013)

Εξετάσεις νομιμοφροσύνης προς τη γραμμή του κόμματος θα δίνουν, λέει, οι Κινέζοι δημοσιογράφοι. Από το Ρόιτερς:

Testing time for Chinese media as party tightens control

The exam will be based on a 700-page manual being sold in bookshops. The manual is peppered with directives such as "it is absolutely not permitted for published reports to feature any comments that go against the party line", and "the relationship between the party and the news media is one of leader and the led".​


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## Costas (Dec 19, 2013)

Ας συσχετίσουμε την παραπάνω είδηση με τούτη την αυγουστιάτικη (την αναφέρει άλλωστε και το παραπάνω άρθρο):

*China orders nation’s journalists to take Marxism classes*
China has ordered its entire press corps back to school in an effort to shore up ideological unity. The nation’s 307,000 reporters, producers and editors will soon have to sit through at least two days of Marxism classes, the Communist Party’s Propaganda Department has announced along with the press association and the state press regulator.
The announcement comes a week after Xi Jinping called for increased unity in a much publicised speech and amid a widening crackdown on online dissent. (South China Morning Post)


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## Costas (Dec 19, 2013)

3η στον κόσμο σε κρατούμενους δημοσιογράφους η Λαϊκή Κίνα, μετά την Τουρκία και το Ιράν, με 32 (ή μήπως 31;) άτομα, σύμφωνα με την ανεξάρτητη, εδρεύουσα στη Νέα Υόρκη Committee to Protect Journalists.


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## Costas (Dec 22, 2013)

Παραπομπή σε δίκη του Xu Zhiyong [#790, #854] και άλλων του Νέου Κινήματος Πολιτών από τις εισαγγελίες. Το ποινικά κολάσιμο έγκλημα; Συγκέντρωση πλήθους με σκοπό τη διατάραξη της δημόσιας τάξης. Κοινώς, κρατούσαν πλακάτ κι έβγαζαν φωτογραφίες της εκδήλωσής τους με αίτημα τη δημοσίευση των περιουσιακών στοιχείων των κρατικών αξιωματούχων και την ισότητα πρόσβασης στην εκπαίδευση (μεγάλο πρόβλημα με τα δικαιώματα των εσωτερικών μεταναστών).


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## Costas (Dec 23, 2013)

Σύλληψη του Λι Ντονγκ-σένγκ, νο. 3 της κινεζικής αστυνομίας, υπευθύνου μεταξύ άλλων και για την καταστολή του Falun Gong. (Le Monde)


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## Costas (Dec 23, 2013)

*Why the World Needs to Roar around the New Citizens Movement Trials*
By Xiao Shu, published: December 22, 2013
(China Change)

As this stands to be the largest-scale series of political cases in China this century, comparable to Taiwan’s Kaohsiung Incident of yore, it’s worth the world’s time to stand around and bear witness.

The New Citizens Movement is a rights-based movement initiated by a group of Chinese grassroots activists, the main purpose of which is to see the implementation of the human and civil rights provided for in China’s constitution and laws.

Dr. Xu Zhiyong, who initiated this movement, is a prominent public intellectual in China who rose to prominence in 2003 as one of the three young legal scholars who brought an end to use of custody and repatriation detention.

Since then, Xu has dedicated his time to the rights defense movement (_weiquan_), through which he established the grassroots rights defense group Open Constitution Initiative (公盟，Gongmeng). When Gongmeng was forced to dissolve in 2009, Xu himself was detained for more than a month.

After regaining his freedom, rather than withdraw Xu Zhiyong chose to pitch himself back into battle. In 2010 he initiated the well-received “Citizens’ Commitment” online campaign, an invitation to the like-minded to sign on and hold each other to a personal commitment both to the fulfillment of civic duty and the pursuit of civil rights.

This in fact was a turning point for social movements in China, an upgrade from the traditional weiquan movement to a citizens’ movement. Where _weiquan_ focused traditionally on specific incidents and individual interests on a case-by-case basis, this civic movement differed in its approach to quality of life issues from the perspective of universal rights.

(…)

Rather than a bottom-up attempt at violent revolution, this was a bottom-up growth process for civil society. It was an attempt, through the power of growth, to change China and push for peaceful transition, and provide China a soft landing for the crisis in which it is now deeply stuck.

Thus the mould was cast for this civic movement: forward-looking, rational and moderate. And it was these qualities that drew participation from every sector and ethnic group in society, growing like a rolling snowball.

(…)

The New Citizens Movement was evidently able to break free of this and—similar to the way Antaeus was only able to gain real power with feet firmly on the ground—begin to engage mainstream society. For social movements in China, this was an historical breakthrough.

And it was precisely this that led to a backlash by authorities, for whom the biggest taboo is citizens organizing among themselves.

The New Citizens Movement took great pains to avoid this high-voltage tripwire, keeping things both deinstitutionalized and decentralized: voluntary cooperation based solely on consensus and tacit agreement.

In spite of such restraint, to authorities it was still unacceptable.

Since the days of Jiang Zemin, the philosophy of governance has been to nip all forms of grassroots organization in the bud, to deliver a crushing blow at the earliest sign of existence rather than let anything grow to infancy, keeping civil society scattered in the wind rather than allowing any space for it to grow. 

(…)

Authorities initiated targeted crackdowns in March this year. One-by-one, New Citizens Movement participants were taken down: Zhao Changqing (赵常青) and Ding Jiaxi (丁家喜) in Beijing, Li Huaping (李化平) in Shanghai, Liu Jiacai (刘家财) in Hubei, and Liu Ping (刘萍), Wei Zhongping (魏忠平) and Li Sihua (李思华) in Xinyu, Jiangxi province.

The repression reached its peak in July this year with the arrests of New Citizens Movement advocates Xu Zhiyong and Guo Feixiong. Prominent entrepreneur Wang Gongquan was also detained for his support of Xu, and remains held by authorities today.

In just half a year, more than 20 New Citizens Movement participants were arrested, well in excess of the scale of repression seen following the release of Charter 08. Among the victims are the economically disadvantaged such as Liu Ping, intellectuals like Xu Zhiyong, and professionals like Ding Jiaxi, not to mention entrepreneurs such as Wang Gongquan, in all comprising nearly every layer of intermediate society.

(…)

Talking domestic politics over dinner? Against the law. Dissatisfaction with the political system? Against the law. Uploading photos taken in open empty spaces? Against the law. Demanding officials publicly disclose personal assets? Against the law. Demanding equal access to education? Against the law. Demanding the National People’s Congress ratify the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights it signed years ago? Against the law.

In a word, fulfillment of civic duties and the pursuit of civil rights has essentially been criminalized. The absurdity of these and other trial details that leaked out left people in disbelief.

(…)

No matter which way they scramble, authorities won’t be able to free themselves from their predicament: the hole they dug for themselves through repression of the New Citizens’ Movement.

They proclaim full adherence to the constitution, then cast the strictly constitutionalist New Citizens Movement as an enemy of the state; they want the comfort of a dictatorship, but also the legitimacy derived from upholding rule of law; they want to persecute, but they also want to maintain appearances; they want it all, which is impossible. Civilization or barbarism? You can’t have both, so authorities need to make a decision.

Let Wang Gongquan go home. Let Xu Zhiyong go home. Let Guo Feixiong and all citizens who lost their freedom simply for striving for their civil rights go back to their homes.

These aren’t pleas, these are decrees based in natural law. What’s needed now are the voices of civil society from around the world, rising together in one loud roar.

_Xiao Shu (笑蜀), the pen name of Chen Min, is a former columnist for the Chinese newspaper Southern Weekly and the Chinese magazine Yanhuang Chunqiu, and an active participant in the New Citizens Movement. He is currently a visiting scholar at National Chengchi University in Taiwan._

(Translated by John Kennedy.)


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## Costas (Dec 23, 2013)

Ειδικά στην εποχή μας, οι άνθρωποι πρέπει να έχουν πρόσωπα. Το παραπάνω άρθρο έχει φωτογραφίες επτά μελών του Κινήματος:






Xu Zhiyong (许志永)





Liu Ping (刘萍)





Wang Gongquan (王功权)





Li Huaping (李化平)

 ......................... 

Guo Feixiong (郭飞雄 )...... Ding Jiaxi (丁家喜)...........Zhao Changqing (赵常青)


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## nickel (Dec 23, 2013)

Κώστα, έβαλες στο αρμόδιο νήμα σημείωση για τον Xu Zhiyong της νέας αβατάρας σου;


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## Costas (Dec 23, 2013)

Ευχαριστώ, δεν είχα ποτέ ανοίξει αυτό το νήμα!


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## Costas (Dec 23, 2013)

Από ένα άρθρο του Murong Xuecun στη New York Times περί του νέου στιλ λεκτικής και εικαστικής προπαγάνδας στην ΛΔΚ, μια ιστορία που θυμίζει τη θυσία του Αβραάμ και μια άλλη που θυμίζει...Μακαβέγιεφ!

Some of these legends of filial sacrifice verge on the extreme. One tells of a poor man who was prepared to kill his young son so that his starving mother would have more to eat. (The man starts to dig a grave in which to bury his son, and instead finds a pot of gold, the reward for his virtue.) Another relates the story of a man so worried about his father’s health that he secretly tastes the old man’s feces. (The sweet taste confirms that the father was gravely ill. The son prays that his life be taken instead of his father’s, and both men live.)

Μου άρεσε και το τέλος του άρθρου (se non è vero, è ben trovato):
But my old schoolmate, the party member Mr. Lin, sees it differently. “Of course it’s stupid!” he told me. “But who cares? We can stick that stupid stuff on all those walls. Can you?”


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## Costas (Dec 23, 2013)

The Gong Fu Tie Calligraphy, a hanging scroll with just nine characters, was sold for US$8.229 million at Sotheby’s in the Fine Classical Chinese Paintings and Calligraphy auction on September 19 after 70 rounds of heated bidding. It has been described as one of the finest examples of calligraphy ever produced. (...) However, three researchers with Shanghai Museum, Zhong Yinlan, Shan Guolin and Ling Lizhong, said the Gong Fu Tie bought by Liu was a forgery, the Xinmin Evening News reported yesterday. (xinhua)


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## Costas (Dec 23, 2013)

The survey was conducted by the French market research company Ipsos in September and polled more than 16,000 adults in 20 countries. Chinese respondents topped the list in measuring success by their possessions, coming in more than double the global average, according to the results published last week. Seventy-one percent of Chinese respondents agreed with the statement “I measure my success by the things I own,” far higher than respondents from its East Asian neighbors South Korea, at 45 percent, and Japan, 22 percent. (NYT)


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## Costas (Dec 26, 2013)

Αποσπάσματα συνέντευξης του προέδρου και διευθύνοντος συμβούλου της Monsanto Hugh Grant στο οικονομικό περιοδικό Caixin.


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## Costas (Dec 30, 2013)

Πρωτοχρονιά, σχεδόν· άντε να ξελαμπικάρουμε και λίγο:



Το ουρί λέγεται Shu Pei. Οι κατασκευαστές τού ουρίου λέγονται Jean-Paul Gaultier, Mark Pillai (φωτ.), Jose Sanchez (μεϊκάπ).


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## Costas (Jan 2, 2014)

Το 2014 ξεκινά με το κατέβασμα ρολών άλλου ενός από τους διάσημους μπλόγκερ, δια τον φόβον των Ιουδαίων (το λινκ μέσα στο κείμενο, δικό μου):
(South China Morning Post)
*Prominent scholar He Weifang says 'goodbye' to online debate *
By Patrick Boehler and Laura Zhou

He Weifang, one of the mainland’s best known "public intellectuals", said farewell to his Sina Weibo account on Tuesday, reducing further the number of prominent political thinkers debating on Chinese social media.

“In the past year, I’ve seen one familiar blogger after the other disappear, it could not avoid feeling disappointed,” he wrote in post on Tuesday afternoon. “It’s time to close this microblog. Goodbye,” he concluded.

He, a law professor at Peking University, told the South China Morning Post on the phone that he felt “uncomfortable” with insults and abusive words leftists left in his microblog.

He has more than 1.1 million followers on his Sina Weibo microblog. His decision to end his microblogging follows a trend of prominent opinion-leaders, known as “public intellectuals”, going silent amid a government crackdown against dissent.

After a series of detentions in August, the Supreme People’s Court said in September that any online post deemed libellous that is reposted more than 500 times or viewed more than 5,000 times can land its author in jail.

Some prominent commentators, like venture capitalists Charles Xue Biqun and Wang Gongquan, have been detained on seperate charges. Others, like historian Zhang Lifan, have seen their weibo accounts closed.

Scholar He attached a painting of the Tao Yuanming, an ancient poet who retired from government service in disgust of corruption, to his post. A signatory to Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo’s Charter ’08, he has in the past frequently called for constitutional rule and political reforms.

“The doctrine of communism inevitably leads to slavery, because it takes away people’s right to think and to express - and these problems have not been properly resolved," he told the Post in an interview in October.

Hundreds of internet users have expressed regret over his decision to leave social media. “If He is gone, how many wumao will lose their jobs?”, quipped one, referring to government-paid leftist attackers of “public intellectuals” like He.


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## Costas (Jan 5, 2014)

Ο Bill Bishop του Sinocism κοιτάζει στη γυάλα και προλέγει για το 2014:

1. 2014 is the Year of the Horse but it will also likely become known as the Year of the Grind as Beijing works through its many political, economic, environmental and social challenges;

2. Xi Jinping will continue to consolidate power. The apparent ongoing purge of Zhou Yongkang and his allies will result in Xi having more control over both the security services and the military than any leader in decades;

3. Xi's appointment to head the leading group for comprehensively deepening reform is positive for reform prospects. Some had expected Premier Li Keqiang to lead the group and now see this move as a diminution of Li, but given that the scope of the group is much broader than just the economy it makes more sense for the General Secretary to lead it. Only Xi may have the authority and the bureaucratic power to push through reforms that affect so many entrenched interests (though of course reform will also bring new opportunities to some). If Xi is successful in rebuilding Party discipline through the Mass Line Campaign and the corruption crackdown then there is a decent chance the reforms will succeed. But there is a reason some in Beijing say that Xi is the Party's last chance to make the changes needed to keep it in power;

4. The corruption crackdown will intensify and while it will not solve the root issues it will be more successful than most have predicted. Zhou Yongkang may be the first tiger to fall in 2014 but there will be others. There will be increasing pockets of resistance as cadres are squeezed but Xi appears to have the power base to continue the crackdown. And business prospects will not improve for luxury goods merchants;

5. The economy will continue to struggle, in large part due to the excessive buildup of corporate and government debt. The recent audit and the listing of "resolving risk associated with local government debt" as a key task in 2014 by the Central Economic Work Conference are signs of both how worried Beijing is and how serious it is taking the debt mess. There are no quick fixes though, moral hazard is a huge issue and while a debt crisis is unlikely (but never say never) Beijing's options are increasingly constrained and any overly aggressive efforts to rein in credit growth could dramatically slow the economy. GDP growth should come in around 7% (and there will be plenty of debate about how "healthy" or real" that growth is), the Shanghai Composite will end 2014 15% higher, the RMB will appreciate to between 5.8-5.9 to the US Dollar and first-tier and maybe second-tier city real estate markets will continue to see price appreciation, though at least one high profile real estate developer will be taken down as a scapegoat for the high housing prices;

6. The Party has made much progress towards its goal of seizing the commanding heights of the Internet and those efforts will continue, as will a continued shift in social media usage from Weibo to Wechat. The stepped up control of the Internet will continue part of the broader, ongoing ideological tightening;

7. Alibaba and the Hong Kong Stock Exchange will both make concessions by the second quarter that will allow the company to list on the HKSE. The IPO will be bigger than Facebook's even though Tencent's Wechat will increasingly be seen as serious threat and Laiwang, Alibaba's Wechat clone, will have little traction;

8. There will be more China pain for US technology companies in the wake of the Snowden revelations. Do not be surprised if Beijing bans military and security personnel and cadres above a certain rank from using Apple products;

9. There will be progress on cleaning up the environment though the problems are so huge that not much will change substantively in a year. But there will be more bureaucratic will and policy support as Beijing has come to realize that the environmental disaster is one of the core threats to the country. One of my predictions for 2013 was that the environmental issues would lead to "more protests as citizens become more aware of their rights and are emboldened to protect them." In fact there were fewer large scale ones than in 2012 as Beijing narrowed the public sphere.

10. Verbatim from last year's predictions: "China’s external environment is increasingly complex. Mr. Xi is likely to work hard on maintaining stable relations with the United States, while at the same time expanding China’s military capabilities and asserting its regional interests. China has unsettled its neighbors with its approach to the disputes over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea and the various islands in the South China Sea. Both issues look intractable, so a solution is unlikely in 2013. Expect a quickening arms race in Asia, increasingly nationalist rhetoric, continued tensions with Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines and growing risks of misunderstandings — and possible mishaps — as the various countries send more vessels into the disputed areas."

What I will add for 2014 is that there will be increasing recognition that Beijing has a well-crafted strategy, not ad-hoc and uncoordinated actions, that it believes it will demonize and isolate Japan in the region and force the US to choose between supporting an increasingly unpopular regional partner or applying pressure on Japan such that other countries will see the US as an unreliable ally. I am not convinced it will work but it does look to be a significant part of Beijing's strategy. And Prime Minister Abe is starting to look like a gift for Beijing.

Of course any unforeseen, exogenous events could render some or all of these non-operative...

Σχετικά με το σημείο 10, η γιαπωνέζικη Asahi Shimbun προ ημερών έγραφε:

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe appears to have badly misjudged Washington's reaction to his surprise Dec. 26 visit to Yasukuni Shrine.
In a rare public criticism, the U.S. government expressed disappointment at Abe's first visit as prime minister to the Tokyo shrine that memorializes Japanese war dead along with 14 Class-A war criminals. Both the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo and the U.S. State Department in Washington expressed their concerns over Abe's visit. (...)
One high-ranking Foreign Ministry official said: "It was shocking to see the United States use the terminology 'disappointed.' If disharmony should arise between Japan and the United States, China, South Korea and North Korea could be emboldened to take stronger measures against Japan." (...)
When former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi visited Yasukuni every year during his administration in the early 2000s, the United States refrained from making comment. (...)
A high-ranking Pentagon official said Dec. 27 that the statement about being disappointed said everything about Washington's position. The official added the visit would only increase friction between Japan and its neighbors at a time when it is vital for the United States that Japan have good relations with its neighbors.


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## Costas (Jan 5, 2014)

Statistics from the Ministry of Education last September showed that about 30 percent of the Chinese population, or 400 million people, cannot speak Mandarin. (Xinhua)

Έπιπλα Huanghuali. (WSJ)


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## Costas (Jan 16, 2014)

Πλησιάζει η κινεζική Πρωτοχρονιά, και...

*Spring Festival Gala Performance by Chinese Rock Icon in Doubt*
By LUO TIAN (ΝΥΤ)

An iconic Chinese rocker whose music is closely associated with the 1989 pro-democracy movement is unlikely to appear on this year’s Spring Festival gala on Chinese state television because of censorship concerns, his agent said.

The invitation extended to Cui Jian to perform on the China Central Television variety show, a staple of the Chinese holiday and one of the most watched programs in the world, had been seen as a breakthrough for the man known as the “Godfather of Rock” in China. Despite his fame, Mr. Cui has long been kept off state radio and television, mainly because of the political connotations of his work.

“In the end Mr. Cui Jian can’t participate in this performance,” his agent, You You, told The New York Times in an e-mail. Asked why, she replied, “Because we cannot change the song lyrics.”

Ms. You declined to elaborate on the censorship process but held out the possibility that Mr. Cui could perform if no cuts to his songs were required. “We are still waiting for the results of the censorship,” she said.

Mr. Cui is currently directing a film and declined an interview request.

News of the invitation to Mr. Cui earlier this month prompted questions about whether he might play “Nothing to My Name,” the 1986 ballad that became an anthem of student protesters in Tiananmen Square.

The CCTV New Year’s Gala is an hours-long annual special watched by hundreds of millions of Chinese on the eve of the country’s most important holiday. It is light entertainment, with comedy, music and dance performances. The content is tightly scripted, sometimes with overt political messages. In 2010, a singer from the Uighur ethnic minority performed a song titled, “The Party’s Policies are Good,” and was ridiculed online for the crude propaganda.

In recent years, public enthusiasm for the the show has declined, particularly among younger viewers who favor the Internet rather than state television for entertainment. A few regional broadcasters have also created rival shows, and some ordinary Chinese have even staged alternative holiday performances online.

The invitation to Mr. Cui was seen as a possible attempt to add some punch to the CCTV special and attract viewers whose interest may have waned.

Mr. Cui, who faced close official scrutiny and unwritten restrictions on large-scale performances in the 1990s, did not appear on a big stage before a mass audience in mainland China for 15 years. But over the last decade, cultural and security authorities have eased up on rock as popular tastes have diversified and the market for music festivals has grown. Mr. Cui, too, has become far less taboo for the censors, who have allowed him to perform in stadium concerts and state media to interview him.

CCTV has flirted with adding Mr. Cui to its holiday lineup before. In 2012, he recorded for a performance for an online version of the gala, but it was never shown.

The 1989 student movement and the bloody crackdown that ended it are among the most sensitive subjects for China’s ruling Communist Party. The themes of loneliness and alienation conveyed by Mr. Cui’s songs, including the 1987 hit “A Piece of Red Cloth,” which he performed in Tiananmen during the demonstrations, resonated with the protesters, though he has said in interviews that they were originally meant as love songs.

Little is known about the vetting and censorship of acts in the Spring Festival gala. But in 2012, Zhao Benshan, an actor who had appeared in 21 previous consecutive New Year’s shows, declined to perform and later described the censors as “unhappy” and “nervous.” In 2010, the Taiwanese magician Liu Qian complained the censorship process was “truly frightening.”


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## Costas (Jan 16, 2014)

Έχω ξαναποστάρει γι' αυτή τη δολοφονία, είναι πολύ γνωστή και υπάρχει και ντοκιμαντέρ στο youtube (πού στον κόρακα το 'χωσα; :s )

*Bowed and Remorseful, Former Red Guard Recalls Teacher’s Death*
By CHRIS BUCKLEY
(NYT)
Nearly half a century after Bian Zhongyun was beaten, kicked, tormented and left to die, bloody and alone, at the Beijing girls’ school where she was deputy principal, a daughter of the Communist Party elite has offered public penance — of a kind that instantly brought controversy — for her part in one of the most notorious killings of the Cultural Revolution.

Growing numbers of aging Red Guards have declared their contrition for violence perpetrated from 1966, when Mao Zedong urged students to turn against the school and party authorities he accused of stymieing his vision of a revolutionary society cleansed of ideological laxity.

But the apology from Song Binbin, reported 
by The Beijing News on Monday, quickly drew attention and was featured on many Chinese news websites. Here was a daughter of a veteran revolutionary apologizing for what has been widely described as the first killing of a teacher in the decade-long Cultural Revolution.

Ms. Song’s father was Song Renqiong, a general who served as a senior official under Mao and later Deng Xiaoping.

Ms. Song herself won fame as a member of the first wave of Red Guards when she was photographed meeting Mao. But for years, many of them spent in the United States, she was muted about the death of Ms. Bian, a deputy principal at the elite Beijing Normal University Girls High School, where she was a student. The Cultural Revolution remains a sensitive, and heavily censored, chapter in China’s history. President Xi Jinping mentioned it only once and briefly in a speech last month celebrating the 120th anniversary of Mao’s birth.

On Sunday in Beijing, Ms. Song, who was born in 1949, told a gathering of former students and teachers from the school that she was sorry.

“Please allow me to express my everlasting solicitude and apologies to Principal Bian,” she said, according to The Beijing News. “I failed to properly protect the school leaders, and this has been a lifelong source of anguish and remorse.”

Tearfully, Ms. Song read out a statement about her “responsibility for Principal Bian’s terrible fate.” (Though Ms. Bian was actually a deputy principal, she served as the school’s leader.) The newspaper showed a photo of Ms. Song and other former students bowed before a bust of Ms. Bian.

“The Cultural Revolution was a massive calamity,” she said, according to a text of her statement published on “Consensus Net,” a Chinese website that specializes in intellectual and political discussions. She said:

<<How a country faces the future depends in large part on how it faces its past…

I hope that all those who did wrong in the Cultural Revolution and hurt teachers and classmates will face up to themselves, reflect on the Cultural Revolution, seek forgiveness and achieve reconciliation.>>

Ms. Song’s apology immediately prompted rival views on the Internet in China. Some welcomed her words, others called them belated and inadequate. Some said the Communist Party itself should apologize.

Yin Hongbiao, a scholar at Peking University who studies the Cultural Revolution, said in a telephone interview that Ms. Song had taken a valuable step in confronting her past and that rumors had overstated her role in Ms. Bian’s death.

But Cui Weiping, a retired professor of literature in Beijing who has written about China’s struggle to recall – or forget – its traumatic past, said Ms. Song lacked candor. Ms. Cui said:

<Given who she was, this wasn’t enough. She was an important figure among the Red Guards, and so the demands should be higher than for ordinary people. It’s meaningless to say you witnessed a murder and then say you don’t know who the killers were.>

Ms. Song’s declaration of remorse also appeared unlikely to satisfy Ms. Bian’s widower, Wang Jingyao, who for years has accused Ms. Song and others of disguising their part in the death of Ms. Bian on Aug. 5, 1966.

Ever since then, Mr. Wang, 93, has preserved his wife’s memory and sought an honest reckoning from the perpetrators. He took photos of her battered body soon after she died and has kept a shrine to her in his home. In a telephone interview on Monday, he said he had heard about Ms. Song’s apology but had not heard directly from her.

“She is a bad person, because of what she did,” he said. “She and the others were supported by Mao Zedong. Mao was the source of all evil. He did so much that was bad. And it’s not just an individual problem” of someone like Ms. Song, he added. “The entire Communist Party and Mao Zedong are also responsible.”

Mao launched his Cultural Revolution to purge the authorities of perceived ideological foes, but initially its most ardent young supporters were the sons and daughters of powerful party officials, who saw the campaign as a chance to display and hone their revolutionary credentials. Ms. Song was among that early wave of Red Guards, who soon fell from Mao’s grace and were often then attacked by other, even more radical groups.

She was among the band of students who formed the school’s first group of Red Guards — youths pledged to enforce Mao’s revolutionary will — who organized rallies to criticize and humiliate the school authorities and teachers accused of sabotaging the Cultural Revolution.

In a memoir published in 2012, Ms. Song said she and other Red Guard leaders at the school twice tried to stop students from assaulting Ms. Bian and other school staff who had been dragged to a school sports ground. Only later was Ms. Song told that Ms. Bian was close to death, Ms. Song wrote in “Remembrance,” a Chinese magazine devoted to Cultural Revolution memoirs that circulates by email. A senior party official told Ms. Song soon after the killing to keep quiet about it, she wrote.

But other accounts, often citing Ms. Bian’s widower, Mr. Wang, have indicated that Ms. Song played a bigger role in the death, by abetting or implicitly endorsing the attacks and conspicuously failing to help Ms. Bian afterward.

In the ensuing mayhem of the Cultural Revolution, many other deaths followed. In August and September 1966, nearly 1,800 people died in attacks instigated by Red Guards and other radicals across Beijing, according to party estimates published in 1980.

Two weeks after Ms. Bian died, Ms. Song was among the Red Guards taken up to meet Mao as he stood on top of Tiananmen — the “Gate of Heavenly Peace” overlooking the square, where throngs of adoring students had gathered. That encounter with Mao brought Ms. Song fame among her peers, and newspapers said that, at Mao’s suggestion, she took the name Yaowu, words indicating “Willing Fighter.” But in 1968, Ms. Song’s father fell from favor, and his family suffered.

After the Cultural Revolution, Ms. Song went to the United States to study and completed a doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She worked for the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection, Bloomberg News reported in a 2012 profile of the family. In 2003, she moved back to China, she said in her statement on Sunday.

The Beijing News asked Ms. Song how she would respond if people called her apology insincere. “If I wasn’t prepared for that, I would not have stood up to do it,” she said.

Didi Kirsten Tatlow contributed reporting.


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## Costas (Jan 16, 2014)

New Citizens Movement's συνέχεια (μα όχι τέλος)

*Chinese Activists Test New Leader and Are Crushed*
By ANDREW JACOBS and CHRIS BUCKLEYJAN. 15, 2014
(ΝΥΤ)
BEIJING — The 20 or so activists gathered at an isolated guesthouse on the outskirts of the capital, leaving their cellphones behind to avoid detection by the police. China’s first leadership change in a decade was fast approaching, and the group saw an opening for a movement to fight injustice and official corruption.

That day, in May 2012, they began work on a plan to expand the New Citizens Movement, an ambitious campaign for transparency and fairness that would eventually draw as many as 5,000 supporters, inspire street protests across the country and provide the first major test to help gauge the new leadership’s tolerance for grass-roots political activism.

They were heartened when China’s new leader, Xi Jinping, came to power that November, vowing to stamp out corruption, promote judicial fairness and respect the Constitution, goals tantalizingly close to their own.

Now, 14 months later, their ideals have collided with a harsh reality.

About 20 people associated with the group have been detained. Three members have been tried and await judgment. And the rights lawyer who organized the guesthouse meeting, Xu Zhiyong, was indicted last month for “gathering a crowd to disrupt public order” and faces almost certain conviction.

The crushing of the New Citizens Movement is just one stark example of the new leadership’s refusal to countenance any stirrings of opposition.

Since Mr. Xi assumed control, the Communist Party has used the state news media to denounce perceived ideological threats, sought to rid the Internet of politically unwelcome rumors and opinion, and tried to silence rights lawyers and muckraking journalists. Wen Yunchao, a Chinese rights activist studying at Columbia University, estimates that 160 activists have been arrested over the past year, not counting the Tibetans and Uighurs detained on separatism-related charges.

These events have largely flown under the radar, drawing little notice at home or abroad and only muted international protest. But taken together, they amount to a sweeping crackdown that experts say is broader and more concerted than other recent assaults on dissent.

“The new leadership has been much more systematic and strategic about how it cracks down,” said Maya Wang, a researcher in Hong Kong for Human Rights Watch, noting simultaneous efforts to rein in traditional news media and online commentary and stamp out even the smallest street rallies. “The government is basically sending a signal in dealing with these people that it has the upper hand.”

Mr. Xu, 40, is hardly a radical firebrand. As a young lawyer, he earned a national reputation for forging social change on the edges of the system. In 2003, he won a seat as an independent candidate on a district People’s Congress, a council stacked with party-appointed officials. Photogenic and articulate, he was celebrated by the domestic news media and appeared on the cover of the Chinese edition of Esquire magazine.

He emerged as a dogged legal activist during a popular backlash against the practice of forcibly relocating people without proper residence permits. In 2003, after the fatal police beating of a young designer in the southern city of Guangzhou, Mr. Xu and two other legal scholars publicized a petition to the government demanding an end to the system. To their surprise, Wen Jiabao, then prime minister, abolished it months after assuming office in 2003.

That case and others crystallized into an approach to activism combining litigation and government appeals on specific cases with public lobbying in the media and the rapidly expanding Internet. Mr. Xu and his colleagues took up the cases of death-row prisoners, parents of children poisoned by adulterated milk powder and a woman raped by officials. The movement came to be called “rights defense,” or weiquan in Chinese.

“You could think of the weiquan rights defense movement as an unintended consequence of legal reforms and the spread of the Internet,” said Eva Pils, an associate law professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. “They allowed the genie to come out of the bottle.”

But the movement soon drew official hostility. The police, courts and the party-run body that oversees lawyers prevented them from taking sensitive cases, refused to allow their suits to move forward or revoked their law licenses. In 2009, the government shut Mr. Xu’s advocacy and research organization, the Open Constitution Initiative, and arrested him on tax evasion charges. After a public uproar, he was released on bail and the matter was dropped.

Rather than subdue the movement, the pressure convinced many activists to shift away from the increasingly fruitless battles in party-run courts and toward broader and more public campaigning for political change.

Chinese citizens were increasingly aware of their legal rights, and willing to challenge the government to assert them. The Internet, especially social media, magnified public awareness of abuses.

Mr. Xu and other activists decided it was time to advance their ambitions through a more cohesive effort. In 2012, they created the New Citizens Movement and issued a manifesto, urging supporters to adopt its ideals and symbol — a distinctive blue and white logo declaring “Citizen” — and to form groups that would meet regularly.

“This is a political movement whereby this ancient nation bids ultimate farewell to autocracy and completes the civilized transition to constitutional government,” Mr. Xu wrote that May.

The new leader’s promises about corruption and fairness were not the only signs that bolstered the movement’s resolve. Mr. Xi also downgraded the post of domestic security chief, suggesting to some that the police would have to pay more heed to legal restraints.

The party’s initially mild response to a protest over censorship at the Southern Weekend newspaper in early 2013 also fed expectations that the government would tolerate more concerted activism, said Chen Min, a former editor at the paper.

“The impression left with some people was that there would be more space for street-level, organized rights defense, even if there would always be risks and setbacks,” said Mr. Chen, who is better known by the pen name Xiao Shu.

Supporters also saw an advantage in the movement’s lack of clearly defined leadership, which they feared would provoke a government ban. Meetings were informal, often over dinners at restaurants.

Mr. Xu “believed in the power of the people to make a change,” said Guo Yushan, a reform-minded scholar. “He thought he would succeed, and that once he stepped out, others would follow him.”

In early 2013, supporters organized public demonstrations on the streets of Chinese cities. Some wore T-shirts and pins with the movement insignia and its slogan “Freedom, Justice, Love.” They posted pictures of their rallies online.

As awareness of the group spread, it began drawing grass-roots activists like Liu Ping, a former steel mill worker from China’s southeast Jiangxi Province.

Ms. Liu and two others remain jailed as they await sentencing for illegal assembly and other charges, but in a telephone interview, her daughter, Liao Minyue, said Ms. Liu’s activism was initially spurred by unpaid wages and the beating of a relative. “Over time, she became interested in other people’s problems, she became more involved and more aware, and she saw the New Citizens Movement as way of realizing her ideals,” Ms. Liao said.

The Communist Party has partly endorsed some of the changes demanded by rights advocates, like ending re-education through labor, a form of imprisonment without trial. But behind the scenes, Mr. Chen and others said, the gatherings fed leaders’ fears that the growing clamor for reform could crystallize into a threat to the party’s authority.

During secretive meetings last spring, security and propaganda officials concluded that they had to take a tough line, Mr. Chen said. In April, the leadership approved an internal directive identifying seven ideological threats, including rights defense activists and civil society advocates.

The detentions appear to have effectively stymied the movement. In addition to a core of longtime activists, the authorities in October arrested Wang Gongquan, a wealthy venture capitalist who supported the group.

In their indictment, prosecutors described Mr. Xu as the “ringleader” of several of the 2013 protests. On Monday, as he sat in a Beijing jail, his wife gave birth to a daughter.

“This time, I think Xu is going to prison, and not for a short time,” said Mr. Guo, the scholar. “Xi needs to put on a big show. He feels confident right now. He needs to show people who’s boss.”

Andrew Jacobs reported from Beijing, and Chris Buckley from Hong Kong.


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## daeman (Jan 16, 2014)

Costas said:


> Έχω ξαναποστάρει γι' αυτή τη δολοφονία, είναι πολύ γνωστή και υπάρχει και ντοκιμαντέρ στο youtube (πού στον κόρακα το 'χωσα; :s) ...





Costas said:


> Αν βρεθείτε στη Βιέννη αρχές Ιουνίου, ίσως σας ενδιαφέρει αυτό:
> 
> A Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire: The Cultural Revolution in the Cinema
> 2 ­ 13 June 2011
> ...


*Red Guards Apologize For Cultural Revolution*

Former Red Guard students apologize for their actions during the Cultural Revolution campaign, when teachers were insulted, tortured, and even killed by their students.
http://www.ntd.tv/en/China Forbidde...cultural-revolution.html#sthash.6Wzt6OV8.dpuf


Το ντοκιμαντέρ δεν το βρήκα στο youtube, οπότε:

*Though I am Gone*, also known as:* Wo Sui Si Qu | Though I Was Dead*
directed by Hu Jie, 70 minutes

Δεν προβάλλεται στην Ελλάδα, αλλά ίσως μπορέσεις να παρακάμψεις την απαγόρευση με κάποιο anonymizer.

_*Though I Am Gone (Wo Sui Si Qu) *_2006 (Amazon, ενοικίαση προς 5 δολάρια)


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## daeman (Jan 16, 2014)

daeman said:


> Το ντοκιμαντέρ δεν το βρήκα στο youtube, οπότε:
> ...



Κώστα, γράψε λάθος, το βρήκα και μάλιστα με αγγλικούς υπότιτλους, ψάχνοντας κινέζικα :): *我雖死去*


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## Costas (Jan 16, 2014)

Να 'σαι καλά, Δαεμάνε! :up: Η αλήθεια είναι πως αν έψαχνα θα το 'βρισκα, όπως εσύ, αλλά εγώ έψαξα μόνο στα playlist μου, απ' όπου είχε εξαφανιστεί, εν τω μεταξύ είχα ξεχάσει ποιος ήταν ο τίτλος, κι έπρεπε να φύγω...


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## Costas (Jan 18, 2014)

Ξεκινάει η δίκη του εικονιζόμενου στην αβατάρα μου (έγινε πατέρας προ ημερών):
[τα παχιά δικά μου]
*Trial Begins Next Week for Human Rights Activist in China*
By CHRIS BUCKLEY
(ΝΥΤ)
HONG KONG — One of China’s most prominent human rights activists, Xu Zhiyong, will stand trial next week and believes that his conviction is all but certain, although he will fight the charges, his lawyer said Friday.

The lawyer, Zhang Qingfang, said that after a day of unsuccessfully trying to convince court officials in Beijing that there were major procedural flaws in the case, the officials handed him a notice that Mr. Xu would face trial on Wednesday for *“assembling a crowd to disrupt order in a public place.” If convicted, Mr. Xu could spend up to five years in prison*, Mr. Zhang said in a telephone interview.

“I also visited Xu during the day, and he was very normal and steady,” Mr. Zhang said. “But he sees that this trial is basically just going through the motions. We can foresee the outcome already.”

Another defense lawyer for Mr. Xu, Yang Jinzhu, who also went to the court meeting, confirmed the trial date in a brief telephone interview.

The trial will be a show of *the determination of President Xi Jinping and other Communist Party leaders to extinguish any organized opposition, however mild, emerging to challenge their control,* Mr. Xu’s supporters have said.

China's courts are controlled by the Communist Party and rarely find defendants innocent, especially in politically contentious cases like this one. Mr. Xu will nonetheless contest the charges, Mr. Zhang said.

“All the prosecution’s witness testimony will probably be given in writing, with none of the witnesses called to the courtroom, and Xu Zhiyong has said he will stay silent for that phase, and we will respect his wishes,” Mr. Zhang said. “But in the defense phase, it’s likely that we’ll vigorously reject the whole basis of the charges, and Mr. Xu hasn’t excluded also making his own statement then.”

Over the past decade, Mr. Xu, 40, has become one of China’s best-known rights advocates, campaigning against, among other things, arbitrary detention by the police, discriminatory barriers against rural schoolchildren and “black jails” used to secretly detain aggrieved citizens who travel to Beijing to complain to officials. He taught law at the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications.

He also became the most prominent advocate of the New Citizens Movement, which won widespread attention early last year with small protests across the country demanding that Communist Party officials disclose their wealth, release political prisoners and give people more say in government. Mr. Xu was detained by the police in July and had been under informal house arrest since April.

After Mr. Xi assumed leadership of the party in November 2012, he promised greater accountability and a fairer legal system. *But Mr. Xi and other leaders have also emphasized that they wanted to bolster, not weaken, controls over the Internet, ideology and social unrest — and the efforts to stamp out the New Citizens Movement have reflected that determination.

“They believe there’s a crisis of control and civil forces are constantly strengthening, so finally we have this intense contention,” Teng Biao, a Chinese legal scholar who has long been friends with Mr. Xu, said in an interview. “It’s very difficult for a system like this to abandon power of its own accord.”*

Altogether, about 18 participants in the New Citizens Movement were arrested last year, although a few were released, according to Maya Wang, a researcher in Hong Kong for Human Rights Watch. Three stood trial in Jiangxi Province in southeast China late last year, and are awaiting verdicts.

The prosecutors’ indictment against Mr. Xu, issued last month, dwelled on allegations that he had orchestrated protests in Beijing, including a gathering by people calling for equal schooling opportunities for rural and urban children.

Only a handful of Mr. Xu’s relatives will be allowed in the courtroom, Mr. Zhang said. Mr. Xu’s wife gave birth to their first child, a daughter, on Monday.


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## Costas (Jan 18, 2014)

China Unveils New Native Operating System
By BREE FENG
(Sinosphere, NYT)
Chinese researchers have developed a new mobile operating system intended to break the dominance in China of systems produced by Google, Apple and Microsoft.

At a ceremony in Beijing on Wednesday, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Shanghai-based Liantong Network Communications Technology unveiled the domestically produced China Operating System, or COS, designed for use on many devices including smartphones and personal computers.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences called COS a strategic product for national security, urgently needed following revelations regarding United States surveillance and Microsoft Windows ending further support of its XP system, the state-run Global Times newspaper reported.

The COS is “completely” independently developed, from the basic coding to the user interface, said an article posted on the Chinese Academy of Sciences website.

It said existing open-source operating systems pose security risks, and foreign-made systems have “acclimatization” difficulties in China, problems that COS addresses.

Li Mingshu, director of the Institute of Software at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said Wednesday that the researchers intend to continue making improvements to COS and match or even overtake other systems that dominate the Chinese market today.

Chen Feili, the deputy general manager of Liantong Network Communications Technology, told C114, a Chinese communications news website, that the Chinese telecom giants China Mobile and China Telecom have been testing phones based on COS over the past three months.

There’s already “a certain consensus” about bringing a commercial version of COS to market, Mr. Chen said. He said that discussions about business models and compatibility issues were already underway.

Though he declined to mention the names of the manufacturers, Mr. Chen said that there are already four smartphone models that use COS.

COS can run Java applications, and supports HTML 5 web applications and games, the C114 article said. It is currently compatible with over 100,000 applications, it said.

The state broadcaster CCTV showed COS in action on Thursday, in a news segment in which a reporter demonstrated that people could play popular games, including “Cut the Rope” and “Angry Birds” on an unbranded black mobile phone.

Mr. Chen said he has high ambitions for COS, saying the “ultimate goal” is to make it the main operating system in China. This is a lofty goal. According to the American market researcher International Data Corporation, China’s smartphone market is dominated by Android with nearly 90 percent of phones in 2013 running on the Google system.

COS is not the only domestically produced operating system to make headlines recently. On Jan. 9, the Chinese technology company Coship Electronics announced that it had produced the country’s first smartphone operating system with independent intellectual property rights. The company’s chairman, Yuan Ming, said that the system, called 960 OS, took 15 years to develop.

How long COS was under development and the costs of research and development were not disclosed.

Although the state-run People’s Daily praised COS on Thursday as the “realization of the Chinese Dream in the field of operating systems,” the online reaction from Chinese consumers was more scathing.

“Its full name should be Copy Other System,” said one user with the handle “byxu,” in one of the most upvoted comments on Sina weibo. “It’s not open source because they’re terrified that others will see that the source code is the same as Android, and accuse them of cheating the government out of money.”


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## Costas (Jan 20, 2014)

Red Guard Betrays Family in 1976 Cultural Revolution Comic (China Smack)


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## bernardina (Jan 20, 2014)

Costas said:


> Red Guard Betrays Family in 1976 Cultural Revolution Comic (China Smack)


Τα σχόλια από κάτω είναι θησαυρός! [δυστυχώς η πραγματικότητα που διηγείται το κόμιξ μόνο για γέλια δεν είναι].


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## Costas (Jan 20, 2014)

Great snapshot on China IT market (από το 1.10 και μετά):


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## Zazula (Jan 20, 2014)

Να 'σαι καλά, Κώστα, που το μοιράστηκες — εξαιρετικά ενδιαφέρον! Έξοχες κι οι αναφορές στο πόσο ρηξικέλευθα σκέφτονται για πράγματα όπως το μάρκετινγκ κττ. Κι όπως είπε κι ο οικοδεσπότης, σε κάνει να θέλεις να φύγεις για Κίνα!... :)


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## Costas (Jan 20, 2014)

Φέρε μας και κάνα xiaomi στο γυρισμό! :)
(σιάομι προφέρεται, όχι shaomi που λέει του παρουσιαστή. Το ίδιο και την πρώτη του φράση [καμάκι του έκανε;], μην τη μάθετε, κυρίες μου και δεσποινίδες, "τσίν-τχιαν" αλλά "τσίν-τχιεν"· κατά τα άλλα όμως είναι σωστή).


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## Costas (Jan 22, 2014)

Μάχη συμβόλων στη σκιά των επιδεινωνόμενων σχέσεων Ν. Κορέας-Κίνας-Ιαπωνίας. Ο Γιαπωνέζος πρωθυπουργός πηγαίνει και αποτίει φόρο τιμής στους εγκληματίες πολέμου του ΒΠΠ, οι Κινέζοι τώρα έφτιαξαν μνημείο και έκθεση για έναν Κορεάτη που είχε σκοτώσει τον 4 φορές πρωθυπουργό της Ιαπωνίας Ίτο Χιρομπούμι (επώνυμο-όνομα). (Voice of America)

TOKYO — Japan on Monday protested against a Chinese memorial to a Korean who assassinated a Japanese official over a century ago, branding him a terrorist and saying the move did not help repair deteriorating ties.

China's ties with Japan have long been colored by what Beijing considers Tokyo's failure to atone for its brutal occupation of parts of the country and what it sees as whitewashing of atrocities in school textbooks.

The memorial in question honors Ahn Jung-geun, who in 1909 killed Hirobumi Ito, a former top Japanese official in Korea, which at that time was occupied by Japan.

Ito was killed in the northeastern Chinese city of Harbin, the site of the memorial. Ahn was convicted and executed in 1910.

Japanese chief cabinet secretary Yoshihide Suga told a news conference on Monday that Japan would protest the move through diplomatic channels.

“The coordinated move by China and South Korea based on a one-sided view [of history] is not conducive to building peace and stability,” in East Asia, Suga said. “The move is truly regrettable as we had made our stance and our concerns clear to the Chinese and South Korean governments.”

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said Ahn was well respected in China and that it was totally proper to set up a memorial.

“We cannot accept this so-called protest,” Hong told a daily news briefing. “We demand Japan earnestly face up to history and reflect on it.”

Ahn is seen in Korea as a symbol of the fight against Japanese colonial rule. Ito served four terms as Japanese prime minister and is viewed as a key architect of its first constitution.

China's ties with Japan have deteriorated over the last year due to a row over a chain of disputed islands in the East China Sea, China's setting up of an air defense identification zone and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's visit to the controversial Yasukuni Shrine, where war criminals are honored along with war dead.

Both China and Korea suffered under Japanese rule, with parts of China occupied in the 1930s and Korea colonized from 1910 to 1945.


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## Costas (Jan 22, 2014)

*Leaked Records Reveal Offshore Holdings of China’s Elite
*(ICIJ)

(...)
The confidential files include details of a real estate company co-owned by current President Xi Jinping’s brother-in-law and British Virgin Islands companies set up by former Premier Wen Jiabao’s son and also by his son-in-law.

Nearly 22,000 offshore clients with addresses in mainland China and Hong Kong appear in the files obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. Among them are some of China’s most powerful men and women — including at least 15 of China’s richest, members of the National People’s Congress and executives from state-owned companies entangled in corruption scandals.

PricewaterhouseCoopers, UBS and other Western banks and accounting firms play a key role as middlemen in helping Chinese clients set up trusts and companies in the British Virgin Islands, Samoa and other offshore centers usually associated with hidden wealth, the records show. For instance, Swiss financial giant Credit Suisse helped Wen Jiabao’s son create his BVI company while his father was leading the country.
(...)
In November, a mainland Chinese news organization that was working with ICIJ to analyze the offshore data withdrew from the reporting partnership, explaining that authorities had warned it not to publish anything about the material.
ICIJ is keeping the identity of the news outlet confidential to protect journalists from government retaliation. Other partners in the investigation include the Hong Kong newspaper Ming Pao, the Taiwanese magazine CommonWealth and the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung.

The ICIJ team spent months sifting through the files and the leaked lists of offshore users. In most cases, names were registered in Romanized form, not Chinese characters, making matching extremely difficult. Many offshore users had provided a passport as well as an address when they set up their companies, which made it possible to confirm identities in many but not all cases. Some suspected princelings and officials in the files could not be confirmed and have not been included in this story. 

Along with the China and Hong Kong names, ICIJ’s files also include the names of roughly 16,000 offshore clients from Taiwan. ICIJ will continue to publish stories with its partners in the next few days and will release the Greater China names on its Offshore Leaks Database on Jan. 23.
(...)
Κάντε μια έρευνα και για τους δικούς μας, βρε παιδιά, γιατί αν περιμένουμε από την ελληνική Δικαιοσύνη...


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## Costas (Jan 23, 2014)

Απάνθισμα από το τελευταίο (σημερινό) Δελτίο Τύπου του Sinocism, του Bill Bishop:

Someone Just Said Something About The Japan-China Conflict That Scared The Crap Out Of Everyone (Business Insider)
I went to one of those fancy private dinners last night in Davos, Switzerland.
(...) The Chinese professional at dinner last night did not seem so much worried about a military conflict as convinced that one was inevitable. And not because of any strategic value of the islands themselves (they're basically worthless), but because China and Japan increasingly hate each other. (...) But then he said that many in China believe that China can accomplish its goals — smacking down Japan, demonstrating its military superiority in the region, and establishing full control over the symbolic islands — with a surgical invasion. In other words, by sending troops onto the islands and planting the flag.
The Chinese professional suggested that this limited strike could be effected without provoking a broader conflict. The strike would have great symbolic value, demonstrating to China, Japan, and the rest of the world who was boss. But it would not be so egregious a move that it would force America and Japan to respond militarily and thus lead to a major war.
[Άλλος δημοσιογράφος στο twitter:] Just interviewed Shinzo Abe @Davos. He said China and Japan now are in a "similar situation" to UK and Germany before 1914.

Και πώς το βλέπουν κάποιοι Αμερικάνοι (και ενδιαφέροντα σχόλια αναγνωστών):
Time to Escalate? Should the U.S. Make China Uncomfortable?
In the January/February issue of Foreign Policy, Elbridge Colby and Ely Ratner of the Center for a New American Security argue [their piece] that when the U.S. plays peacemaker it encourages China to raise the stakes, pursuing ever greater levels of adventurism with the confidence that Washington will step in and make sure things don’t get truly out of hand. “China is taking advantage of Washington’s risk aversion by rocking the boat,” they write, “seeing what it can extract in the process and letting the United States worry about righting it.” Instead, they conclude, the U.S. ought to pursue a military and diplomatic strategy that includes lowering its tolerance of provocations at sea, deepening military ties with Japan, and building stronger alliances with other countries in the region “to inject a healthy degree of risk into Beijing’s calculus, even as it searches for ways to cooperate with China.”

Two Thoughts on the Sanger/Shanker Story on NSA Infiltration of Foreign Networks (Lawfare)
the US Government's penetration of Chinese networks revealed in this piece looks a lot like the things the United States has been complaining about the Chinese doing in the United States for years. This implicates an old bugaboo for me – the obviously self-serving hypocrisy in the USG’s high-handed complaints in recent years about Chinese penetration of U.S. networks. The NYT quotes an NSA spokesman drawing the usual distinctions: “We do not use foreign intelligence capabilities to steal the trade secrets of foreign companies on behalf of — or give intelligence we collect to — U.S. companies to enhance their international competitiveness or increase their bottom line.” But I agree with Peter Singer of Brookings, who is quoted in the story as saying that “[t]he argument is not working . . . To the Chinese, gaining economic advantage is part of national security.” The USG argument is effectively that we want the Chinese to spy on and steal information from us only in the ways we spy on and steal information from them, because the ways we spy on and steal from them, if done to us, won’t cause us as much harm as the espionage and theft strategies that best serve Chinese interests. This obviously self-serving argument is not going to convince anyone outside the United States (...)

Doing stuff, not making stuff (The Economist)
For the first time since 1961, China's production of services (which include transport, wholesaling, retailing, hotels, finance, real estate and scientific research, among other things) exceeded its industrial output (see chart). The new figures meant that China's economy is now primarily based on doing things for people not making things for them. For a country renowned for its industrial clout, this marked a long-awaited turning point.

The income earned from all this production was also distributed a little differently in 2013. The country's official Gini coefficient, a measure of inequality that ranges from zero (when income is evenly distributed) to 1 (when one person takes all), fell ever so slightly to 0.473, continuing a five-year trend of narrowing inequality.

This trend in the official figures is not believed by many Chinese citizens, who are frequently disgusted by the conspicuous consumption of China's wealthy elites. Sceptics suspect that the official bean-counters miss a lot of the shady income that passes through the hands of the flashy rich. Not every household, after all, records their income as scrupulously as Mr Ye does.

But the narrowing of inequality may nonetheless capture something real. China's statistical shortcomings, insofar as they exist, should distort the level of the Gini coefficient more than its trend. And it's also possible that China's resentful citizenry are so preoccupied with rising inequaility within China's metropolises that they ignore the narrowing inequality between its cities and the countryside. In 2009 the disposable income of the average Chinese urbanite was 3.33 times the net income of a rural resident. That ratio has now fallen to 3.03, according to today's NBS figures

The migrants who cross from the countryside to the city are also enjoying healthy gains in wages. Their monthly incomes increased by 13.9% in nominal terms in 2013. These pay hikes may reflect the increase in their bargaining power as China's workforce begins to thin out. The country's population of working age (aged 16-59) fell by 2.44 million in 2013, according to the NBS. Its head noted that many firms report labour costs rising by 10-15%.

H (κυβερνητική) Global Times για τη δίκη του Xu Zhiyong (αβατάρα):
China is speeding up the construction of the rule of law. As for these political activists, they must have a clear vision of the boundary line between politics and law, ensuring that their political advocacies are shown to the public within the rule of law. As far as we are concerned, Xu probably advocated his political views by "gathering crowds," which "disrupted the public order."

It's a misleading thought to forcefully connect Xu's Movement and his trial as cause and effect. Xu's advocacies are a matter of politics and public opinion, not the business of the court. But the court will function if public order is disrupted.

But in actuality, the line between the rule of law and the activists' advocacy is not clearly defined. A "gray zone" is used and expanded by many dissidents, who want to legitimize their advocacy, even some radical political actions. By painting themselves as "democracy fighters," they want to step out of the jurisdiction of the law. Any charges against their violations will be interpreted as "oppression" of democracy.

Xu's case offers an opportunity for Chinese society to demarcate the rule of law. We support Xu to protect his legitimate rights in the court, and meanwhile, we call for the court to strictly comply with the laws disregarding the disruptions from the West.

Chinese society is growing to be more mature than in the old days. This outdated voice, which might call for a severe penalty for Xu after he was caught, has already lost ground in Chinese society. A flexible Chinese society can accept any verdicts given by the court, as long as they are made on the basis of facts and laws.

Και ο "συναγωνιστής" του: (SCMP)
Mainland internet users reacted strongly to news that Wang Gongquan, a venture capitalist and an outspoken civic rights advocate, confessed to disturbing public order in a high-profile case and was released on bail.
(...)
One commenter suggested the ordeal of detention might have played a part in the billionaire's confession. “When a person is detained for than 70 days, with repeated interrogations, sometimes three or four times a day, and he rarely has any contact with the outside world, he could not not sober.”
Wang also made new statements that he would cut ties with Xu, Beijing TV reported.
In December, Wang made video statements to police and said he would "sever the relationship" with Xu, if "that is what the authorities want".
This was a far cry from his statements five months prior, when Wang told the South China Morning Post in July that he had been working to release his friend Xu.
"The more I get involved, the less I fear. I've not broken the law nor do I have bad intentions. Why should I be in fear?" he said at the time.

Hong Kong publisher Yao Wentian, working on Xi Jinping book, held on mainland China (South China Morning Post)
Editor of Morning Bell Press was working with author of book about Xi Jinping when lured to Shenzhen and detained three months ago

Chinese internet users will now be required to register their real names to upload content to Chinese online video sites, an official Communist Party body says (Radio Australia)


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## Costas (Jan 23, 2014)

Δυο-τρία αποσπάσματα από τη δήλωση του Xu Zhiyong στη δίκη του (διάβασε γύρω στα 10 λεπτά και μετά ο δικαστής τον διέκοψε γιατί τα λεγόμενά του "δεν είχαν σχέση με την υπόθεση"), που δίνουν το στίγμα του (δημοκρατικός συνταγματισμός, μεταρρυθμισμός, χριστιανισμός):
(China Change)

Humans are political animals, in need of more than a full stomach and warm clothes. Humans also need freedom, justice, and participation in governance of their own country. You say the National People’s Congress is China’s highest body of power, then again you say this highest body of power answers to the Party. If the country’s basic political system is such an open lie, how is it possible to build a society that values trust?
(…)
Following the Cultural Revolution, China’s economic reforms led to a model of incremental reforms in which social controls were relaxed but the old system and its interests remained untouched, although new spaces created by the market slowly eroded the old system as reforms were laid out.
Political reforms in China could rely on a similar model, one in which the old system and its interests stay in place as social controls are relaxed and democratic spaces outside the system are permitted to grow in a healthy direction. A model such as this would actually prove a valuable path for China to follow.
(…)
Although I possess the means to live a superior life within this system, I feel ashamed of privilege in any form. I choose to stand with the weak and those deprived of their rights, sharing with them the bitter cold of a Beijing winter the way it feels from the street or an underground tunnel, shouldering together the barbaric violence of the black jail.
God created both the poor and the wealthy, but keeps them apart not so we can reject or despise one another, but in order for mutual love to exist, and it was my honor to have the chance to walk alongside petitioners on their long road to justice.
(…)
I now finally accept judgment and purgatory as my fate, because for freedom, justice, and love, the happiness of people everywhere, for the glory of the Lord, all this pain, I am willing.
(…)
Absent a clear direction toward democracy and constitutionalism, even if reforms deepen as promised the most likely result will be to repeat the mistakes made during the late Qing Dynasty, picking and choosing Western practices but not fixing the system. To a large extent, what we see happening around us today is re-enactment of the tragedy of the late Qing reforms, and for that reason I am deeply concerned about the future of the Chinese nation. When hopes of reform are dashed, people will rise up and seek revolution. The privileged and powerful have long transferred their children and wealth overseas; they couldn’t care less of the misfortune and suffering of the disempowered, nor do they care about China’s future. But we do. Someone has to care. Peaceful transition to democracy and constitutionalism is the only path the Chinese nation has to a beautiful future. We lost this opportunity a hundred years ago, and we can’t afford to miss it again today. We, the Chinese people, must decide the future direction for China.


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## Costas (Jan 26, 2014)

Υποτίθεται ότι θα έφερναν πελάτες (in.gr)
*Κακόγουστοι Βούδες ξηλώθηκαν με συνοπτικές διαδικασίες από εστιατόριο*
Τοποθέτησαν στην πρόσοψη του εστιατορίου πελώρια αγάλματα του Βούδα να σκαρφαλώνουν από τα τζάμια ή τη στέγη του εστιατορίου. Ήταν όμως τόσο κακόγουστα και προσβλητικά που τα κινεζικά μέσα κοινωνικής δικτύωσης πλημμύρισαν από σχόλια και αναφορές εξοργισμένων χρηστών. Τελικά, τα αγάλματα κατέβηκαν με συνοπτικές διαδικασίες.
Η φωτογραφία αξίζει!


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## bernardina (Jan 27, 2014)

Αυτοί δεν είναι βούδες --βούζες είναι. :cheek:


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## Costas (Jan 27, 2014)

Πράγματι!

Ο Xu Zhiyong (Ξ[Σ]υ Τζ-γιόνγκ) [αβατάρα μου] καταδικάστηκε σε 4 χρόνια φυλακή. ΝΥΤ:

*China Sentences Legal Activist to 4 Years for Role in Protests*
By Andrew Jacobs and Chris Buckley

BEIJING — A Chinese court sentenced a prominent legal activist to four years in prison Sunday in a case widely seen as a demonstration of the Communist Party leadership’s determination to quell any challenges to its hold on power.

The activist, Xu Zhiyong, was convicted of “gathering a crowd tο disturb public order,” a charge that stemmed from his role organizing a grass-roots New Citizens Movement, which sought to give voice to public discontent over official corruption and social injustice.

After a judge of the No. 1 Intermediate People’s Court in Beijing announced the guilty verdict and sentence, Mr. Xu denounced the trial as he was led away by guards, said one of Mr. Xu’s lawyers, Zhang Qingfang.

“He said, ‘The court today has completely destroyed what remained of respect for rule of law in China,’ and then he was taken away,” said Mr. Zhang. His account of the verdict and Mr. Xu’s comment was confirmed by the other defense lawyer, Yang Jinzhu.

“He can still appeal, but this outcome was decided by the senior leaders, and there’s no hope of changing the verdict,” Mr. Zhang said. He said the court could have imposed a maximum sentence of five years.

The judgment, coming unusually swiftly after a trial Wednesday, will silence Mr. Xu for now. But the sentence could also enhance Mr. Xu’s prominence as an advocate for political liberalization. Mr. Xu and his two lawyers remained silent in protest for most of the proceedings, but Mr. Xu used his concluding statement to deliver part of an impassioned manifesto for democratic change, free speech and rule of law. The full text has circulated on the Internet.

For the verdict hearing, the police stood guard for blocks around the courthouse, keeping away journalists, diplomats and ordinary citizens concerned about the case. Journalists who tried to approach the court were told to leave.

As the first prosecution of a high-profile activist under Xi Jinping, the Communist Party secretary who took power in November 2012, the case was seen as a barometer of how China’s new leadership — the first in a decade — would respond to organized calls for reform. Some liberal intellectuals and rights advocates initially hoped that Mr. Xi would be more tolerant than his predecessor, Hu Jintao, of mild campaigns for change.

In 2012, Mr. Xu helped promote the New Citizens Movement, an organization that drew up to 5,000 members dedicated to fighting government graft and education policies restricting the children of rural migrants from attending big city schools.

While many of the group’s activities involved informal discussions at restaurants across the country, some of its members took part in small street rallies in 2012 and early 2013 that unnerved the Communist Party leadership.

Prosecutors claimed Mr. Xu was the “ringleader” of several protests in Beijing during which participants held aloft banners denouncing corruption or demanding an end to the nation’s discriminatory education policies.

Other participants in the New Citizens Movement and similar protests also face prosecution, including two who stood trial in the two days after Mr. Xu’s trial. Four others face trial Monday in Beijing, according to Human Rights in China.

Legal experts and human rights advocates described the prosecution of Mr. Xu as deeply flawed. His lawyers were not allowed to cross-examine prosecution witnesses, whose testimony was submitted in writing only so they did not appear in court. Nor were the defense lawyers permitted to call in witnesses of their own.

Mr. Xu’s lawyers unsuccessfully challenged the legality of holding separate trials for the New Citizens Movement defendants in Beijing, a move they said prevented them from benefiting from testimony that could help in their defense. Mr. Zhang, one of his lawyers, called the trial last Wednesday “a piece of theater.”

Nicholas Bequelin, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch in Hong Kong, said Mr. Xu’s slapdash prosecution and the sentence were designed to deter others seeking to agitate against the Communist Party’s monopoly on power.

“It sends out the message that the law is essentially a tool for the party to rule the citizenry, not for the citizenry to curtail the power of the state,” he said.

---------------------------------------------------------------

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL

PRESS RELEASE
26 January 2014

*China: Xu Zhiyong four year jail sentence “shameful”*

Roseann Rife, East Asia Research Director at Amnesty International, commented:

This is a shameful but sadly predictable verdict. The Chinese authorities have once again opted for the rule of fear over the rule of law. At best the injustice of prosecuting Xu Zhiyong is hypocrisy of the highest order. On the surface his calls to expose corruption coincide with President Xi Jinping’s own much heralded clampdown.
But the message sent from the courtroom today runs far deeper: In Xi Jinping ’s China the Communist Party maintains a monopoly on the political process and anyone that speaks out will be severely dealt with.
The persecution of those associated with the New Citizens Movement demonstrates how fearful the Chinese leadership are of public calls for change. Xu Zhiyong’s calls for justice and accountability are entirely legitimate. He is a prisoner of conscience and he should be released immediately and unconditionally.


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## Costas (Jan 28, 2014)

Η ζήτηση για πτερύγιο καρχαρία μειωμένη κατά 70% στην Κίνα. (tweeter) Αξίζει για τη θλιβερή φωτογραφία...

(NBC/Behind the Wall):
The predator seems to be getting a break thanks to the most unexpected of reasons – the Chinese Communist Party’s crackdown on corruption....με την έννοια ότι σαν αποτέλεσμα έχουν περιοριστεί δραστικά τα λουκούλλεια γεύματα, τα ακριβά ρολόγια, οι προπόσεις μέχρι τελικής πτώσεως με πανάκριβο baijiu, και γενικά αν είσαι αξιωματούχος πρέπει να προσέχεις τον κώλο σου, γιατί οι καιροί είναι πονηροί. Οπότε όλα τα προϊόντα πολυτελείας, κινέζικα και εισαγωγής, έχουν πάθει μεγάλο στραπάτσο. Γι' αυτό και η Global Times (μερικά ποστ πιο πάνω) έγραφε ότι τα θέματα της αγκιτάτσιας του (κατάδικου στο μεταξύ) Xu Zhiyong είναι γνωστά στην κινεζική κοινωνία (υπονοώντας ότι αυτός όμως τα μεταχειρίζεται σαν προκάλυμμα για να περάσει τις μεταρρυθμιστικές του ιδέες, οι οποίες απαγορεύονται βεβαίως ασυζητητί στην πολιτικά κομουνιστική αυτή χώρα). Την εκστρατεία ενάντια στη σκανδαλωδώς χλιδάτη διαβίωση των κρατικοκομματικών αξιωματούχων τη θεωρεί ο πρόεδρος της Κίνας και του ΚΚΚ αγώνα ζωής και θανάτου για το Κόμμα, ο δε αγώνας είναι διμέτωπος: χτυπάμε τα πιο χοντρά συμπτώματα της διαφθοράς στο μηχανισμό ώστε να έχουμε το ηθικό ανάστημα (οΘντκ) να συνεχίσουμε να ασκούμε το νομοθετικά και θεσμικά κατοχυρωμένο μονοπώλιο της εξουσίας, και παράλληλα φυλακίζουμε ό,τι κουνιέται και κλείνουμε τη στρόφιγγα του ίντερνετ, ώστε να γίνει κατανοητό ότι μόνο αφεντικό είναι το κόμμα και ότι μόνο αυτό έχει δικαίωμα "δια να ομιλεί".


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## Costas (Jan 30, 2014)

As China’s Economy Slows, the Pain Hits Home By KEITH BRADSHERJAN. 29, 2014 (NYT)

(...)
China’s steadily strengthening renminbi, persistent inflation and soaring blue-collar wages have combined to erase much or all of the cost advantage of domestic production for a long list of commodities. At the same time, tightened pollution regulations have made it harder for steel mills to use China’s low-grade iron ore reserves or for power plants to burn China’s low-quality coal.

“With the increasing focus on the environment and high costs in some industries in China, China seems to be importing more of the key commodities they need,” said Bruce Diesen, an analyst at the Oslo-based investment bank Carnegie.

Another profound change in Chinese society is also having an impact. Hundreds of millions of Chinese are eating more meat and drinking more milk. The extra animal feed, as well as chicken, beef and dairy products, for that shift is coming increasingly from farms as distant as Uruguay and Argentina. Chinese farms have grown uncompetitive because they tend to be small and inefficient and have a reputation for contaminated food.

Charter rates for bulk freighters, often a good leading indicator of China’s commodity imports, have stayed strong. The shipping industry is betting that even when long-distance freight charges are included, new mines opening in Brazil and Australia will outcompete mines in China.
(...)


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## Costas (Feb 8, 2014)

Γιαπωνέζικα νέα σήμερα, από το newsletter της Asahi Shimbun:
Japan Broadcasting Corp. (NHK) continued to make headlines in the past week due to controversial remarks by some governors at the public broadcaster. Before assuming her governor's post, Michiko Hasegawa, a scholar on comparative ideology, wrote an essay in which she lavished praise on a right-wing activist who shot himself inside the president's office of The Asahi Shimbun 20 years ago. Another governor, writer Naoki Hyakuta, said during speeches supporting a like-minded candidate in the Tokyo gubernatorial election that the Nanking Massacre was a fabrication designed to cancel out U.S. atrocities.
Our coverage of these developments are drawing great global reader attention, given the fact that NHK, Japan's version of the BBC, is required to be a neutral and fair news media outlet.

One of AJW's most-read articles this week was about the Minami-Kyushu municipal government's ongoing bid to have the last letters of kamikaze pilots, often written shortly before they took off for their wartime suicide missions, designated as UNESCO's Memory of the World.

Another NHK governor ignites firestorm with comments on suicidal right-winger
NHK governor campaigns for revisionist in Tokyo election
Writings of kamikaze pilots eyed for UNESCO's Memory of the World


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## Costas (Feb 9, 2014)

Ο Xu Zhiyong (Ξ[Σ]υ Τζ-γιόνγκ) άσκησε έφεση. Έχει ενδιαφέρον το κείμενο, που περιγράφει τα καθέκαστα της πρώτης δίκης (China Change). Το λινκ επίσης κάτω-κάτω οδηγεί στον (και μεταφραστικού ενδιαφέροντος για τη σύλληψή του) ιστότοπο China Law Translate, και δίνει το σύνολο της απόφασης του δικαστηρίου (αποδεικτικό υλικό, σκεπτικό, επιμέτρηση ποινής):

Xu Zhiyong submitted an appeal on February 3, 2014, in the Beijing Third Detention Center where he is currently detained. His reasons for appeal are as follows:

I. The court of first instance decided that we had committed the offense of “gathering a crowd to disrupt order;” but we were simply exercising a citizen’s right to freedom of expression, which is guaranteed by the Constitution, and we were asking that a government organ redress its wrong policy. The site where we gathered is the entrance area of a government organ and its nearby sidewalks, and neither are public places defined by the Criminal Law. According to China’s Criminal Law, the impeding of a government organ’s normal work order can only constitute the offense of “gathering a crowd to disrupt social order” or that of “gathering a crowd to assault a State organ,” but not that of “gathering a crowd to disrupt order in a public place.”

Gathering a crowd on public roads to the extent of impeding residents’ use of it can only constitute the offense of “gathering a crowd to disrupt transportation order,” not that of “gathering a crowd to disrupt order in a public place” either.

Finally, our actions constituted no crime whatsoever because they did not hinder the normal work of either the Ministry of Education or the Beijing Municipal Education Commission, nor did they inconvenience the normal goings and comings of the city residents.

II. The court of first instance decided that we had committed the offense of “gathering a crowd to disrupt order” in Chaoyang Park (朝阳公园), Zhongguancun (中关村) and Xidan Plaza (西单广场); but what we did was simply exercise a citizen’s right to freedom of expression that is guaranteed by the Constitution, and citizens have the constitutional right to call for asset disclosure by officials.

“Public order” is a concrete term, not an abstraction, in the Criminal Law. During the trial, the prosecutors had presented no evidence whatsoever to prove that our actions had infringed upon the legitimate rights of any specific resident or any government unit. The court therefore has no right to decide that these actions of calling officials to disclose assets constituted “gathering a crowd to disrupt order in a public place,” and the court cannot make such a ruling according to an abstract idea that social order was affected.

III. The trial was fraught with outrageous procedural violations. According to the indictment, the action brought against Ding Jiaxi, Zhao Changqing, Li Wei, Yuan Dong, Hou Xin, Zhang Baocheng and me ought to be a necessary joint action, and all of us should be tried as one case. But the court not only separated our case into several cases, and more egregiously, it placed their cases at a lower-level court for trials, thus eliminating the second instance’s ability to correct errors of the first instance and review its decision. After my defense lawyer and I made a strong protest, the presiding judge of the first instance said, to my disbelief, that “though we can’t say it is not problematic to handle it so, we will just have to try the case in the manner the procuratorate made indictments.”

The court of first instance had no legitimate reasons to reject witness requests by my defense lawyer and myself. Since I was denied the right to a fair trial, my defense lawyer and I remained silent during the trial.

This case involves basic civil rights, and citizens should have been allowed to have an audience at the trial according to the law. But the court of first instance arranged, in advance, to have irrelevant people occupy the audience seats while refusing to accept requests by the media and by citizens who really cared about the trial, making it not a real open trial but a black-box operation.

IV. In its decision, the court of first instance erred severely in stating the facts. During the trial, the persecutors presented not one single Beijing resident who alleged his or her legitimate rights had been hindered by the New Citizens Movement activities; testimonies by the prosecutors’ witnesses obviously contravened the video recording of the events; and the court didn’t allow any argument and counterargument. Under such circumstances, the court decided that we had seriously disrupted order in a public place. It is a purely fictitious decision. 

To sum up, the decision of the first instance distorted the basic facts and applied the law incorrectly. Spare any talk about rule of law in China if the second instance does not correct the decision of the first instance.



Related:

_First-instance verdict in the Xu Zhiyong case_. “In the morning of January 26, 2014, the Beijing Municipal No. 1 Intermediate People’s Court has reached a first-instance verdict in open court concerning the defendant Xu Zhiyong charged with gathering crowds to disrupt order in a public place, confirming Xu Zhiyong has committed the crime of gathering crowds to disrupt order in a public place, and hereby sentences Xu Zhiyong to a fixed term imprisonment of four years.”


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## Costas (Feb 13, 2014)

A morning rain has settled the dust in Weicheng
Willows are green again in the tavern door yard
Wait till we empty one more cup
West of Yang gate there will be no old friends
Wang Wei
(σόλο erhu, 43:18-52:00)


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## Zazula (Feb 14, 2014)

Από το γιουτιουμπικό κανάλι τού *First News*:


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## Costas (Feb 15, 2014)

Καταπληκτικό έργο του Xu Bing (Ξ[Σ]υ Μπινγκ) εκτίθεται σε γοτθική εκκλησία των ΗΠΑ. Το αποτέλεσμα, μαγευτικό. (includes slide show)

*Phoenixes Rise in China and Float in New York*
Xu Bing Installs His Sculptures at St. John the Divine
By CAROL VOGELFEB. 14, 2014
(ΝΥΤ)
On a recent wintry afternoon, a team of eight was putting the final touches on a pair of monumental birds that had just been hung in the majestic nave of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in Morningside Heights. As these phoenixes hovered some 20 feet above, their tiny, twinkling lights illuminated an array of unexpected materials: feathers fashioned from impeccably layered shovels; crowns made of weathered hard hats; heads created from jackhammers; and birds’ bodies sculpted from other salvaged construction debris, including pliers, saws, screwdrivers, plastic accordion tubing and drills. 
(...)
Both Feng, the male, and Huang, the female, faced the decoratively carved bronze doors, as if poised to take flight in the middle of the night. “If they faced toward the church,” referring to the altar, Mr. Xu explained, “it would have seemed too religious.”

Throughout China’s history, every dynasty has had its form of phoenixes. Representing luck, unity, power and prosperity, these mythological birds have, for the most part, been benevolent, gentle creatures. But this pair, fashioned from the materials of commercial development, reflect the grimmer and grittier face of China today.

“They bear countless scars,” Mr. Xu explained, having “lived through great hardship, but still have self-respect. In general, the phoenix expresses unrealized hopes and dreams.”
(...)
The project started in 2008, when he was asked to create a sculpture for a glass atrium at the base of a new building designed by the architect Cesar Pelli for the World Financial Center in Beijing’s central business district.

“When I first visited the building site, I had a sense of shock,” Mr. Xu recalled in an interview at a coffee shop near St. John the Divine. “It was impossible to imagine that with all the modern technology today, the building was constructed with such low-tech methods.”

The poor working conditions for the migrant laborers who were building such luxury towers, he said, “made my skin quiver.” Mr. Xu had such a violent reaction to what he saw that he decided to make the phoenixes rise, as it were, out of debris and workers’ tools that he salvaged from the construction site.

That was just a few months before the financial crisis of 2008. It was also when there was a government ban on all trucking and construction to ensure cleaner air during the Beijing Olympics. The building’s developers, afraid that the birds carried a message about waste, asked Mr. Xu if they could be gussied up, perhaps with a crystalline exterior.

He declined, and, in the end, the developers rejected his birds. But Mr. Xu was determined to forge ahead. He had them constructed at a factory on the outskirts of Beijing, where they were to have taken take four months to complete. Instead, the process took two years, with Mr. Xu working from drawings, models and computer-generated diagrams.


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## Costas (Feb 15, 2014)

Hong Kong’s Indentured Servants (ΝΥΤ)
Υπηρέτριες από Φιλιππίνες και Ινδονησία


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## Costas (Feb 15, 2014)

Από την παρασκευιάτικη σούμα της γιαπωνέζικης Asahi Shimbun (τα παχιά, δικά μου):

In the high-profile Tokyo gubernatorial election on Feb. 9, former health minister Yoichi Masuzoe was the winner, backed by the pro-nuclear Liberal Democratic Party and New Komeito. Defeated former Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa, supported by another former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, called for rebuilding Japan through a zero-nuclear energy policy.

In the meantime, the most-read article over the past week was a feature focusing on dolphin hunting in Taiji, Wakayama Prefecture. A fishing cooperative official connected with the seasonal dolphin hunt here is defending the tradition as painless to the small cetaceans and is inviting U.S. Ambassador to Japan Caroline Kennedy to see for herself. There was very strong reaction and criticism from people opposed to dolphin hunting after the story went online.

*Another story that got wide reader attention is about the increasing number of publications in Japan that are highly critical of China and South Korea, a phenomenon that is prompting leading publishing companies to jump on the bandwagon to take advantage of the trend.*


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## Costas (Feb 17, 2014)

Κι άλλο γιαπωνέζικο: Φουκουσίμα, καθαρισμός, Γιακούζα και άστεγοι.
Special Report: Japan's homeless recruited for murky Fukushima clean-up (Reuters)


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## Costas (Feb 17, 2014)

Μετά από 65 χρόνια, συνάντηση Ταϊβάν-ΛΔΚ σε επίπεδο υπουργών, στο Νάντζινγκ.
(CNN)
The exclusion of two Taiwan reporters from covering the meeting has soured the start of Wang's historic visit, which is expected to last until Friday. Two journalists from Taiwan's Apple Daily and Radio Free Asia were excluded from a delegation of more than 80 reporters accompanying Wang, according to Freedom House, a press freedom watchdog.


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## Costas (Feb 18, 2014)

China Nobel wife's health worsens; needs treatment
GILLIAN WONG Published: Feb 14, 2014
(Associated Press)

_FILE - In this June 9, 2013 file photo, Liu Xia, the wife of imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, cries outside Huairou Detention Center where her brother Liu Hui has been jailed in Huairou district, on the outskirts of Beijing, China. The health of Liu Xia has deteriorated under lengthy house arrest and she urgently requires medical treatment, close friends said Friday, Feb. 14, 2014. (AP Photo/Alexander F. Yuan, File)
_
BEIJING (AP) - The health of the wife of China's jailed Nobel Peace Prize laureate has deteriorated under lengthy house arrest and she urgently requires medical treatment, close friends said Friday.

Liu Xia has been forcibly sequestered at home alone for the past three years by state security in apparent retaliation for the activism of her imprisoned husband Liu Xiaobo. In recent months, friends who have had contact with her family or her say she has been suffering from heart problems and depression.

Her condition took a turn for the worse last month when she suffered what felt like a heart attack and had to be rushed to a hospital's emergency ward for treatment, said Wu Wei, a close friend of Liu Xia.

Wu, a writer based in the southern city of Guangzhou, said Liu Xia told him in a brief phone call Friday that doctors say she suffers from a serious shortage of blood to the heart muscle. Wu, better known by his pen name Ye Du, also said Liu Xia had a cold and fever.

"She sounds weak," Wu said. "Because she's been kept indoors for long periods of time, she has few opportunities to exercise and strengthen her health."

Another family friend, a writer who spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of government reprisal, confirmed Wu's account of Liu being rushed to hospital last month because of her heart. The writer added that Liu's family was considering asking for permission to send her abroad for medical treatment but that she worried she would not be allowed to return to China.

The couple's lawyer Mo Shaoping said Liu was admitted on Feb. 8 to a hospital in Beijing to undergo a battery of tests but was unexpectedly asked by the hospital to leave after one night.

Mo said Liu was accompanied by four or five police officers and that the hospital might have been intimidated by the security presence.

Liu Xia's brother-in-law, Liu Xiaoxuan, said he had spoken to her late last month and that she told him her heart was not well and that she was trying to see a doctor.

Her husband, Liu Xiaobo, was convicted of subversion in 2009 and sentenced to 11 years in prison after he wrote and disseminated the Charter '08 document calling for democracy. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, an embarrassment for the Chinese government, which denounced the award.
___
Associated Press journalist Isolda Morillo contributed to this report.


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## Costas (Feb 19, 2014)

A Pure and Remote View: Visualizing Early Chinese Landscape Painting — A lecture series by Professor Emeritus James Cahill
Το βρήκα στη νεκρολογία του στην ΝΥΤ.

Εδιτ: να προσθέσω και αυτό το ενδιαφέρον, από την παραπάνω νεκρολογία:
The work, a scroll titled “Riverbank,” was said to be by Dong Yuan, a 10th-century painter. Professor Cahill said it was probably the work of Zhang Daqian, a 20th-century Chinese artist, collector and master forger whose own work sells for millions of dollars.


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## Costas (Feb 19, 2014)

Ψήλωσαν οι Κινέζοι και δεν χωρούν στα τανκς! (και άλλα τέτοια εργονομικά που απαιτούν, τι άλλο; αύξηση στις στρατιωτικές δαπάνες) (nooz)


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## drsiebenmal (Feb 19, 2014)

Κατά τη θητεία μου στο ΠΝ είχα ακούσει να διηγούνται την ιστορία ότι το δεύτερο «Έλλη», που πήραμε μεταπολεμικά ως πολεμική αποζημίωση, είχε χτιστεί αρχικά για το κινεζικό ναυτικό, με αποτέλεσμα να περισσεύουν τα πόδια των ναυτών μας από τις κουκέτες. Se non è vero...η ιστορία έχει κέφια πάντως.


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## Costas (Feb 20, 2014)

Πεκίνο, Σεούλ, Τόκυο, Ουάσινγκτον. Σταυρόλεξο για πολύ δυνατούς λύτες (υπάρχουν;)

*Nationalistic Remarks From Japan Lead to Warnings of Chill With U.S.*
(ΝΥΤ)

By MARTIN FACKLER FEB. 19, 2014

TOKYO — A series of defiantly nationalistic comments, including remarks critical of the United States, by close political associates of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has led analysts to warn of a growing chill between his right-wing government and the Obama administration, which views Japan as a linchpin of its strategic pivot to Asia.

Rebuttals from the American Embassy in Japan have added to concerns of a falling-out between Japan and the United States, which has so far welcomed Mr. Abe’s efforts to strengthen Japan’s economy and military outreach in the region to serve as a counterbalance to China. The comments, which express revisionist views of Japan’s World War II history, have also led to renewed claims from Japan’s neighbors, particularly China and South Korea, that Mr. Abe is leading his nation to the right, trying to stir up patriotism and gloss over the country’s wartime history.

One of the most direct criticisms of the United States came this week, when Seiichi Eto, a governing party lawmaker and aide to Mr. Abe, posted a video online in which he criticized the Obama administration for expressing disappointment in the prime minister’s recent visit to a shrine. The visit to the shrine, which honors the war dead including war criminals, stoked anger in South Korea and China, which both suffered under Imperial Japanese rule.

“It is I who am disappointed in the United States,” said Mr. Eto in the video on YouTube, which was removed on Wednesday as the prime minister’s office sought to control the diplomatic damage. “Why doesn’t America treat Japan better?” he added.

The disconnect between Washington and its strongest Asian ally comes at a time of rising regional frictions that Mr. Abe has likened to Europe on the eve of World War I. The disputes over history and territory have complicated the United States’ already fraught attempts to persuade Japan and Korea to present a united front to a more confident China, while also trying to avoid antagonizing the Chinese.

American officials express frustration that Mr. Abe is not doing enough to allay fears in South Korea, a crucial American ally in Asia, about a conservative agenda they worry includes rolling back the apologies that Japan made for its early 20th-century empire-building. American officials also fear he could undermine his own efforts to restore Japan’s standing in Asia by playing into what they call Chinese efforts to paint the Japanese as unrepentant militarists.

Analysts say such concerns are behind the United States Embassy’s taking the unusual step of publicly criticizing Mr. Abe’s trip to the shrine.

For their part, Japanese officials express their own exasperation that the United States does not take a clearer stand in favor of Japan in its continuing dispute with China over the control of islands in the East China Sea. They also complain that the Obama administration has not rewarded Mr. Abe enough, despite his self-proclaimed efforts to improve ties with Washington by taking such politically difficult steps as pushing to restart a stalled base relocation in Okinawa.

“Prime Minister Abe feels frustrated,” said Yuichi Hosoya, an expert on United States-Japan relations at Keio University in Tokyo. “He feels he is not being thanked enough for expending his political capital to strengthen the alliance.”

One of the most provocative comments from Abe allies came this month, when an ultraconservative novelist, Naoki Hyakuta, who was appointed by the prime minister himself to the governing board of public broadcaster NHK, said in a speech that the Tokyo war tribunal after World War II was a means to cover up the “genocide” of American air raids on Tokyo and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The United States Embassy called the comments “preposterous.”

Mr. Hyakuta’s comments came days after the new president of NHK, who was chosen last month by a governing board including Abe appointees, raised eyebrows in Washington by saying that Japan should not be singled out for forcing women to provide sex to Japanese soldiers during the war, saying the United States military did the same. Most historians say the Japanese system of creating special brothels for the troops, then forcing tens of thousands of women from other countries to work there, was different from the practice by other countries’ troops in occupied areas who frequented local brothels.

The Japanese discontent with treatment by the Obama administration goes back to early last year, when a newly elected Mr. Abe tried to arrange an immediate trip to meet the president, only to be told to wait a month. More recently, Japanese officials have appeared hurt that Mr. Obama wants to spend only one night in Japan during a visit to the region in April.

Some analysts say this feeling of being held at arm’s length may be driving some of the recent criticisms of the United States.

“This is one of the most dangerous moments in U.S.-Japan relations that I have seen,” said Takashi Kawakami, an expert on international relations at Takushoku University in Tokyo. “Japan is feeling isolated, and some Japanese people are starting to think Japan must stand up for itself, including toward the United States.”

Analysts note that many of the comments are being made by relatively minor figures, and not members of Mr. Abe’s cabinet. They also say that Japanese public attitudes remain overwhelmingly favorable toward the United States, which has been the guarantor of Japan’s postwar security with its 50,000 military personnel stationed in the country.

At the same time, the analysts say, frustrations on both sides are real. In the United States, they reflect an ambivalence toward Mr. Abe, as some worry that he is returning to the agenda he pursued the last time he was prime minister — trying to revise the country’s pacifist Constitution and downplay wartime atrocities in the name of restoring lost national pride.

“I think the Yasukuni visit was a turning point in U.S. attitudes toward Abe,” Daniel C. Sneider, associate director for research at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University, said of the visit to the shrine. “It was a reminder that he is still trying to push his patriotic remake of postwar Japan.”

The Yasukuni Shrine visit, and the American criticism of it, also appeared to unleash the current wave of revisionist statements.

American analysts and officials have faulted Mr. Abe for failing to sufficiently distance himself and his administration from the nationalistic statements. Instead, his government’s spokesman has merely said the statements represented the speakers’ “personal views” without criticizing them, though the spokesman did say the administration had asked Mr. Eto to remove the video expressing disappointment in the United States.

Visiting members of Congress have also warned that revisionist statements as well as Mr. Abe’s visit to Yasukuni would only benefit China. They added, however, that the American relationship with Japan is still sound enough to be easily fixable.

“There are always unfortunate statements and unfortunate comments even among the best of friends, and this is something that is going to have to be worked out and gotten over with,” said Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, Republican of Wisconsin, who was part of a group of visiting Congress members in Tokyo who met on Wednesday with Mr. Abe. “It is important that we have an economically vibrant and strong Japan to act as a counterbalance to China.”


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## Costas (Feb 20, 2014)

Στο νοσοκομείο (για δεύτερη φορά) η γυναίκα του Λίου Ξ(Σ)ιαομπό, Λίου Ξ(Σ)ια. Το σημερινό άρθρο λέει όχι ότι δεν θέλει η ίδια να πάει για νοσηλεία στο εξωτερικό (φοβούμενη ότι δεν θα της επιτρέψουν να ξαναγυρίσει στην κατ' οίκον φυλακή της) αλλά ότι δεν το επιτρέπει η αστυνομία. Επίσης λέει ότι η ίδια νωρίτερα δεν ήθελε να πάει σε νοσοκομείο γιατί φοβόταν περαιτέρω τιμωρίες, χωρίς να διευκρινίζεται τι είδους τιμωρίες. Γενικά, η τιμωρία σ' αυτή τη γυναίκα που δεν κατηγορείται για τίποτα πάει σύννεφο.

*Wife of China's jailed Nobel Laureate Liu hospitalized*
By Sui-Lee Wee
BEIJING Wed Feb 19, 2014 11:06pm EST

(Reuters) - The wife of jailed Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Liu Xiaobo has been admitted to a Beijing hospital after police refused to allow her to seek medical help overseas, a close family friend said on Thursday.

Liu Xia, who has been under effective house arrest since her husband Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, suffers from heart problems, possibly severe depression, and other ailments made worse during her time under guard, her friends say.

She was admitted to another hospital earlier this month under heavy police guard but the hospital told her to leave after a day without giving a reason, said Mo Shaoping, a prominent human rights lawyer and a close family friend.

Liu Xia was admitted to the second hospital on Tuesday but it is unclear how long she will remain there because her family has been told by police not to disclose details about her condition and whereabouts, Mo said.

"Her family had proposed seeking medical treatment overseas but the police didn't approve it," Mo said. It was then that Liu's family was told to find treatment for her in Beijing.

In December, Liu Xia's friends said she refused to seek medical help because she is afraid of further punishment.

Liu, who has not been convicted of any crime, is rarely allowed out of her home, except for occasional visits to her husband and family, and is almost never permitted visitors.

Ye Du, a writer and a friend, said Liu told him of her heart problems when they spoke recently by telephone.

"Last month, she said her heart was not feeling too good and she was sent to the hospital, where they told her that her heart was lacking blood," Ye said.

Ye confirmed Liu's family had asked to seek medical help for her overseas, possibly in Europe, but police had rejected the request.

"The environment that she's been placed in, having been put under house arrest for so many years, is the main reason (for her worsening health), and they thought that going overseas was the only way they could fully guarantee that she will have good treatment," Ye said.

Another friend, Ma Shaofeng, said Liu had told him when they spoke a week ago she had suffered a heart attack.

The United States and the European Union have repeatedly urged China to let Liu Xia move freely again.

Liu Xiaobo, a veteran dissident involved in the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests crushed by the Chinese army, was jailed for 11 years in 2009 on subversion charges for organizing a petition urging the overthrow of one-party rule.

Liu Xia filed an extraordinary appeal for her husband's retrial last month, a move that could renew the focus on China's human rights record.

The Chinese government says that Liu Xiaobo is a common criminal and has rejected as unwarranted interference any criticism of its handling of the case by foreign governments.

(Editing by Paul Tait)


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## Costas (Feb 22, 2014)

Η πολιτική κατάσταση στο Χονγκ-Κονγκ ως προς τις σχέσεις του με την ΛΔΚ, από τη γνωστή και μη εξαιρετέα Jamestown Foundation. Και ένας όρος: mainlandization.


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## Costas (Feb 22, 2014)

Το ξήλωμα του δικτύου επιρροής του πρώην μέλους της 9μελούς Διαρκούς Επιτροπής του ΠΓ της ΚΕ του ΚΚΚ και πρώην αρμόδιου για την εσωτερική ασφάλεια Τζόου Γιονγκ-κάνγκ, συνεχίζεται με μια νέα σύλληψη κοντινού σε αυτόν στελέχους, αυτή τη φορά από τις υπηρεσίες εσωτερικής ασφάλειας.

Beijing Official Detained in Investigation of Former Security Chief
By CHRIS BUCKLEY and JONATHAN ANSFIELDFEB. 21, 2014
(ΝΥΤ)
Liang Ke, the director of the Beijing Municipal Bureau of State Security, was taken into custody last month by the party’s arm for investigating official misconduct

The detention of Mr. Liang takes the investigation encircling Mr. Zhou into especially secretive terrain: The Ministry of State Security and its local bureaus are unaccountable even by China’s standards and rarely discussed in public. 

Before retiring in November 2012, Mr. Zhou was one of nine men on the Politburo Standing Committee — the party’s top decision-making body — and headed the committee that oversees China’s courts, police and other arms of domestic security. In his five years in those two posts, he accumulated considerable clout as the party made maintaining social stability a top priority and devoted ever greater resources to the security forces under his control.

“Because the party stressed stability above all, and that became fundamental national policy, his power expanded to overshadow other Standing Committee members, and the police, courts, security authorities became his political resource,”

After Mr. Zhou stepped down in late 2012, party anticorruption officials began removing and investigating officials and company executives who had career links with him. They started in Sichuan Province, where Mr. Zhou was party secretary from 1999 to 2002. The authorities also detained executives, present and previous, of the China National Petroleum Corporation, or C.N.P.C., where Mr. Zhou had risen to become general manager in the 1990s.

In December, the party announced an investigation of a vice minister for public security, Li Dongsheng, who was appointed while Mr. Zhou was in power.

“I think Xi has been taking a very stepwise approach,” Mr. Johnson, the analyst, said of the investigations. “He blew up Sichuan, he blew up C.N.P.C., and last December he shifted over into the Ministry of Public Security, and so these guys are the next logical target.”

This week, authorities also announced that they were investigating Ji Wenlin, a vice governor of Hainan Province in southern China, who had served as an aide to Mr. Zhou for a decade, moving with him from the Ministry of Land and Resources to Sichuan Province and then to the Ministry of Public Security.

Mr. Xi appears determined to make a show of methodically dismantling Mr. Zhou’s influence, said Wu Wei, a former official. He said he had heard rumors of Mr. Liang’s detention.

“This amounts to pulling out a tiger’s teeth so it turns into a sick cat,” he said. ( μου άρεσε αυτό!)


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## Costas (Feb 22, 2014)

Εμείς λέμε για τα τσολιαδάκια, αλλά στις ΗΠΑ
American Flags Made In China Now Banned In U.S. Military


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## Costas (Feb 28, 2014)

*Uighur professor could face death sentence in China: lawyer* (Reuters)

Advocates for Tohti say he has challenged the government's version of several incidents involving Uighurs. That includes what China says was its first major suicide attack, in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in October, involving militants from Xinjiang, by pointing out inconsistencies in the official accounts.

"China's accusation of so-called separatism is a political excuse to suppress Uighurs who express differing opinions," Dilxat Raxit, a spokesman for the main Uighur exile group, the World Uyghur Congress, said in an emailed statement.
Tohti, who teaches at Beijing's Minzu University which specializes in ethnic minority studies, told Reuters in November that state security agents had threatened him for speaking to foreign reporters.
"I have never associated myself with a terrorist organization or a foreign-based group," Tohti told Radio Free Asia's Uyghur Service last year in a statement he asked to have released if he was taken into custody. "I have relied only on pen and paper to diplomatically request the human rights, legal rights, and autonomous regional rights for the Uyghurs."


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## Costas (Mar 4, 2014)

Communique "Arrest of Professor Ilham Tohti" (2014/02/27)

We have learned of the formal arrest of Ilham Tohti, renowned professor of economics at the Central Nationalities University (中央民族大学). He now stands accused of attempted separatism, a crime punishable, in the worst of cases, by the death. Although Professor Tohti regularly speaks out to defend the rights of the Uyghur minority in Xinjiang and to question the central administration’s policy in this region, he has never approved of violence, nor has he defended the cause of independence of Xinjiang or any other form of separatism. Ilham Tohti’s criticisms and propositions are based on his academic research which he has carried out with the utmost rigour. Indeed, through his website “Uyghurs online,” he has worked for a number of years towards creating a space for dialogue between the Han majority and the Uyghurs. Through student exchanges, co-advised PhDs and joint research projects, our university has enjoyed a long-standing partnership with the Central Nationalities University, an institution renowned for its academic excellence. For all these reasons, we wish to draw attention to the worrying situation of this colleague. This affair constitutes an inacceptable violation of the intellectual freedom of academics, and more generally, of freedom of expression.

Gregory Lee, Chair of the Department of Chinese, University of Lyon (Jean Moulin)
Claire Dodane, Director, the Institute for Transtextual and Transcultural Studies (IETT), University of Lyon (Jean Moulin)
Florent Villard, Deputy Director, the Institute for Transtextual and Transcultural Studies (IETT), University of Lyon (Jean Moulin)

--------------------------------------------------------------

Florent VILLARD
Département des Etudes Chinoises
Institut des Etudes Transtextuelles et Transculturelles (EA 4186)
Université de Lyon - Jean Moulin Lyon 3
http://univ-lyon3.academia.edu/FlorentVillard


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## Costas (Mar 15, 2014)

Η περιοχή-φάντασμα Kangbashi της πόλης Όρντος από έναν ταξιδιώτη-μπλόγκερ.


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## Costas (Mar 16, 2014)

Internet Freedom in China: A Menace that Must Be Removed
By Mo Zhixu (China Change)


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## nickel (Mar 16, 2014)

Μια διάσταση που δεν πρέπει να ξεχνάμε.

Το κύριο χαρακτηριστικό της ραγδαίας οικονομικής ανάπτυξης της Κίνας είναι ότι κατά την προηγούμενη δεκαετία δόθηκε απόλυτη προτεραιότητα στη βελτίωση των οικονομικών μεγεθών αγνοώντας το περιβάλλον. Αυτό είχε ως αποτέλεσμα την εγκατάσταση πάνω από τις κινέζικες πόλεις ενός πυκνού νέφους ρύπανσης, οι μακροχρόνιες επιπτώσεις του οποίου δεν έχουν ακόμα αποτιμηθεί. Η αλλαγή πορείας όμως έχει πολιτικά χαρακτηριστικά γιατί η ραγδαία οικονομική αύξηση των τελευταίων χρόνων σταδιακά *δημιουργεί κινέζικη μεσαία τάξη, η οποία εκτός των άλλων απαιτεί και ποιοτικές συνθήκες διαβίωσης*. Είναι χαρακτηριστικό ότι σε δύο επαρχίες, στην ανατολική Shandong και στη βορειοδυτική Gansu έχουμε την προσθήκη της προστασίας του περιβάλλοντος στη δέσμη κριτηρίων για την οικονομική ανάπτυξη. Αυτό πρακτικά σημαίνει μείωση της εξάρτησης της οικονομίας από ρυπογόνες πηγές ενέργειας όπως το κάρβουνο. Είναι όμως κατανοητό ότι είτε μείωση είτε η κατάργηση κάθε τύπου παραγωγής ενέργειας προϋποθέτει την ύπαρξη αξιόπιστης εναλλακτικής λύσης η οποία θα στηρίξει την αναπτυξιακή πορεία της κινεζικής οικονομίας.

Άρα, όλα τα παραπάνω ενδεχομένως να αποτελούν τα επιμέρους θέματα της αλλαγής πορείας του τρόπου διακυβέρνησης της κινέζικης οικονομίας. Κι όλα να επικαλύπτονται από την προσπάθεια της κινεζικής ηγεσίας να επιβραδύνει το ρυθμό ανάπτυξης με στόχο:

α) τις διαρθρωτικές αλλαγές στην οικονομία και

β) την ορθολογική χρήση των φυσικών πόρων. 
http://www.athensvoice.gr/article/city-news-voices/πολιτικη/ο-κινέζικος-δράκος-παρουσιάζει-αρρυθμίες


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## Marinos (Mar 16, 2014)

Flower Town -- The rise and fall of a Sichuan village


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## Costas (Mar 16, 2014)

Βρε! χρόνια είχα να δω το όνομα του Sascha Matuszak! Έγραφε παλιά κάθε τόσο στο antiwar.com κάποια, μάλλον αδύναμα όμως, άρθρα, για και από την Κίνα πάντα. (βλ. Additional Contributors)


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## Costas (Mar 19, 2014)

Τα απόνερα της ουκρανικής κρίσης στην Ταϊβάν:

(J. Michael Cole / National Interest)
Days ahead of a referendum that could result in the loss of the southern territory of Crimea to Russia, Taiwan, which like Ukraine lives in the shadow of a great power, is watching closely to see whether Moscow’s gambit could embolden Beijing to adopt similar strategies toward the island democracy.

While Crimea serves as an imperfect analogy for Taiwan’s situation, there are enough parallels to warrant an exploration of the current crisis and its denouement to determine if they can possibly create a precedent for Chinese behavior. Key to this effort is the fact that both Moscow and Beijing have notions of the “Near Abroad”—that is, territories that, while foreign and sovereign, their governments regard as fair game.

Υπάρχει όμως και το αντίστροφο σενάριο, άλλου σχολιαστή:
In contrast to Cole's opinion (and more in keeping, I might say, with the drift of his scenario and the propensity for mischief displayed by China hawks in the US), I think a more likely scenario for violent political unrest in Taiwan is that pro-independence forces, if egged on by the United States and Japan with the promise of recognition, might foment a political crisis in Taiwan, overwhelm the current government, declare independence, and dare the PRC to respond. That's pretty much what happened in Ukraine.
(...)
But it doesn't matter who you think the bad guy would be; whether you think the PRC would take the enormous geopolitical risk of fomenting chaos in Taiwan in order to justify an invasion, or if you think the United States would roll the dice on its future in Asia by egging on pro-independence radicals in Taipei, or you simply hope that nobody starts World War III during your lifetime…


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## Costas (Mar 19, 2014)

Ως και οι ίδιοι βαρέθηκαν τους εαυτούς τους! (ΝΥΤ)
Mr. Wang, head of the party’s internal discipline commission and one of seven members of the party’s Politburo Standing Committee, had just delivered a speech to which the Jilin party secretary, Wang Rulin (no relation to Wang Qishan) was expected to respond.
As Wang Rulin began reading from what was apparently a written response, Wang Qishan interrupted, telling him to “Make it short!” When Wang Rulin said he couldn’t, Wang Qishan bristled in annoyance. “No doubt your response is about how my speech was important in such and such way,” he said, according to the accounts. “I didn’t have a script for my speech,” he continued. “So how could you have such a long printed response? Wouldn’t you say this is formalism? There’s no need for you to read it anymore!”

Αλλά η αγάπη τους για τη σκηνοθεσία δεν γνωρίζει όρια (ΝΥΤ, Sinosphere):

On Thursday, Li Keqiang, now in his second year as prime minister, took more than a dozen questions from reporters on subjects like housing, pollution, bureaucratic red tape and themissing Malaysia Airlines plane.

He gesticulated with ease as he talked about China’s relations with the United States (“Wise people will seek common interests, while the unwise will focus on their differences.”) and the fight against official graft (“Corruption is the natural enemy of a people’s government.”).

And unlike the somewhat ponderous, long-winded style of his predecessor, Wen Jiabao, Mr. Li was breezy and jocular as he complimented foreign reporters on their Chinese language abilities while making only slightly dated references to pop culture, including a nod to the motivational bestseller “Who Moved My Cheese?”

But unbeknownst to many people in China, all the questions had been vetted in advance, with foreign reporters and Foreign Ministry officials having negotiated over what topics were permissible, and then how the acceptable questions would be phrased.

This year CNN, Reuters, CNBC, The Associated Press and The Financial Times were among the outlets permitted to ask questions. Most of those who covered the event agreed it was a lackluster affair, without even a nugget of bona fide news.

According to several foreign journalists involved in the negotiations – a process that began months ago – there were a few non-negotiables: no questions about the stabbing attack in a train station in southwestern China earlier this month that claimed 29 lives, no mention of the self-immolations in Tibet and no references to Zhou Yongkang, the former powerful head of internal security who is reportedly the focus of a corruption inquiry.
(...)
Mr. McDonell, a former president of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China, has been one of the more vocal critics of the Chinese government’s efforts to manipulate its public image through what he and others describe as “fake” reporters – foreigners employed by media outlets that masquerade as overseas news organizations, but are entities controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.

Earlier this week, Mr. McDonell and several other Western reporters caused a stir at a news conference headlined by China’s central banker after the moderator picked on a succession of people employed by party-affiliated outlets – and ignoring members of the overseas press. When the moderator announced it was time to call on a foreign reporter and pointed at a young Australian woman working for Global CAMG Media Group, a Chinese-owned company based in Melbourne, Australia, Mr. McDonell shouted, “Can we have questions from the real foreign press?”


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## Costas (Mar 19, 2014)

(Reuters)
In a rare but brief interview, Abdullah Mansour, leader of the rebel Turkestan Islamic Party, said it was his holy duty to fight the Chinese.

"The fight against China is our Islamic responsibility and we have to fulfill it," he said from an undisclosed location.

"China is not only our enemy, but it is the enemy of all Muslims ... We have plans for many attacks in China," he said, speaking in the Uighur language through an interpreter.

"We have a message to China that East Turkestan people and other Muslims have woken up. They cannot suppress us and Islam any more. Muslims will take revenge."


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## Zazula (Mar 19, 2014)

Θιβετιανοί μαστίφ κι εκατομμύρια δολάρια: http://www.hindustantimes.com/world...million-in-china-report/article1-1197006.aspx


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## Costas (Mar 22, 2014)

Ταϊβανέζικα συμβάντα με ελαφρό άρωμα Ουκρανίας. 3 ρεπορτάζ:

-1-
*Opponents of China Trade Deal Occupy Taiwan’s Legislature*
By AUSTIN RAMZY (NYT, Sinosphere blog, 19/3/14)

Hundreds of people have occupied Taiwan’s legislature to protest a trade deal with China that they fear will give Beijing too much influence over the island’s economy.

The protesters, including many students from local universities, stormed into the legislature around 9 p.m. Tuesday, holding up banners that accused President Ma Ying-jeou and his allies in the governing Kuomintang party of forcing through the measure without allowing a review of its details.

The measure, which drops barriers on service trades, is a follow-up accord to the 2010 Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement between Beijing and Taipei. The services agreement has raised concerns in Taiwan that it will harm local businesses.

China considers self-governed Taiwan, to which Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces retreated after losing a civil war to the Communists in 1949, to be part of its territory that must eventually be reunified.

The demonstrators said they had occupied the legislative assembly hall to protest a trade act that would “forfeit Taiwan’s future,” according to a statement posted on Facebook. The police had tried unsuccessfully to oust the protesters late Tuesday night.

Outside the legislature Wednesday morning, hundreds more demonstrators listened to speeches, while police officers with riot shields blocked the front entrance and workers installed barbed-wire barriers around surrounding buildings.

“I feel at this point it might be a little bit too late, but if we don’t have this kind of activity, then we won’t be able to let the government hear the voice of the people,” said Chen Ying-yu, a 25-year-old hospital worker. She joined the protesters outside the legislature before starting her shift on Wednesday.

“If we decide that our future is only in trading with China, then we will just restrict ourselves,” said Huang Pei-hao, 20, a junior at Fo Guang University, who spoke to a group of demonstrators outside the legislature.

The opposition Democratic Progressive Party accused the Kuomintang of breaking an agreement to conduct an itemized review of the trade pact. The Kuomintang responded on Wednesday that the move was necessary because D.P.P. legislators had tried to block official business. “The D.P.P. is encouraging people to use unreasonable behavior to voice their opinion and this should be severely condemned,” read a statement posted on the Kuomintang’s website.

Under the agreement the two sides would lower barriers on cross-strait investment in dozens of fields including health care, finance and insurance. The D.P.P. said it would fight approval of the deal, but it lacked the votes to thwart the Kuomintang, which holds 65 of 113 legislative seats, versus 40 for the D.P.P.

An opinion poll released last week by Taiwan Indicators Survey Research found that 44.5 percent of respondents opposed the trade deal, while 32.8 percent supported it and 22.9 percent did not respond. A majority, 73.7 percent, said they endorsed a line-item review of the agreement.

-2-
*Students in the house*
By Banyan (The Economist, 3/20/14)

NEARLY three days into their occupation of the debating chamber of the Legislative Yuan, Taiwan’s parliament, in Taipei, dozens of activists, mostly students, show no sign of flagging. They broke in on Tuesday evening, March 18th, and resisted attempts by the police to evict them overnight. Since then, a stand-off has persisted. The police are stopping new arrivals from joining them, but allow in food and water. The protesters include a team of white-coated medics. They look well settled.

Three legislators from the main opposition, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), started 70-hour hunger-strikes just before the occupation. They are taking eight-hour shifts in the parliament to afford the protesters extra protection—to shift the students, the police will also have to manhandle the legislators.

Outside, a crowd of several hundred ignores the drizzle to listen to speeches and songs, wave artificial sunflowers, and shout denunciations of the government and of Taiwan’s president, Ma Ying-jeou.

The occupation was billed as lasting 120 hours, to block a plenary parliamentary session on Friday 21st March, and to provide a deadline for the government to meet the protesters’ demands. These are three-fold: they want Mr Ma to come to the chamber himself to apologise for the way in which his party pushed an agreement on opening up services trade with China through parliament on Monday (available here, in Chinese); they also want the parliamentary speaker, Wang Jin-pyng (who happens to be a rival to Mr Ma in the ruling party, the Kuomintang, or KMT ) to come to pay his respects; and they want legislation passed to institutionalise parliament’s right to scrutinise such agreements item by item.

The DPP insists the students are acting on their own initiative. But it is supporting their protest, which it believes is tapping a rich vein of discontent with the government, focusing on the services-trade agreement.

The sit-in was provoked by what the DPP sees as the KMT’s breaking of its promise to allow a parliamentary committee to review the agreement clause by clause. At a press conference on March 20th, the DPP’s chairman, Su Tseng-chang, portrayed this as a “key moment” for Taiwan’s quarter-century-old democracy, which he said the party would “do whatever it takes” to protect.

In less lofty terms, the DPP seems to have spotted an opportunity to exploit the unpopularity of a man they call “a 9% president”—a reference to the low point Mr Ma’s approval rating fell to last year in opinion polls—on an issue where they think he is weak. With local elections in December and a new presidential contest due in 2016, when Mr Ma will have to stand down, the DPP seems to think it has the KMT on the run.

Improving relations with China has been a central theme of Mr Ma’s presidency since he took office in 2008. In 2010 China and Taiwan signed the Economic Co-operation Framework Agreement (ECFA), significantly boosting cross-strait ties. The services agreement, signed last June, is part of the effort to implement that framework.

At the press conference, Mr Su spoke under a banner reading: “Demand substantial review; restart negotiations with China.” The DPP argues the agreement will hurt small businesses on Taiwan and is lopsided in some of its market-opening measures. But also, the party’s roots are in the movement that wants Taiwan to declare formal independence from China; it worries about Taiwan’s becoming too dependent economically on the mainland. Hsiao Bi-khim, one of the DPP hunger-strikers, thinks most people on Taiwan are behind it on this, since they have yet to see the benefits they were promised from ECFA. The economy is still, by local standards, sluggish.

For his part, Mr Ma may be thinking about his legacy, and wanting to use his remaining years in power to make a breakthrough in relations with China. Last month Nanjing in China played host to the first formal meeting between ministers from China and Taiwan in their government capacities since the end of the civil war in 1949 formalised the division. A next step would be a summit between Mr Ma and China’s president, Xi Jinping. Hopes that the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation summit in Beijing this autumn might provide an opportunity are fading. But it would be easier to achieve a meeting elsewhere if the implementation of ECFA were going well.

In the shorter term, however, Mr Ma has a nasty local problem. The students say they will not leave after their five-day deadline if their demands have not been met; and they may take their “occupy” strategy to other targets: Mr Ma’s own office, for example.

It is already highly unusual for a government to have tolerated the seizure of parliament by protesters for so long. But, fearful of the ugly headlines using force against peaceful students would attract, it does not have many easy options.

-3-
*Taiwan Legislature occupiers' ultimatum passes without response from government*
By Ray Sanchez and Zoe Li, CNN (21/3/14)

Hundreds of student protesters barricaded inside Taiwan's Legislature for the past four days say they are disappointed by the government's failure to respond to their ultimatum Friday.

The demonstrators, mostly university students, are protesting against the ruling party's push for a trade pact with China, which they claim will hurt the island. The movement has been dubbed the "Sunflower Revolution" by Taiwanese media.

The group leading the protest -- The Coalition of Student and Civic Groups against the Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement -- announced the ultimatum on Thursday, demanding that President Ma Ying-jeou withdraw the controversial trade agreement and issue an apology by noon Friday.

As the deadline passed, no direct response from Ma was given, and student protesters appeared on Taiwanese television expressing their disappointment. They said they would continue to occupy Legislature and would announce their next move at a press conference to be held at 6 p.m. local time (E.T. 6 a.m.) Friday.

The protesters entered the main assembly hall inside the Legislative Yuan in Taipei on Tuesday night and blocked the entrances with chairs, according to images and accounts filed from the scene with CNN iReport <http://ireport.cnn.com/topics/1108725>.

Police responded but had not dispersed the protesters, who also filled the streets around the Legislature in the center of Taipei.

By March 19, Taiwan's state news agency reported that 38 police officers were injured* when more than 400 protesters took over the Legislature.

Four protesters were arrested in two unsuccessful attempts to evict them, the news agency reported. Police said there were more than 2,000 protesters both inside and outside the building, with a equal number of officers on the scene.

"We do not want to clash with the police," said protester and iReporter Shanny Chang, 19. "We just have to let the government know that never try to fool the people."

One CNN iReporter said that after the protesters took over, hundreds gathered outside the building, with some making speeches and singing songs.

In a video, a young woman sings Bob Dylan's song "The Times They are a-Changin'," which many associate with the protest spirit of the 1960s.

"She played the Dylan song because she thinks the lyrics match the ongoing events happening in Taiwan," said iReporter George Chang, 24, who shot the video. "Bob Dylan isn't really that popular in Taiwan, especially not to the 8th grade generation, what Taiwanese call children born after 1991, but to the older generations I think he isn't a stranger to them."

The trade pact was signed last year in Shanghai to ease investment and trade between the two longtime adversaries, mainland China and Taiwan.

"The agreement was passed without proper procedure; that's why the people are angry," said Kaiyu Chang, who shot this photo of a crowd assembled in Taipei Wednesday.

But opponents have voiced concerns that not only will Taiwan's economy be hurt as businesses and investments flow to China, but the island's democratic system could be undermined by closer ties with the mainland.

"The trade agreement was not supervised by the people of Taiwan, and benefits only big companies and harnesses our jobs," Chang wrote. "But I do agree we need to open Taiwan to the world, even China too. But NOT this way, not by signing an agreement that is not fair to us and was negotiated by people who have no profession in these territories. We must rewrite the agreement and make it work for the both of us, towards a peaceful future between the strait of Taiwan."

An iReporter identified as kwarrior, an Asian-American living in Taiwan, wrote that the government's handling of the trade agreement "was unconstitutional and a blatant violation of the people's rights. ... I care deeply because my parents are Taiwanese and they always loved their nation like no other. I am personally affected because I value the rights of the people to voice and make changes in a democratic country."

In a statement, Amnesty International urged security forces to show restraint.

"The situation is clearly tense. ... While police have a duty to maintain order and to protect the safety of the public, the response must only be proportionate to the threat. Force should only be used as a last resort. The authorities must ensure the rights of all those protesting are upheld and respected," said Roseann Rife, the group's East Asia research director.

Last month, Taiwan and China held their highest-level talks in more than six decades, marking the first government-to-government contact since the pair's acrimonious split in 1949.

Wang Yu-chi of Taiwan's Mainland Affairs Council, which oversees the island's China policy, met with his mainland counterpart, Zhang Zhijun of China's Taiwan Affairs Office.

After the meeting, China's state news agency Xinhua said the two sides had agreed to open a regular communication channel.

"We should both be resolute to not let cross-strait relations suffer any more twists and turns and never let (the relationship) go backward," Zhang was quoted as saying.

Previous contact between the two sides has been conducted through semi-official foundations or through political parties, not by government ministers acting in their official capacities.

Beijing considers Taiwan a breakaway province and has never ruled out the use of force to achieve reunification.

Taiwan also calls itself the Republic of China.

Relations between the two sides have improved since Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou came to power in 2008. On Wednesday, Ma called for the passage of the trade pact.

*Ένας σχολιαστής ισχυρίζεται: The statement that 38 police officers have been injured which appears in the CNN article posted earlier is almost certainly fabricated. It was first reported in Want China Times, a fiercely pro-Beijing source. All other indications are that this has been a very civil and respectful protest.
----------------------------
Στο λινκαρισμένο ταϊβανέζικο βίντεο από την κατάληψη των φοιτητών ο πρόεδρος της Ταϊβάν παριστάνεται με κέρατα ελαφιού. Ο λόγος:

President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) has a doctorate from Harvard University, and yet he could still say with authority in a speech to Lions Club International that deer antlers, a famous New Zealand export, are the part of the deer’s fur that grows inside its ear. The president emphasized the point by indicating his own right ear. This was broadcast on TV, so there was little possibility his words were misheard or misrepresented by the media.


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## Costas (Mar 22, 2014)

*Sunflower Student Movement.*
(P. Kerim Friedman, στο μπλογκ του Savage Minds, Notes and Queries in Anthropology) (22/3/14)

Διεξοδική ανάλυση, πλήθος υπερδεσμών, βίντεο και φωτογραφίες από το Κίνημα των Ηλιοτροπίων.

_P. Kerim Friedman is an associate professor in the Department of Ethnic Relations and Cultures at National Dong Hwa University, in Taiwan, where he teaches linguistic and visual anthropology. He is co-director of the film _Please Don't Beat Me, Sir!_, winner of the 2011 Jean Rouch Award from the Society of Visual Anthropology._

Από το άρθρο του J. Michael Cole, _Taiwanese Occupy Legislature Over China Pact_ (The Diplomat) που λινκάρει ο Kerim Fredman στο άρθρο του:

Controversy over the Cross-Strait Services Trade Agreement (CSSTA) began in June 2013 after negotiators from Taiwan’s semi-official Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF) signed the agreement, a follow-on to the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) signed in 2010, with their Chinese counterparts. The breadth and scope of the reciprocal agreement, which was negotiated behind closed doors and would open various sectors of the service industry to China, was such that many legislators from the KMT, whose leadership favors closer ties with China, balked, fearing the pact’s repercussions on their constituencies.

After the KMT imposed internal measures making dissent grounds for expulsion, its reluctant legislators fell in line and began the process of passing the pact in the legislature.

However, close scrutiny by opposition lawmakers, academics, and civic organizations, which held a series of peaceful protests, compelled the government to submit the CSSTA to the legislature for consideration. Further pressure from civil society, which feared negative consequences of the pact not only for Taiwan’s economy, but also for freedom of speech and other aspects of the nation’s democracy, eventually forced the government to compromise. A June 25, 2013 agreement stipulated that the pact would be reviewed clause-by-clause. Additionally, on September 25, parties agreed to hold a total of 16 public hearings — eight chaired by the KMT, and eight by the opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) — for consultations with academics, NGOs, and many of the sectors that stood to be affected by the pact.

The KMT held its eight hearings within the space of a week, with several members of social groups and NGOs complaining about lack of access. Moreover, several business representatives were not invited to attend, or were informed at the last minute, making their participation all but impossible.

Following completion of the hearings and substantial input by academics and the business sector, KMT Legislator Chang Ching-chung, the presiding chair of the legislature’s Internal Administrative Committee, said the agreement could not be amended and had to be adopted as is, raising questions over the utility of the public hearings. The hearings and legislative battles over the CSSTA nevertheless made it impossible to pass it by the end of 2013, as the government had hoped.

Negotiations on the matter resumed in the legislature in March 2014, when DPP Legislator Chen Chi-mai secured the right to plan the agenda for a clause-by-clause review as agreed earlier. However, KMT legislators blocked the process, leading to clashes in the legislature over a period of three days. Meanwhile, civic organizations launched a sit-in outside the LY.

Then, on March 17, with the legislature brought to a standstill and the DPP occupying the podium, Chang, citing Article 61 of the Legislative Yuan Functions Act, announced that the review process had gone beyond the 90 days allotted for review. The agreement should therefore be considered to have been reviewed and be submitted to a plenary session on March 21 for a final vote. Immediately, the Executive Yuan “congratulated” Chang for successfully reviewing the agreement, even though no review was ever held, and experts later noted that Article 61 did not apply, as the CSSTA is a component of the ECFA, which itself is a “prospective treaty” (准條約) and not an executive order. With 65 members in the 113-seat legislature, the KMT was assured a victory, with expectations that the pact could be implemented as early as June 2014.

The sudden announcement caught everybody by surprise and sparked anger among the public. The sit-ins continued on the evening of March 17, followed by a much larger one on the evening of March 18.

Αυτές οι κοινοβουλευτικές πρακτικές κάτι μου θυμίζουν, μα τι μου θυμίζουν...


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## Costas (Mar 22, 2014)

Το κίνημα έχει βεβαίως και το σχετικό άρθρο στη Wikipedia: Sunflower Student Movement.


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## Costas (Mar 23, 2014)

Είναι πρωί στην Ταϊβάν, οπότε όποιος θέλει να παρακολουθήσει ζωντανά τις εργασίες της κατάληψης μπορεί να το κάνει εδώ. :)


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## Costas (Mar 25, 2014)

[Η Wikipedia, που έχει καλό άρθρο για την κατάληψη της ταϊβανέζικης Βουλής, δεν θεώρησε ωστόσο την είδηση αρκετά σημαντική ώστε να την περιλάβει στο κουτί των "παραμόνιμων" ειδήσεων της πρώτης σελίδας της. Στη ροή, αντιθέτως, υπάρχει, στην Κυριακή 23 Μαρτίου, ως εξής:

Sunflower Student Movement in Taiwan
Protesters opposed to the vote of the Cross-Strait Trade Agreement without a clause-by-clause review continue to occupy the Taiwanese parliament.
Protesters push to occupy the nearby Executive Yuan as well. (FocusTaiwan).

Περίεργο· κάθε πότε καταλαμβάνεται παγκοσμίως Κοινοβούλιο χώρας από διαμαρτυρόμενους, φοιτητές εν προκειμένω;]

Ενημέρωση από το άρθρο της Wikipedia:
Premier Jiang met with demonstrators outside the legislature on March 22 but stated that the executive branch had no intention of dropping the trade pact. At a press conference on March 23, President Ma restated his resolve in passing the trade pact and affirmed he did not act according to orders from Beijing.
In response to the press conference, a group of protesters stormed and occupied the Executive Yuan around 7:30 p.m. local time on March 23. The protesters were removed from the Executive Yuan with high-pressure water cannons by 5:00 a.m. on March 24, but some congregated again on Zhongxiao East Road.

Legislative Yuan = η Βουλή, πρακτικά. Executive Yuan = Η κυβέρνηση και το κτίριο όπου εδρεύει.


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## Costas (Mar 25, 2014)

Ο πρόεδρος της Κίνας πραγματοποιεί περιοδεία στην Ευρώπη (προχτές ήταν στις Κάτω Χώρες). Επικαιρότητα από τη Γαλλία. Αλλά πρώτα το πλαίσιο, από τη γαλλική Wikipedia (τα παχιά δικά μου):

*Institut franco-chinois de Lyon*

Fondé septembre 1921 grâce au concours d'intellectuels et d'hommes politiques en France et en Chine, l'Institut franco-chinois de Lyon ( IFCL - 里昂中法大学 Lǐ'áng zhōng fǎ dàxué) était une école réservée aux étudiants Chinois. Elle avait pour fonction principale de préparer ces étudiants aux études universitaires en France. Les personnalités à l'initiative du projet furent notamment Li Shizeng 李石曾, Wu Zhihui 吴稚挥 et Chu Minyi 褚民谊, des intellectuels Chinois basés en France, fondateurs d'un groupe anarchiste positiviste et cosmopolite, Cai Yuanpei 蔡元培, philosophe et recteur de l'université de Pékin, Maurice Courant, Professeur de Chinois à l'Université de Lyon, Paul Joubin, Recteur de l'académie de Lyon et Edouard Herriot, Maire de Lyon.

Situé au sein du Fort St Irénée dans le 5e arrondissement de Lyon, l'Institut hébergea, entre 1921 et 1946, 473 étudiants, dont 51 filles, originaires de différentes provinces chinoises (Guangdong, Hebei, Jiangxi, Henan, Hubei, Fujian, Shandong, etc). Parmi ces étudiants, 140 réalisèrent une thèse de doctorat dans une université française, pour la plupart au sein des facultés de l'Université de Lyon. Les disciplines choisies par ces étudiants couvraient l’ensemble du champ académique de l’époque : Médecine, Sciences naturelles, Biologie, Pharmacie, Mathématiques, Lettres, Géographie, Histoire, Droit. Certains étudiants de l'IFCL sont devenus ensuite des scientifiques réputés, des universitaires de renom, des écrivains ou des artistes reconnus.

Après leur passage à l'IFCL, la plupart de ces étudiants ont vécu dans ce qui deviendra la République Populaire de Chine. Après la Guerre civile entre nationalistes et communistes (1946-1949), certains se sont ensuite installés à Taiwan ou à Hong-Kong. Leurs trajectoires plurielles reflètent l'histoire chaotique de la Chine moderne et contemporaine. Parmi les étudiants remarquables de l'IFCL, nous pouvons citer les personnalités suivantes: Zheng Dazhang 郑大章, doctorant de Marie Curie et pionnier des études sur le radium en Chine; Zhang Xi 张玺, précurseur de l'océanographie chinoise; Yang Kun 楊堃, fondateur des études ethnologiques en Chine ; le célèbre poète et essayiste moderniste Dai Wangshu 戴望舒, ; Su Xuelin 苏雪林, une des premières femmes écrivains dans l'histoire de la littérature moderne chinoise, professeur à l'Université Chenggong de Tainan (Taiwan); La peintre Pan Yuliang 潘玉良; le mathématicien et ancien Ministre de la justice de la République de Chine (Taiwan), Zheng Yanfen 郑严芬.

*Une légende tenace accrédite l'idée que Zhou Enlai 周恩来 et Deng Xiaoping 邓小平 ont étudié, ou au moins séjourné, au sein de l'IFCL. Pourtant, aucune trace dans les archives administratives ne permet de valider cette assertion.*
(...)
*Xi Jinping, le président actuel de la République Populaire de Chine, viendra lors de son voyage diplomatique en France visiter l'institut le mercredi 26 mars 2014.*

Και ένα σχόλιο που το υπογράφουν δύο πανεπιστημιακοί κινεζικών σπουδών της Λυόν (mediapart):

*‘In the Steps of Deng Xiaoping’ - Xi Jinping’s Visit to Lyon, Academic Freedom, and the Re-Writing of History*
24 mars 2014 | Par G.B. Lee
President of China, and General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping, is visiting France this week. Airbus contracts will be signed, and French wine exports discussed, but the Chinese delegation has also decided to incorporate a cultural and historical aspect to events by visiting the site of the former Sino-French University Institute (1921-1946) located in Lyon. At first sight this visit would seem to be a wonderful photo-opportunity for the city of Lyon. However, are local and national politicians aware of the political and symbolic implications of this decision? Prudence is demanded when history is turned into a show by a state determined to control public utterances and historical accounts concerning it both at home, and now abroad. Indeed, the Chinese news stories already circulating show that a main objective of Chinese coverage of the visit is to emphasise a return to the orthodox sources of Communist Party legitimacy by allusion to the supposed presence of Communist Chinese legends Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping in Lyon. The latter however is a total historical fallacy. A second objective is demonstrating the PRC is retrospectively responsible for and in control of all of China’s modern history irrespective of its past political colours.

Sticking to the seemingly political and symbolic neutrality of economics would have permitted the City of Lyon to save face. Certainly, hosting a state visit of the leader of the largest dictatorship on earth is less than glorious, but the attractive contracts sugar-coat the pill that would otherwise have been difficult to swallow.

However, Lyon also benefits from a very particular historical relationship with China, and not simply through its well-known silk trade connections. Thanks to the history of the Sino-French University Institute, Lyon was fortunate in being the site of a unique intellectual, academic and educational experiment with China. Between 1921 and 1946, numerous residents of this elite college for Chinese students would become celebrated pioneering academics and scientists, certain of them occupying high functions, while others became famous authors, poets and painters. For a long time neglected in France, this venture initiated by progressive and anarchist Chinese intellectuals is well-known in China itself, and constitutes an important episode in the country’s political and intellectual history.

Over the past few years the Lyon municipal authorities have come to understand the potential of this major cultural capital and a small museum telling the Institute’s story has been created in its former premises. During his visit President Xi will visit Fort St. Irénée — the original site of the Sino-French Institute now student accommodation for French and foreign students alike. In preparation for the President’s visit the original 1921 Chinese and French names of the institute engraved over the old archway have been re-gilded, and a nearby building requisitioned for a temporary exhibition which the Chinese leader will briefly visit on 26th March.

Thus unique heritage was obviously a deciding factor in the choice of the Chinese President’s extra-Parisian leg of his visit (other cities such as Lille and, the home to Airbus, Toulouse, had also been contenders for this favour), but it would be naive to think that this decision was motivated by anything but Chinese internal political considerations. The authorities of the People’s Republic of China know better than anyone that History, it its spectacular and falsified version, is a remarkable tool in reinforcing the legitimacy of power.

President Xi JInping’s visit to Lyon will necessarily be the opening item on China's flagship news programmes this coming week. Footage of the President in this mythic Sino-French melting-pot will be no less fictional than the successful Chinese TV soap « Our Years in France » which told the story of young Chinese revolutionary students in 1920s France, and which also evoked the history of the Institute. Over images of the great leader in Lyon, the news announcer will mention the homage rendered to the late revered leaders Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping, held to be illustrious former residents of the Institute, even though in the Archives there is no trace of their ever having been there. The message will be clear: Xi Jinping is returning to the historic sources of the Chinese Communist movement and confirming his alignment with his hardline predecessor.

The fact that Lyon’s Sino-French Institute had no connection with the Chinese Communist Party, and that the Chinese and French founders of this atypical institution took the trouble to inscribe political and religious neutrality into its rules of conduct, are mere details. The media show could not care less about historical truth. And beyond the supposed Communist legacy of the Institute, is quite simply the PRC state’s desire to recuperate, and monopolize the telling of, all modern history, even that in which the Chinese Communist Party had no part.

However, the Chinese authorities know that history must be manipulated with caution, for it can reflect back badly. The exhibition in honour of Xi Jinping, approved in advance by the Chinese authorities, will note that one of the founding fathers of the Sino-French Institute was a certain Cai Yuanpei, who came to Lyon several times, notably to sign the founding charter of this institution which would prepare its students for advanced study in France. The exhibition will also mention that Cai Yuanpei was a great educator, a one-time Minister of Education, and former President of Peking University.

What it will not foreground is that Cai Yuanpei was an ardent defender of the independence of universities, of freedom of expression and of intellectual pluralism. Even less likely will be any mention of his role as a founder of the Chinese League for the Defence of Civil Rights. Indeed, the politically liberal and humanist opinions of Cai Yuanpei are the antithesis of the policy currently implemented by the new Chinese President, and the situation in Chinese universities today, even in the relatively tolerant Peking University, would doubtless have led the illustrious Cai Yuanpei to despair.

Over the past few months, the hardening of political control, of censorship and suppression of dissident voices has led to some spectacular consequences. There are numerous examples: In October 2013, Xia Yeliang, known for his opinions in favour of political reform, was fired from Peking University on the grounds of academic incompetence; in December 2013, Zhang Xuezhong, Professor of Law at the East China University of Politics and Law suffered the same fate for his calls to respect the 1982 Chinese constitution; even more serious is the case of the renowned and respected professor at the Central Nationalities University, Ilham Tohti, a pacific and moderate defender of the rights of the Uighur minority, who was arrested several weeks ago and accused without any foundation of the crime of promoting separatism, a crime punishable by death. Several of his research students are also in detention. All have been denied legal representation.

What a paradox then to see the leader of a state engaged in a ferocious struggle against independent voices now taking advantage of a photo opportunity in an institution founded by the historic defender of intellectual and academic freedom, Cai Yuanpei. And how unfortunate for Lyon that Xi Jinping should have chosen the city to reinvent and exploit history so as to reinforce his legitimacy during the 25th anniversary year of the fateful Spring of 1989 that ended so disastrously for China’s people. Let us recall that the 4th June Massacre at Tiananmen, where students had gathered to demand greater freedom, and the bloody and violent repression that followed it, were ordered by Deng Xiaoping, then in supreme command of the country.

Reporting on the preparation for the Lyon visit, the local newspaper tells us that the Chinese delegation will want to walk ’’in the steps of Deng Xiaoping.’’ What is certain is that in terms of political and intellectual heritage, it is undeniable that Xi Jinping's Lyon pilgrimage honors the methods of Deng Xiaoping rather than the hopes of Cai Yuanpei.


Gregory B. Lee, Professor of Chinese Studies, University of Lyon (Jean Moulin)
Florent Villard, Associate Professor of Chinese Studies, University of Lyon (Jean Moulin)


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## Costas (Mar 25, 2014)

Νεότερο άρθρο του Michael Cole στο The Diplomat:

*Riot Police Crack Down on Taiwanese Protesters*

The standoff over a controversial trade agreement between Taiwan and China that began on March 19 with the occupation of the legislature took a turn for the worse on March 23 after riot police turned on protesters who had occupied the nearby Executive Yuan, injuring several dozens.

Sunday night’s dramatic events occurred a day after an unsuccessful meeting between Premier Jiang Yi-huah and Lin Fei-fan, one of the leaders of the “sunflower revolution,” and following an international press conference by President Ma Ying-jeou, who refused to meet the group’s demands. Since March 19, tens of thousands of Taiwanese have protested outside the legislature, while about 300 — mostly students — remain shacked up inside the building.

The alliance against the services trade pact, an amalgam of student organizations, lawyers, and civic organizations, had initially demanded that the Cross-Strait Services Trade Agreement (CSSTA), signed in China in June 2013, be reviewed clause-by-clause by the legislature, that a mechanism be set to monitor future agreements with China, and that President Ma apologize for the crisis. It later changed its demands by requesting that the pact be annulled altogether and calling for a national conference on the matter.

Many Taiwanese, including leading economists and politicians, fear that the problematic pact, which was negotiated behind closed doors, will damage vulnerable sectors of Taiwan’s economy. Others fear it plays into Beijing’s unification goals. Although 70 percent of the public favors a line-by-line review of the agreement, President Ma’s Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) broke a promise on March 19 (following deadlock in the legislature) to hold such a review and sent it directly to a plenary session for a vote, sparking the crisis (the KMT has a legislative majority and the Central Committee has threatened any dissenter with suspension).

With no sign of a resolution in sight, a group of protesters slipped past security at the Executive Yuan, the seat of the Cabinet, at 7:35 p.m. on March 23. Immediately the group inside the legislature distanced itself from the action in a press release, though from the leadership on the ground it was obvious that they belonged to the alliance. By 8:30 p.m., a few thousand people were occupying the compound. Following a brief standoff with police, protesters broke into the building through the main door or by climbing ladders to upper windows. Aside from damage to the main doors and two broken windows, there were no other signs of damage to the building. Several thousand people also gathered on Zhongxiao Road in front of the building.

Although police authorities had not acted on orders to evict the activists from the legislature — relations have in fact been rather cordial, with protesters often applauding and thanking law enforcement — Sunday’s occupation of the Executive Yuan was a major escalation, and soon there was chatter that police would intervene. The Cabinet gave the order at 10:30 p.m. and told police to do everything necessary to evict the occupiers by 11 p.m. In response, the Democratic Front Against Cross Strait Trade In Services, one of the groups orchestrating the occupation at the legislature, issued a press release, in which it called on the authorities, “to not use violence to suppress the protesters.” It also called on the government “to not release emergency orders and to not mobilize the armed forces.”

As hundreds of police with shields and batons formed a line in front of the Executive Yuan, an even larger contingent of riot police, flanked by truck-mounted water cannons, faced off with protesters behind the building on Beiping Road. At about midnight, the order was given to rid the area of protesters. About 200 riot police, armed with shields and batons, descended on the protesters as the latter were about to sit down and shouted “please don’t use force against us.” At one side, a young woman, crying, called out to her boyfriend who was among the protesters. Several black-clad riot police swung their batons at young protesters, while police used their PVC shields to hit sitting protesters on the legs. Several dozens of protesters were eventually taken out — oftentimes shoved violently and dragged around — while police pushed out of the area. Protesters complained that the riot police had masked their badge numbers. Journalists who identified themselves as such and showed identification were also ordered to leave.

According to unconfirmed reports, as many as 50 protesters had sustained injuries in clashes with police since the beginning of the occupation.

Meanwhile, at the main site of the Executive Yuan, political leaders from the opposition, including Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Chairman Su Tseng-chang and Tsai Ing-wen, the party’s presidential candidate in 2012 and a former chairperson, joined the group in a bid to prevent a police crackdown. This did not prevent police from moving in. At 2 a.m., police ordered media to leave the Executive Yuan, whereupon riot squads stormed the building and evicted the several dozen protesters who were still inside. Based on accounts by activists and the state of those who were taken out of the building, riot police used excessive force to expel them. Several protesters had head injuries and cuts. One woman, wearing a blazon from the small opposition party Taiwan Solidarity Union, lay unconscious on the ground.

By then, about 600 riot police and several hundred more law-enforcement officers were deployed at the Executive Yuan, while a few thousands protesters remained. Clashes were still occurring at 4:30 a.m., with police using water cannons and tear gas against protesters, who by then were shouting slogans calling on Ma and Jiang to step down.

Although the decision to occupy the Executive Yuan — which did not seem to be supported by everybody inside the legislature — may have undermined the alliance’s image with the public, images of police brutality against predominantly school-age protesters were likely to mitigate the initial drawback and exacerbate public resentment with the administration. Conversely, some critics observed that the alliance’s decision to change its demand from a full review of the pact in the legislature to its annulment may have closed the door on possible negotiations and forced a weakened Ma administration into a corner.

Μου αρέσει η κάλυψή του.

Νά και η περιοχή στο Google Maps. Η πινέζα συν το κίτρινο αστέρι είναι η Βουλή (Legislative Yuan), το δε σκέτο κίτρινο αστέρι είναι η έδρα της κυβέρνησης (行政院) στις οδούς Zhongxiao, Zhongshan και Beiping.


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## Costas (Mar 25, 2014)

*Kobe University Chinese scholar goes missing in China*
By THE ASAHI SHIMBUN

A Chinese-born academic at Kobe University who has done prize-winning research on ethnic Uighurs in China seems to have vanished into thin air after returning to his homeland for a brief visit.

University officials are trying to contact 57-year-old Wang Ke, a professor of area cultural studies in the Faculty of Intercultural Studies.

Wang's specialty is modern Chinese philosophical history, but he is also known for his research on the Uighurs.

According to Kobe University officials, Wang departed for China on March 1, and planned to return to Japan on March 10.

However, on March 10, he phoned his family in Japan and told them his return would be delayed because he needed to look in on his mother in Xian who he said was not feeling well.

Family members have not heard from him since his phone call. They also checked on Wang's mother and found out that she was not ill. They subsequently conferred with Kobe University officials on March 19.

Wang had been scheduled to attend a symposium in Singapore on March 21. However, symposium sponsors said they were contacted by Wang, who told them he would not be able to attend.

Wang was born in Henan province, China. He completed the doctoral program at the University of Tokyo's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in 1994. He has been a professor at Kobe University since 2001.

In 1996, his book about the Uighur independence movement during the 1930s and 40s was awarded the prestigious Suntory Prize for Social Sciences and Humanities.

It is not the first time a Japan-based researcher has not been heard from while visiting China.

In July 2013, China detained Zhu Jianrong, a professor of international relations and Chinese history at Toyo Gakuen University in Tokyo, while he was visiting China. Zhu was released in January and returned to Japan.

Ilham Tohti, a prominent Uighur economist calling for fair political treatment of the Turkic ethnic group in China, has been held in detention since January.


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## Costas (Mar 25, 2014)

(China Digital Times)
As Russia steps-up its occupation of Crimea, China’s government censors were quick to forbid news organizations from making any connection to China’s own sovereignty “issues.” Weibo comments linking the Crimean referendum with Xinjiang, Taiwan, or Tibetan independence were deleted.
(...)
This week’s Minitrues, or censorship instructions issued to the media by government authorities, include (...) from the Central Propaganda Department, instructions that “all media must refrain from hyping or exaggerating the referendum in Crimea.”

_CDT collects and translates sensitive words blocked on Sina Weibo. See CDT’s most recent finds or browse all of CDT’s collected sensitive words._


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## Costas (Mar 26, 2014)

Οι τελευταίες εξελίξεις από την Ταϊπέι:
Taipei Times (3/26/14)
*Protesters willing to meet with Ma*
FOR ALL TO WITNESS:Student protest leaders said a meeting with the president to address the trade pact siege should be held in a public setting
By Alison Hsiao / Staff reporter

The leaders of student protesters occupying the legislative chamber and civic group representatives yesterday agreed to meet with President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) without preconditions, as they called for lawmakers’ support for the passage of an act on the oversight of cross-strait agreements.

The protesters made the statement in response to remarks by Presidential Office spokesperson Lee Chia-fei (李佳霏), who said that Ma is willing to meet with representatives of protesting students “without any preconditions” to help end the standoff over the cross-strait trade agreement and allow the legislature to get back on track.

Lee said Ma is willing to invite representatives of the protesters to the Presidential Office in Taipei to discuss the pact and listen to their views if it will help end the student-led occupation of the legislature that began on Tuesday last week.

Lin Fei-fan (林飛帆), a National Taiwan University graduate student and one of the student leaders, said the protesters agreed to have a conversation with Ma without preconditions and proposed two questions that have attracted wide attention for the potential discussion between the two sides.

“The first question is whether there is a need for the institutionalization of the supervision of cross-strait agreements, and the second is whether such a supervision mechanism needs to be in place before reviewing the cross-strait service trade agreement,” Lin said.

Lin added that the students are willing to converse with Ma “in a public setting” and to discuss “in concrete terms” the questions mentioned.

“By the time we get there to have the conversation, we will not want to take extra time to give him a lecture,” Lin said. Another student leader, Chen Wei-ting (陳為廷), a graduate student at National Tsing Hua University, said that the conversation should not be a private one that can be heard only by the representatives, but one that is open to public witness.

The protest leaders and civil group representatives said that the minutes of the latest legislative meeting on March 17, made public yesterday, showed that the review of the trade pact, which according to Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers has been completed, was not documented.

It means that the issue has been returned to the legislature’s Internal Administrative Committee pending further discussion, the group said.

“We ask the government not to hold any negotiations with the Chinese government until the institutionalization of the supervision of cross-strait agreements. The trade pact must be returned to the Executive Yuan until such institutionalization is completed,” Chen said.

The group called on legislators to promise to respond to their three requests.

“Our first request is that the legalization of a ‘cross-strait agreement oversight act’ be initiated during this legislative plenary session. The second is that any reviews of cross-strait agreements be held off until legislation is finalized. And finally, that the bill be placed on the legislature’s Procedure Committee agenda,” Chen said.

Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌), a research fellow at Academia Sinica, said that the call is “aimed at each legislator rather than only at the party caucus.”

While some, mainly the media, have been asking what the protesters’ “exit strategy” is, Lin said: “It is president Ma who needs to have an ‘exit strategy.’


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## Costas (Mar 29, 2014)

Η είδηση θα ήταν φαιδρή, αν δεν είχε ψηφιστεί πρόσφατα ο νόμος για τις "διαδικτυακές φήμες", που τιμωρεί με φυλάκιση όποιον "διασπείρει ψευδείς ειδήσεις ή συκοφαντίες" στο ίντερνετ και το ποστ του ή το άρθρο του αναδημοσιευτεί 500 φορές και πάνω. Λοιπόν, μετά την πρόσφατη επίσκεψη της Μισέλ Ομπάμα στην ΛΔΚ, ένας γνωστός καθηγητής πανεπιστημίου (που υποτίθεται ότι κατάγεται από το σόι του Κομφούκιου) ο οποίος είχε παλιότερα αποκαλέσει σε εκπομπή της δημόσιας τηλεόρασης τους κατοίκους του Χονγκ Κονγκ "σκυλιά", υπήρξε πρωταγωνιστής της εξής ιστορίας (ΝΥΤ) [τα παχιά δικά μου]:

It was just after Michelle Obama, the American first lady, had extolled the glories of free speech, during a talk last Saturday at the prestigious Peking University, that the student allegedly blurted out her sarcastic retort to the guest of honor.

“Is America’s strength a result of the U.S. secret services listening to the voices of its citizens?” the young woman supposedly asked. “Could you tell me in America what the difference is between ‘listening to’ and ‘listening in’?”

Kong Qingdong, a professor at the university who relayed the exchange via his microblog account on Sina Weibo, described the first lady’s response this way: “Dumbfounded by the question, Michelle Obama eventually replied that she was not there to talk about politics,” Mr. Kong wrote, stirring a maelstrom of indignation from some of his two million followers.

There was only one problem with Mr. Kong’s story: It was completely untrue, according to reporters and students who attended the event.
(...)
Although Mr. Kong boasts a huge following from Chinese neo-leftists and nationalists, he has plenty of enemies. In recent years, editors at Xinhua, the state news agency, and students at Peking University have campaigned, unsuccessfully, to have him dismissed from the university.
(...)
Throughout the week, as it became apparent that he had fabricated the exchange between Mrs. Obama and the imaginary female student, Mr. Kong found himself on the receiving end of online anger and indignant newspaper commentaries.

“This is the hijacking of rumors in the name of patriotism,” the Shenzhen Daily News wrote in an editorial.

As reposts of his tale reached tens of thousands, high-profile commentators called on the authorities to investigate his online behavior. Among them was Ren Zhiqiang, a property magnate with more than 19 million followers on Sina Weibo, who noted that *Mr. Kong’s made-up story had exceeded 500 repostings, the threshold that would allow the authorities to prosecute him for “spreading rumors” under a new law that carries a three-year jail term.*

As of Thursday, however, Mr. Kong remained unshackled, and unrepentant.

“All of you are dogs of America,” one of his posts read, “and traitors to China.”


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## Costas (Mar 31, 2014)

*Large Crowds Fill Taipei Streets in Protest Over China Trade Bill*
By AUSTIN RAMZY (ΝΥΤ)

Large crowds of demonstrators took to the streets of Taipei to protest efforts by the government to approve a trade pact with Beijing and show support for the students who have occupied Taiwan’s legislature for nearly two weeks.

Organizers estimated that at least 350,000 people were gathered, as of 2 p.m., on the streets around the Presidential Office Building to express discontent over a pact that would open up dozens of service fields to cross-strait investment. Police counted 116,000 demonstrators by 4 p.m., according to Taiwan’s Central News Agency, while some television news stations put the number as high as 700,000.

After President Ma Ying-jeou’s ruling party, the Kuomintang, pushed the pact onto the floor of the legislature without an item-by-item review, as previously promised, hundreds of protesters, mostly college students, stormed the legislature chamber on March 18. They have remained, with crowds of supporters filling the streets outside.

The trade pact has spurred concerns that it would harm local businesses and increase Beijing’s influence over Taiwan, a self-ruled island it claims as part of its territory. While many demonstrators are opposed to the service trade pact, the most widely held complaint was that the measure has not been sufficiently examined. A poll before the occupation of the legislature indicated that more than 70 percent of respondents supported a line-by-line review of the pact.

“The level of public trust with President Ma and his government is really low throughout the country, and the review of this pact has been very cursory,” said Wu Hsiang-min, a 30-year-old engineer who joined the black-clad protesters Sunday in central Taipei. “So I felt that if the students were willing to stand up on this matter, then I should stand up, too.”

On Saturday, Mr. Ma attempted to respond to some of the students’ demands, saying he would back an itemized review of the trade pact and a law that would allow the legislature to more closely monitor agreements with Beijing.

Mr. Ma said he was opposed to demands that the pact, which was signed by quasi-governmental organizations representing Taiwan and China last year but still needs legislative approval, should be withdrawn. The president has said that the deal is necessary for Taiwan’s economy to maintain its competitiveness with regional rivals like South Korea, and that failure to approve it could harm Taiwan’s ability to enter into other trade agreements.

Mr. Ma’s Kuomintang controls the legislature, with 65 of 113 seats, meaning it can eventually win approval of the measure. Protesters had called for Mr. Ma, as the party’s chairman, to relax rules that enforce discipline on voting by its members in the expectation that some K.M.T. legislators might oppose aspects of the pact. Mr. Ma said Saturday that such decisions were made by the party’s legislative caucus and not directly under his control.

On Saturday, a much smaller demonstration of a few thousand people gathered outside Taipei’s central train station to show support for Mr. Ma’s government. “I want the students to leave the legislature,” said Chang Wei-feng, 24, from Taichung in central Taiwan. “You can’t use this sort of occupation in the middle of a democratic process.”


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## Costas (Mar 31, 2014)

Και από την Guardian:

*More than 100,000 protesters rally in Taiwan against trade pact with China *
Protesters say deal was rushed through and could leave Taiwan beholden to China's Communist party leaders
By Reuters

More than 100,000 protesters took to the streets of Taiwan's capital on Sunday as a two-week-long campaign against a trade pact with China gathered steam, piling further pressure on the island's leader.

The rally in Taipei – where many were dressed in black and some clutched sunflowers to symbolise hope – was one of the largest in recent years in Taiwan, an island that split from China over six decades ago after a civil war.

Protesters say the deal to open 80 of China's service sectors to Taiwan and 64 Taiwanese sectors to China was rushed through, and could leave Taiwan increasingly beholden to China's Communist party leaders.

Some called for the resignation of Taiwan's China-friendly president Ma Ying-jeou, whose popularity has plunged despite helping to improve ties with China since taking office in 2008.

"We must safeguard our island's interests," said Chin Mei Ching, a 29-year-old mother who was pushing her one-year-old daughter in a buggy. "We have to guard against China using the economy to control us."

A coalition of student and civil groups behind the demonstration said that around 500,000 people had massed in streets near the presidential palace and the parliament building that has been occupied by protesters for nearly a fortnight.

Police put the figure at 116,000.

Police erected steel barricades to prevent protesters from reaching major government buildings including the cabinet offices that were raided by students last Sunday, sparking scuffles and the use of water cannon by police.

"We will not back down," said Lin Fei Fan, one of the student leaders behind the occupation of Taiwan's legislature. "The large turnout today shows there is a clear majority in Taiwan that demands President Ma address our concerns in an acceptable manner." Activists have plastered anti-Ma banners on the legislature walls, and stacks of armchairs block the exits.

Ma has said the trade agreement is necessary for Taiwan's economic future, but opponents say the deal could hurt small Taiwanese companies. Many also worry the pact will allow Beijing to expand its influence over a fiercely independent and proudly democratic territory that China sees as a renegade province.


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## Costas (Apr 1, 2014)

*Years After Revolt, Chinese Village Glumly Returns to Polls*
By DAN LEVIN (NYT)

WUKAN, China — After staging a very public revolt against official corruption and then voting in remarkably unfettered democratic elections, the people who live in this southern Chinese village returned to the polls on Monday amid torrential rains and growing fears that the Communist Party was taking back control of their local government.

In December 2011, villagers in Wukan, a fishing hamlet of 15,000 in Guangdong Province, took to the streets in large protests, chased out local party officials they accused of illegal real estate deals and engaged in an 11-day standoff with armed security forces. After drawing the attention of the international news media, the confrontation ended peacefully when senior Communist Party officials from the provincial capital agreed to allow free elections and promised to investigate the land deals at the heart of the protests.

In March 2012, residents voted into office a number of the protest leaders, raising hopes, however faint, that the so-called Wukan model of grass-roots democratic participation might be the start of a political overhaul in a nation governed by single-party authoritarian rule.

Yet as they arrived on Monday at a heavily guarded schoolyard to begin the process of electing a new seven-member village committee, many voters said they had come to view their earlier electoral success as the beginning of the end of local self-governance.

“There’s a lot less enthusiasm this time around,” said Wang Jinzhen, 62, after she stuffed her paper ballot into a locked metal box. “We still haven’t gotten our land back. The municipal and township governments are corrupt, and they don’t want to help us solve this problem.”

Such widespread disenchantment was heightened by the Communist Party’s recent moves to undo Wukan’s hard-won political independence. Early last month, villagers said, higher-level authorities in Donghai township, which includes Wukan, appointed a formerly ousted official to be the next deputy secretary of the Wukan party committee, and he will be joined by four of his former colleagues.

Villagers were particularly outraged by the arrests on bribery charges of two protest leaders they elected in 2012, Yang Semao and Hong Ruichao, just weeks before Monday’s election. Mr. Yang was later released on bail, though Mr. Hong remains in custody. Another protest leader fled to the United States this year and is seeking political asylum based on claims that he, too, will become a target of the authorities for challenging their rule.

The Chinese government introduced local village elections in the 1980s, but party officials often decide who runs or rig the results to maintain power. Analysts said the shortcomings of Wukan’s independently elected leaders, hamstrung by higher authorities or perhaps because of their own failings, had exposed the limitations of village-level democracy in China and the risks of trying to push those boundaries.

“The government just does whatever it wants, and if you say anything they arrest you,” said Cai Keizhou, 35, a driver who participated in the 2011 protests. “It’s like an adult beating a child.”

Holding a crimson umbrella beneath a propaganda banner that read “civilized election; fair competition,” Mr. Yang, 47, who was hoping to be elected village chief, had a simple explanation for his detention, “We’re not collaborators.”

As for the corruption charges, Mr. Yang has acknowledged accepting 20,000 renminbi, or about $3,200, in bribes but said he immediately donated half to a local school and returned the remaining amount. He would not say who gave him the money. Although the authorities first questioned Mr. Yang and Mr. Hong about the bribery accusations last May, they only decided to detain them two weeks ago, raising suspicions that their detentions were aimed at preventing them from running again.

A bigger concern among voters, however, was the lack of resolution over the land deals that prompted the initial protests. The land, more than 1,000 acres of farmland jointly owned by the villagers, had been sold to developers by the former party secretary, Xue Chang, who held the post for more than three decades before he was ousted during the rebellion. He was later convicted on corruption charges. Despite a promised investigation by the provincial government, only a small portion of the land, some of which contains a pig farm, a hotel and other properties, has been returned.

Frustrated by the lack of progress, about 400 villagers returned to the streets in protest last April. Only after the village chief, Lin Zuluan, sat down to negotiate with officials in Lufeng city, which oversees Wukan, did people return to their homes. But Mr. Lin, a former protest leader, has become a target of popular frustration, with some villagers saying he has become too close to the authorities he once challenged. “I used to idolize Lin but no longer,” said Hong Ruiqin, 37, a hairdresser whose brother remains in police detention on bribery charges.

On Monday night, local authorities announced that Mr. Lin had been re-elected with more than 5,000 of more than 8,000 votes. Voting will resume on Tuesday to elect two deputy chiefs and four committee members. “The election in 2012 was voted on emotions and feelings,” Mr. Lin told journalists in his living room after his victory. “Now it’s much more mature. We have a clearer understanding of democracy.”

Land disputes are a major cause of unrest in China. About 90,000 protests or other expressions of civil unrest occur across the country each year, two-thirds of them related to land appropriated by local authorities who then resell the property to commercial developers with little or no compensation provided to the former occupants, according to a 2011 survey by the Landesa Rural Development Institute of Seattle, Renmin University in Beijing and Michigan State University.

In Wukan, many villagers expected that their political victory two years ago would end the need for street protests over land. Li Fan, an elections expert who runs the World and China Institute in Beijing, said they sorely misread China’s political reality. “Even though the elected village committee in Wukan represented the people’s interests, it still didn’t have any power to deal with higher-level governments or big state-owned enterprises that have strong political connections,” he said. “Wukan’s last election was very successful, but it solved nothing. Even if it’s a success this time around, it won’t solve anything either.”

Yet villagers unhappy with the performance of their elected leadership turned out in droves to support it anyway. According to the authorities, voter turnout on Monday was above 90 percent. “If you don’t vote at all, the municipal government will just install the old corrupt officials,” said Hong Xiaozhuang, 19, a high school student. “But if you vote there’s still a silver lining of hope.”


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## Costas (Apr 1, 2014)

*Mao's Little Red Book: A Global History*, by Alexander C. Cook - paperback
Mao Zedong's Little Red Book (Quotations from Chairman Mao) - a compilation of the Chinese leader's speeches and writings - is one of the most visible and ubiquitous symbols of twentieth-century radicalism. Published for the first time in 1964, it rapidly became the must-have accessory for Red Guards and revolutionaries from Berkeley to Bamako. Yet, despite its worldwide circulation and enduring presence there has, until now, been no serious scholarly effort to understand this seminal text as a global historical phenomenon. Mao's Little Red Book brings together a range of innovative scholars from around the world to explore the fascinating variety of uses and forms that Mao's Quotations has taken, from rhetoric, art and song, to talisman, badge, and weapon. The authors of this pioneering volume use Mao's Quotations as a medium through which to re-examine the history of the twentieth-century world, challenging established ideas about the book to reveal its remarkable global impact.


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## Costas (Apr 1, 2014)

*What’s Going on in Taiwan?*
(China Matters)
The ineluctable drift of Taiwan outside of the PRC’s political orbit, with a helping shove from Taiwan’s DPP (Democratic Progressive Party), that’s what’s going on.


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## Costas (Apr 2, 2014)

Απαίσιο θέμα

*A forbidden practice becomes popular among China’s ruling class: watching tigers die before eating them.*


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## Costas (Apr 6, 2014)

Και προβολή ταινίας στην κατάληψη [και τι ταινίας!] (Taipei Times)

TRADE PACT SIEGE: Producer screens ‘Kano’ for students in legislature
By Feng Yi-en, Wang Wen-hsuan and Jason Pan / Staff reporters, with staff writer Wed, Apr 02, 2014

Lights were dimmed to turn the occupied legislative chamber into a movie theater on Monday night, as the blockbuster Taiwanese film Kano was screened for the assembled students and media corps inside for an evening of entertainment.

The screening was a treat for the Sunflower movement protesters holed up inside the legislature, and was arranged with the approval of Wei Te-sheng (魏德聖), executive producer of the baseball movie set in the 1930s. Kano, whose domestic box office receipts have already surpassed NT$250 million (US$8.23 million), is based on the true story of a high-school baseball team from Chiayi City overcoming the odds to reach the 1931 final of Japan’s prestigious Koshien high-school baseball championship, held annually in Osaka.

It has made history by becoming the first full-length feature film on the commercial circuit given a screening inside the legislature.

Wei, Taiwan’s leading movie director and producer, threw his support behind the Sunflower movement, while the students, who were into the 14th day of their siege of the legislature, said watching Kano was a much-needed respite and morale booster for them.

A spokesperson for Wei’s ARS Film Production Co said: “The students initiated contact with us. We decided to give the go-ahead for the movie screening inside the legislature. It was our way of showing support, because we understood that many students were worn out mentally and physically after what they went through in the past weeks.”

The screening began at 8:30pm on Monday evening, with several hundred students and media representatives on hand to watch the three-hour-long feature film.

After the rally in Taipei on Sunday, Wei was moved to write a letter to the students, which was read aloud for the audience inside the legislature before the screening.

In the letter, Wei lauded the courage of the students in their action “in defense of our democracy.”

He also asked: “For the cross-strait service trade pact, can we not go back and restart the negotiations from the beginning?”

“That night, when students broke down the doors to the legislature, I felt such shock and intense emotions as I had never experienced before. It was not the use of force by students, but because my heart deeply felt it was the start of an awakening movement of people defending Taiwan,” Wei wrote.

“The government should not ask the students when the protest will end, but should ask them to help solve problems,” he added.

“I truly wish that in future years I can still listen to songs and music belonging to Taiwan, to tell stories about Taiwan and to smell the aroma from the land of Taiwan,” Wei wrote at the end of the letter.

“I want to thank this group of students who are defending Taiwan’s democracy. It is because of them that I have seen the beauty and goodness of Taiwan,” Wei said.


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## Costas (Apr 17, 2014)

Η κατάληψη έληξε, επιστρέφουμε στην Κίνα. Ταύρος σε υαλοπωλείο συνειδητά, ο Όλιβερ Στόουν:

Oliver Stone Slams Chinese Film Industry at Beijing Festival
(The Hollywood Reporter)
The Oscar-winning director sparked tension when he said that no true co-production is possible until filmmakers in China address Chairman Mao Zedong's controversial legacy.

BEIJING – Oliver Stone caused embarrassment, a little outrage and a fair helping of delight at the Beijing International Film Festival when the Platoon director urged Chinese filmmakers to deal with controversial historical issues such as the painful legacy of the country’s founder Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution he unleashed half a century ago.

"Mao Zedong has been lionized in dozens and dozens of Chinese films, but never criticized. It's about time. You got to make a movie about Mao, about the Cultural Revolution. You do that, you open up, you stir the waters and you allow true creativity to emerge in this country. That would be the basis of real co-production," said Stone, speaking at a panel on co-production which also included Gravity director Alfonso Cuaron and Paramount Pictures COO Frederick Huntsberry, and was moderated by Zhang Xun, president of China Film Co-production Corporation.

MPAA president Christopher Dodd gave a talk earlier in the panel, and senior figures from China's Film Bureau and the State Administration of Radio, Film and TV were also in attendance.

Chairman Mao is a revered figure in China, and his face gazes impassively at Tiananmen Square from the Forbidden City. He adorns every banknote. However, there is acceptance of the malign role he played in organizing Stalinesque purges, causing famine with the disastrous agricultural experiment known as the Great Leap Forward, in which millions died, and in orchestrating the Cultural Revolution, an experiment in ideological extremism orchestrated by Mao nearly 50 years ago and in which many of today's leadership suffered, including President Xi Jinping.

Even though Mao was largely responsible for the excesses of those years, the official line is that his legacy is 30 percent bad, 70 percent good, and the Communist Party he created is still in power since the 1949 revolution. And talking about Mao's legacy in public is just not done.

"You talk about co-production but you don't want to face the history of China. You don’t want to talk about it," Stone said.

"Three times I've made efforts to co-produce in this country and I've come up short. We've been honest about our own past in America, we've shown the flaws."

Movies about Mao are exclusively propaganda films like Founding of a Great Republic, which showed Mao's role in the establishment of China. However, critical depictions of Mao are not permitted.

When the moderator of the discussion tried to turn it into more general areas, Stone accused her of missing his point.

"It's all platitudes. We are not talking about making tourist pictures, photo postcards about girls in villages. This is not interesting to us. We need to see the history, to talk about great figures like Mao and the Cultural Revolution. These things happened, they affect everybody in this room. You talk about protecting the people from their history. I can understand you are a new country since 1949. You have to protect the country against the separatist movements, against the Uighurs or the Tibetans, I can understand not doing that subject. But not your history, for Christ's sake," he said.

"We're talking about the essential essence of this nation of how it was built, this whole century, you’ve not dealt with it," he continued, to applause from the audience.

Τους χάιδεψε και τ' αφτιά με Θιβετιανούς και Ουιγούρους. [Πλάκα έχει και αυτό το essential essence!...]


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## Costas (Apr 21, 2014)

Μια από τις απαντήσεις στον Oliver Stone ακριβώς από πάνω:

It is not just him, who try to think of China as another "country", --as when Stone says "I can understand you are a new country since 1949. You have to protect the country against the separatist movements, against the Uighurs or the Tibetans, I can understand not doing that subject. But not your history for Christ's sake," -- as if the history of Chinese imperial conquest and domination of those places didn't inevitably make that history a core part of "your history" -- as the burden of empire.

It seems to me that the deeper remaining taboo against addressing history and how imperialist expansion created today's "country" (which is instead rendered as if it somehow was naturally already there/is manifest destiny), is of course also one shared with the US, a country basically built by annexing and stealing others' lands, killling them in the process, genocide and ethnic cleansing coast to coast. Where are the Hollywood movies showing George Washington's generals finishing off their killings by burning the winter corn stores of the Ithaca, NY area Iroquois so that the last survivors would starve and die and empty the land for resettlement by the victors. And so on. No films on that -- at best, you have pathetic pictures where the lives of the last Indians are saved by some cowboy. In China, the story is similar.

It seems that this deep taboo against facing history is one shared by the whole US-Chinese Hollywood "we", and beyond, also crossing neoliberalist-"Left" boundaries.


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## Costas (Apr 21, 2014)

The Tiananmen Square Museum China Doesn’t Want to See 
(WSJ / Chester Young)

Organizers behind a planned museum in Hong Kong dedicated to the bloody 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown are vowing to press on despite running into threat of legal challenge that they call politically motivated. 

Backed with nearly $800,000 in donations, the 800-square-foot June 4 Memorial museum is currently slated to open later this month. The museum is being opened to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the violent event, in which People’s Liberation Army soldiers opened fire on unarmed civilians.

“Hong Kong is a very special place. We can still have space to discuss about the June 4th incident, which is a taboo in China. That’s why we want to have a permanent museum here—to remind the public of this brutal crackdown,” said Mak Hoi-wah, vice-chairman of the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, which is behind the museum.

Last December, the alliance bought the fifth floor of an office tower in Tsim Sha Tsui, an area popular with mainland tourists and studded with high-end luxury shops. The total cost of the location was 9.76 million Hong Kong dollars (US$1.26 million). They paid the HK$6 million down payment with the help of public donations and other fundraising efforts, Mr. Mak said.

But the museum plans have run into resistance just a few weeks before its opening to the public, with the owners’ committee at the building voting to oppose such a move and threatening legal action. In a letter dated Feb. 28 sent by the Tung, Ng, Tse & Heung solicitor firm, the owners’ committee said that they were concerned the museum would “operate as a lightning rod and attract…an inordinate number of visitors, both supporters and detractors, as well as reporters, police and members of the curious public etc.”

The letter said that the owners’ committee had no political affiliation. Among other concerns cited in the letter was whether the building’s two small elevators, each aged 24 years, could handle the anticipated crush. Calls to the firm Thursday weren’t returned.

To date, Mr. Mak, he isn’t aware of any concrete action being taken, and says the museum will continue to open as planned. Mr. Mak—who sees such resistance as politically motivated—said the alliance hadn’t informed the owners’ committee of their intent to open a museum because they believed their plans fit within the parameters of acceptable commercial activity.

Visited on Thursday, a number of building tenants said they were indifferent to museum plans.

Diony Tong, who works at an architecture firm on the building’s 13th floor, said he didn’t expect much of an impact as the museum would be located closer to the ground floor.

He said a store selling cellphones on the 17th floor was “much more of a nuisance, as it attracts many mainland customers to shop every weekend,” he said.

Another tenant who runs a company on the 12th floor, Raymond Yip, said that he didn’t think the museum would pose much an issue. “But I will say the museum has a very sensitive name,” he said. “June 4 Memorial Museum? That touches peoples’ nerves and gets peoples’ attention,” he said.


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## Costas (Apr 21, 2014)

Meet Göran Malmqvist, Nobel Prize member and champion of Chinese literature
By Janice Leung (South China Morning Post) (τα παχιά δικά μου)

The young Malmqvist went on to read Dao De Jing, a seminal work believed to have been written in the 6th century BC. He found himself lost in its various translations in English, French and German, and decided he had to learn Chinese to properly understand the text.
(...)
He "dabbled" in translation, too. Malmqvist has published more than 50 Swedish translations of Chinese literary works, including collections of poetry from the Han, Tang and Song periods, Taoist classic Zhuangzi and two of China's four great classical novels - Water Margin and Journey to the West.

Translation plays a critical role in promoting world literature, Malmqvist says, especially in bringing a writer's work to a readership beyond his or her home country. "A former secretary of the Swedish Academy once said: '*World literature is translation*.' I think this is a very important statement."

That's why he believes sinologists should not only engage in academic research but also in translation; and for himself: "It's to allow people from my country to appreciate the Chinese literature I like."

Unfortunately, he says, there are as many poor translators as there are good writers in China.

"What makes me angry, really angry," he cries, eyes blazing, "is when an excellent piece of Chinese literature is badly translated. It's better not to translate it than have it badly translated. That is an unforgivable offence to any author. It should be stopped.

"Often translations are done by incompetent translators who happen to know English, or German, or French. But a lot of them have no interest and no competence in literature. That is a great pity."

There are notable exceptions such as *the late British sinologist David Hawkes' rendition of Cao Xueqin's epic novel The Story of the Stone, which he regards as a rare gem of translated Chinese literature.*[*]

Malmqvist also translated works by modern Chinese writers such as Ai Qing, Lu Xun, Wen Yiduo and Shen Congwen. Of Shen, he says: "If he hadn't passed away, he would have got the Nobel Prize in 1988."

In the 1980s, he began to translate contemporary works by Bei Dao and Gu Cheng, Taiwanese poetry, and works by Gao Xingjian and Mo Yan.


[*]Πρόκειται για το γνωστό Dream of the Red Chamber.


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## Costas (Apr 22, 2014)

Γάτα ο Κινέζος!


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## daeman (Apr 22, 2014)

Costas said:


> Γάτα ο Κινέζος!



Purrrfect! :)


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## nickel (Apr 24, 2014)

Αληθεύει ότι το Αιγαίο μεταφράζεται «θάλασσα της αγάπης» στα κινέζικα; Τι ακριβώς εννοούσαν με αυτό που είπαν στο δελτίο του Mega;


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## daeman (Apr 24, 2014)

...
Εν αναμονή του σινολόγου μας, προσωρινά μέτρα. Βρίσκω ένα μπλογκ όπου κάποιος -προφανώς κινεζικής καταγωγής- γράφει:

Li and I looked at each other and nodded ascent. They then asked, “Why are there so many Asian women in long white dresses like yours around here taking pictures? You look beautiful – but we can’t quite understand why there are so many right here. We’ve been eating lunch and must have seen two dozen women dressed that way over the last hour or so.”

We smiled and explained how the church above the restaurant had turned into something of a Mecca for Chinese tourists because of its fame in the National Geographic photo shoot. The group who stopped us said they were Canadian but had never heard of that specific photo. We then shared how the Aegean Sea could be phonetically translated as the Sea of Love in Chinese and how young Chinese couples wanted to get a shot by the church as a memory.


Ενώ σε συνέντευξή του ο Έλληνας πρέσβης στην Κίνα αναφέρει:

Besides, the diverse landscape of our country, a combination of mountains, valleys, long coastline – 20% of the EU’s coastline - and beautiful islands, the blue of the Aegean Sea – “Sea of Love” for Chinese people who choose the Aegean islands for their wedding ceremonies.


Την ηχητική ομοιότητα επιβεβαιώνει η γκουγκλομετάφραση: Aegean (Ài qínhǎi, 爱琴海) - sea of love (Àiqíng hǎi, 爱情海).

Αναμένω εναγωνίως στη γωνιά μου να μάθω κι εγώ τι να κάνω, να πάρω τα βουνά ή τα νησιά; ;)

Sea of Love - Phil Phillips


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## Costas (Apr 24, 2014)

Έτσι κάνουν οι Κινέζοι· αποδομούν τη λέξη σε χοντρικά ομόηχές της συλλαβές, που συχνά τις διαλέγουν να σημαίνουν κάτι ευχάριστο ή τέλος πάντων κάτι με μήνυμα, ευχάριστο ή δυσάρεστο, ανάλογα το τι θέλουν. Από τη λέξη Κόκα Κόλα ως τη λέξη Aegean. Ο οπαδός της ψηφαρίθμησης Ν.-Γ. Πεντζίκης πολύ θα το έκανε γούστο, νομίζω.


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## Costas (Apr 25, 2014)

Yes, It Looks Like the US Government Coordinated the 2012 Anonymous China Hacks (τα παχιά δικά μου)
(China Matters)
On April 23, Mark Mazzetti reported in the New York Times that the FBI had used Hector Xavier Monsegur, a hacker it had in its clutches, to coordinate hacks in 2012 against Iran, Syria, Brazil, and Pakistan, and other targets. The actual hacks were carried about by an associate of Monsegur, Jeremy Hammond, who was a dupe in that he did not know that Monsegur was turning over the information and access he gleaned to the US government.

Jeremy Hammond is serving a ten-year jail sentence for other hacks. I’m not clear if Monsegur is currently incarcerated; last reference I saw was to the cancellation of a 2013 court date that was expected to give him a suspended sentence for a previous guilty plea. In addition to running the foreign hacks for the US government, Monsegur also rolled up his own Lulzsec hacking network, which carried out s series of US hacks in a spectacular 50-day campaign, and his months if not years of cooperation with the US government may have netted him some favorable treatment.

Mazzetti’s article does not mention China; but I did! Back in 2012!

Back on 2012 I wrote for Asia Times Online about “Hardcore Charlie”, who identified himself as an associate of Monsegur and the hacks he had inflicted on various Chinese government websites.

At the time, it seemed fishy to me that “Hardcore Charlie”—whose profanity-laced anti-imperialist Spanglish rants sounded a lot like Monsegur’s persona—had suddenly decided that the cause of liberty and lulz was best served by hacking into Chinese language websites like the Taoyuan Land Reclamation Bureau.

Concluding my piece, I wrote:


My speculation is that the campaign of cyber-attacks against Chinese targets was seeded by the US government, but has gathered its own momentum and is drawing in freelance foreign and some Chinese hackers searching for lulz - the hacker term for giggles or detached/callous amusement.


Lulzsec closed shop at the end of June 2011, when an asset in England was arrested. It appears that was not enough to elude the bloodhounds of the Federal Bureau of Investigation or forestall Monsegur's betrayal of his associates.

…
Pattern-oriented readers might consider whether the sudden eruption of Lulzsec resembles the cyber flashmob that is currently swarming Chinese sites.

Contrarian readers might find it interesting that the focus of hacking seems to have done a 180-degree turn away from American government, security and corporate targets to tormenting their Chinese equivalents (despite the limited lulz obtainable when hacking a site whose language one does not understand).

Curious readers might also wonder if information from Monsegur has helped the authorities get "Hardcore Charlie" in their sights and he is hacking into Chinese websites either at their behest to help get the Anonymous China ball rolling or is pre-emptively demonstrating his utility and eagerness to please.



Compare w/ Mr. Mazzetti’s account:


Over several weeks in early 2012, according to the chat logs, Mr. Monsegur gave Mr. Hammond new foreign sites to penetrate. During a Jan. 23 conversation, Mr. Monsegur told Mr. Hammond he was in search of “new juicy targets,” the chat logs show. Once the websites were penetrated, according to Mr. Hammond, emails and databases were extracted and uploaded to a computer server controlled by Mr. Monsegur.

The sentencing statement also said that Mr. Monsegur directed other hackers to give him extensive amounts of data from Syrian government websites, including banks and ministries of the government of President Bashar al-Assad. “The F.B.I. took advantage of hackers who wanted to help support the Syrian people against the Assad regime, who instead unwittingly provided the U.S. government access to Syrian systems,” the statement said.

The court documents also refer to Mr. Monsegur’s giving targets to a Brazilian hacker. The hacker, who uses the alias Havittaja, has posted online some of his chats with Mr. Monsegur in which he was asked to attack Brazilian government websites.

One expert said that the court documents in the Hammond case were striking because they offered the most evidence to date that the F.B.I. might have been using hackers to feed information to other American intelligence agencies. “It’s not only hypocritical but troubling if indeed the F.B.I. is loaning its sting operations out to other three-letter agencies,” said Gabriella Coleman, a professor at McGill University and author of a forthcoming book about Anonymous.



It certainly looks like the China operation was cut from the same cloth. The interesting question is if Monsegur eschewed a cutout and ran the China operation himself as “Hardcore Charlie”.

In the era of Snowden, it is difficult to remember, but *in 2012 the United States was pre-emptively (and, in light of the already revealed Stuxnet attack on Iran's nuclear facility at Natanz, quite hypocritically) claiming the moral and legal high ground against Chinese hacking. In fact, Chinese cyber misbehavior was teed up as the next existential threat to the world order.*

Revelation of any US government involvement in Hardcore Charlie's antics would be somewhat embarrassing for the Obama administration, since they involved website defacement, disabling, and public compromise of administrator account information, in other words "cyberwarfare" and not just covert information gathering. The additional fact that the United States outsourced its cyberattack to a known criminal, who in turn may have established an independent network of hackers beyond US control, is not likely to be regarded as an extenuating circumstance.

In this context, a decision to unleash a wild hacking campaign against Chinese websites would look like a piece of questionable judgment.


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## Costas (Apr 26, 2014)

Η περιοδεία του Ομπάμα στον Ειρηνικό θεωρείται πολύ σημαντική και κρίσιμη, τα δε αποτελέσματά της σταθμίζονται ποικιλοτρόπως:

China Matters / NYT / Asahi Shimbun


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## Costas (Apr 26, 2014)

China Strips Sina of Publication, Distribution Licenses Over Lewd Content 
(WSJ)
By Paul Mozur 

BEIJING--The Chinese government stripped popular Internet portal Sina Corp. of two online-publication and distribution licenses, official media said on Thursday, as a government crackdown on Internet pornography intensified.

Sina, which controls the popular Weibo social-media service along with many widely read news portals, was found to have released 20 articles and four videos that contained lewd content, according to China's official Xinhua News Agency. China's State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television said it would revoke the company's license to publish newspapers, magazines and books online, as well as its license to publish audio and video, according to Xinhua.

Beijing-based Sina didn't respond to requests for comment. On its websites on Thursday the company apologized to "Internet users and all parts of society," and added that it is working closely with the government to respond to the antipornography campaign and remove problematic content.

Sina generates revenue mostly through the sale of ads on its news, entertainment and video web portals. Its website, including video content, appeared to be operating normally on Thursday. Sina's online video operation is small, so a shutdown would be unlikely to have a major impact on the company.

The government attack on lewd content in China comes amid a sustained government crackdown on online discourse. Beginning last autumn the government has warned and punished a number of well-known social-media commentators. It also said it would crack down on the spread of what it says are rumors and personal attacks online. Critics say the moves are aimed at quashing dissent and the discussion of sensitive topics.

Still, the suspension of Sina's licenses marks the first time the government has used its annual campaigns to go after the country's largest listed Internet companies. In the past, sites would be taken down and social-media accounts suspended, but the operations of companies like Sina were generally left alone. The move likely sends a signal to China's other major Internet companies and news portals to ensure that their platforms do not feature prurient content.

Many of the problematic commentators were on Weibo, which this month publicly listed in New York. Sina still holds a controlling stake in the business, Weibo Corp.

The renewed attention on controlling the Internet has become a key characteristic of the presidency of new Chinese leader Xi Jinping. In February the Chinese Communist Party set up an Internet-security committee led by Mr. Xi and other top party officials to focus on cybersecurity and guide public opinion online.

Although China carries out annual campaigns to combat the distribution of lewd content over the Internet, the most recent crackdown has been significantly more severe than those of recent years. Known as the "Cleaning the Web 2014" campaign, thus far it has led to the shutdown of 110 websites and 3,300 accounts on China-based social networking services like Weibo and Tencent Holdings Ltd.'s smartphone messaging application WeChat, according to Xinhua.


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## Costas (Apr 26, 2014)

Οι μεταμορφώσεις του μαοϊσμού

Young Chinese Maoists set up 'hippy' commune
Filled with nostalgia for an era they never experienced, admirers of Chairman Mao have set up a commune where young Chinese can escape the pressures of capitalism 
(Malcolm Moore / The Telegraph)
(...) The farm grows eight or nine crops of organic vegetables and raises sheep and free-range chickens. Three or four local farmers have taught the students how to manage the land. This year, the strawberry crop has been particularly successful, with enough left over to make plenty of jam. “We sell our produce to Beijing for quite high prices,” said Mr Han.

“We work every day. We do not have weekends,” he said. “But we respect the traditional Chinese holidays. And when the students have free time they study. There is a small library with books on agriculture, history and philosophy. The students are free to learn by themselves what interests them.”

Mr Han, an economist by training, is one of the most famous critics of China’s economic liberalisation and has become notorious as a co-founder of the Utopia website, one of the leading Maoist forums.

But in person, he is quiet and reserved, a far cry from the man who, in the heat of the anti-Japan protests of 2012, slapped an old man in the face for criticising the Great Helmsman in public.

In recent years, those left behind by China’s economic miracle - the workers fired from the state jobs that were once as secure as an “iron rice bowl”, or those who have struggled to get on the property ladder - have begun to wax nostalgic for the “good old days” under Chairman Mao.

“Because China now has the largest wealth gap in the world, it is normal that people are missing the past,” said Mr Han.

Most of these new Maoists are too young to remember the viciousness of his rule, and have only been taught in school to lionise him as China’s saviour.

Mr Han said his students all practice “Mao Zedong Thought”. But what they take from it is not the fire of furious revolution, but the freedom to drop out of the pressure cooker of modern Chinese society.

“What it means to me is serving the people,” said Yang Ling, a recent graduate. “The current value system where everyone wants to make a better life for themselves, to be successful, stops you from feeling for others,” she said.

“I do not have any desire for a fancy house or car. I have friends in Beijing and Shanghai or other big cities who went there to work and they are lost and struggling.

“Here on the farm, everyone is so different. People who have a little money left over spend it to buy machinery for the farm, for the common good. And we all eat together in the canteen.”

A 22-year-old pharmacology student, Dong Lanlan, echoed her views. “My parents are both farmers. Before I came here, I thought I should try to escape the countryside and follow the national trend. 
(...)


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## Costas (Apr 26, 2014)

Yue Yuen Says 80% of Workers Return After Plant Strike (Bloomberg)
(μιλάμε για 45.000 εργάτες σε εγκαταστάσεις 1,4 εκατομμυρίων τετραγωνικών μέτρων, δηλ. 1.400 στρεμμάτων...)


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## Costas (Apr 26, 2014)

China’s Police Will Carry Guns Unlike Any Others (WSJ)
“They also choose nonstandard (proprietary) ammunition to make ammo supply more complicated for criminals who might obtain revolvers from policemen.” In other words, even if a gun is stolen from a police officer, finding the correct ammunition to reload it could be difficult because technically only the police would have access to it.

Σχετικό: Έκρηξη βίαιων περιστατικών στην Κίνα (anarchy press)


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## Costas (Apr 26, 2014)

Υγεία-Διατροφή 

Residents of Lanzhou, Gansu Province, are angry to learn their water supply facilities ran through an area contaminated by a petrochemical plant (Caixin)
Lanzhou Veolia (γαλλική εταιρεία διαχείρισης υδάτων) officials have admitted that the results publicized on April 10 came from a [water] sample taken on April 2. Assuming the benzene leak began on April 2, the people of Lanzhou unknowingly drank benzene-contaminated water for nine days. Lanzhou Veolia statements have varied throughout the course of the episode.

Tainted Food in China Cited in Cyclist's Failed Doping Test (ΝΥΤ)
The International Cycling Union, known by its French initials U.C.I., said Wednesday that Mr. Rogers’s disqualification in that race would stand but that any further sanctions would be dropped as “there was a significant probability that the presence of clenbuterol may have resulted from the consumption of contaminated meat from China.”

[Άλλο: "another batch of Cadmium contaminated rice in Hunan. just don't eat rice from Hunan"]

Τα παραπάνω ποστ, courtesy Sinocism.


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## Costas (Apr 26, 2014)

(Language Log)
Lǎowài 老外 (lit., "old foreign") is a ubiquitous term for a certain type of person from abroad in China, and dictionaries almost invariably gloss it as "foreigner". Yet the subtleties and nuances of the term seem almost endless, and they can sometimes lead to misunderstandings and hurt feelings. To try to get a handle on this colloquial expression, I asked a number of laowai who have had long experience in China what they thought of this appellation that they had doubtless been called hundreds of times and some Chinese friends who most likely had had occasion to employ that designation themselves.
(....)


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## Costas (Apr 26, 2014)

Για τους φαν του αμερικάνικου ράγκμπυ

Year of the Pigskin
My hilarious, heartbreaking, triumphant season with the American Football League of China 
(The New Republic)


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## Costas (May 10, 2014)

In High Seas, China Moves Unilaterally (ΝΥΤ)
By JANE PERLEZ and KEITH BRADSHER
At least twice in recent years, Beijing has sought to explore the South China Sea but backed down after protests by Vietnam. That good will evaporated this week. 


Σχετικά, από το China Hand.
Wednesday, May 07, 2014
*Twilight of Soft Power*
PRC Moves to Hard Power in South China Sea

It is difficult to be blithe about the dispatch of China’s HYSY981 drilling rig into disputed waters off the Vietnamese coast.

It actually would have been less of a provocation if the PRC had sent the aircraft carrier Liaoning down there instead.

One of the interesting by-products of the US “freedom of navigation” campaign in the South China Sea was the U.S. staking out a position that military operations by foreign vessels inside an Exclusive Economic Zone or EEZ were not the kind of economic intrusion that UNCLOS intended to preclude.

In fact, after the harassment of the USNS Impeccable, a US Navy survey vessel that cruises through China’s EEZ towing various gadgets, the US went out of its way to assert that the ship was not doing anything that could be construed as economic or even dual use, such as mapping the ocean floor, and insisted the ship was there to track PLAN submarine movements.

By that logic, the Liaoning chugging through any waters in the South China Sea, in EEZs disputed or not, is something that nobody can complain about. And indeed, that’s what the Liaoning did, on its shakedown cruise in the South China Sea at the end of 2013.

Sending the HYSY981, China’s billion dollar deep water drilling rig--with its Vaderesque Death Star mission to intimidate China’s hydrocarbon adversaries by demonstrating the PRC’s capabilities in unilateral development of contested oil fields--is exactly the kind of destabilizing EEZ gambit that raises tensions and invites a response. 

The PRC has left itself some wiggle room by sending the rig to a location close to the Paracel Islands—held by China and deserving some as yet undetermined EEZ of its own—so that the waters are contested rather than unambiguously Vietnamese, but the nature of the incursion implies that the PRC was not expecting Vietnam to suck it up and ignore the PRC challenge.

The HYSY981 is reportedly escorted by a flotilla of dozens of vessels, including the PRC’s ubiquitous maritime patrol vessels and, I would assume, the various support vessels needed to go about its drilling business. I also came across a report, well, actually a statement by an overwrought PRC nationalist blogger, that the rig is also escorted by anti-missile destroyers, which would be a major crossing of the line in bringing overtly military elements into the PRC’s economic contention with its maritime neighbors.

Even if the destroyers aren't on the scene, the PRC is committed to dishing it out. 

Vietnam released a video of PRC maritime patrols vessel ramming Vietnamese coast guard cutters trying to approach the rig, a sign that the PRC has no qualms about playing the pugnacious/threatening/aggressive regional power for a world audience.

The big question is Why?

Why, after Vietnam has been reasonably cooperative in its dealings with the PRC, most conspicuously by declining to openly support the Philippines’ arbitration case against the nine-dash-line, is the PRC picking on it in such an ostentatiously crude and overbearing fashion?

On the most immediate level, I think it’s because the PRC wants the practice—practice in engaging in relatively large, cumbersome naval operations in a genuinely hostile environment, but one in which the embarrassment of a catastrophic military encounter is pretty low. Engaging in a major provocation inside Vietnam’s declared EEZ and getting the chance to bully Vietnam, with its underpowered marine forces and lack of a formal defense alliance with a capable regional (Japanese) or world (US) power, fills the bill.

One of the biggest challenges to the PRC’s military capability and credibility is that it hasn’t fought a hot war with anybody in the last 45 years. With a provocation against Vietnam, the military system gets a nice little exercise.

Bearing in mind a comment I read that “the same capital ships that escorted the Liaoning are with the HYSY981", it doesn’t take too much imagination to imagine the Liaoning plunked down inside the same kind of security cordon that now contains the rig.

On the intermediate level, I see the Vietnam gambit as preparation for a confrontation with the country that the PRC really wants to humiliate: the Philippines.

The Philippines is a much riskier nut, since it has 1) a military alliance with the United States and 2) a foreign policy team that has put most of its eggs in the brinksmanship basket, refusing to engage bilaterally with the PRC, relying/hoping that the US will deter PRC aggression and, if some kind of conflict breaks out, intervene in an effective way on the Philippines behalf.

The Philippines apparently sees it the same way, if yesterday’s seizure of a Chinese fishing boat is indeed designed to demonstrate its resolve to succor Vietnam by presenting the PRC with the unwelcome prospect of getting embroiled in two maritime disputes—with the prospect of US involvement—at once.

I don’t think the PRC will take that particular bait today. But I would not be surprised to see the HYSY981 show up in the “West Philippine Sea” in the near future.

On the higher, long-game level, I believe the PRC leadership has decided that the United States can no longer bring anything positive to the table for the PRC as it has completely and symbolically committed to the Asia pivot and its narrative of PRC containment with President Obama’s trip to Asia.

I think it would have been prudent for President Obama to have hedged America’s bets by dropping in on Beijing, but he didn’t, sending Michelle Obama instead. Die is cast, in other words.

The PRC response, I believe, is not to confront the United States; it is to marginalize it, by driving the Asian security narrative into regions that deeply concern its neighbors but only tangentially engage the United States.

In recent weeks, I would contend that the PRC has reversed the wedge against the US-Japan alliance. 

Instead of trying to wedge the United States away from Japan and toward some kind of accommodation with PRC interests, the PRC is trying to wedge Japan away from the United States by goading/enticing Japan into an independent role that marginalizes the United States.

So we saw the PRC wait for President Obama to leave Asia, then resume its provocations in the Senkakus, while exchanging peaceable mid-level envoys with Japan…

…and ostentatiously beating up on Vietnam, which Japan has been courting as a member of Prime Minister Abe’s anti-PRC economic and security alliance.

The motive, I would guess, is to compel Japan to abandon its formal lockstep identification with the US pivot leadership in Asia (which, I would posit, Japan has honored in the breach already with its independent-minded footsie with Vietnam, Philippines, & North Korea) and emerge with its own initiative to provide Vietnam with some kind of diplomatic, economic, or military support—or else reveal the hollowness of the assurances it is offering to South East Asian countries to entice them into the Japanese camp.

Once Japan is “off the rez” so to speak, it will be forced to engage in a meaningful way, either through confrontation or negotiation, with the PRC in order to advance its Asia strategy…and the United States will see its clout diminished and have to deal with the PRC as well to get back into the game.

Given the PRC’s traditional focus on avoiding confrontation while it muscles up militarily and diplomatically, this kind of provocation and open escalation would seem to be counter-intuitive.

But I think the PRC has decided that, with the US public commitment to the pivot and encouragement to Japan to implement collective self defense, the US “honest broker” ship has sailed, the real US security role in Asia is backstopping its pivot allies, and the pivot battleline has to be challenged before it became too entrenched.

And it’s doing that by demonstrating, in relatively crude terms, that the deterrent strategy that underpins the pivot will not, well, deter the PRC and the PRC will bear—and extract—the economic costs of defying the will and preferences of the US and its Asian allies (and, in the case of Vietnam, its unlucky Asian associates).

As to why the PRC should decide to excite universal fear and loathing at this particular junction, one could spin it positively by saying that it is simply accelerating the birth of a new Asian order with a new balance of powers and the US stripped of its dominating role.

The negative interpretation is probably more persuasive. The PRC sees a hard and ugly decade ahead, with anti-PRC administrations in power in many of the Asian capitals, keystoned by a Hillary Clinton presidency. Best to lance the pivot boil early, before the pivot military bulk-up has completed , and while the relatively conciliatory President Obama is in power and distracted by the idea that he doesn’t want to pile a confrontation with China on top of his current problems with Russia.

The PRC’s decade of soft power is, prematurely, over, thanks to the success of the pivot in blunting the PRC’s drive to dominate the region by virtue of its economic, demographic, and implied military clout. Its relations with its maritime neighbors will, I expect, be increasingly driven by hard power.

I think the PRC has decided to hunker down, and absorb the diplomatic, economic, and social costs of heightened fear and anger, and gamble that it can outmaneuver and outlast the hostility of the pivot nations.

It’s an ugly and dangerous gamble, especially since the first, second, and third instinct of everyone involved on the anti-PRC side will be to escalate in order to create a greater feeling of security and also bolster the deterrent narrative that the military capabilities of the US and its pivot partners is what is keeping Asia safe.

Dangerous days, indeed.


I originally addressed these themes a couple weeks ago in a piece I’m excerpting below. So far the model is holding up. If trends continue, we're in one of those "hate to be right" scenarios.


From April 23, 2014:

In bad news for the United States and the pivot, it looks like the PRC has decided to call [the pivot] bluff.

When Secretary of Defense Hagel visited the PRC, his counterpart, Chang Wanquan, stated:

"The China-U.S. relationship is neither comparable to U.S.-Russia ties in the Cold War, nor a relationship between container and contained. China's development can't be contained by anyone."

This statement is not just bravado and bullshit, in my opinion. It reflects the PRC’s considered response to the threat of the pivot.

Specifically, the PRC is stating that the containment model doesn’t apply because the PRC is deeply integrated into the global economy and, indeed, into the economies of its putative adversaries. The PRC does not recapitulate the containment of the USSR envisioned by George Kennan; for Kennan, the USSR had intentionally isolated itself and sought to prop up its rule by invocation of the Western threat, so economic isolation automatically underpinned the military element of containment.

Also, I think the PRC position is based upon the perception that there are no existential issues involved in the PRC’s conflicts with its neighbors. Nobody wants to upset the global economic applecart by starting World War III over TWINWTDF [The Worthless Islands Nobody Wants to Die For].

So the PRC is signaling it does not fear the pivot. Or, more accurately, the pivot has produced genuine disadvantages and costs to the PRC, but it has decided it is in its interests to push back, strategically and systematically, instead of trying to modify its behavior to suit the US and its pivoteers. That’s why the PRC excluded Japan from the naval fleet review planned at Qingdao and, when the US pulled out to demonstrate its support for its pivot partner, cancelled the whole exercise instead of pursuing some face-saving compromise.

…
Given the unfavorable west Pacific environment, sitting idly by, or trying to ingratiate itself with the Asian democracies and the United States through soft power gambits do not appear to be high on the PRC's list of options.

With its overtly confrontational moves in Qingdao and Shanghai, it appears the PRC is signaling it is prepared to abandon "soft power", give up on the promise of US forbearance, and manage its business in an increasingly hostile regional environment.

And it doesn't seem likely that the PRC is blustering in order to obtain some face-saving concessions or lip service from the US. It is targeting Japan instead of dealing with the US, and challenging the United States to do something effective in support of its ally.

The PRC has always been alert to the need or opportunity to challenge the credibility of the US deterrent and, with the heightened anxiety fostered by Russia's annexation of Crimea, that day has arrived perhaps sooner than anybody wished.

If the PRC intentionally fomented the Ayungin Shoal resupply crisis with the resolve to let the US-PRC relation go south if needed rather than passively let the pivot dynamic play out to its disadvantage, we are definitely in for some tense and unpleasant times - and the costs of maintaining the credibility of the US deterrent might be considerably higher than we prefer.

The PRC appears to be signaling its determination to hunker down and weather the geopolitical storm - which might include a sooner-rather-than-later Taiwan crisis and the need to blame a handy US scapegoat - for years if need be, and pursue the struggle in domestic venues where it holds an advantage.

Και επίσης, προχτεσινό:
Thursday, May 08, 2014
China Offers Vietnam the Red Pill or the Blue Pill…Now!


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## Costas (May 15, 2014)

(China Hand, May 15, 2014)

There has been some bewilderment expressed as to why Vietnamese demonstrating--against the PRC’s provocative positioning of its HYSY 981 oil rig in waters claimed by Vietnam as part of its Exclusive Economic Zone--attacked Taiwanese factories.

The answer is depressingly simple.

Anti-Chinese prejudice—including prejudice against all Chinese, including Taiwanese Chinese, PRC Chinese, and Vietnam’s own ethnic Chinese citizens—is baked into Vietnam’s current political and social narrative.

It is not a matter that Vietnam was colonized by China in the far off imperial era or, for that matter, the fact that Chiang Kaishek’s KMT army behaved extremely poorly when it made a clumsy play to claim northern Vietnam as part of China’s political sphere immediately following World War II.

Anti-Chinese sentiment grew out of the Vietnamese government’s sense of threat in the 1970s, as it pursued its alliance with the Soviet Union while spurning the People’s Republic of China.

Ethnic Chinese dominated the commercial sector of the economy, especially in recently liberated/conquered Saigon, and were seen as an undesirable social element capable of disloyalty to the Communist government, divided loyalties vis a vis the PRC, and also serving as a key component in the bourgeoise economy that presented obstacles to the socialization.

So the Vietnamese government adopted and implemented various policies hostile to its ethnic Chinese community. Hostile enough, in fact, that over half a million ethnic Chinese fled. Here’s a good, if perhaps dated, discussion of the period. 

Remember the “boat people” of the 1970s? Maybe not. But they were predominantly ethnic Chinese Vietnamese.

The Vietnam government also implemented extremely harsh measures against Chinese communities in Cambodia during its invasion to topple the PRC-backed Khmer Rouge.

This combination of toxic elements contributed to the PRC invasion of Vietnam in 1979 which, in a development little recognized in Vietnam today, was executed by the PRC after US president Jimmy Carter gave Deng Xiaoping the green light as part of the whole “contain Soviet influence in Asia” exercise (now, of course, succeeded by the whole “contain PRC influence in Asia” exercise).

Distrust of Chinese—not just China i.e. the PRC—is still an essential social and political element in modern Vietnamese nationalism, as well as the government’s effort to maintain its a central, legitimate position in that nationalistic narrative.

So, it’s not much of a stretch for angry nationalists demonstrating against a (PRC) Chinese oil rig to burn down an (ROC) Chinese plastics factory.

The good news, if there is any, is that this level of anti-Chinese resentment and violence has always been bubbling near the surface in Vietnam. It’s been managed before, and I’m sure the government in Hanoi hopes it will be able to get the lid on again.


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## Costas (May 24, 2014)

Άρθρο του συγγραφέα Yu Hua (Γυ [προφ. Γϋ] Χουά) στη ΝΥΤ

Follow the Money, China-Style
The economy's mystery of surplus currency yet low inflation may be a result of the piles of cash hoarded by corrupt officials.

(...)

For example, Xie Mingzhong, a former Communist Party secretary of Wenchang in Hainan Province, was dismissed after he allegedly concealed more than 25 million yuan in safe deposit boxes.

Yan Dabin, the former chief of the state communications bureau in Wushan County, Chongqing, hid cardboard boxes containing 9.39 million yuan in the bathroom of his new apartment, where they were discovered after a water leak.

Xu Qiyao, a former chief of the construction department of Jiangsu Province, accepted some 20 million yuan in bribes. Parts of that sum were wrapped in layers of plastic and hidden in a hollow tree trunk, beneath an ash heap, in a rice field and inside a latrine.

Li Guowei, the former chief of the highway bureau in Ganzhou, Jiangxi Province, buried a box stuffed with 2.8 million yuan in a garbage heap next to a brother’s house. “I was an unlucky dog when I got picked out,” he said.

Luo Yaoxing, the former chief of the immunization planning office of the disease control center of Guangdong Province, rented a luxury apartment to store his booty. He wrapped the notes tightly inside black plastic bags. Despite protecting his stash with waterproof paper and drying agents, 1.2 million yuan still got moldy.

(...)

Yu Hua is the author of “Boy in the Twilight: Stories of the Hidden China.”


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## Costas (May 24, 2014)

President Xi Jinping
Beijing, China

Mr President

We have learned that our fellow scholars Xu Youyu, Hao Jian, and Hu Shigen, and civil rights lawyer Pu Zhiqiang and writer Liu Di, were criminally detained for “creating a disturbance in a public place, causing serious disorder.” The alleged reason for their detention was that on 3 May they were among the fifteen participants in a “2014 Workshop on Beijing’s June Fourth” that took place in a private apartment in Beijing.

These detentions raise many disturbing questions. For example, how can a private meeting “create disturbance in a public place”? These Citizens were detained because they discussed an event that took place twenty-five years ago and that had a profound impact on the course of Chinese history. How can a discussion among scholars, lawyers and writers at someone’s home be considered a “disturbance”? As you have often reminded your Japanese counterparts, to be strong, a nation must confront its past. As scholars who have devoted our lives to the study of China, we are convinced that this country will only benefit from a free exchange of ideas that helps to establish historical truth.

Three days after these citizens’ detention, we learned that veteran journalist Gao Yu was criminally detained for “leaking State secrets”. She has admitted to having sent a Party document abroad. But, since the end of the Cultural Revolution, the separation of the state and the Party in China has been a fundamental principle. How, then, can A “Party document” be considered a “state” secret?

It is obvious that none of the above-mentioned citizens has committed a criminal offense. Their detention is an injustice to loyal Chinese citizens as well as a harm to the image of China at a time when it is becoming a great power. We therefore ask you respectfully to correct this mistake, and to free unconditionally the citizens who have been wrongfully detained.

Sincerely,

Jean-Philippe Béja
Senior Research Fellow at CNRS Paris, CEFC Hong Kong

Michel Bonnin
Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales

Jean-Pierre Cabestan
Baptist University, Hong Kong

Joseph Cheng
City Unversity of Hong Kong

Steven Levine
University of Montana

Perry Link
University of California, Riverside

Andrew J. Nathan
Columbia University

Xiao Qiang
University of California, Berkeley

-----------------------------------------------------

I, Too, Will Stand Up for Tiananmen
(Murong Xuecun, ΝΥΤ 22/5/14)

(...)

On May 6 three of my friends were arrested in Beijing on suspicion of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” They are Xu Youyu, a scholar and former researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Prof. Hao Jian of the Beijing Film Academy, and Pu Zhiqiang, a prominent human rights attorney.

Three days earlier my three friends and a dozen other people had gathered at Hao Jian’s home to discuss the Tiananmen Square crackdown 25 years ago, when a huge number of students and other protesters took to the streets calling for democracy and an end to dictatorial rule and official corruption. The peaceful protests lasted nearly two months, but in the end the government sent troops and tanks, killing several hundred — possibly several thousand — unarmed citizens. Hao Jian’s cousin was among the dead.

I wanted to attend the gathering, but I had to travel to Australia, where I am a writer in residence at Sydney University. One of those present read out an essay I wrote about the Tiananmen crackdown. Hard as it may seem to believe — I have a law degree, and I myself can hardly believe it — reciting such an essay at a private gathering can violate China’s laws. By the government’s logic, I too have committed the crime of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.”

I am going to turn myself in.

For me, the Tiananmen crackdown was the beginning of a gradual awakening. I was only 15 in 1989, a middle school student in a remote mountain hamlet in China’s far northeastern province of Jilin. Everything I knew about the events of that year came entirely from China’s state-run television station, CCTV: The demonstrators were counter-revolutionary rioters. The People’s Liberation Army exercised great restraint and did not open fire, whereas some rioters burned soldiers alive. I believed it all. I was even grateful to the government and the army for rescuing the nation.

Gradually, the events of 1989 receded from center stage. Everyone was busy earning university degrees or getting rich, as if nothing had ever happened. Even today, the Tiananmen crackdown remains one of the biggest taboos in modern China. Beijing has been attempting to expunge our collective memory through the worship of a soaring economy. But this most traumatic of memories has never truly faded. It continues to live among the people, despite Beijing’s determined efforts to suppress its history.

Soon after I entered university in 1992, a senior student came to our dormitory, sat down and demanded a cigarette. He then asked if we knew what had happened at the school in 1989. We said we didn’t know. He took a deep drag, then told us solemnly that during the Tiananmen incident students from our school, the China University of Political Science and Law, were the first to take to the streets. They were, he said, the first to coordinate links with protesters from other universities. The first president of the Beijing Students Autonomous Federation was from our school. Our university, he told us, had “19 firsts.”

Since then, I came to understand what really happened in 1989 and its significance to China and the world. The government may have condemned the participants as “criminals,” but we students considered it a glorious moment. We regard it as a great honor to have had even the slightest connection with the democracy movement.

My university’s “19 firsts” may not have been entirely accurate, but they became a legend, passed down from one student body to the next. In 1994, when I was the wise senior who visited the new students’ dormitory, I too drew deeply on my cigarette and solemnly intoned: “During the Tiananmen incident of 1989 this university had 19 firsts ... ”

By then, all traces of blood on Tiananmen Square had been scrubbed clean and the bullet holes cemented over, but in the nooks and crannies of the city the story passed from person to person. Around 2003, a friend bought a documentary about the crackdown in Hong Kong. In no time we all made copies. One day I watched it with some friends in a bar in the southern city of Guangzhou. One scene in particular struck me. A youth lay prone on a broad avenue amid the sound of intermittent gunfire. We thought he was dead, but then he suddenly began crawling in a circle. He did not dare stand up, but he didn’t want to stay where he was, pretending to be dead. Crawling was better than doing nothing. “If I were there,” said a migrant worker from Sichuan Province who was standing behind us, “I’d have carried him to safety.”

Whenever I’m asked about China’s future I recount this anecdote of the migrant worker from Sichuan.

(...)

_Murong Xuecun, a novelist and blogger, is the author of “Leave Me Alone: A Novel of Chengdu” and “Dancing Through Red Dust.”_ [ΣΣ: το παρόν νήμα έχει και άλλες εμφανίσεις του]


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## Costas (May 24, 2014)

Chinese elite push for release of jailed Nobel laureate
By Benjamin Kang Lim and Michael Martina
BEIJING Sun May 11, 2014 12:25am EDT

(Reuters) - A group of "princelings", children of China's political elite, has quietly urged the Communist Party leadership to release jailed Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo on parole to improve the country's international image, two sources said.

Liu's release is not high on the agenda of the party, which is trying to push through painful economic, judicial and military reforms amid the most extensive crackdown on corruption in over six decades, the sources with ties to the leadership said, requesting anonymity.

But the back channel push for Liu's parole shows that a debate is taking place among leaders about damage to China's reputation caused by his jailing. It also suggests the ruling elite are not monolithic when it comes to views on dissent.

Liu, 58, a veteran dissident involved in the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests crushed by the army, was jailed for 11 years in 2009 on subversion charges for organizing a petition urging an end to one-party rule. He won the Nobel Peace Prize the following year.

"For many princelings, the pros of freeing Liu Xiaobo outweigh the cons," one of the sources said. "Liu Xiaobo will definitely be freed early. The question is when."

He is eligible for parole after serving half his term.

The sources declined to say how big the group of princelings was, but said most were second- or third-generation born in the 1960s or 1970s and some were close to President Xi Jinping.

"The biggest worry is hostile forces using Liu Xiaobo once he is freed," the second source told Reuters.

Asked how the message was relayed to the leadership, the source said: "We have our channels ... the topic has come up many times during our gatherings."

The sources declined to identify the princelings or say if they had written or spoken to Xi or went through his aides or family members.

The Foreign Ministry, Ministry of Justice and State Council Information Office did not respond to faxed requests for comment.

Liu's wife, Liu Xia, has been put under effective house arrest since shortly after her husband won the Nobel prize, ostensibly to prevent her from talking to the media, and could not be reached.

Liu Xia was admitted to hospital in February after police refused to let her seek medical help abroad.

Liu Xiaobo is considered a moderate dissident, but the Communist Party is obsessed by anyone or anything it perceives as a threat to social stability.

Critics say Chinese leaders are insecure about what they feel are Western efforts to undermine one-party rule by pushing democratization.

President Xi, despite being the son of a reform-minded former vice premier, has shown no sign of wanting to loosen the political system. He said in Belgium last month that China had experimented with multi-party democracy and that it did not work.

China's human rights record has been a thorn in its side since the army crackdown on student-led demonstrations for democracy centered on Beijing's Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, which attracts endless opprobrium abroad.

SUPPRESSION OF EXPRESSION

The government has stepped up pressure on the rights community ahead of the 25th anniversary of the crackdown, detaining several leading dissidents and activists, including lawyer Pu Zhiqiang and journalist Gao Yu.

Xi's administration has also clamped down on Internet critics and tightened curbs on journalists in what rights groups call the worst suppression of free expression in recent years.

Yet the purge of retired domestic security tsar Zhou Yongkang could be conducive to Liu's release, the sources said.

Zhou is under virtual house arrest and under investigation for corruption. He had little sympathy for dissidents and during his five-year watch government spending on domestic security eclipsed the defense budget.

"Zhou Yongkang had recommended imprisoning Liu Xiaobo," the second source said, adding that this could be an opportunity to undo Zhou's deeds.

"But even if Liu Xiaobo is freed, the government will not (politically) rehabilitate June 4 soon," the source said, referring to the Tiananmen crackdown.

Liu's lawyer, Mo Shaoping, said that any decision on releasing Liu would be political, not legal.

Maya Wang, Asia researcher at Human Rights Watch, said there have been sustained efforts from within China to get Liu released, but that she was not optimistic.

"According to Chinese law he would have to admit guilt first. Since he didn't, the likelihood of that happening is rather low," Wang said.

Despite Beijing's crackdown on dissent, there have been nuanced changes to China's policy towards the 1989 protests.

Taiwanese song writer Hou Dejian, who defected to China in 1983 and was deported seven years later for staging a hunger strike with Liu and two others in support of student protesters on the eve of the Tiananmen crackdown, set foot in China in 2006 for the first time in 16 years.

Hou's return and the recent release from detention of two outspoken bloggers - Xue Manzi and Wang Gongquan - have raised hopes the government may show leniency towards Liu.

In another sign of possible tolerance, President Xi approved publication in China last year of the Chinese version of "Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China" by Harvard academic Erza Vogel, multiple sources said.

The book was the first unofficial account of the crackdown by a foreign academic to be published in China.

In yet another sign, "democracy movement" was dropped last year from a government blacklist of "hostile forces", three independent sources said. But the security apparatus continues to put dissidents and bereaved families of victims under house arrest ahead of politically sensitive dates.

In a rare move, Chen Ziming, who was sentenced to 13 years in prison as one of two "black hands" behind the 1989 protests, was allowed to go to the United States in January for medical treatment and to receive a human rights award.

The 1989 protests had initially been labeled "counter-revolutionary", or subversive, but have since been watered down to a "political disturbance".

(Additional reporting by Ben Blanchard, Maxim Duncan and Sui-Lee Wee; Editing by Nick Macfie)


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## Costas (May 25, 2014)

Μια μικρή συζήτηση για τη μεγάλη απεργία του Απριλίου. (alternet)


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## Costas (May 26, 2014)

Monday, May 26, 2014
Cold War Heats Up in Asia (China Matters)
(στην πρωτότυπη σελίδα το κείμενο έχει λίνκια)

The People’s Republic of China decided to defy the “pivot to Asia” by parking its HYSY 981 drilling platform—protected by a flotilla of various vessels perhaps not including PLAN ships-- in waters that Vietnam considers part of its EEZ.

Vietnam has been displeased, to put it mildly. It has reached out to the Philippines, indicating that it may support Manila’s legal challenge to the nine-dash-line or perhaps institute a legal case of its own.

A Vietnamese deputy prime minister is also visiting Washington DC at US Secretary of State John Kerry's invitation, apparently to provide optics for an expected US congressional resolution condemning PRC activities in the South China Sea. The visit also raises the specter (for the PRC) of a US return to Cam Ranh Bay, the massive US-built naval base on the southish Vietnamese coast.

Many Western observers believe that the PRC has blundered into the pivot’s clever trap, and its aggressive moves are simply driving its neighbors into the welcoming arms of the United States, enabling a more forward military presence for the US around China’s borders, and justifying US claims to a central role in the region as security guarantor.

I suspect, however, that the PRC has gamed this out and is willing to roll the dice in the South China Sea. 

The long-term view from Beijing, I think, is that China occupies enough islands to move beyond the hard to defend “cow tongue” claim to a more defensible island sovereignty + EEZ formula for pursuing its interests in the SCS; China’s growing economic and military heft, its ability to limit the terms of dispute to economic terms, the unresolved issues of EEZ ambiguity, definition, and enforcement, and the PRC’s unwillingness to budge from its positions will force its neighbors to come to terms, albeit reluctantly and resentfully, over the long haul.

East China Sea is a different matter. 

On the issue of the Senkakus, the “possession is 9/10s of the law” shoe is on Japan’s foot. Furthermore, the islands are unambiguously included in the scope of the US-Japan security treaty thanks to President Obama’s statement during his recent pivot tour to Asia (even though the US doesn’t recognize Japanese sovereignty over the islands; that’s another story), and Japan’s military infrastructure and capabilities to defend them are increasing. Assuming that Prime Minister Abe is able to thread the needle through the Japanese constitution and past the suspicious Japanese public and institute “collective self defense”, Japanese military power will be augmented by its ability to engage in “defensive” military activity while conducting joint operations with the US.

I read the red tea leaves and believe that the PRC does not have a realistic expectation of seizing the Senkakus or otherwise changing the status quo vis a vis Japan over the islands. I wouldn’t be surprised if the PRC has few serious intentions of occupying the Senkakus and foments tension simply as a “pricetag” retaliation for Japan’s increasingly overt and aggressive anti-PRC foreign policy.

With the PRC deterred from making a genuine move against the Senkakus, the dominant dynamic in the East China Sea will be of Japan trying to achieve unity of doctrine and response with the United States for a contain-China policy, while the PRC will be trying to wedge US and Japan.

The process plays out with Japan’s invocation of “gray zone crises” i.e. friction with the PRC manifested in non-military ways. Japan is trying to define a definition of gray zone conflicts that permits a military response to a non-military scenario such as the PRC's ceaseless salami-slicing, and thereby gets the United States on the hook to provide backup muscle for the Japanese move. I see this as Japan's desired quid pro quo for signing on to "collective self defense".

One scenario I saw involved “armed Chinese fishermen” i.e. the idea that the PRC might try to seize the Senkakus with some kind of irregular force that the coast guard couldn't handle, and would require an SDF response even though PLA forces nominally weren't involved. As the United States digests the Crimea annexation precedent, expect Japan to invoke this kind of scenario more frequently.

The United States, whose primary interest is to get Japan on the hook for US military adventures, not the other way around, is apparently resistant to nailing down the “gray zone conflict” definition and giving Japan a green light (or at least a blinking yellow) for pushing back on the PRC, especially in murky a.k.a. "gray" clashes between Japanese and PRC vessels on the high seas.

Indeed, the gray zone problem neatly crystallizes the whole problem of the pivot: that it creates a moral hazard (in Western terms) or emboldens US allies (the PRC formulation) to engage in reckless behavior not necessarily advantageous to US interests, specifically the US interest in not engaging in a scorched earth economic conflict with the PRC for the sake of some uninhabited rocks.

Failing a meeting of the minds on “gray zone” conflicts, Japan has to content itself with provocations against the PRC in the hope that a PRC over-reaction will compel the US to expand its de facto security guarantees to Japan.

I place the recent contretemps over the close-quarters flyby conducted by Chinese fighter jets against Japanese military surveillance aircraft in the area of the joint PRC-Russia naval exercise in the category of a provocation, committed with an awareness of growing US disgruntlement with the PRC as well as the Obama administration's need to explicitly stand with allies post-Crimea.

Western media has reliably regurgitated Japanese government spin that the flyby was some recklessly aggressive behavior by the PRC.

However, facts indicate that the Chinese military posted ano-fly/no sail notification concerning the naval exercise and Japan flew over there anyway. 

The only justification that Japan can offer is that it refuses to recognize the PRC ADIZ over the East China Sea. In fact, the incident shows why it’s important to respect other countries’ declared ADIZs and in fact the reckless party in this episode was not the PRC, but Japan. In terms of unintended consequences, it may also feed into US concerns about the hazards of letting Japan take the initiative in butting heads with the PRC in the ECS and then demanding US backing.

Interestingly, the official Japanese position now seem to be limited to the “Chinese planes flew too darn close” bleating. 

An as yet unnoted element of the ADIZ issue is that the United States is the only power that asserts the right to fly military aircraft through somebody else’s ADIZ without filing a flight plan (to refresh everybody’s memory, US-flagged civilian carriers respect the PRC ADIZ regs. But the US immediately flew two B-52s into the ADIZ unannounced to affirm the US military prerogative). 

Now Japan seems to be asserting that same right for its military aircraft, at least within the PRC ADIZ, a “destabilizing” “status quo-changing” state of affairs, one that also places the Japanese military at parity with the United States on this issue. I wonder if the US is terribly happy about this but will have to suck it up since Japan is currently dangling the collective self defense and TPP carrots before it.

It would seem unlikely that the United States would take Japan under its wing, so to speak, and conduct joint military flight patrols within China’s ADIZ as a show of support, but the Obama administration’s red line manhood is being questioned worldwide post-Syria and post-Crimea. So it might happen.

And the PRC might just have to suck it up, consoling itself with the idea that getting its way in the South China Sea is adequate compensation for getting balked in the East China Sea. 

At the back of everybody’s mind, I think, is the potential real crisis in East Asia: the possibility that Taiwan will declare de jure independence at some time, and the PRC will be compelled to put up or shut up on the relatively existential issue of losing Taiwan. That’s when military posturing, military threats, and military maneuvers become genuinely pressing issues.

In this context, I consider the most disturbing development in US-PRC relations is not the tussling over rocks in the South China Sea or the East China Sea; it is the decision to twist China’s nuts with the indictment of five PLA officers for hacking. I expect the US national security civilian apparatus considers the indictment one of those clever, legalistic soft power moves that, again traps China in the web of law and international norms.

But the battle lines in Asia have hardened: pivot vs. China. The status quo is becoming confrontation, at least in regional security issues. With the expectation that US and PRC forces will be engaging and confronting each other, it would seem desirable that both sides have a better understanding of their opposite numbers. Indeed, the US Department of Defense has shown little enthusiasm for the White House's anti-hacking jihad which, in addition to clearing out the US government's stock of cyberrighteousness, seriously depreciated by the Snowden revelations, has scotched US-PRC military-to-military exchanges on ground rules for cyberwarfare.

Engagement with the PRC, for better or worse, has become a military matter. And if a clash occurs, it had better be because at least one side really wants it, and not because of the main abettors of military catastrophe: FUD or "Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt."


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## Costas (May 28, 2014)

Νέα διεμβόλιση ψαράδικου, βιετναμέζικου από κινέζικο αυτή τη φορά, στη Νότια Κινεζική Θάλασσα (βλ. αμέσως προηγούμενη ανάρτηση): Wide Support on Chinese Social Media for Boat Attack (με τη βοήθεια και της λογοκρισίας των αντίθερων φωνών, βεβαίως-βεβαίως) (ΝΥΤ/Sinosphere. Η πρωτότυπη σελίδα έχει λίνκια)

Updated, 3:50 a.m. ET| As news spread in China that a Chinese fishing boat had rammed and sunk a Vietnamese fishing boat about 20 miles from a deep sea oil rig that China has placed in waters contested by both countries, the reaction in social media appeared overwhelmingly supportive — even bellicose.

Critical voices appeared to be censored, including one that sharply criticized the Chinese Foreign Ministry, saying a comment it made about Vietnam after the incident calling into question the country’s credibility was “beneath the dignity” of a major power. But most commentators whose opinions were permitted to remain online by China’s tens of thousands of censors in the police and Internet companies, seemed excited by the action.

“Chinese fishermen are mighty! There are still heroes among the people!” wrote a person with the online handle Hou Ning on his Sina Weibo account. According to Vietnamese accounts, the 10 fishermen aboard the boat that sank on Monday were all rescued.

Other social media sites also showed support for the action of the Chinese boat, such as on the popular Phoenix, or ifeng, bulletin board. “This finally shows some backbone,” wrote a commenter in Hubei Province, garnering more than 6,600 thumbs-up signs.

The top-ranking comment on ifeng.com, with nearly 13,000 thumbs-up, from someone in Beijing with the handle Smog in the Imperial Capital, suggested that the Chinese were only doing to the Vietnamese what others have done to the Chinese.

“South Korea detains Chinese fishermen. Japan detains Chinese fishermen,” the person wrote. “Russia attacks them with cannons. A Chinese fishing boat rams and sinks a Vietnamese fishing boat, hahahahahahaha.”

China and Vietnam fought a brief but bloody war in 1979 that Vietnam won. But many Chinese regard Vietnam as a minor southern nation that, they say, was once a Chinese province.

Many commentators approvingly forwarded a statement by the Chinese Foreign Ministry that Vietnam’s credibility in the international community was “very low.”

But one comment posted on Sina Weibo was sharply critical of the Foreign Ministry statement, saying relations between states should be conducted with greater courtesy. That comment was censored, according to Freeweibo, an overseas-hosted website that gathers such censored comments.

Speaking of the statement by Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang on Monday, a person named Duan Wanjin, who said he was a lawyer and whose account had a “V” for verified, indicating he had been approved by Sina Weibo, said the Chinese government was behaving in a way unbecoming of a great power.

“Territorial disputes are something that should be talked about, and one shouldn’t humiliate another country,” he wrote in the censored comment. “A country’s whose pattern” of foreign relations “is too small will find it hard to rise, unless China has decided it wants to make its relations with Vietnam like those between the United States and North Korea.”

“Today the Foreign Ministry is flooded with clowns who only want to ingratiate themselves with the leaders. There isn’t the slightest bit of Confucian culture exerting any uplifting influence of refinement. It’s just all ruffians. The gateway to the country is in a sad state.”

But many other commentators approved of scorning Vietnam: “I think the best way to frighten Vietnam is to attack Japan. Kill the monkey to scare the chicken,” wrote a person with the online handle The Ninth Number on My Identity Card Is Eight.

The phrase neatly turns around a Chinese saying that one should “kill the chicken to scare the monkey” — that is, frighten one’s real enemy by attacking a lesser one. The reversal both threatens and humiliates Vietnam, by suggesting it is a lesser nation.

The central notion of a master-servant relationship between China and Vietnam also featured elsewhere: “Originally Vietnam was a prefecture of China, today you are independent. Take good care of yourself and that’s enough, how dare you act rashly!”

Also on Tuesday, the state news agency Xinhua reported that direct flights that had begun on May 18 from Tianjin, a major city near Beijing, to Danang, a coastal destination in Vietnam, had been indefinitely suspended “because of the influence of the situation on the ground.”

The Vietnamese authorities had offered Chinese citizens a visa on landing in Danang to facilitate tourism, said the report, which described Danang as “not inferior to the Maldives,” a major Chinese holiday destination.

Referring to the boat incident, the latest development in a growing territorial conflict over the South China Sea, Haoshuai De Ba from Sichuan Province wrote on ifeng.com’s bulletin board: “A new phase is beginning… get ready for it….”

More than a thousand people gave that the thumbs-up.


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## Costas (May 30, 2014)

Ανακοίνωση της Διεθνούς Αμνηστίας για τη δίκη των 55 Ουιγούρων σε στάδιο.

China: Shameful stadium ‘show trial’ is not justice

The deplorable mass sentencing of 55 people at a stadium in China’s north-western Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region [XUAR] is no solution to addressing public security fears, said Amnesty International. 

Fifty five people, believed to be mostly Muslim Uighurs, were sentenced for terrorism, separatism and murder. Three were sentenced to death. 

“Those responsible for the recent violent attacks have shown a callous disregard for human life and must be held to account. But speedy show trials will not deliver justice for the victims. Hastily sentencing people after unfair trials will only exacerbate tensions in the region,” said William Nee, China researcher at Amnesty International. 

The sentencing took place in front of more than 7,000 people state media reported on Wednesday. 

All of those sentenced are believed to be at risk of torture in detention. The local Communist Party leader, Zhang Chunxian said recently that suspected criminals should be “severely punished” before trial. 

“With such charades, the Chinese authorities appear more concerned with courting public opinion than justice. It is highly doubtful the accused received fair trials,” said William Nee. 

The sentence parade followed a wave of attacks as ethnic tensions rise within the XUAR. Thirty-one people died and over 90 were injured on 22 May, when bombs were thrown from two cars driving along a busy street in the region’s capital Urumqi. 

The Chinese authorities have declared a “strike hard” campaign in response to recent attacks. Last week saw the launch of an anti-terrorism campaign, with convoys of anti-terrorist forces and military equipment paraded through Urumqi.

“The Chinese authorities have a duty to ensure public security but the response so far seems only likely to inflame tensions,” said William Nee. 

Ethnic Uighurs face widespread discrimination including in employment, education, and housing, and curtailed religious freedom and political marginalization.


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## Costas (May 30, 2014)

Αφιέρωμα της South China Morning Post στα 25χρονα της καταστολής της 4ης Ιουνίου 1989 στο Πεκίνο.

_Επίσης:_
Tiananmen Square massacre anniversary: the last prisoner of the protests
Twenty-five years after the Tiananmen protests, one man is still paying for the stand he took on the streets of Beijing 
By Malcolm Moore, Beijing
3:23PM BST 26 May 2014

 A tall, introverted 50-year-old man from Beijing is the only known person still serving time in prison of the roughly 15,000 who were arrested after the Tiananmen protests.

Miao Deshun was a factory worker who became wrapped up in the chaos of the Tiananmen protests. Together with four friends, he was arrested for arson as he battled the army on the streets of Beijing.

"According to our records, at present he is the one prisoner still in prison," said John Kamm, the director of the Dui Hua Foundation, which has successfully lobbied for the release of several prisoners from the Tiananmen protests.

Workers like Mr Miao, who took to the streets to fight, were hit with far harsher sentences than the students peacefully occupying Tiananmen Square, Mr Kamm said. Dui Hua estimates that "fewer than 100 people" were even executed.

"There's a big difference between violent and non-violent counter revolution," he said. 

"The higher educated, university graduates did not, for the most part, get as heavy sentences as the workers and the peasants. Those guys were all in the front line throwing molotov cocktails and the intellectuals did not do that," he said. "If you look at all the recent releases that we have reported, they have all been workers".

He added that Dui Hua had a list of a handful of other prisoners who were unaccounted for. "Based on what happened to many others, dozens who were given life in prison or a suspended death sentence, they would be out. But we do not know," he said.

A cellmate who spent time with Mr Miao in Beijing's No.1 prison, where he was initially confined, said that his sentence had been extended because he refused to cooperate with the prison authorities. The man asked not to be named in fear that he might be targeted for speaking out.

"Miao was very opinionated about the Communist party and he refused to do the work we were set in prison," he said. At the time the prisoners manned a badminton racquet production line inside the block.

Each day, the prisoners would rise at 6am and work until 10pm, breaking to eat watery cabbage soup that was ladled from an old oil barrel that had its top sliced off.

"Everyone had their sentence cut for good behaviour, one way or another, but Miao never got anything. Actually his sentence was extended not long after he was thrown in because he refused to do the labour."

"It got him beaten up over and over. He was always thrown into solitary confinement, once for two months, because he had rebelled against the guards," he added.

Almost 6ft-tall and rake-thin, Mr Miao seldom spoke, but stood out among the prisoners. "He was so skinny and he developed hepatitis and often went to the clinic," he said. "He never slept at night and sat on his bed all day while everyone else worked. He refused to consider himself a prisoner and he would spend days reading the newspapers, analysing every article."

He added that five years after his imprisonment, his family had stopped visiting. "His father used to come frequently, always crying, and he would buy things for him," he said.

"But I think he did not want his family to have to look after him, he wanted to be responsible for himself. But after his father stopped visiting, he had no money. He only had six yuan (60p) per month and would spend two yuan on soap, two yuan on toilet paper and two yuan on washing powder. The others gave him food sometimes."

Another prisoner, who also developed hepatitis at the same time, said the authorities had stopped Mr Miao's family from visiting him because Mr Miao would not confess to his crimes.

A third prisoner, who also knew Mr Miao, described how the authorities had rounded up workers after the protests. "I was a worker in a printing factory," he said.

"I went on the streets and I set fire to an oily rag and put it on the wheel of a truck. Someone must have reported me. On June 10, there were two plainclothes at the office. They put me in a jeep and lifted my t-shirt over my head and forced me to kneel on the floor of the jeep, with one person stepping on my face and another sitting on my back. When we got to the police station, they started beating me hard, and then slamming my head into the door over and over," he said.

"They told me they would send me to Tiantan park where the martial law forces were camped and they would dig a hole and bury me there."

After his trial, he spent 17 years in prison, being released in September 2006. "What we did was just to show our anger and dissatisfaction with the government and we were not some mob.

"Some people once asked me whether I regretted what I did. I said I don't regret it and will not regret it, even though it has cost me a lot. My father died in 2003 and after I was put in prison my wife and my three year old son left me.

"I see him sometimes during the Chinese New Year holiday. Once when he was in school, the teacher threatened that if he was naughty he would be put in prison like me. He is quite introverted, and I think what happened to me had an influence on him."

Mr Miao is now in Yanqing prison, a special facility for prisoners with medical conditions. He is scheduled for release in 2018, but may have nowhere to go. It was not possible to contact his family. "He suffers from severe mental illness," said Mr Kamm.

"If we look at the guy who was released at the end of 2012 in a very similar situation, essentially he had nowhere to go. The family was indigent, the sister couldn't take him in, she had to sell her home and a neighbourhood committee stepped in and made arrangements for him. That is a possibility. It may be he has no one to go to and he is ill," he said.

Additional reporting by Adam Wu


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## Costas (Jun 8, 2014)

Το τανκς τού έλιωσε τα πόδια, κι έτσι έγινε καλός για τους παραολυμπιακούς. Αλλά υπό όρους... (China Change)

The Morning of June 4th and Its Long and Insidious Shadow (1) (2) (3)
By Fang Zheng

I was a student communist party member at the time. “As a party member,” the party official said to me, “you should keep the party’s interest in mind and yield to it. June 4th crackdown is in line with the party’s interest, and you have to make demand of yourself according to the standards of a party member.”

The party official claimed that “the interest of the party is the interest of the people.” I disagreed. “June 4th crackdown may be in line with the party’s interest, but it is not in the interest of the people. On this, the party does not represent the people.”

After the unsuccessful visits by school officials, many teachers whom I was familiar with came to give me advice one after another. “Give up,” they said. “For the sake of getting your diploma and for the sake of getting a job to survive, don’t say you were run over by a tank. You can say you were run over by a military truck, or even by an armed vehicle. As long as you don’t say tank, they will let you pass.”
(...)
Lots of people were standing around, and I saw a few people lifting and moving the Chairman of the CDPF into the hall. He was Deng Pufang (邓朴方), Deng Xiaoping’s wheelchair-bound son who was paralyzed when he had jumped out of a window in Peking University during the Cultural Revolution to escape “rebels” pursuing him for being the son of one of the biggest capitalist roaders.

Liu Xiaocheng (刘小成), the chairman of the CDPF and a few other officials came over to me. “I talk to you today on behalf of the CDPF,” Mr Liu began. “We know how you became disabled and we discussed whether we should let you participate. Despite differences among ourselves, the CDPF still hopes to keep you if you can make three promises. If you do, you can continue to train and attend the games.”

1) Do not talk about June 4th and your injury with other athletes at the training camp;

2) Do not contact anyone connected to June 4th during the training or the games;

3) If you win medals you will be requested for interview by the media. We hope you avoid media; if it really cannot be avoided, do not talk about the circumstances in which you were injured. Make up something else, like a car accident. Anything.

“If you can promise these three things,” Liu Xiaocheng concluded, “we will let you compete.”


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## Costas (Jun 8, 2014)

Online censorship reaches unprecedented scale on June Fourth anniversary
British Broadcasting Corporation, June 4, 2014

One legacy of Tiananmen: China’s 100 million surveillance cameras
The Wall Street Journal, June 5, 2014

LinkedIn is censoring posts about Tiananmen Square
Quartz, June 4, 2014

Vietnamese state media publish articles on June Fourth anniversary, soon deleted
British Broadcasting Corporation, June 4, 2014


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## Costas (Jun 8, 2014)

Voices from Tian'anmen (South China Morning Post)
Σύμφωνα με τον Bill Bishop του Sinocism το καλύτερο αφιέρωμα στο τότε κίνημα, αλλά σέρνεται απελπιστικά. Προκαλεί μάλιστα σούρσιμο σε όλο μου το σύστημα.

Και μια και τον ανέφερα, νά και η γνώμη του:

I first came to China 25 years ago, to spend the second semester of my junior year at Peking University. We arrived in late January and I stayed until the third week of June. No one who was in Beijing then will ever forget the Beijing Spring and subsequent crackdown.

The one lesson I took away from those first few months in China is that it is always a mistake to underestimate what the Party will do to stay in power.

That lesson, which has held up very well over the last quarter century, is why I continue to believe that Xi Jinping is very serious about both economic reforms and reining in corruption. There is no shortage of people, inside and outside China, who believe Xi’s efforts will fail without said political reform, but Xi and his colleagues appear to disagree. Political reforms in any Western or liberal sense seem even less likely now than they have in decades.


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## Costas (Jun 9, 2014)

(The New Statesman)

At the peak of its popularity, Mao's bible was the most printed book in the world. It attained the status of a sacred, holy text during the Cultural Revolution, and retains its place among western devotees.

In 1968 a Red Guard publication instructed that scientists must follow Mao Zedong’s injunction: “Be resolute, fear no sacrifice and surmount every difficulty to win victory.” Expert knowledge was not valid, and might be dangerously misleading, without the great leader’s guidance. Examples of revolutionary science abounded at the time. In one account, a soldier training to be a veterinarian found it difficult to castrate pigs. Studying Mao’s words enabled him to overcome this selfish reaction and gave him courage to perform the task. In another inspirational tale, Mao’s thoughts inspired a new method of protecting their crops from bad weather: making rockets and shooting them into the sky, peasants were able to disperse the clouds and prevent hailstorms.

By the time the Red Guard publication appeared, Mao’s Little Red Book had been published in numbers sufficient to supply a copy to every Chinese citizen in a population of more than 740 million. At the peak of its popularity from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, it was the most printed book in the world. In the years between 1966 and 1971, well over a billion copies of the official version were published and translations were issued in three dozen languages. There were many local reprints, illicit editions and unauthorised translations. Though exact figures are not possible, the text must count among the most widely distributed in all history. In the view of Daniel Leese, one of the contributors to Mao’s Little Red Book, the volume “ranks second only to the Bible” in terms of print circulation.

Originally the book was conceived for internal use by the army. In 1961, the minister of defence Lin Biao – appointed by Mao after the previous holder of the post had been sacked for voicing criticism of the disastrous Great Leap Forward – instructed the army journal the PLA Daily to publish a daily quotation from Mao. Bringing together hundreds of excerpts from his published writings and speeches and presenting them under thematic rubrics, the first official edition was printed in 1964 by the general political department of the People’s Liberation Army in the water-resistant red vinyl design that would become iconic.

With its words intended to be recited in groups, the correct interpretation of Mao’s thoughts being determined by political commissars, the book became what Leese describes as “the only criterion of truth” during the Cultural Revolution. After a period of “anarchic quotation wars”, when it was deployed as a weapon in a variety of political conflicts, Mao put the lid on the book’s uncontrolled use. Beginning in late 1967, military rule was imposed and the PLA was designated “the great school” for Chinese society. Ritual citation from the book became common as a way of displaying ideological conformity; customers in shops interspersed their orders with citations as they made their purchases. Long terms of imprisonment were handed out to anyone convicted of damaging or destroying a copy of what had become a sacred text.


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## Costas (Jun 9, 2014)

Xinjiang moving towards Talibanization: Duowei (Want China Times)

Northwest China's restive Xinjiang Uyghur autonomous region is drifting towards "Talibanization," says Duowei News, an outlet run by overseas Chinese.

Xinjiang is home to the Muslim Uyghur ethnic minority, who have been blamed for a slate of terror attacks on the mainland in recent years, including the bombing of an open market in the regional capital of Urumqi last week that killed 39 people and injured another 94. Activists point the finger back at Beijing for exaggerating security threats to justify hardline measures that perpetuate an ongoing economic, cultural and religious suppression of Uyghurs.

Citing an article by Beijing-based scholar Deng Yuwen, the controversial former deputy editor of the Central Party School journal Study Times, Duowei says there are three distinct signs that indicate life in Xinjiang is starting to imitate the practices of the Taliban, including the strict regulation of women, discriminatory attitudes towards non-Muslims, the banning of "Western" activities, radical religious views and the aggressive enforcement of regulations.

The first sign, according to Deng, is that terrorist activities have branched out from specific locations like Xinjiang to occur across the entire country. Last October, for example, a jeep carrying people identified as Uyghurs plowed into crowds in Beijing's Tiananmen Square before the vehicle burst into flames, killing a total of five people. Then in March, a knife-wielding gang went on a rampage at Kunming railway station in southwest China's Yunnan province, killing 29 civilians and injuring more than 140.

The second sign, Deng writes, is that more and more of these terror attacks are being carried out against the general population. In the past, the majority of the attacks have been targeted at the authorities and in particular police stations in Xinjiang, though recent high-profile attacks have been launched at innocent and random people.

The third sign of Xinjiang's Talibanization, Deng says, is that government efforts to crack down on terrorism feel lacking or even helpless. Beijing's Xinjiang policy has completely failed, as both the "hardline" and "flexible" approaches have done little to put a halt to terror attacks, Deng said, adding that the Chinese government needs to be extremely careful in implementing its Xinjiang strategies and must also adjust its ethnic, religious and social policies.

Duowei points to the July 2009 riots in Urumqi which killed 197 people and injured thousands as the turning point for when Uyghur society started its descent into extremism. Increasing numbers of Uyghur women have exchanged their colorful traditional silk dresses for veiled black gowns, niqabs and burqas, while many men have quit smoking and drinking. Failure to conform has led to strong criticism and even risk of being ostracized from the community.

In recent years, pictures of girls showing skin on social media have received insulting comments, while women wearing T-shirts in public have reportedly been abused for their lack of modesty. Village officials say many local Uyghurs have stopped dancing their traditional dances as music is prohibited, and family members of the deceased no longer offer guests the traditional Nazer meal at funerals.

Hong Kong's Phoenix Weekly also reported that many teenagers in southern Xinjiang look up to Taliban soldiers as heroes and hang pictures of them on their walls.

What is clear despite this alarming movement, however, is that Beijing is putting up a fight in Xinjiang, Duowei says, pointing to numerous reports of authorities cracking down hard on terrorist organizations, hideouts and training facilities.

Recent reports state that public securities have also targeted the dissemination of terrorist propaganda and materials online, and that police have busted as many as 23 suspected terror groups, arrested more than 200 people and seized over 200 explosive devices this month.

During a meeting of China's decision-making Politburo on May 26, Communist Party leaders discussed further measures to ensure stability in Xinjiang, including improving economic development, ethnic unity, bilingual education, promoting societal values and observance of the law, as well as putting an end to religious extremism.

The Global Times, a tabloid under the auspices of the party mouthpiece People's Daily, also reported that a recent survey of nine Chinese cities revealed that 90% of citizens supported tougher anti-terror legislation.


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## Costas (Jun 11, 2014)

Michael Rank, "Orwell in China: Big Brother in every bookshop"
The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 11, Issue 23, No. 2, June 9, 2014.

(...)
The first, and probably the best known, of the many Chinese translations of Nineteen Eighty-four published on the Mainland is by Dong Leshan 董乐山 (1924-99), who, like Orwell, was an independent-minded socialist and who like almost all Chinese intellectuals suffered badly during the Cultural Revolution. Dong, who translated the first PRC edition of the novel that was published in 1979, wrote a remarkably frank introduction which is downloadable here in an edition published by the Liaoning Educational Publishing House in 1998. “Orwell is not a so-called anti-communist writer in the general meaning of the phrase, and Nineteen Eighty-four is not simply a so-called anti-Soviet work….Orwell was first and foremost a socialist, and next he was anti-totalitarian and his struggle against totalitarianism is the inevitable result of his belief in socialism,” Dong declared. “He believed that only if totalitarianism is defeated can socialism be victorious.” Dong’s condemnation of the Chinese Communist Party’s brutality and authoritarianism is clear enough, and becomes even more direct when he praises Orwell for not being like those Western intellectuals in the 1930s who “paid homage to the ‘new Mecca’ [Stalin's Soviet Union] and were led by the nose through ‘Potemkin villages’ and when they returned raved how they had seen the bright sunshine of a new world.” (Dong was too astute to mention the Western leftists who praised Mao’s China in the 1960s and 70s in similar awestruck terms). But Dong saved his most daring critique for last, concluding with the words: “The twentieth century will soon be over, but political terror still survives and this is why Nineteen Eighty-four remains valid today. In any case so far as we are concerned, only if we thoroughly negate the terror of totalitarianism associated with the ‘Cultural Revolution’ can those people who fought for socialism for so many years bring about true socialism which is worth aspiring to.”
(...)
Αναφέρεται και το ζήτημα της μετάφρασης ή μη του Τελευταίου Πειρασμού του Καζαντζάκη ως highly controversial, χωρίς όμως εξηγήσεις.


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## Costas (Jun 15, 2014)

Έβλεπα BBC προ ημερών και ο ανταποκριτής ήταν στο Πεκίνο και μ' ένα τηλεφώνημα κι ένα ραντεβού στο δρόμο λίγο αργότερα αγόρασε για 60 δολάρια μια άδεια εργασίας λόγω ασθενείας με σφραγίδα κανονικού γιατρού και κανονικού νοσοκομείου (είπε), ώστε να μπορέσει να δει το Μουντιάλ σε εργάσιμη ώρα. Του την έφεραν με ντελίβερυ, δηλ. με παπί...


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## AoratiMelani (Jun 15, 2014)

Φανταστικό...
Εγώ παρακολούθησα τις τρεις τελευταίες μέρες στο κανάλι της Βουλής ένα ντοκιμαντέρ του BBC για την σύγχρονη Κίνα, πολύ ενδιαφέρον. Κάποια πράγματα τα ήξερα, αλλά βολεύει για μας τους αδιάβαστους να μας τα σερβίρουν απλά και συμπυκνωμένα.


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## Costas (Jun 18, 2014)

Μου θυμίζει τη διαφορά ελληνικής και χριστιανικής θρησκείας:

The late Dr. Hu Shih, eminent historian of Chinese thought and culture, used to say with sly delight that centuries of Christian missionaries had been frustrated and chagrined by the apparent inability of Chinese to take sin seriously. Were we to work out fully all the consequences for Chinese society of the model offered by an organismic cosmos functioning through the dynamism of harmony, we might well be able to relate the absence of a sense of sin to it. For in such a cosmos there can be no parts wrongfully present; everything that exists belongs, even if no more appropriately than as the consequence of a temporary imbalance, a disharmony. Evil as a positive or active force cannot exist; much less can it be frighteningly personified. No devils can struggle with good forces for mastery of humans and the universe, and people’s errors, unlike sin in other worlds, can neither offend personal gods nor threaten a person’s individual existence.

Frederick Mote, _Intellectual Foundations of China_, the Problem of Evil and Consequences of A World without Sin

Η μεγάλη κατάφαση:

The Chinese [narrative] tradition has tended to place nearly equal emphasis on the overlapping of events, the interstitial spaces between events, in effect on non-events alongside of events in conceiving of human experience in time. In fact, the reader of the major Chinese narrative works soon becomes conscious of the fact that those clearly defined events which do stand out in the texts are nearly always set into a thick matrix of non-events: static description, set speeches, discursive digressions, and a host of other non-narrative elements. … The ubiquitous potential presence of a balanced, totalized dimension of meaning may partially explain why a fully realized sense of the tragic does not materialize in Chinese narrative. Such characters as Prince Shen-sheng, Hsiang Yu, Yueh Fei, and even Chia Pao-yu clearly possess the qualities of the tragic figure to one extent or another. But in each case the implicit understanding of the logical interrelation between their particular situation and the overall structure of existential intelligibility serves to blunt the pity and fear the reader experiences as he witnesses their individual destinies. In other words, Chinese narrative is replete with individuals in tragic situations, but the secure inviolability of the underlying affirmation of existence in its totality precludes the possibility of the individual’s tragic fate taking on the proportions of a cosmic tragedy. Instead, the bitterness of the particular case of mortality ultimately settles back into the ceaseless alternation of patterns of joy and sorrow, exhilaration and despair that go to make up an essentially affirmative view of the universe of experience.

Andrew Plaks, _Chinese Narrative_


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## Costas (Jun 18, 2014)

mainland China’s ‘red classics’: a term that has recently come to refer to the major works of literature, film, and other cultural products that were first produced and rose to national prominence during the early period of communist rule.

“Red Classics” in post-Mao Chinese cultural discourse refers to the major literary and visual texts produced in the seventeen years from 1949, the year of the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), to 1966, the year Mao launched the Cultural Revolution; hence they are also called literature/film of “the Seventeen Years,” or “socialist literature/culture.” This body of literary and visual texts as a whole reflects the results of a nationwide, state-sanctioned literary practice of constructing revolutionary myth in order to legitimize and secure the rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in mainland China. At the same time the works created models of the socialist new person offering a vision of how the individual and collective should function in a more egalitarian, socially considerate and selfless manner. While the thematic and stylistic potential initially demonstrated in the original sources of many such texts were rich and diverse, as the political climate in China changed, works were progressively made to fit into the CCP’s increasingly homogenized and extremist ideological system through a complex process of appropriations and revisions. This process reached its extreme in the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) during which the nation’s cultural landscape shrank into a single narrow ideological mold dominated by class struggle and typified by the famous Revolutionary Model Operas (Yangbanxi) whose ranks included remakes of red classics including Tracks in the Snowy Forest and The Red Lantern. It is no surprise that after the end of the Cultural Revolution, this body of ‘socialist realist’ literature was quickly abandoned, together with Maoist ideology, as the Chinese people embraced the new era of reforms. The ensuing 1980s saw a rapid economic expansion, a surge of new modes of literary and artistic experiments, and quickly shifting literary trends from modernism to postmodernism. In the 1990s and continuing into the new millennium, however, as the country’s economic reforms continued to expand, new problems emerged including the ever- greater disparity between rich and poor, and rampant official corruption. Paralleling this, a significant change occurred in China’s cultural landscape— a change ironically marked by the return of the literary and cultural products of “the Seventeen Years,” now elevated to the status of “Red Classics.” The novels and short stories first published in “the Seventeen Years” were put back onto the shelves of the now privately owned bookstores; old films about revolutionary heroes and heroines were remade into better images and sound-tracks, with Blue Ray definition, playing in showrooms right next to those playing Batman. Old revolutionary stories were adapted into household television dramas, played by stars of kung fu films; and Red songs could be heard from the government’s conference halls to restaurants to Karaoke houses, and even in public parks. The reappearance of the Red Classics at multiple points in China’s recent history attests to their importance as a cultural phenomenon.


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## Costas (Jun 18, 2014)

*What Does Chinese Say* allows you to search among Chinese news and social media (weibo). It uses Baidu translation API, so you can search in English and view results (machine-translated) in English.

*AAUP Rebukes Colleges for Chinese Institutes and Censures Northeastern Ill.*
The American Association of University Professors on Saturday urged colleges that operate Chinese language and culture centers financed by the People’s Republic of China to either scrap the partnerships or renegotiate them to promote transparency and protect academic freedom.

In a statement approved last week by the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure and released here on Saturday at the association’s annual conference, the AAUP argues that many colleges in the United States and Canada have sacrificed their integrity and jeopardized academic freedom by giving the Chinese government considerable say over the centers, which are known as Confucius Institutes.

As things now stand, the statement said, the Confucius Institutes in place at about 90 North American colleges "function as an arm of the Chinese state and are allowed to ignore academic freedom." It said the agreements that establish them feature "nondisclosure clauses and unacceptable concessions to the political aims and practices of the government of China".


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## Costas (Jun 18, 2014)

Watch The Dying Art Of Neon Sign-Making In Hong Kong
The Huffington Post | By Mallika Rao

But it was in China that they reached their pinnacle. A neon arms race between Shanghai and Hong Kong meant both cities became major producers of the stuff, so that by the 1980s, when American shop owners swayed by changing public taste were opting instead for internally-lit shadow boxes, you couldn’t find an alley in Hong Kong undazzled by a rainbow of meticulously bent, glowing characters. So drenched was the city, Ridley Scott famously used it as inspiration for his vision of a glamorously seamy future in "Blade Runner," eschewing the dark streets of New York as too “medieval.”


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## Costas (Jun 19, 2014)

As Chinese Leader Takes On Graft, Relatives Are Said to Shed Investments (NYT)
As President Xi Jinping of China prepares to tackle what may be the biggest cases of official corruption in more than six decades of Communist Party rule, new evidence suggests that he has been pushing his own family to sell hundreds of millions of dollars in investments, reducing his own political vulnerability.

Chinese rights lawyers have warned that they are under mounting pressure, with the formal arrest of one of China's best-known advocates, Pu Zhiqiang, and multiple detentions. One bleak joke doing the rounds is that even lawyers' lawyers need lawyers" these days.
(Guardian)


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## Costas (Jun 22, 2014)

Ενθύμησις επισκέψεως πρωθυπουργού Λι Κετσιάνγκ:

China bans unauthorised critical coverage by journalists | Reuters 
Reporters in China are forbidden from publishing critical reports without the approval of their employer, one of China's top media regulators said on Wednesday. The rule comes as the government intensifies a crackdown on freedom of expression, both online and in traditional media. The State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television published the rule in a circular announcing a crackdown on false news and journalists who take bribes or extort money from their sources. Στη συνέχεια οι αρχές διαβεβαίωσαν ότι ο μόνος λόγος που πάρθηκε αυτό το μέτρο είναι οι κιτρινιάρηδες και εκβιαστές δημοσιογράφοι...

*Mainland China code seeks to muzzle lawyers who publicise cases through social media* | South China Morning Post 
Mainland lawyers are angry about a new code being drafted by the national bar association that restricts what they can say online. The code urges lawyers to exercise extreme caution when commenting about cases on the internet and bans them from revealing case information before court rulings. An association spokesman confirmed yesterday that such a draft was being considered but would not give details.


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## Costas (Jun 22, 2014)

China Jails Anti-Graft Activists Linked to New Citizens’ Group (Bloomberg)

Pay High Attention to Online Ideological Security | China Copyright and Media 
This article by Lieutenant-General Li Dianren of the National Defence University was published first in the Chinese Journal of Social Science, and republished on Seeking Truth online, on 15 June.
Equally important as safeguarding information technology security is safeguarding ideological cybersecurity. The former aims for hard power, the latter fights in soft disputes. Together, these two constitute two indispensible sides of cybersecurity. At present, some Western countries rely on their “network information superiority”, to change the network into a main channel to penetrate and destroy other countries, export Western ideology on a large scale, preach Western political systems and models, slander and attack other countries’ political systems and value views, vigorously conduct “peaceful evolution” and carry out “colour revolutions”, and direct one “smokeless war” after another. To some extent, ideological penetration has become one of the main forms of Western “netwar”, it is the same as “hard destruction” based on information technology, and it constitutes a grave challenge to target countries’ cybersecurity and national security.

'Tell me where my husband is' – wife’s plea to China's Communist Party - Telegraph 
Nearly six months after her husband disappeared into the custody of China’s security services, the wife of respected Uighur academic Ilham Tohti issues an emotional plea for information on his whereabouts.


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## Costas (Jun 22, 2014)

China Says Hong Kong Online Referendum Illegal as Website Hacked - Bloomberg 
The voting website, which opened yesterday, suffered “severe” distributed denial-of-service attacks, in which hackers flooded systems with information to shut them down, the organizers of the poll said in a statement dated June 19. More than 265,000 votes had been submitted as of 7 p.m. yesterday, the website showed. The election procedure is not in line with Hong Kong’s constitutional Basic Law, Xinhua said, citing the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office of the State Council. The public nomination of candidates runs counter to the Basic Law, Xinhua said.

Yunlin Dog Sellers Openly Taunt Dog Lovers: “Buy The Dog Or It Dies!” | Nanfang Insider 
We first heard rumors that the Yulin dog eating festival was to be cancelled, and then heard reports that it had already taken place last week. With tensions running high between animal rights activists and Yulin’s traditional dog-eaters, it now appears Yulin’s dog sellers are taunting activists and exploiting their love of dogs. Reports in the Morning Report suggest that dog sellers in Yulin are selling their live dogs to animal activists at inflated prices while threatening harm to the dogs in their possession.

Το Πεκίνο από ψηλά


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## Costas (Jun 28, 2014)

Αμερικανική, ουσιαστικά, είδηση, αλλά με κινεζικό ενδιαφέρον:

Chinese tycoon Chen Guangbiao sparks fury among New York's homeless after 'publicity stunt'
*Organiser says the event could have been 'planned better'*
By Andrea Chen and Agence France-Presse in New York City (SCMP)

Chinese philanthropist Chen Guangbiao’s New York charity lunch ended bitterly as hundreds of homeless people, who were promised US$300 in cash, left empty-handed -- and furious.

The eccentric Chen, who made his fortunes in the recycling business, last week bought a full-page advert in The New York Times – a paper he once attempted to buy – promising 1,000 underprivileged residents a swish meal at the Boathouse in Central Park, along with the cash.

At yesterday’s event, the first batch of beneficiaries – 250 shelter residents of the New York City Rescue Mission, which helped organise the luncheon – sat down for a three-course meal as promised.

Guests were bused in and treated to a sit-down meal of seared tuna, filet mignon and seasonal berries, waited on by staff in suits and bow ties.

Chen serenaded the guests with his signature rendition of We Are the World and a magic show. Volunteers, dressed up in green military uniforms, sang a Chinese patriotic song. Then a cart filled with cash was wheeled onstage.

But the giddy atmosphere fell apart when it was announced that the tycoon would not be handing out the cash, at the behest of the Mission, which was concerned the money would be used on drugs and alcohol.

After the announcement, several people tried to rush at Chen, who was shielded by guards, while others shouted insults at him, media reports said.

Speaking to the South China Morning Post, a member of the event’s organising team described the scene as “weird and troublesome”.

“Chen could have organised the luncheon in a better way,” the organiser said, requesting anonymity.

“At least he did not have to bring all those military uniforms – [viewed as] Halloween costumes [by] the Americans – and asked his volunteers to put on the uniforms and sing a patriotic song,” she said.

After the Mission intervened, an anxious Chen at first told his guests there was a change of plan and that he would distribute the US$300 at the shelter after the lunch.

Chen announced through a translator that he was heading to the New York City Rescue Mission -- which helped organise the lunch -- and invited guests to join him there.

Several homeless people were asked to pose with Chen in front of the cart of cash while holding dollar bills.

“He took photos with some of the guests holding US$300 on the stage,” the organiser told the Post. But at the end of the event, none of the guests received any donation in cash.”

“Don’t lie to the people!” Ernest St Pierre told AFP. “We came here for $300 but now he’s changed his tune.”

“This individual who’s filthy rich put it in the paper,” St Pierre, a former US Navy medic, told reporters.

Retired Vietnam War veteran Harry Brooks told reporters he would be “highly upset” if he didn’t get the cash, despite enjoying the food “very much.”

“I could use $300,” he said. “Clothing for one thing,” he said gesturing at his shabby attire when asked how he would spend it.

Not all guests were unhappy. Many said they enjoyed the food and called the experience “beautiful,” saying they were touched that someone had flown all the way from China wanting to help.

But as they were herded outside to queue up to get the bus back, complaints multiplied.

Quin Shabazz, 34, said he felt the homeless had been exploited and branded the lunch -- covered by a mob of TV cameras and reporters -- “a big publicity stunt.”

Al Johnson, 42, said he had been banking on the money to get his life together and go home to his family in Texas.

“This was going to change my life,” he said. “Fraud. This is fraud with a capital F,” he added. “I feel used for a photo op.”

Craig Mayes, executive director of the New York City Rescue Mission, was left to deny there had been any injustice.

“I’m really sorry. It was misrepresented in the paper,” he said.

Michelle Tolson, director of public relations at the Mission, said Tuesday that no cash would be handed out to individuals and that it had taken 1.5 months of negotiations to convince Chen to instead donate $90,000 to the group.

The money would be ploughed straight into the Mission’s $5 million yearly expenses to feed and house people, she said.

The shelter provides people with a hot meal, a clean shower and a safe bed, clothing and assistance in addressing their problems.

Chen, known for publicity stunts and reportedly worth an estimated $825 million, serenaded his guests with a rendition of the 1985 charity single “We Are the World.”

The smiling, bespectacled businessman said he wanted to give back after wealthy Americans had contributed to relief efforts after disasters in China.

“Hopefully, I will really lead the way to encourage other people who are in a position to help to follow through,” he said.

However, the rocky start to his philanthropy campaign in New York has not dented Chen’s confidence, saying he planned to hold more charity luncheons and keep his promise of treating 1,000 homeless people to fine meals. “My homeless friends, please trust me, and trust the Mission,” Chen had said before leaving the restaurant, according to The New York Times.

Chen grabbed headlines in the US months ago for his effort to buy the Times and hosting a news junket where he distributed business cards proclaiming he was the “most influential Chinese”.

He is listed at number 227 on Forbes’ list of the 400 richest Chinese, with an estimated wealth of US$825 million.

Coalition for the Homeless says around 60,000 homeless men, women and children bed down in New York’s shelters and thousands more who sleep rough on the streets or elsewhere.

The number of homeless New Yorkers has risen by 75 percent since 2002 and in recent years has reached the highest levels since the Great Depression of the 1930s, according to the advocacy group.


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## Costas (Jun 28, 2014)

Ιαπωνία (τα παχιά δικά μου):
Publishers fighting back against bestsellers highly critical of China, South Korea (Asahi Shimbun)

A growing group of publishing companies are banding together to battle the recent popularity of books and magazines that are disparaging of China and South Korea and even appearing on a top-10 bestseller list.
(...)
......because most of the anti-China and anti-South Korea books contain contents that raise doubts about reporting on those two nations by the mass media, the popularity of such books is likely due to media literacy education.

"In school classrooms, the emphasis has been on taking a critical view of information," Sato said. "On the other hand, schools have not taught their students that simply *being critical of everything is not really being intellectual*. Readers of the anti-China and anti-South Korea works will likely continue to seriously read such books because they are under the impression that they possess a critical way of thinking."
By MAYUMI MORI/ Staff Writer


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## Costas (Jun 28, 2014)

Μέσω Sinocism:

ICANN 50 in London: Lu Wei, Minister of Cyberspace Affairs Administration of China (βίντεο) Προσφώνηση. Το ζουμί (διατυπωμένο μέσα από γενικές αρχές) είναι στο 6.00-9.00

China's 'Sovereign Internet' (By Shannon Tiezzi / The Diplomat)

A new report in People’s Daily interviewed five Chinese experts on Internet security and political thought, including Fang Binxing (credited with creating China’s “Great Firewall”). The report focuses on the idea of “Internet sovereignty” — the idea that each country has the right to control its domestic internet space. Yet by moving from a discussion of China’s rights to talk of international law, the report moves beyond a defense of China’s internet censorship to outlining China’s vision for global internet governance.

The idea of China’s “Internet sovereignty” is a high-profile resurrection of a concept first rolled out in a 2010 white paper called “The Internet in China.” The white paper explained the “Internet sovereignty of China” as meaning that “within Chinese territory the Internet is under the jurisdiction of Chinese sovereignty.” All persons and organizations operating within Chinese territory are expected to follow China’s Internet laws and regulations, the white paper said.

In an interview with New Yorker’s Evan Osnos at the time, Columbia University professor Tim Wu noted that China’s idea of “Internet sovereignty” was simply “a statement of private international law as typically practiced.” Most countries, Wu noted, have decided that the Internet is subject to national laws. The difference between China and the rest of the world, according to Wu, was simply one of scale: “Other countries, if they don’t consider the Internet sovereign, have a certain respect for the network as a platform for free speech … Again this varies from place to place, but China is unique in its lack of respect for the idea of an open Internet.”

Thus, among China’s rules and regulations for the Internet are typical prohibitions against “divulging state secrets” and “subverting state power” as well as more unique bans on “damaging state honor,” “propagating heretical or superstitious ideas,” “spreading rumors [and] disrupting social order and stability.” These rules were lumped into the category of “internet security,” equating these actions to hacking and other forms of cyber crime.

The People’s Daily article seeks to argue not only that China has the right to set up its own rules and regulations for the Internet, but that an international consensus should be reached to recognize this right. The article begins by noting that, in the Internet age, China now has “information borders” in addition to traditional sovereignty over land, air, and sea. The report argues that each country has a right to strengthen control over its own domestic Internet, and that such actions will help safeguard order and stability on the global Internet system.

In the interview with People’s Daily, Fang Binxing pointed to a 2013 report from a UN-commissioned group of experts on information security. That report noted that “state sovereignty and international norms and principles that flow from sovereignty apply to State conduct of ICT [information and communication technologies]-related activities, and to their jurisdiction over ICT infrastructure within their territory.” Fang argued that this statement proves the UN has already accepted China’s idea of “Internet sovereignty.”

Fang made no mention of the next item in the UN report, which requires that “state efforts to address the security of ICTs must go hand-in-hand with respect for human rights and fundamental freedom set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” The juxtaposition of these two points in the UN report outlines the basic difference between China’s concept of the Internet and the Western concept: is cyberspace entirely made up of domestic spheres, each under a different country’s sovereign rule, or is the Internet as a whole subject to international rule in the name of “universal values”? People’s Daily argues for the former approach.

The next expert interviewed, Wang Jun of Minzu University’s Marxism school, acknowledges the difficulty of defining boundaries for cyberspace, but offers some suggestions. “Although cyberspace has no national boundaries, network infrastructure has borders. Internet users have home countries. Internet companies and organizations always belong to a specific country.” Thus Wang suggests that each country can control these physical aspects of cyber space and “other countries have no right to interfere.”

Yet even while holding that “Internet sovereignty” is immune to external interference, the People’s Daily article acknowledged the importance of international consensus on defining cyberspace boundaries and rules of conduct. Currently, disagreements between countries are a major barrier to defining boundaries and implementing control of cyberspace, Wang Xiaofeng of Fudan University’s Center for America Studies said. Lang Ping of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences noted that no country can independently face the challenges posed by cyberspace.

Lang and Wang also see a competition among major powers for influence in cyberspace. Wang said that “some countries” (almost certainly a reference to the U.S.) are “abusing” their technological advantages to conduct cyber-espionage and cyber-attacks. Later, both Fang and Lang explicitly complained that the United States has an outsized role in controlling cyberspace due to its technological prowess. The experts generally agreed on a need for international dialogue and consensus on clear boundaries and rules for Internet control.

China’s goal for this dialogue would be to codify its own interpretation of “Internet sovereignty” into international law, much as Western countries have been able to codify their idea of “universal values.” The People’s Daily article sees cyberspace as a contested zone where the U.S. wields too much influence; it seeks to combat this by pushing for international consensus modeled on its own vision for the Internet.

Ai Weiwei, art without compromise (By William Wan / The Washington Post)
(...)
But he remains as confrontational as ever in his life and art. Of late he has gone from fighting the government to warring with others in China’s art community, criticizing some for surrending too readily to government pressure and censorship. Recently, after his name was left off a press release about an exhibition at Beijing’s influential Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Ai pulled his work from the exhibition and posted transcripts on Instagram of embarrassing conversations with the director about government pressure to omit his name. [ΣΣ: [1][2] ]

Then, he went a step further and began taping interviews with other artists about what they thought of the omission, demanding that they choose a side: to stand with him or against him.

The fight has kicked up controversy and debate among Chinese artists. Some have dismissed Ai as an egotistical diva warped by newfound fame, while others praised him for exposing the compromises many now quietly make in China’s art world. [ΣΣ. πολύ ενδιαφέρον το τελευταίο αυτό λινκ]
(...)
Και ακολουθεί συνέντευξη όπου οι απαντήσεις και τα σχόλιά του δεν μπορούν ν' αφήσουν κανέναν αδιάφορο.


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## Costas (Jun 28, 2014)

Μέσω Sinocism, συνέχεια:

Nightmares uncovered after girl dies at Chinese web addiction rehab school (Games in Asia)
(...) Apparently, during a lengthy training session meant as punishment, teachers pulled Ling Ling up by her arms and legs and then dropped her—repeatedly—to the ground. When she began to vomit blood and became unable to stand, her classmate Xin Xin said, the teachers said that she was faking and continued to beat her. Both girls ended up in the hospital, but Ling Ling’s bed was in the morgue, where her mother was called the following morning to identify her body. (...) Web addiction—which often means addiction to MMORPGs—is a serious problem in China. In fact, China was the first country to officially name internet addiction a clinical disorder, and for years, the government has considered it a major health threat. Experts estimate that China has about 4 million people that are seriously addicted to the web and/or online gaming. (...) In one instance, a 15-year-old child named Deng Senshan was sent by his parents to a Nanning training camp, and then died within eight hours of his arrival. And shockingly, eight hours isn’t the fastest that staff at these schools have managed to do serious harm. A 13-year-old student had his clavicle fractured by staff at a school in Liaoning within just two hours of his arrival when he attempted to run away. The schools’ promotional materials are full of phrases like “guidance” and “training”, but the contracts parents sign when enrolling their kids often states that the school does employ ‘suffering’ and ‘disciplinary’ teaching methods and that the parents agree to permit this so long as the students are not injured. (...) ...the school’s ‘treatments’ hadn’t worked, and in fact the addiction had become more severe. (...) Four schools of the twelve were shut down (including the Zhengzhou school that killed Ling Ling) and others were investigated, but several got away with simply paying compensation to the family or, in one case earlier this year, simply refunding tuition.


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## Costas (Jun 28, 2014)

Μέσω Sinocism, τέλος:

Ο νέος χάρτης της ΛΔΚ, όπου οι διεκδικήσεις της στη Νότια Κινεζική Θάλασσα (με την 9 φορές διακεκομμένη γραμμή) δεν είναι πια σε γωνιακό κουτάκι αλλά κανονικό μέρος του χάρτη, που έτσι μεγάλωσε κατά πολύ. [Την ίδια ώρα οι χάρτες της Ελλάδας έχουν όχι μόνο το Καστελόριζο πάντοτε σε κουτάκι αλλά συχνά και τη Ρόδο-Κω, την Κέρκυρα κλπ.]

--------------------
Vietnam needs brotherly correction (By Wang Qiang / Global Times)
"Comrades and brothers" is used to describe the friendship between the Communist parties of China and Vietnam and the friendship between the two countries and their people during liberation and national building. However, due to the wrong attitude, provocative wording and dangerous actions of Vietnam in the South China Sea issue in recent days, some people have raised doubt over the "comrades and brothers" friendship, and the bilateral relationship has faced some challenges.

The key to solving the deadlock of China-Vietnam relations is whether Vietnam can give up its wrong stance.
(...)
If the Communist Party of Vietnam cannot acknowledge the conspiracy behind some international hostile forces or leaves the country's nationalist and anti-Communist forces unchecked, domestic security and social order will face more threats and chaos.

It is necessary for the parties of both countries to strengthen cooperation. When conditions are ripe, we can communicate on theories like "depoliticization of the armed forces," "multi-party mechanisms" and "separation of the three powers" to unite thoughts within the party.
(...)
China would set a good example by firmly cracking down on Vietnam's fuss-making.
(...)
Besides, it is necessary to take some measures to make our brother correct its own mistakes. That is what we call "brotherly affection." 
_The author is a research fellow with Non-war Military Operations Research Center at National Defense University PLA China._

Άμα έχεις τέτοιον big brother να σε στέργει...

----------------------------
Στο πλαίσιο της καμπάνιας για την περιστολή της διαφθοράς στις τάξεις του Κόμματος και του κράτους, για τις συνεδρίες κριτικής και αυτοκριτικής Officials can buy scripts for their democratic life meetings for 100 rmb online...

------------------
Όλος ο κόσμος μέσα σ' ένα καρυδότσουφλο: η Τόνγκα, τα παγκόσμια μπλοκ, η υπερχρέωση, οι εθνοτικές ταραχές... (AP)


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## Costas (Jun 28, 2014)

The Debate Over Confucius Institutes (China File)

Last week, the American Association of University Professors joined a growing chorus of voices calling on North American universities to rethink their relationship with Confucius Institutes, the state-sponsored Chinese-language programs whose policies critics say are anathema to academic freedom. We asked contributors to discuss the debate. Specifically: the costs and benefits of having a Confucius Institute on a university campus; the economic forces at play; and the role of China in university life more broadly. —The Editors

Update: Several readers have noted with dismay that this Conversation does not include an entry by someone who works for or with a Confucius Institute. We share this concern. We have solicited responses to our original question—and to the discussion as it has developed—from numerous employees of universities that have Confucius Institutes as well as from people who teach at Confucius Institutes, and people who work with and for Hanban. So far, none of the people in the above categories whom we have approached has been willing or able to contribute. We welcome such contributions. —The Editors

Μια παράγραφος από την ανακοίνωση του AAUP, στο πιο πάνω λινκ "joined":
Confucius Institutes appear designed to emulate the cultural ambassadorship and programming associated with, for example, the British Council, the Goethe Institut, and L’Alliance Franςaise. These latter three entities are clearly connected to imperial pasts, ongoing geopolitical agendas, and the objectives of “soft power,” but none of them is located on a university or college campus. Instead, their connections to national political agendas and interests require that they be established in sites where they can fulfill their mandates openly without threatening the independence and integrity of academic institutions in host countries.


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## Costas (Jun 28, 2014)

People’s Daily Takes Firm Stance Against Urine Consumption
By CHRIS BUCKLEY / NYT

If imbibing urine is not your cup of tea, People’s Daily — the solemn voice of the Chinese Communist Party — is with you on that one. On Friday, the newspaper took time off from its usual encomiums to party leaders to warn people against drinking their own pee.

“There is no clinical or medical basis for using urine over a long period of time as a product for preventing and curing illness, or as a health supplement,” an investigative report in the paper said, citing squadrons of medical experts.
(...)
People’s Daily may have been prompted to move against urine drinkers by a recent burst of publicity for their cause. In news reports that spread on the Internet in China, elderly Chinese men have boasted of the benefits of the habit and demonstrated its pleasures in pictures that may cause some readers to wince.

One man in his late 70s told a newspaper in the southwestern city of Chongqing that the therapy took some getting used to, but gulping down the liquid was not as unpleasant as many assumed. “At least, it’s a lot better tasting than many bitter Chinese medicines,” he said.

But he recommended using a glass, not plastic cup, to preserve “the authentic taste” of the liquid. For reasons that the report did not explain, he insisted on using a false name.


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## Costas (Jul 1, 2014)

Ξάφρισμα από Sinocism:

Η είδηση απασχόλησε και τα ελληνικά ΜΜΕ. Εδώ, μια ανάλυσή της:
Xi Bags High-Level Military “Tiger” Amid Deepening Corruption Crackdown
Instead of highlighting the usual litany of “personal failings” typically associated with such graft cases, the official announcement noted that Xu “took advantage of his post to assist the promotion of other people and accepted bribes personally and through his family members.” Such a direct—and public—assertion about the buying of military office suggests Xi and his civilian peers are keen to send a message concerning the party’s control of the military. The accusation goes right to the heart of the PLA's loyalty to the CCP and its role as the ultimate guarantor of party rule. The Egyptian military’s summary abandonment of then President Mubarak in 2011 presumably has prompted some soul searching among the senior civilian leadership in China, and, unlike his predecessor, Hu Jintao, Xi appears to have the wherewithal to bring the PLA fully to heel.

(Reuters)
In a visit certain to be watched carefully in Pyongyang, President Xi Jinping will be holding talks with South Korean President Park Geun-hye for the fifth time in a year, without yet meeting the North's leader, Kim Jong Un.
(...) South Korea is also one of the few major economies that runs a surplus with China, to the tune of $63 billion last year, thanks to exports of cars, smartphones, flatscreen TVs, semiconductors and petrochemicals.
(...) "My belief is that North Korea wants to be left alone, with some modest economic opening that they control," [Deputy US Secretary of State Richard] Armitage said at a recent forum in Beijing. "They don't like China much more than they like the United States."

Special Report: The battle for Hong Kong's soul (Reuters)
"Xi Jinping has rectified (China's) policy for governing Hong Kong," a source close to the Chinese leader told Reuters in Beijing, requesting anonymity. "In the past, the mainland compromised toward Hong Kong too much and was perceived to be weak." 

This tightening grip has fueled resentment and sparked a civil disobedience movement called "Occupy Central", which threatens to blockade part of Hong Kong's main business district.

Mass protests can paralyze this high-density city. Business leaders have warned that Occupy could damage businesses: Four of the largest multinational accounting firms placed advertisements in local newspapers warning against the movement, which has been branded illegal by Chinese authorities.

Occupy's primary aim is to pressure China into allowing a truly democratic election in 2017. 

Beijing says Hong Kong can go ahead with a vote in 2017 for the city's top leader. But mainland officials stress that Hong Kong's mini-constitution, the Basic Law, specifies that only a nominating committee can pick leadership candidates. Pro-democracy activists demand changes that would allow the public to directly nominate candidates.

Nearly 800,000 people voted in an unofficial referendum that ended on Sunday, which called for Beijing to allow open nominations of candidates for the 2017 poll – a vote China's State Council, or cabinet, called "illegal and invalid", said the state Xinhua news agency.

Fears that the screws are tightening were heightened when Beijing published an unprecedented cabinet-level White Paper in June on Hong Kong. It bluntly reminded Hong Kong that China holds supreme authority over the city.

"The high degree of autonomy of (Hong Kong) is not an inherent power, but one that comes solely from the authorization by the central leadership," it says.

Mass Hong Kong protest looms as democracy push gathers steam (Reuters)
Hong Kong is bracing for its largest protest in more than a decade after nearly 800,000 voted for full democracy in an unofficial referendum, a move likely to stoke anti-China sentiment in the former British colony.

The annual July 1 rally, marking the day the territory returned to China in 1997, will focus on pressuring Beijing's Communist Party leaders for full electoral freedom, organizers said, and could draw the largest turnout since 2003, when half a million people demonstrated against proposed anti-subversion laws which were later scrapped.


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## Costas (Jul 1, 2014)

China to let Indian experts monitor Brahmaputra in Tibet (The Hindu)
 China has for the first time formally agreed to allow Indian hydrological experts to conduct study tours in Tibet to monitor the flows on the upper reaches of the Brahmaputra, according to a new agreement signed here on Monday during the visit of Vice-President Hamid Ansari.

In a move to assuage India’s concerns about the ongoing dam projects on the upper reaches of the river — known as the Yarlung Zangbo in Tibet — Beijing has formally agreed to allow India to “despatch hydrological experts” to conduct study tours “according to the principle of reciprocity”.


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## Costas (Jul 2, 2014)

Uphill Fight Ahead for Hong Kong’s Democracy Movement
By KEITH BRADSHER (NYT)

HONG KONG — A pro-democracy march held Tuesday by a huge crowd of mostly young demonstrators underlined the determination of many of this autonomous Chinese city’s residents to preserve and expand the freedoms that they inherited from British rule. But it also brought to light more challenges that may lie ahead.

The protesters remained peaceful and did not resort to violence, which would have given the local government a pretext to respond much more firmly and probably would have hurt broader public support for the demonstration. But at an overnight sit-in that followed the march, the police also showed that they could efficiently remove and arrest 511 protesters in less than four hours — a brisk pace suggesting that they may be ready to respond to larger sit-ins that some democracy advocates are contemplating for later this year.

The calm and poise of the demonstrators Tuesday seemed to help reassure the business community that future protests would not severely disrupt commerce, resulting in a 1.55 percent rise in the Hong Kong stock market on Wednesday. But while the protesters disproved government warnings that their activities would lead to chaos, their civil behavior could also lead to an impression that they are manageable, which could limit the pressure they are able to bring to bear on the government for changes.

The preponderance of young people among the demonstrators may also make it much harder, rather than easier, to reach any compromise with the local government and its backers in Beijing. The key question is who may run to become the territory’s chief executive in the next elections, in 2017. That issue was front and center for Tuesday’s march, as well as the subject of an informal vote last month in which nearly 800,000 Hong Kong residents participated, and which Beijing dismissed as illegal.

Students and people in their 20s have overwhelmingly supported a plan calling for the general public to be allowed to nominate candidates for chief executive — so-called civil nomination, an idea completely dismissed by Beijing and its allies.

By contrast, older Hong Kong residents have tended to support a compromise that would retain the nominating committee mandated by the Basic Law, the territory’s mini-constitution, but make that nominating committee more diverse and open to a wider range of candidates than Beijing wants.

Asked after a speech on Wednesday afternoon whether the political center was eroding in Hong Kong, Anson Chan, the second-highest official in the Hong Kong government in the years immediately before and after the British returned the territory to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, bluntly replied, “I have to say that I agree.”

Mrs. Chan, one of the most influential advocates of democracy here, noted that a key pro-democracy member of the city’s legislature, Ronny Tong, had even withdrawn his own plan for reconstituting the nomination committee, after concluding that support in the democratic camp for civil nomination was overwhelming. She said that she still favored a nominating committee with broad rules that would make it possible for a full array of candidates to appear on the ballot, not just those approved by Beijing.

She contended that such a procedural compromise would still make it possible to achieve full democratic goals.

“Hong Kong people have demonstrated that we want the whole loaf, not half a loaf, and we certainly don’t want a loaf rotten through and through,” she said at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club.

Mrs. Chan noted that foreign countries and their citizens and companies in Hong Kong had a large stake in the issue as well. If the many individual and political liberties that define Hong Kong are eroded, then the city could eventually lose its separate, preferential status from mainland China for the purpose of many international agreements, covering everything from airline routes and international trade to taxes, cross-border investments and visa requirements, she said.

Michael DeGolyer, the director of the Hong Kong Transition Project, a 26-year-old coalition of academics who have been studying the territory’s political evolution from a British colony to a Chinese territory, expressed caution about whether Tuesday’s march had been large enough to change political calculations in Hong Kong’s government and in Beijing.

“It wasn’t this enormous, overwhelming turnout that everyone would be stunned by — it was big,” Mr. DeGolyer said.

Organizers estimated that 510,000 people joined the march, while the police calculated that the largest number of people simultaneously participating at any one time during the eight-hour march was 98,600. The police did not attempt to estimate the total number of participants.

The Hong Kong University Public Opinion Program estimated that 154,000 to 172,000 people had taken part in the march. Since 2003, a sizable pro-democracy march has been held every year in Hong Kong on July 1, the anniversary of its return to Chinese sovereignty; the turnout Tuesday came closest to rivaling that of the enormous 2003 march.

One lingering question Wednesday, after the police had removed and arrested participants in the sit-in, was whether future sit-ins would be as peaceful. A small but noticeable number of elderly residents and people in wheelchairs chose to participate; one of the many subthemes of the march had been a call for better social benefits for the elderly and the disabled.

The young protesters treated the elderly and wheelchair-bound protesters among them with respect and even deference, resulting in a calmer tone to the sit-in than most had expected. The police also treated those protesters with great caution, and reluctantly arrested them while showing a clear awareness that every move was being followed by numerous television cameras and cellphone cameras.

“Nobody wants to be a granny beater,” Mr. DeGolyer said later.

But the participation of elderly and disabled protesters at future protests is uncertain. At the same time, the police showed Wednesday morning a new willingness to formally arrest large numbers of people, not just carry them out of the downtown road they were blocking.

“This was not an illegal assembly; it was a peaceful and legitimate protest under international law,” said Mabel Au, the director of Amnesty International Hong Kong. “The police action was hasty and unnecessary andsets a disturbing precedent.”

The backdrop for the protest was an increasingly repressive political environment in mainland China, where detentions of human rights advocates and others have increased as President Xi Jinping has rapidly consolidated power. Some demonstrators in Hong Kong, particularly the limited number of older demonstrators, voiced an awareness that they were seeking a greater political voice at a time when the political climate, if anything, may be darkening.

“I just try my best by marching even though it may not be of much use,” Gary Fong, a 45-year-old metalworker, said during the march on Tuesday. “Who knows, this may be the last year that we will be allowed to march.”


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## Costas (Jul 3, 2014)

No regrets, say the Chinese women who chose independence over marriage
The girls who took a lifelong vow of chastity are now in their 80s, the last survivors of a unique custom
(Tania Branigan in Shatou village, Guangdong / The Guardian)

Her mother carefully undid Liang Jieyun's plaits, combed out the strands and pinned them into a bun. When her friends put up their hair, they wore the red clothing of brides. But as Liang left her girlhood behind and stepped across the family threshold, she was embarking on a lifelong commitment to remain single.

At 85, Liang is a rare survivor of a custom stretching back to the early 19th century in parts of southern Guangdong. Women here could vow to remain a "self-combed woman", or zishunü (自梳女), leaving their parents' home to work without marrying. "If I hadn't become a 'self-combed woman', the landlord would have forced me into marriage," she said.

Pretty girls were often forcibly taken as wives or concubines. It happened to two of her friends, and they killed themselves.
(...)


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## Costas (Jul 4, 2014)

Μέσω Sinocism:

China bans Ramadan fast in Muslim northwest (yahoo)
BEIJING (AP) — Students and civil servants in China's Muslim northwest, where Beijing is enforcing a security crackdown following deadly unrest, have been ordered to avoid taking part in traditional fasting during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.

Ramadan, Beijing style (The Economist)
In China Ramadan this year comes against the backdrop of increased violence perpetrated by Uighurs and a government line which more strongly than ever attributes it to radical Islam and international jihadism. In Xinjiang, authorities have reportedly taken steps, as they have in years past, to discourage Ramadan fasting among ordinary people and ban it outright for many party members, government workers and school children.

At the Madian mosque, however, the scene was more relaxed. Bitter tensions may be roiling in Xinjiang, but in the cool shade of craggy pine trees and the sweeping eaves of the central courtyard of the Qing-dynasty mosque, diversity and tolerance were on display.

Nightclubbing, we're nightclubbing...
Clubbing with China's Cocky Young 1 Percenters (Jamie Fullerton / Vice)


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## Costas (Jul 4, 2014)

Why China Will Reclaim Siberia
(Frank Jacobs / NYT)
“A land without people for a people without land.” At the turn of the 20th century, that slogan promoted Jewish migration to Palestine. It could be recycled today, justifying a Chinese takeover of Siberia. Of course, Russia's Asian hinterland isn't really empty (and neither was Palestine). But Siberia is as resource-rich and people-poor as China is the opposite. The weight of that logic scares the Kremlin.

Moscow recently restored the Imperial Arch in the Far Eastern frontier town of Blagoveshchensk, declaring: “The earth along the Amur was, is and always will be Russian.” But Russia's title to all of the land is only about 150 years old. And the sprawl of highrises in Heihe, the Chinese boomtown on the south bank of the Amur, right across from Blagoveshchensk, casts doubt on the “always will be” part of the old czarist slogan.

Siberia – the Asian part of Russia, east of the Ural Mountains – is immense. It takes up three-quarters of Russia's land mass, the equivalent of the entire U.S. and India put together. It's hard to imagine such a vast area changing hands. But like love, a border is real only if both sides believe in it. And on both sides of the Sino-Russian border, that belief is wavering.

The border, all 2,738 miles of it, is the legacy of the Convention of Peking of 1860 and other unequal pacts between a strong, expanding Russia and a weakened China after the Second Opium War. (Other European powers similarly encroached upon China, but from the south. Hence the former British foothold in Hong Kong, for example.)

The 1.35 billion Chinese people south of the border outnumber Russia's 144 million almost 10 to 1. The discrepancy is even starker for Siberia on its own, home to barely 38 million people, and especially the border area, where only 6 million Russians face over 90 million Chinese. With intermarriage, trade and investment across that border, Siberians have realized that, for better or for worse, Beijing is a lot closer than Moscow.

The vast expanses of Siberia would provide not just room for China's huddled masses, now squeezed into the coastal half of their country by the mountains and deserts of western China. The land is already providing China, “the factory of the world,” with much of its raw materials, especially oil, gas and timber. Increasingly, Chinese-owned factories in Siberia churn out finished goods, as if the region already were a part of the Middle Kingdom's economy.

One day, China might want the globe to match the reality. In fact, Beijing could use Russia's own strategy: hand out passports to sympathizers in contested areas, then move in militarily to "protect its citizens." The Kremlin has tried that in Transnistria, Abkhazia, South Ossetia and most recently the Crimea, all formally part of other post-Soviet states, but controlled by Moscow. And if Beijing chose to take Siberia by force, the only way Moscow could stop would be using nuclear weapons.

There is another path: Under Vladimir Putin, Russia is increasingly looking east for its future – building a Eurasian Union even wider than the one inaugurated recently in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, a staunch Moscow ally. Perhaps two existing blocs – the Eurasian one encompassing Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization – could unite China, Russia and most of the 'stans. Putin's critics fear that this economic integration would reduce Russia, especially Siberia, to a raw materials exporter beholden to Greater China. And as the Chinese learned from the humiliation of 1860, facts on the ground can become lines on the map.


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## Costas (Jul 5, 2014)

"I never thought it strange when two men become a couple," Zhou says. "We are reading about two guys together exactly because we like boys." Ουφ! 

Chinese women crave Tanbi lit 
(by Sun Ye / China Daily)

Tanbi is a form of Japanese literature depicting love between men that its hardcore following of young, heterosexual women can't get enough of. Sun Ye reports on the growing phenomenon.

In the literary world of tanbi [danmei 耽美], a Japanese term meaning "the pursuit of beauty" and often used to refer to two good-looking men in a romantic relationship, there are answers to what a heterosexual woman wants in love and life.

At least, this is the case for Cici Zhou, a 25-year-old real estate agent who has devoured 1,200 tanbi books over the past 10 years, drawn to them by the strong characters and their fighting spirit.

Zhou's favorite, Tianxiadiyi (translated to English means "No 1 in the world"), is the story of two opposing majestic kings who are mutually attracted but have to fight against each other and their desire.

"You can't find these characters in normal chick-lit," she says. "They're both strong, outstanding men. There are dramatic ups and downs and greater obstacles to overcome."

There is no official tally, but there are an estimated one million readers of tanbi stories in China, according to Yang Ling, associate professor with Xiamen University who studies tanbi sub-culture.

The scene is dominated by work from Japan and China's Taiwan, but tanbi lovers are also putting out original stories in forums, podcasts, custom-made books and other items that target hardcore fans.

Jinjiang Literature, one of the more popular websites that features original tanbi stories, clocks two million log-ins a day. Ninety percent of its users are female, and 80 percent are in the 18 to 35 age group, according to a report the company provided to China Daily.

Tanbi borders on gay fiction, but the readership is predominantly heterosexual women.

"I never thought it strange when two men become a couple," Zhou says. "We are reading about two guys together exactly because we like boys."

"They're reading for the variety tanbi offers," Yang says.

The genre is broken down into a gamut of sub genres, that touch on a wide variety of themes from apocalyptic tales, star wars, martial arts, and fan fiction. The stories can be "clear-water" (platonic) or x-rated. Tanbi is written in so many styles that there are stories told in dialects from northeastern China to Cantonese.

"Whatever subject you like, you can find it there," Yang says. "It's like a small literary kingdom." And then there is the love story at the core.

"In tanbi, love and relationships have no set patterns like in Cinderella, where a hero rescues a beauty in danger," Yang says. "Both sides can be strong. Or they can take different roles in different circumstances. There are many more possibilities to explore."

That is perhaps one of the reasons why these readers are more open-minded when setting their own terms, and more understanding to others, Yang says, who has interviewed many tanbi fans in recent years.

"These are definitely positive influences. When they are open to different types of relationships, they are also open to other discussions, such as staying single for longer, or raising a child on their own," Yang says.

According to Ducky, another seasoned reader of 10 years, who will only reveal the name she uses online, "I'm an independent woman, I get to make my own decisions in work as well as in life." She says she prefers stories where both members of the couple are standing on their own two feet and fighting for what they want in love.

"However, we still like alpha males better," she says. "When there are two of them, there is the tension we want. Especially now that boys are becoming feminine and girls have somehow turned aggressive."

In the strong male characters, the female readers find their most desired kind of romance.

"I believe tanbi describes the purest kind of love," says Jodie Cheng, who first discovered tanbi when looking for news of her idols, the Korean pop group Super Junior, in 2010. In a fictional account, written by tanbi fans, band members become lovers.

"But as long as a story has a modicum of realism, two men together means trouble, and giving up everything for love," Cheng says. "That's rare in our real life, therefore, we look for it."

With the rise of Sina Weibo and Wechat, two major instant messaging platforms in China, tanbi is no longer the cult genre it was a decade ago. There has been a growing number of girls, or fojoshi (a Japanese term for girls who endorse male homosexual love), who have started to write fan fiction that moves tanbi into the world of mainstream literature.

A recent work pairs two X-men, Magneto and Professor X, powerful opponents who care about each other, at least in the Hollywood megahit X-Men: Days of Future Past.

"There are so many fojoshi that it's almost a selling point now," Yang, the researcher says.

"But whatever the girls are attracted to, they are after the true, good, beautiful human feelings that have always been at the center of literature."


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## nickel (Jul 5, 2014)

Τεράστια η συζήτηση για τη Σιβηρία (#1121). Το Χόλιγουντ θα έχει ψωμί για αρκετές ταινίες...

Με την ευκαιρία έκανα κι ένα φρεσκάρισμα της ιστορίας της Σιβηρίας:

The Russian conquest of Siberia has been considered genocidal towards the native Siberian peoples by some historians, with many native peoples subjected to massacres and extermination. The Russian colonization of Siberia and conquest of its indigenous peoples has been compared to European colonization in the United States and its natives, with similar negative impacts on the natives and the appropriation of their land. During the following few centuries, colonization and trade grew steadily, but the inflow of higher-educated or middle-class people remained relatively low, one instance from abroad being the expeditions of the German naturalist, physician and explorer Georg Wilhelm Steller and the Danish explorer Vitus Bering in the 1740s; both men were exploring on the orders of the crown. Another category of people being sent to Siberia consisted of prisoners exiled from Western Russia or territories held by Russia, like Poland (see katorga). Over the 19th century, around 1.2 million prisoners were sent to Siberia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberia

(Κάτι σαν αποικισμός της Αμερικής και της Αυστραλίας σε ένα.)


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## Costas (Jul 9, 2014)

Η σκηνή όπου ο κατηγορούμενος τραγουδάει τη Διεθνή είναι σκέτος κλαυσίγελος, ή μάλλον γελωτοκλαυθμός...

Tale of abuse and revenge behind fall of China "tiger"
*When Chinese official Zhou Jianhua refused to tell Communist Party investigators he had received massive bribes, he says they beat him and forced him to drink toilet water until he confessed.*
(Channel News Asia)
BEIJING: When Chinese official Zhou Jianhua refused to tell Communist Party investigators he had received massive bribes, he says they beat him and forced him to drink toilet water until he confessed.

As a crackdown on corruption pushed by Chinese President Xi Jinping ensnares a growing list of senior officials, Zhou's account -- in a recording obtained by AFP -- offers a rare glimpse inside the ruling Party's opaque internal disciplinary system.

Lawyers say his case demonstrates how the faction-riven graft investigations can mask power struggles and are carried out with little respect for the law.

"They used my relatives as hostages, and tortured me unrelentingly until I accepted the fabricated charges," Zhou -- handed a suspended death sentence earlier this year -- told his lawyers in a recorded meeting.

The Party's internal justice system, known as "shuanggui", operates without oversight from judicial authorities and has been increasingly criticised by China's legal community.

At least 15 officials have reportedly died from abuses in "shuanggui" since 2007.

Xi has vowed to take down high-ranking "tigers" as well as low-level "flies" in an anti-corruption push introduced in response to widespread public anger over endemic graft.

Zhou's case was thrust into the spotlight last month when one such tiger -- the former top Communist official in Jiangxi province, Su Rong -- was placed under investigation.

Zhou says his own fall came swiftly after he accused Su's wife of corruption, and was payback from his party superior.

For years Zhou was a loyal Communist Party member and successful bureaucrat in Xinyu in Jiangxi, known for its enormous steel plant, where he rose to become head of the city People's Congress, the local legislature.

Like his colleagues, he earned little but amassed enough money -- sometimes through illicit means -- for his wife to travel to Britain and other countries.

But in 2011, Zhou began to suspect he might be targeted by an inquiry, and took the risky step of telling a Party anti-corruption team that Su's wife had been illegally profiting from land deals in Xinyu.

Weeks later, several of Zhou's associates were taken into police custody and he was informed that Su had ordered the same team to investigate him.

In January 2012, Communist officials detained Zhou and took him to a centre where he would be held for nearly six months without any access to a lawyer, normal practice under "shuanggui".

"He felt that because he reported Su Rong's wife, he was being targeted as revenge," said Zhou Ze, one of China's most outspoken human rights lawyers, who now represents the former bureaucrat.

Zhou told investigators that he had accepted around 600,000 yuan ($100,000) in bribes, saying this was customary among local officials, who each New Year exchange red envelopes bursting with cash.

"Everyone takes (red envelopes), so I took them too," Zhou admitted in a written account confirmed by Zhou Ze.

But when he refused to confess to larger bribes of around 10 million yuan, the physical abuse began.

"I was beaten, and finally they took me to a toilet, forced my head into a toilet bowl, and forced me to drink the water," he said in an interview recorded at a detention centre in March and made available online. Its veracity was confirmed by his lawyer.

"I knew that if I didn't confess, my wife would face prosecution, but if I did confess, I'd have stains on my reputation I could never wash off."

Meanwhile, several associates said they were also forced into providing evidence against Zhou.

"After days of mistreatment when I was at my wits' end, I confessed to giving Zhou's wife 140,000 yuan," Yang Peng, the owner of an upmarket hotel in Xinyu who was detained for three months, wrote in a statement posted online.

Zhou Jianhua says he gave in and offered a confession on Tomb Sweeping Day, when Chinese people commemorate family ties by sprucing up their relatives' graves.

"I cried because I knew that writing a confession would have serious repercussions," he said.

Zhou says Party officials warned him that his wife would be targeted if he renounced his confession, and he was found guilty at trial -- as are more than 99.9 per cent of criminal accused in China.

In January, the court announced a suspended death sentence -- usually commuted to life in prison.

But while in detention, Zhou had been chronicling details of Su Rong's alleged crimes on the back of empty cigarette boxes, smuggled out of a detention centre by his ex-wife and other visitors.

They in turn passed the accusations to Beijing officials, including members of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI), the body that runs the "shuanggui" system.

Last month, the CCDI announced Su was under investigation for "severe discipline violations", generally a euphemism for graft. Days later he was sacked from his central government post as vice-chairman of the CPPCC, a discussion body that is part of the Communist-controlled machinery of state.

At the time he was the highest-ranking official to fall in Xi's much-publicised anti-corruption drive, which has since claimed former top general Xu Caihou.

Earlier, Zhou's family asked Zhou Ze to lead the defence at his appeal in May, but officials denied him access to the court.

Instead he stood outside the building's white romanesque facade holding a sign reading "Jiangxi high court, I still have the right to defend my client."

Inside, a state-appointed lawyer spent just eight minutes presenting an appeal, while the court was packed with plain-clothes police, according to lawyer You Feizhu, who entered by posing as a relative.

The defendant howled with indignation and began to sing the Communist anthem the "Internationale", he added.

"The court violated my client's rights to a defence," Zhou Ze said.

The appeal decision has yet to be announced, but despite Su's fall the lawyer remained pessimistic.

"These cases are political," he said.

- AFP/nd


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## Costas (Jul 9, 2014)

Ένα κινέζικο εγκληματάκι πολέμου;
Shadow of Brutal ’79 War Darkens Vietnam’s View of China Relations
(Jane Perlez / NYT)
(...)
The shadow of the 1979 war, ordered by the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping to punish Vietnam for its invasion of Cambodia, endures in places along the border. The memories are strong not only because of the death toll but also because the Chinese pummeled towns and villages as they withdrew, destroying schools and hospitals, in what the Chinese military later called a “goodbye kiss.”
Lang Son has since been rebuilt, and modest high-rises emblazoned with neon give it the feel of a prosperous trading post. But people here still remember a river full of bodies, both Vietnamese and Chinese, and how long it took for the terrible smell to go away. The combined death toll has been estimated at least 50,000 troops, along with 10,000 Vietnamese civilians.
(...)
After China and Vietnam normalized relations in 1991, the government erased all official commemorations of the 1979 fighting, a contrast to the copious memorials to Vietnam’s wars against the French and the Americans in which the Chinese gave vital assistance. Relations between the fraternal Communist parties thawed, cross-border business flourished and memories were eclipsed. Those memories resurfaced two months ago with the arrival of the Chinese oil rig in waters claimed by both countries off Vietnam’s coast.
(...)


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## Costas (Jul 9, 2014)

BEIJING, July 8 (Xinhua) -- China's press authority has issued rules to tighten management on information including state secrets received by journalists during their work.
Journalists are banned from illegal copying, recording, or storage of state secrets, according to the rules made public on Tuesday but released by the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television on June 30.
According to the administration, the rules cover various information, materials and news products that journalists may deal with during their work, including state secrets, commercial secrets and unpublicized information.
Under the rules, journalists should not violate non-disclosure agreements signed with their employers.
"Reporters, editors and anchormen should not disseminate state secrets in any form via any media and they should not mention such information in their private exchanges or letters," the rules stipulate.
The administration asked media institutions to standardize and step up management of job-related information and sign non-disclosure agreements with journalists in accordance with the law.


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## Costas (Jul 12, 2014)

Και τώρα τους απαγόρεψαν επίσης να δουλεύουν για και να δίνουν άρθρα τους σε ξένα ΜΜΕ. (ΝΥΤ)

Στα πλαίσια της επίσκεψης του Γιαπωνέζου πρωθυπουργού στην Αυστραλία, όπου όλο το ζουμί ήταν στη συμμαχία εναντίον της ΛΔΚ στο πλευρό των ΗΠΑ, ο Αυστραλός πρωθυπουργός Τόνυ Άμποττ είπε για τους Γιαπωνέζους στρατιώτες του Β' ΠΠ πως η Αυστραλία ''admired the skill and the sense of honour that they brought to their task, although we disagreed with what they did''...


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## Costas (Jul 16, 2014)

Tibetan Activist on Her Latest House Arrest
By EDWARD WONG / NYT

Πρόκειται για την Tsering Woeser. Ο άντρας της, ο (η συνέχεια στο παρακάτω απόσπασμα)...
“Wang Lixiong asked the Public Security University students [που είχαν στρογγυλοκαθίσει έξω από το διαμέρισμά τους] if they knew that what they were doing was illegal,” she wrote. “A student gave a very funny answer: ‘I have the right not to answer your question.’ It was as if he were being questioned at a trial.”


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## Costas (Jul 21, 2014)

Την ίδια ώρα, στην Ελλάδα...

Συνεχίζεται η διδασκαλία κινεζικών στα πρότυπα πειραματικά σχολεία
Σε συνεργασία με την κινεζική πρεσβεία και το Ινστιτούτο Κομφούκιος

Κανονικά θα συνεχιστεί το πρόγραμμα διδασκαλίας της κινεζικής γλώσσας στα πρότυπα πειραματικά γυμνάσια σε συνεργασία με την κινεζική πρεσβεία στην Αθήνα και το Ινστιτούτο Κομφούκιος.

Την απόφαση αυτή πήρε το υπουργείο Παιδείας με στόχο τόσο τη σωστή διδασκαλία της κινεζικής γλώσσας σε ελληνικά σχολεία όσο και την ανταλλαγή πολιτιστικών στοιχείων ανάμεσα στις δυο χώρες, ώστε να καλλιεργηθεί μια σχέση αμοιβαίου σεβασμού και κατανόησης των δύο λαών.

Οι λεπτομέρειες του προγράμματος αυτού θα παρουσιαστούν την ερχόμενη εβδομάδα από τον υφυπουργό Παιδείας κ. Αλέξανδρο Δερμεντζόπουλο και αρμόδιο για θέματα πρωτοβάθμιας και δευτεροβάθμιας εκπαίδευσης, τον κ. Ζανγκ Ζαν εκ μέρους της κινεζικής πρεσβείας στην Αθήνα και την κυρία Γιανγκ Ξιουκουίν από το Ινστιτούτο Κομφούκιος.


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## Costas (Jul 22, 2014)

Defining Taiwan’s Status Quo
Underlying the pithy term status quo is a hodgepodge of perceptions and different interpretations
(Timothy Rich / Thinking Taiwan)

This month, Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) sent to the party’s Central Executive Committee several proposals related to the DPP charter. Arguably the most controversial includes a freeze on the party’s independence clause. While reforms to the charter are not unprecedented — eight since 1986 — this move comes at a time when the party is clearly positioning itself not only for this year’s mayoral and local elections but the 2016 presidential and legislative elections. Such a move attempts to position the party as moderate on one of Taiwan’s main electoral cleavages, the future status of Taiwan, in part to appeal to the proverbial median voter who supports the status quo. Yet appealing to the status quo itself largely sidesteps a broader issue: what does the status quo actually mean?

It is clear that a majority of Taiwanese identify with some version of the status quo and that appealing to this group therefore is in the DPP’s interest. Surveys from the Election Study Center (ESC) at National Chengchi University (NCCU) going back two decades find that roughly a third of respondents support maintaining the status quo and deciding later either on independence or unification, with another segment — roughly a fourth of the population — preferring the status quo indefinitely. In contrast, roughly a quarter support independence, either independence as soon as possible or at an unspecified later date. The ESC’s 2012 post-election survey find that while about 59% of independence supporters identify with the DPP (compared to roughly 16% identifying with the Chinese Nationalist Party, KMT), only a fraction (approximately one-fifth) of those preferring the status quo identified as supporting the DPP, compared to nearly 45% identifying with the KMT.

Yet this only tells part of the story. Underlying the pithy term status quo remains a hodgepodge of perceptions. For many the status quo is de facto independence, with formal diplomatic relations the key distinction. For others the status quo is just a game of wait and see, both in terms of what China may or may not do, but also as Taiwanese identity evolves. Still others may still be hesitant to admit their preferred outcome and risk appearing as extreme. Furthermore, support for the status quo, independence and unification may not be nearly as fixed as often presented. For example, survey work by Emerson Niou in 2004 finds that a supermajority (72%) would support independence if it did not lead to a military attack from China and nearly two-thirds (64.2%) would support unification if the political, economic, and social disparities between both sides were minimal.[1] A quarter (25.38%) would support either condition. Certainly hypothetical questions can be problematic in survey research, but these results and others like it suggest greater complexity on what is meant by both the status quo and alternatives in either direction.

The nebulously defined status quo provides challenges and opportunities. The term allows a diverse group of Taiwanese to self-identify as pragmatic moderates, but this ambiguity can also be easily used to make slippery slope arguments about their opponents. Similarly, the term risks playing into Chinese interests if defined as actions that do not provoke a negative response from China, which is rather disheartening, considering that one side of the equation is a democracy. While greater appeals in general to status quo identifiers benefit the DPP’s electoral chances, redefining the status quo — for example to focus on strengthening the quality of Taiwan’s democracy — may provide a better means to this end.

[1] Emerson Niou. 2004. “Understanding Taiwan Independence and Its Policy Implications.” Asian Survey 44(4): 555-567.

_Timothy S. Rich is an assistant professor in political science at Western Kentucky University. His main research focuses on the impact of electoral reforms in Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan compared to similar legislative systems (e.g. Germany, New Zealand). His broader research interests include electoral politics, domestic and international politics of East Asia, and qualitative and quantitative methods._


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## Costas (Jul 29, 2014)

Μέσω Sinocism:

At McDonald's Outlets in China, Patrons Ask Where's the Meat? (ΝΥΤ)
For vegetarians or pescatarians, the menu in many McDonald’s restaurants across China is suddenly looking very friendly. Gone are the fast-food chain’s signature Big Macs and Chicken McNuggets. Even the beef rice wraps, created specifically to cater to the tastes of the local clientele, are nowhere to be found. On Tuesday, meat shortages were being reported in many of the more than 2,000 McDonald’s outlets in China, including in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and the northeastern city of Jinan. The only sandwich left on offer in most restaurants? Filet-O-Fish.

Newspaper: Serving Expired Meat a Problem Throughout China’s Food Industry (The Nanfang)
China’s current food safety scandal involving expired meat products has focused on the Western fast food restaurants that were supplied with the tainted food, something that has led some people to directly accuse Western fast food restaurants of being the problem. However, allegations have surfaced from the Shandong-based Qilu Evening Report that alleged the use of expired meat is endemic throughout all of the Chinese food industry and is not limited to Western fast food restaurants. While there isn’t much conclusive evidence behind these allegations, they remain horrifying all the same.

Amid China Food Scandal, OSI Workers Allege Widespread Violations At Company's US Plant (International Business Times)
The American meat supplier at the center of a major food safety scandal in Asia engages in widespread food safety and labor violations at its massive processing plant in West Chicago, Illinois, former employees alleged Wednesday in exclusive conversations with International Business Times. OSI Group LLC, which posted more than $6 billion in sales last year, has been under fire since Sunday, when Chinese regulators shuttered OSI’s Shanghai Husi Food Co. Ltd. meat processing facility.

China Removes Crosses From Two More Churches in Crackdown (NYT)
In another sign of the authorities’ efforts to contain one of China’s fastest-growing religions, a government demolition campaign against public symbols of the Christian faith has toppled crosses at two more churches in the coastal province of Zhejiang, according to residents there.

In Chinese shadow, Hong Kong fights for its future (AP )
In the eyes of Chan and others, Beijing's influence has also hit the city's thriving private media. Most newspapers no longer run stories critical of the Chinese government, and even multinational banks HSBC and Standard Chartered recently raised suspicions by pulling advertising from the city's sole pro-democracy newspaper, the Apple Daily. HSBC said in a statement that the advertising decision was purely commercial, and Standard Chartered said it came after a review of their advertising strategy. In a report released this month, Hong Kong's journalists' association called the past 12 months "the darkest for press freedom for several decades," citing among other events a cleaver attack in February that left an outspoken former editor at the Ming Pao newspaper in critical condition. Last year, the French press watchdog group Reporters Without Borders ranked Hong Kong 61st in press freedom, a steep fall from No. 18 in 2002.

China Planning 'Higgs Boson Factory' With World's Biggest Super Collider (Yahoo News UK)
China is planning to build a "Higgs factory", creating a 52km super collider that will smash electrons and positrons together. Scientists at the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) in Beijing are planning to build the collider – which would be the world's biggest collider – by 2028.

Νά κάτι ιστορικά επίκαιρο:
The forgotten army of the first world war: How Chinese labourers helped shape Europe (South China Morning Post)
A special report sheds light on the hundreds of thousands of forgotten migrants of fortune who toiled through the Great War

Microsoft Probed by Regulators in China Amid U.S. Tension (Bloomberg)
China regulators opened an anti-monopoly investigation into Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), seizing computers and documents from offices in four cities amid escalating tensions with U.S. technology companies. The government also is investigating Microsoft executives in China, including a vice president, according to a statement posted today on the State Administration for Industry & Commerce website. The regulator urged the company to cooperate after almost 100 SAIC staff inspected the offices yesterday, copying contracts and financial statements.

Και βέβαια η είδηση της χρονιάς, που μαγειρευόταν εδώ και δύο χρόνια:
China Starts Probe Into Former Security Chief Zhou 
Zhou [Yongkang] is the first standing committee member subject to an open criminal investigation since the Cultural Revolution, when former president Liu Shaoqi died in detention after being purged by Chairman Mao Zedong and denounced as a traitor. Former party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang, who broke with other top leaders in 1989 over their decision to suppress demonstrations in Beijing’s Tian'anmen Square with tanks and troops, was put under house arrest following his June 1989 ouster and never faced criminal charges.


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## Costas (Jul 30, 2014)

Πάντα μέσω Sinocism:

Fall of Zhou Yongkang Lights Up China’s Internet (WSJ)
Chinese bloggers, long used to coming up with clever ways to circumvent censorship rules, roped in International Tiger Day, which falls on July 29, for assistance. The term “tiger” became shorthand for Mr. Zhou, taking its cue from President Xi Jinping’s vow to bring down “tigers and flies,” meaning the biggest and smallest of wrongdoers, in his war on corruption. “For the imperial court to pick today to whack a tiger is very meaningful indeed!” a blogger wrote.
In some ways, official censors appeared to be directing the public discourse by deliberately loosening online controls. Terms that were taboo on the Chinese Internet for more than a year – most notably the Chinese characters for Zhou Yongkang – were unblocked about an hour after the official Xinhua news agency released its customarily terse reports on Mr. Zhou’s fall. The “ZhouYongKangPutUnderInvestigation” hashtag page even came adorned with a picture of the fallen strongman.

Pangolins being eaten to extinction, conservationists warn (The Guardian)
Scaly anteaters are now the most illegally-traded mammal in the world, with all eight species listed as threatened


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## Costas (Jul 30, 2014)

With Urbanization as Goal, China Moves to Change Registration Rules
By CHRIS BUCKLEY / NYT

HONG KONG — The Chinese government on Wednesday issued proposals to break down barriers that a nationwide household registration system has long imposed between rural and urban residents and between regions, reinforcing inequality, breeding discontent and hampering economic growth.

Yet even as officials promoted easier urbanization and the goal of permanently settling another 100 million rural people in towns and cities by 2020, they said that change to the system — which links many government entitlements to a person’s official residence, even if that person has long since moved away — must be gradual and must protect big cities like Beijing.

“This reform of the household registration system will be more decisive, vigorous, broad-ranging and substantive than it’s ever been,” Huang Ming, a vice minister of public security, said at a televised news conference in Beijing where officials explained the proposals set out in a document released Wednesday.

But Mr. Huang later added a caveat that displayed the caution accompanying the promises of change. “At the same time, however, specific policies have to be tailored to the practical circumstances of each city,” he said.

Changing China’s household registration rules was one of the main planks of reform promised by President Xi Jinping at a Communist Party meeting in November, and it was reiterated in plans for more vigorous urbanization issued this year. Now Mr. Xi’s test will be achieving that promise, city by city, despite qualms and resistance from local officials and many long-term urban residents.

“I think there’s more hope of substantive change this time,” said Lu Yilong, a professor at Renmin University in Beijing who studies household registration divisions and their effects. “This is more a coordinated, top-down reform, unlike in the past when local governments had more room to set their own rules. There have been changes already, and now we need a more systematic approach.”

The barriers in China’s system of household registration, or hukou, date to Mao’s era. In the late 1950s, the system was implemented to keep famished peasants from pouring into cities. The policies later calcified into caste-like barriers that still often tie citizens’ education, welfare and housing opportunities to their official residence, even if they have moved far away from that place to find a livelihood. The restrictions hinder permanent migration between many urban and rural areas, and between regions and cities, such as between, say, Shanghai and Beijing.

“The main problem now is not the rural population moving to a local city, that’s quite easy,” said Ren Xinghui, a researcher for the Transition Institute, a privately funded organization in Beijing, who campaigns against educational discrimination directed against children from the countryside. “The main problem is migration across provinces and cities, and the controls imposed by the big cities against cross-region migration. That’s the key to hukou reform.”

Despite market forces that have transformed China’s economy, many of those barriers persist. Nowadays, about 54 percent of the population lives long-term in towns and cities. But only 36 percent of the Chinese people are counted as urban residents under the registration rules, according to government statistics. Under a plan issued in March, the government wants the long-term urban population to reach 60 percent of the total by 2020, and to increase the number with urban household status to 45 percent.

The divisions have become a source of discontent, and sometimes protest — when, for example, children from the countryside or from another city cannot enroll in a local school or take the university entrance exam where they live.

Mr. Xi and, particularly, Prime Minister Li Keqiang have argued that faster urbanization should become an engine of economic growth in the coming decades. Already, 174 million of China’s 1.3 billion people are rural migrants working away from their hometowns, Yang Zhiming, a labor and social welfare official, said at the news conference. Many economists say the barriers deter consumption by migrant workers, who are afraid to spend more of their savings.

The government document released on Wednesday brought together commitments, some already announced, to steadily and selectively lift some of these barriers. Some cities have already implemented such changes, including formally erasing the division between urban and rural registration for local residents. But experts have said such changes do not mean much unless welfare, housing and other policies are also changed to overcome persistent inequalities.

In small cities with urban populations of up to one million, people with steady jobs and housing who meet requirements for welfare payments will be allowed to register as local residents. Similar rules will apply to larger cities, with stricter limits. But the proposals say that for the biggest cities, with urban populations of five million or more, the number of newcomers must be stringently controlled, and a points system will be used to ration out household registration opportunities.

The government also said, as it has before, that it will try to ease barriers that deny places in schools, health care, family planning and other public services to residents who do not have local household registration papers. Many city governments have resisted such changes, and urban residents also fear the erosion of their privileges.

“A major reason why people want household registration in a city is for their children’s education,” said Professor Lu of Renmin University. “The value in a hukou is mostly in education and health care resources, and cities want to limit who gets those resources.”


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## Costas (Aug 1, 2014)

Ilham Tohti Faces Criminal Trial Over Uighur Advocacy (NYT)
Authorities in China’s far west Xinjiang Province have formally charged the Uighur scholar Ilham Tohti with separatism, a serious crime that carries a potential death sentence. Prosecutors in Xinjiang announced the news on their microblog account, saying they had filed a motion with the Intermediate People’s Court in Urumqi, the regional capital, where Mr. Tohti has been held since shortly after he was taken from his Beijing apartment by the police in January.

State-Appointed Muslim Leader Killed in China (WSJ)
The state-approved leader of China's largest mosque by size was killed in the far western Chinese city of Kashgar, according to multiple accounts, in the latest violence in a region beset by ethnic and religious strife. An official in the religious affairs bureau of the Xinjiang region said Jume Tahir was killed Wednesday morning, but didn't know who killed the imam or how. Mr. Tahir was the leader Kashgar's ancient and symbolic Id Kah Mosque.

Wife of Party Official Killed in Xinjiang ‘Revenge Attack’  (Radio Free Asia)
The wife of a ruling Chinese Communist Party official in the restive Xinjiang region was stabbed to death and her husband severely wounded in an attack which authorities said was an act of revenge for a raid on ethnic minority Uyghur Muslims during a mosque prayer session. Unknown assailants wielding axes and knives burst into the home of party secretary Rejep Islam in Hotan prefecture’s Qaraqash county at around 3:00 a.m. on July 19, killing his wife Zeynep Memtimin and leaving him in need of urgent medical care, according to the chief of his village, Memetjan Jumaq.

Melamine found in milk candies produced in Guangdong (Shanghaiist)


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## Costas (Aug 5, 2014)

Περιμένοντας (και ελπίζοντας) την αποφυλάκιση του δικηγόρου Gao Zhisheng (προφ. Γκάο Τζ-Σενγκ), νά η εξιστόρηση της περιπέτειάς του στα χέρια των βασανιστών του το 2007:
Dark Night, Dark Hood and Kidnapping by Dark Mafia (China Aid News)


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## Costas (Aug 6, 2014)

Digital Resources for Sinologists 1.0 (λεξικά) (Dissertation Reviews)


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## Costas (Aug 6, 2014)

Mao’s Sarcophagus and Other Constructions
In ‘The Dog,’ Jack Livings Writes of a Modernizing China (βιβλιοπαρουσίαση, By MICHIKO KAKUTANI / ΝΥΤ)


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## Costas (Aug 8, 2014)

Από Sinocism:

China's next generation jetliner takes next big step
By Jeffrey Lin and P.W. Singer (Popular Science)


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## Costas (Aug 11, 2014)

Gao Zhisheng, That “Radical” Lawyer
By Chang Ping, published: August 10, 2014 (China Change)

He was not so much sentenced as kidnapped. Gao Zhisheng’s years of disappearance and other experiences revealed the “heart of darkness” of the Chinese Communist regime that tries to cloak itself in law. Because of the absence of rule of law in China, people initially refused to believe Gao Zhisheng was “released,” although he completed his prison term, until it was confirmed that he was in the company of his relatives.

Political prisoners may hold a press conference upon their release in some countries, but in China, a “released” political prisoner will still be invisible. The same fate awaits Gao Zhisheng, who was an action-taker and regarded by many as a radical.

Having read a lot of reports and commentaries the last few days, I was surprised that few mentioned the radical political expressions and actions of Gao Zhisheng, the very reasons why he was subjected to extraordinary persecution.

When Gao Zhisheng was missing for much of 2009 and 2010, many believed that he was dead. While the international attention was high and tense, inside China, not that many people were concerned about his life or death. In part, this was due to censorship, but my observation is that the lack of concern was the result of the “radical” label he had been given.

As a rights lawyer, Gao Zhisheng defended coalmine owners whose assets had been seized and farmers whose land had been taken away. He also took up highly sensitive cases involving underground churches and Falun gong practitioners, and he was regarded as having stepped over the line. Such lines were set by the CCP, but to a great extent, it was accepted by the public and even by many opponents of the CCP.

Then there were those who did not accept such lines in theory, but, in action, were willing to accept them to “avoid making unnecessary sacrifices.” But to Gao Zhisheng and his supporters, these sacrifices were not only necessary but a must.

So Gao Zhisheng “overstepped the line” further and further. He not only wrote open letters to the National People’s Congress and the Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao administration to condemn the violent crackdown on people and the persecution of Falungong practitioners. He also launched a hunger strike rally. His actions were openly criticized by other dissidents such as Ding Zilin (丁子霖), the best known “Tiananmen Mother,” and Pu Zhiqiang (浦志强) who has advocated “the path of rational rights defense.”

Gao Zhisheng’s critics believed that Gao strayed from his role as a lawyer when he politicized rights defense actions. They believed that the lawyers’ battlefield was in the courtroom and they should not go on the street to protest. Gao’s critics also worried that, doing what Gao Zhisheng did, they would stand to lose even more since the authorities were bound to retaliate against them.

Responding to Ding Zilin’s criticism, Gao Zhisheng said, “In human societies, any politics that prohibit, or in effect prohibit, participation by ordinary people are the most evil and immoral politics” which “in turn create a distorted logic: the politics of the party are great, glorious and correct, and the politics of those who oppose the Party are, without doubt, reactionary, irresponsible and shameful, and can be illegally repressed, or even killed, for any reason.” He quoted Sun Yat-sen saying that politics are the affairs of the people.

This controversy occurred eight or nine years ago. To this day, the moderate actions of the Tiananmen Mothers have received no response whatsoever from the Chinese authorities, rational rights lawyer Pu Zhiqiang is in prison, and “radical” lawyer Gao Zhisheng is in danger of living invisibly. Time has written the best footnote to this argument about the struggle for rights in China, “radical” or “rational.”

_*Chang Ping (长平)*, former chief commentator and news director of Southern Weekend. He writes columns for the South China Morning Post, Deutsche Welle, and a number of Chinese language websites. Forced to leave China and then Hong Kong, he currently lives in Germany._


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## Costas (Aug 11, 2014)

Μέσω Sinocism:

The Last of the Gilded Citadels
Life Inside the Secretive World of Beijing's PLA Compounds
By Karoline Kan | August 2014 (That's Online)
Ενδιαφέρον κείμενο, για τις νησίδες προνομιούχας κομουνιστικής ευτυχίας στους ενστόλους του Λαϊκού Απελευθερωτικού Στρατού, και την τωρινή φθορά τους.

Censorship at China Studies Meeting
By Elizabeth Redden August 6, 2014 (Inside Higher Ed)
Εις τας Πορτογαλίας:
According to a detailed account posted on the European Association for Chinese Studies website, conference materials were seized and several pages removed from the conference program – including an advertisement for the Taiwan-based Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, a conference cosponsor -- after the chief executive of Confucius Institute Headquarters, Xu Lin, objected to the contents.
(...)
Marshall Sahlins, one of the leading critics of the Confucius Institutes and the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology Emeritus at the University of Chicago, said the incident brings to light the Confucius Institute’s seriousness in enforcing its contractual provisions stating that programming under its name must abide by Chinese laws and regulations – which would, he noted, encompass a wide range of restrictions on speech. 

“Moreover they’re going to enforce them the way they do in China which is not so much by going to court... but simply by fiat,” Sahlins said.


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## Costas (Aug 11, 2014)

Μέσω Sinocism, ας μιλήσουμε για εθνικές μειονότητες:

Μια είδηση, όπως καδράρεται από κρατικό μέσο ενημέρωσης (Xinhua):
China Focus: 18 Xinjiang terrorist rioting suspects surrender
(...)
In the early morning of July 28, he [Yusup Eli, one of the suspects] was attending Muslim worship when a group of people break into the mosque and roared about "holy war." "Thinking about nothing, I rushed home to pick up a hoe to use as a weapon and joined in the rioting," he said.

"I realized my deeds were serious crimes and I finally decided to surrender," Yusup Eli said.

"My mind went blank as I followed others to attack innocent people, who had nothing against me," said Osman Seyit who was coerced with threats into joining the attack.

He fled after the incident, explaining, "I ran away into the desert and later hid in corn fields. I was so scared after seeing the police on the streets and the hearing the broadcast asking me to surrender."

"My mother doesn't know about my bad deeds yet. If she did, she would cry her heart out," he added.

He also advised others to "do the rights thing and not follow the terrorists."

Ένα γενικό άρθρο για την Τσετσενία σε Δυτικό μέσο ενημέρωσης (The Economist):
China’s far west
A Chechnya in the making
An iron fist in Xinjiang is fuelling an insurrection. China’s leadership must switch tactics
(...)
Whenever violence flares up, the government’s rhetoric is uncompromising and usually focused on the dangers of jihadism.
(...)
And China should give up persecuting moderate Uighurs, who hardly embrace jihadism but are still angry about the government’s repressive measures. Amid the carnage of the past few days, the authorities announced they had formally charged a prominent Uighur economist, Ilham Tohti, with separatism. “Fewer and fewer people dare to speak out” about ethnic policies in Xinjiang, Mr Tohti has lamented. If Xinjiang’s Uighurs are not to fall prey to extremists, Mr Xi must allow people like Mr Tohti to speak out, not lock them away.


Beyond the Dalai Lama: An Interview with Woeser and Wang Lixiong, Parts 1 & 2
Ian Johnson (New York Review of Books)

Μέσα στο πρώτο μέρος αυτής της πολύ ενδιαφέρουσας συνέντευξης υπάρχει λινκ προς μια ταινία του Wang Wo, το Dialogue (1ώ42λ), που έχει εξαιρετικό ενδιαφέρον. Παρουσιάζεται ο εθνικότητας Χαν σύζυγος της Θιβετιανής συγγραφέως Τσέρινγκ Ούσερ, Ουάνγκ Λιξ(σ)ιόνγκ, συγγραφέας και ο ίδιος, να στήνει το 2010-2011 ένα μικρό δίκτυο, πρώτα μέσω Τουίττερ κι έπειτα με βιντεοδιάσκεψη, όπου Χαν διανοούμενοι, δικηγόροι εν προκειμένω, μπορούν να έρθουν σε επαφή με τον Δαλάι Λάμα και να υποβάλουν ζωντανά ερωτήσεις δικές τους καθώς και επίλεκτες από τις εκατοντάδες που είχαν θέσει προηγουμένως διάφοροι ιστοπλόοι.
Ακολουθεί η Αραβική Άνοιξη και το κινέζικο καθεστώς σκληραίνει συνεχώς τη στάση του (η τάση αυτή σκλήρυνσης συνεχίζεται και έχει ενταθεί υπό τον σύντροφο, τώρα, Ξ(Σ)ι Τζινπίνγκ [δεν προβλέπεται να γίνει "κύριος" σύντομα]).
Στη συνέχεια ο Ουάνγκ Λιξ(σ)ιόνγκ μιλά στην κάμερα, δύο και τρία χρόνια μετά, για τις προσπάθειες να ριχτούν γέφυρες ανάμεσα στους Χαν και στις εθνικές μειονότητες, για την κρατική καταστολή αυτής της προσπάθειας, για το πώς οι γέφυρες με τους Ουιγούρους έχουν πρακτικά καταστραφεί, για το πώς βλέπει να έρχεται ένα λουτρό αίματος στο μέλλον, για την απαισιόδοξη διαύγειά του και για το πώς αυτή τον έχει οδηγήσει σε μια ηθική στάση του τύπου "κάνε αυτό που νομίζεις σωστό ανεξάρτητα από το τι είναι 'μοιραίο' να συμβεί".
Η ταινία τελειώνει μ' ένα στιγμιότυπο στο Πανεπιστήμιο Εθνοτήτων του Πεκίνου, όπου βλέπουμε τον Ουάνγκ να συζητά με τον Ουιγούρο πανεπιστημιακό Ilham Tohti, ο οποίος εδώ και λίγο καιρό κατηγορείται επισήμως από τις αρχές για αποσχιστικές δραστηριότητες. Ο Tohti εξηγεί πώς ένα αιματηρό γεγονός που παρουσιάστηκε ως τρομοκρατική ενέργεια από τα ΜΜΕ είχε τελείως άλλο χαρακτήρα.
Μην την προσπεράσετε!


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## Costas (Aug 11, 2014)

Film-maker defies China's censors to reveal horrors of the Great Famine
Hu Jie's documentaries tells story of students whose criticisms of Maoist excesses cost them their lives
Tania Branigan in Beijing, Sunday 10 August 2014 (The Observer)

For modern Chinese students it is not the Great Famine but the Three Years of Difficulties. The catastrophe remains so sensitive that their history books do not document how many starved to death, or why. Yet more than 50 years ago, at the height of the disaster, a handful of their predecessors published an underground magazine bluntly accusing Communist leaders of causing the devastation. "The dead couldn't tell," said one of the authors, Xiang Chengjian. "I decided to sacrifice myself … I was ready to die."

The story of _Spark_, and the boldness of the students, is the latest piece of China's past unearthed by film-maker Hu Jie. His documentaries have traced the Maoist excesses of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, and the extraordinary individuals who swam against the tide.

"I want people to have a chance to get to know real history," he said. The bearded former soldier, still muscled in his mid-50s, was fired from the state news agency Xinhua after he began working privately on his first film,entitled _Searching for Lin Zhao's Soul_. Lin was a youthful, gifted dissident executed as a counter-revolutionary, who had written defiant letters in her own blood while in jail.

Soon after came two startling documentaries about the cultural revolution. _Though I Am Gone_ records the brutal death of teacher Bian Zhongyun at her pupils' hands [το είχα λινκάρει παλιότερα, ολόκληρο]; _My Mother Wang Peiying_ [ολόκληρο!] is about the execution of a woman who called on Mao Zedong to resign.

The subjects Hu tackles are so sensitive that some of those involved have not discussed them even with their families. He has persuaded a remarkable range of witnesses to go on camera; some are grateful for the chance to talk after years of suppressing the truth.

"I'm trying to save all of this material. If these people die, the memories are gone," Hu said.

But some simply refuse to talk, and one of the interviews in Spark stops abruptly when the interviewee receives a phone call warning him not to speak. Such challenges help to explain why the film was five years in the making.
(...)
"I knew there was a publication, but didn't know what it was about; I just knew people died for it."
(...)
As they watched the corpses pile up, a small group of students decided to act. The two issues of _Spark_ – all they produced before they were caught – said that communes had turned farmers into slaves, and railed against the cadres who feasted while the people starved.

"Chinese intellectuals remained silent. No one dared to criticise the government," said Hu. "Only the students dared to speak out, at the cost of their lives."
(...)
At one stage, he shot wedding videos to fund his documentaries; now he and his wife, Jiang Fenfen, rely on their pensions. They work on a shoestring budget, buying standing tickets for trains and bedding down in the cheapest hotels. "My sacrifice personally is not worth mentioning, but I admire my wife's contribution," he said.
(...)


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## Costas (Aug 12, 2014)

Πέθανε χτες ένας μεγάλος: ο Pierre Ryckmans, γνωστός και ως Simon Leys. Εκεί στα μέσα της δεκαετίας του '70, όταν η σιελόρροια των κινεζόφιλων κομουνιστών στην Ελλάδα είχε φτάσει στο απροχώρητο, όταν στη Γαλλία κυκλοφορούσαν από χρόνια στις εκδόσεις Maspéro βιβλία με τίτλους όπως La Grande Révolution Culturelle Prolétarienne en Chine, όταν ο Charles Bettelheim και η Rossana Rossanda εκστασιάζονταν με τα επιτεύγματα της ίδιας "επανάστασης", το βιβλίο του Simon Leys _Les habits neufs du président Mao_ άνοιξε τα μάτια όσων διάβαζαν γαλλικά και ήθελαν να καταλάβουν τι παίζεται σ' αυτή την υπόθεση. Συγκλονιστικό για μένα υπήρξε και το _Ombres Chinoises_, ελεγεία σπάνιας ομορφιάς. Η πρόζα του, έξοχη.

Το συγγραφικό του έργο είναι πολύ ευρύτερο, και καλύπτει πολλά πεδία. Μετέφρασε τα Ανάλεκτα του Κομφούκιου και το La Mauvaise Herbe (Wild Grass) του Lu Xun (Λου Ξ[Σ]υν).

Νεκρολογίες από τους Isabel Hilton, Perry Link, Ian Buruma (China File, μέσω Sinocism)


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## Costas (Aug 12, 2014)

China Sees Islamic State Inching Closer to Home
Chinese media lights up after a Hong Kong weekly says IS aims to expand into Xinjiang. 
(Foreign Policy)
They've been grabbing headlines nearly everywhere else, but the jihadis of northern Iraq haven't been getting much play in China. But a threat by the Islamic State (IS) of revenge against countries, including China, for seizing what IS calls "Muslim rights" appears to have changed all that. The comments were made in early July, but the news didn't jump the language barrier from Arabic into Mandarin until August 8, when Phoenix Weekly, a Hong Kong-based news magazine widely distributed in China, made the IS revenge threats against China its cover story. Since then, the article has been widely syndicated on Chinese news websites and gained traction on social media as well. Ordinary Chinese who may have felt distant from the carnage now feel it creeping closer to home. 

The glossy cover of the Phoenix issue features a picture of masked gun-toting jihadis advancing through a desert landscape. The piece inside sounds the alarm over a July 4 speech in Mosul, Iraq by IS leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi where he urged Muslims around the world to pledge their allegiance to him. It quotes Al-Baghdadi saying that "Muslim rights are forcibly seized in China, India, Palestine" and more than a dozen other countries and regions. "Your brothers all over the world are waiting for your rescue, and are anticipating your brigades," al-Baghdadi told his followers. Phoenix noted that China was mentioned first on al-Baghdadi's list. (The article also includes a map that some news reports have said shows the vast territory IS plans to occupy in the next five years, which appears to include a significant portion of Xinjiang. Although the authenticity of the map, which was widely shared on English-language social media sites in early July, has been questioned, the Phoenix piece reports it as fact.) 

Online, Chinese are both agitated and bemused. One Chinese reader wrote on the social media site Weibo: "This is good. It offends all five of the hooligans on the UN Security Council" -- that is, China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States -- which means the IS jihadis "are going to be roadkill." Another responded to a photo of Al-Baghdadi: "Looking at this bearded pervert makes me sick. Hurry up and incinerate this kind of trash, and send him to enjoy his 72 virgins in heaven." A third wrote that ISIS seemed to have "a death wish," but that people should be grateful because the jihadist group was giving Beijing "a reasoned and evidence-based opportunity to crack down on terrorist activities."

This may constitute a welcome opening for Chinese authorities. China has been fighting a low-level separatist insurgency of its own in Xinjiang for decades and worries that foreign Islamic groups are infiltrating the region, emboldening the simmering independence movement. Uighur exile groups say China's government overstates its terrorism problem and falsely paints protests that turn to riots as premeditated terror attacks. In any case, Beijing is likely alarmed by IS's criticism of its treatment of the Muslim Uighurs and alleged plan to seize Xinjiang, no matter how far-fetched the idea might be. But just how actively authorities will deal with any IS threat remains to be seen.

Beijing has consistently tried to keep itself removed from the political and military crises roiling Iraq, even as China has poured billions of dollars into Iraqi oil, enough that about 10 percent of its oil imports come from the middle eastern country. China's most decisive action since ISIS's surge has been to evacuate 10,000 Chinese working in Iraq. On July 8, Chinese special envoy Wu Sike met with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and pledged anti-terror support, but added that Beijing would fully respect the country's sovereignty. When Wu returned to Beijing he briefed reporters about the trip on July 29, telling them that China was the victim of terror with roots in Syria and Iraq. "Solving the conflicts in Iraq and Syria will benefit China and the entire world," he said.

But Beijing's reaction to U.S. airstrikes in Iraq betrays its conflicted allegiances. China usually bristles at or condemns U.S. intervention in global hotspots and has opposed U.S. sanctions against Sudan, Syria, Russia, and Iran. But the interests of Washington and Beijing are unusually closely aligned when it comes to Iraq. On August 8, the official Xinhua News Agency quoted a Foreign Ministry spokesperson saying that China was "keeping an open mind" about operations that would "help maintain security and stability" in Iraq. The statement came in response to a request for comment on U.S. President Barack Obama's announcement that the U.S. would carry out airstrikes against insurgents in northern Iraq. Wang Chong, a researcher at Charhar Institute, a public diplomacy think tank in Beijing, wrote on Weibo that he "firmly supported" the U.S. crackdown on IS. Wang added that the United Staes "ought to send ground troops to wipe out those brutal terrorists" and that if there was a need, "China could also send troops to help and provide training."

That's possible -- within limits. Zhu Weilie, director of the Middle East Studies Institute at Shanghai International Studies University, told the state-run Global Times on July 29 that China believes the United Nations should lead anti-terror operations in the Middle East. "China will be more actively involved in these efforts but will never be as involved in Middle East affairs as the United States," he said.


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## Costas (Aug 15, 2014)

Νεκρολογία στην ΝΥΤ για τον Pierre Ryckmans.


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## Costas (Aug 16, 2014)

Έκκληση για να δοθεί άδεια εξόδου από τη χώρα (την ΛΔΚ) στον αποφυλακισμένο δικηγόρο Γκάο Τζ-Σένγκ, ώστε να σμίξει με την οικογένειά του, που έχει καταφύγει στις ΗΠΑ από το 2009. (Yaxue Cao / China Change)


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## Costas (Aug 18, 2014)

Thousands in Hong Kong Rally in Support of China
By MICHAEL FORSYTHE and ALAN WONG (NYT)
(τα παχιά δικά μου)
HONG KONG — Tens of thousands of people marched under a blistering sun in Hong Kong on Sunday to express their opposition to a pro-democracy movement that has threatened to bring Asia’s biggest financial center to a standstill if the government does not open up the nomination process for electing the city’s top leader.

Protesters, many waving Chinese flags, streamed into Victoria Park in the mid-afternoon before the march, and the contrast with a rally held July 1 by pro-democracy organizers was stark. Most of the participants in Sunday’s rally were organized into groups corresponding to Chinese hometowns, schools or, in some cases, employers, easily identifiable with their matching T-shirts and hats. Middle-aged and elderly people dominated Sunday’s march, while young people dominated last month’s march.

In speech, they often employed the political lexicon of China’s ruling Communist Party. Typical was Kitty Lai, an investment adviser wearing an orange T-shirt and a baseball cap emblazoned with the logo of the Hong Kong Federation of Fujian Associations, a group that represents people from the coastal province across from Taiwan. She said shutting down the Central business district would cause chaos.

“We want everything to be stable,” Ms. Lai, 50, said in Mandarin Chinese. “We want everybody to live harmoniously.”

Organizers of the July 1 rally estimated that more than 500,000 had taken part in that demonstration, which ended with the arrests of hundreds of participants, including some lawmakers, after they staged an overnight sit-in in the Central district.

Hong Kong’s police said 111,800 people left Victoria Park on Sunday for the march, more than the 98,600 they recorded for the July 1 march. Yet photographs taken at the peak points of both marches, at the same location, show many more people on the street on July 1. An independent count by Hong Kong University put the maximum number of participants on Sunday at 88,000, compared with a maximum of 172,000 on July 1.

The protesters on Sunday wanted to show their opposition to Occupy Central With Love and Peace, an umbrella organization encompassing a wide section of Hong Kong society, including students, Christian religious leaders and some bankers. Occupy Central leaders have vowed to bring Central to a standstill with a sit-in should the national legislature and the city government insist on a plan for nominating the chief executive that bars candidates unacceptable to Beijing. That plan could be set in motion at the end of this month, when the National People’s Congress in Beijing is to issue guidelines to the Hong Kong government on how it can write new election rules.

The Alliance for Peace and Democracy, which organized Sunday’s event, said it had gathered 1.4 million signatures in its petition drive against Occupy Central. Leung Chun-ying, Hong Kong’s chief executive, signed it, as did a former chief executive, Tung Chee-hwa. In June, about 800,000 people participated in an Occupy Central referendum that was overseen by a university polling group.

“Hong Kong people desire peace. They’re not afraid of speaking out, and the silent majority has spoken,” Robert Chow, a spokesman for the alliance, said in an interview. “Why should they follow Occupy Central and try to hold Hong Kong hostage? If they really want universal suffrage, negotiate with Beijing. Negotiate with the government.”

Under the laws that have governed Hong Kong since its return to Chinese sovereignty in 1997 from British control, the territory is to move to a system of universal suffrage for picking the chief executive in the 2017 election. But any plan must pass the city’s legislature with a supermajority. Pro-democracy leaders have enough seats in the 70-member Legislative Council to scuttle any proposal should it fail to meet their demands, assuming they stay united.

Some business associations, including leading United States accounting firms, have warned that a protest movement that shut or slowed down Hong Kong’s Central district would harm the city’s image and its economy. China’s vice president, Li Yuanchao, has called the Occupy movement “unlawful.”

“We’re fine the way we are,” said Anita Kwan, a resident in her 40s, speaking in Cantonese, the native language in Hong Kong and much of neighboring Guangdong Province. “Occupy Central damages Hong Kong’s stability and reputation.”

Top Chinese officials overseeing Hong Kong are set to meet with the territory’s legislators in the mainland city of Shenzhen, which abuts Hong Kong, on Thursday in the prelude to the vote by the National People’s Congress.

On Sunday in Victoria Park, the police presence was light, and mostly there to help guide the peaceful demonstrators across intersections. Many participants brought along their Indonesian and Filipino domestic helpers, who also donned the T-shirts and hats, with some given Chinese flags to wave.

After the demonstrators had left, the detritus of protests, including posters, water bottles and flags, was strewed across the park, *in contrast to the aftermath of pro-democracy rallies, when volunteers patrolled the ground, cleaning up everything, including wax from candle drippings*.

The organizers of Occupy Central said on their Twitter account that the anti-Occupy rally on Sunday should help motivate their own movement. “If the horrifying vision of HK manifested by anti-Occupy doesn’t make us fight harder for real democracy,” the group said, “something’s wrong with our side.”


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## Costas (Aug 18, 2014)

Το ειδύλλιο θερμαίνεται κι άλλο:

In China’s Shadow, U.S. Courts Old Foe Vietnam (NYT)
HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam — The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, courted Vietnam over the past several days. He was the first chairman in more than 40 years to visit the old enemy of Washington, now envisioned as a new partner that will acquire American weapons and help offset the power of China.
(πάντως στη φωτό η στολή του Αμερικάνου στρατηγού είναι, ό,τι και να πεις, πιο καλοραμμένη)
General Dempsey, who graduated from West Point as the Vietnam War was winding down, never served here, but his visit capped a vibrant effort by the United States and Vietnam to reconnect. A longstanding embargo on lethal weapons sales by the United States is likely to be eased, he said, and Washington would then begin discussions on what equipment Vietnam would buy, most likely in the field of maritime surveillance.

Vietnam has suddenly become more important to Washington as the United States and China are increasingly at loggerheads over the South China Sea, one of the world’s most vital trading routes. Vietnam is crucial because of its strategic position bordering China, its large population of nearly 100 million and its long coastline on that sea.

“We do think we should have a steady improvement in our relationship with the Vietnamese military,” General Dempsey told reporters here on Saturday. “I would suggest as goes Vietnam in managing its maritime resources and territorial disputes, so goes the South China Sea.”

During his three-day visit, General Dempsey met in Hanoi with Vietnam’s most senior officer, Gen. Do Ba Ty, who last year traveled to Washington, where he was entertained at the chairman’s home. General Dempsey visited Vietnamese vessels and met with their crew in Da Nang, once the site of a major American military base. He also inspected an American thermal treatment plant in Da Nang designed to clean up a deadly ingredient in Agent Orange, the defoliant sprayed by the American military over South Vietnam during the Vietnam War.

Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam, visited Hanoi this month and said the time had come to modify the arms embargo so the United States could help Vietnam with defense abilities.

In May, China deployed a sophisticated deep-sea oil rig to disputed waters off the Vietnam coast, a move that resulted in anti-Chinese riots in Vietnam and two months of skirmishes at sea between well-equipped Chinese Coast Guard boats and more rudimentary Vietnamese vessels.

While moving closer to Washington, Vietnam, which is ruled by a Communist Party that still values its fraternal relations with Beijing and is locked into economic dependence on China, has indicated it is not about to ditch its powerful northern neighbor.

The United States is not trying to force Vietnam to choose between Beijing and Washington, General Dempsey said. “I didn’t come here to focus on China,” he said. “But I recognize inevitably the shadow of China hangs over these conversations.”

In China, the government is watching the American dalliance with Vietnam, and it sees the likely easing of the arms embargo as a move against Beijing in the contest over the South China Sea, said Wu Xinbo, the head of the American Studies Center at Fudan University in Shanghai.

“The United States is trying to encourage Vietnam to take a tough stance against China on the South China Sea,” he said. “I believe Washington is somewhat concerned about the possible reconciliation between China and Vietnam over the South China Sea dispute.”

Who was the more ardent suitor in the wooing between the two former enemies remained an open question. Vietnam was insisting on its own gradual pace of improvement in military relations with the United States, American officials said.

Washington could end up disappointed, said Brantly Womack, a professor of foreign affairs at the University of Virginia, who has written extensively about the two countries. Vietnam, Professor Womack said, is acutely aware of the prickly path over the nearly 20 years since normalization of relations with Washington. “They want to tie us in closer, but they don’t want to hang on the string,” he said.

Vietnam now buys most of its weapons, including a recent order for six Kilo-class submarines, from Russia. Japan agreed last month to send Vietnam six new Coast Guard vessels.

There will be no change in Vietnam’s restriction of only one port visit a year by American naval ships to Vietnam, American officials said. And the possibility of the United States’ having access to Cam Ranh Bay, a strategically significant deepwater port used by the United States during the Vietnam War, is not on the table. Even so, the signs are propitious for a diplomatic tilt toward the United States.

A coalition of 10 Vietnamese labor and religious groups presented a letter to Senator McCain during his visit, saying they supported a gradual lifting of the arms embargo, if the government released all prisoners of conscience.

Initial shipments of American weapons could include surveillance vessels without guns or sophisticated radar, with more advanced weapons slowly phased in as Vietnam improved its human rights record, said Nguyen Quang A, a member of the coalition and a prominent intellectual.

Vietnam has a history, he said, of creating military alliances “not against a third country but for protecting our sovereignty.”

The American assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor, Tom P. Malinowski, said Vietnam had taken “positive steps” on human rights in the past six months that would be factored into the final decision on easing the weapons ban.

Vietnam has released seven prominent prisoners of conscience, registered 113 church congregations and signed the convention against torture, Mr. Malinowski said. Still, the United States wants it to release all prisoners of conscience, including prominent bloggers and writers given lengthy prison sentences last year.

Vietnam’s leadership faced an unusual call for more political openness this month when 61 members of the Communist Party signed a public letter that took aim at the relationship with China. The government should take legal action against China in the international court system for its deployment of the oil rig, the signatories suggested.

“When over 60 members of the Communist Party of Vietnam have signed an open letter calling for leaders to ‘develop a truly democratic, law-abiding state,’ it is time to invite Vietnam to free itself of dependence on Russia and China and to encourage further reform,” said Vikram J. Singh, a former United States deputy assistant secretary of defense for South and Southeast Asia who is now vice president for national security at the Center for American Progress in Washington. “This is about dignity and pride, and being treated on par with other countries in the region.”


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## Costas (Aug 18, 2014)

ISIS Tentacles Reach Toward China
(China Matters)

It’s been reported on the always-reliable Twitter by a Pakistan journalist, Ali Kamran Chishti, that Abdul Maulana Aziz has declared his support for the “Caliphate of Abu Bakar Baghdadi” i.e. ISIS. “Video to be uploaded soon”.

If confirmed, this is potentially big and bad news for the People’s Republic of China.

Abdul Maulana Aziz was the radical spiritual leader of Lal Masjid, the Red Mosque, in downtown Islamabad.

In 2007, after a prolonged and desultory siege, Pakistan armed forces stormed the mosque, signaling a partial fracture of the de facto alliance between the Pakistan deep state and radical Islam.

The confrontation was little noted in the West, but it was big news in the People’s Republic of China.

Followers of the Red Mosque had targeted Chinese sex workers as part of a purification campaign; Uighur students—“terrorists” according to the PRC--were reportedly ensconced at the mosque; and, as the siege muddled slowly on its initial stages, radical Islamists retaliated against Chinese in other parts of the country.

In response the PRC, which at that time relied largely upon the good offices of its local allies and assets to keep a lid on Uighur extremism, demanded action. Pervez Musharraf, torn between his military/intelligence and Chinese constituencies, obliged the PRC by sending troops personally loyal to him to storm the mosque in a bloody, catastrophic attack that probably claimed hundreds of lives.

Aziz had previously attempted to escape the siege by disguising himself in a burka, but was captured and paraded before the cameras in a humiliating fashion. His brother died in the assault.

Maulana Aziz was released on bail in 2009 and spoke to an adoring throng. The Guardian described the scene:

_The 2007 siege had been a necessary sacrifice, he told them. "Hundreds were killed, many were injured. But today the whole country is resounding with cries to implement Islamic law. We will continue with the struggle.

"Now Islam will not remain confined to Swat. It will spread all over Pakistan, then all over the world."

Standing beside him was a senior leader from Sipa-e-Sahaba, a banned sectarian group that kills Shias, and which has close ties to the Red mosque.
_
In 2013, in another murky episode of Pakistan jurisprudence, the over two dozen legal cases against Maulana Aziz all evaporated without any serious government challenge.

Judging by Maulana Aziz’s subsequent re-emergence as member of the Pakistani Taliban’s negotiation team, one can assume his ties to the ISI intelligence services remain strong, and he was cut loose with the hope that he would smooth the way in peace talks between the TTP and the Pakistani government. 

The TTP is reportedly a willing host to Uzbek and Uighur fighters, and does not adhere to the basically hands-off strategy toward the PRC followed by many Islamic militants in the region (China’s links to militants run long and deep, thanks to its central role in funneling hundreds of millions of dollars of materiel to the mujahideen on the CIA’s behalf during the anti-Soviet struggle in Afghanistan). The TTP talks don't seem to be going anywhere, which is bad news for the PRC.

Maulana Aziz is apparently residing in Islamabad, so it remains to be seen what caveats or qualifications he places upon his ISIS allegiance in order to dodge legal jeopardy--and if he and the ISI (Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence) will encourage forbearance in the matter of enabling the training and infiltration of Uighur radicals back into Xinjiang.

Best case for PRC, the bond holds despite Maulana Aziz's presumably deep resentment against the PRC for its role in the siege and the death of his brother, and his apparent sympathy for the extreme Sunni/sharia stance of ISIS.

Worst case, the ISI exploits radical forces and exacts a terrorist price tag in Xinjiang for PRC attempts to balance its support for Pakistan with its desire to strengthen ties with India, in a recapitulation of the bloody anti-diplomacy inflicted on Mumbai by Pakistan terror assets in 2008.

But in any case, the awareness that the dots are slowly but surely getting connected from ISIS to the TTP and onward to Xinjiang will shadow Beijing’s thoughts, its Uighur security policy, and its diplomacy with Pakistan, the Afghan Taliban, and its interlocutors among Islamic radicals in Pakistan’s borderlands.

Below is an excerpt from a piece I wrote in 2007 on the siege, and the important role that the PRC played.

In the Shadow of Lal Masjid (excerpt)

The provocative kidnapping of 7 PRC nationals compelled Musharraf—reportedly under heavy Chinese pressure—to abandon a policy of appeasement and compromise with Islamic militants at the Lal Masjid mosque in Islamabad and, in July of this year [2007], launch a bloody assault that revealed the extent of the security crisis at the heart of the Pakistani military regime and displayed to the U.S. Musharraf’s—and Pakistan’s--wholehearted reliance on China.

In the speech announcing the state of emergency, Musharraf broke into English to tell us what he hoped we wanted to hear, evoking Lincoln as he tried to justify his move to the United States, the EU, and the Commonwealth as a response to judicial activism.

On the other hand, in his remarks in Urdu directed to the local audience as translated by Barnett Rubin , Musharraf cited the Lal Masjid mosque crisis--not the pursuit of al Qaeda and its allies in the border regions--as the primary instance of terrorism and extremism afflicting Pakistan.

And when he commiserated with the victims of terrorism, he took the opportunity to give a heartfelt shout-out to the Chinese, not to the United States:

_Now. We saw the event of Lal Masjid in Islamabad where extremists took law into their own hands. In the heart of Pakistan - capital city - and to the great embarrassment of the nation around the world... These people - what didn't they do? - these extremists. They martyred police. They took police hostage. They burned shops. The Chinese, who are such great friends of ours - they took the Chinese hostage and tortured them. Because of this, I was personally embarrassed. I had to go apologize to the Chinese leaders, "I am ashamed that you are such great friends and this happened to you".
_
Now, about the standoff at the mosque.

One could describe it as Pakistan’s Waco—if Waco had taken place in the heart of Washington, D.C.

It didn’t get the attention it deserved. As the Times of India dryly observed of the attack that claimed at least 100 and perhaps 1000 lives:

_...the week-long stand-off that ended in a massacre on Tuesday attracted little attention in the US, where focus is more on the debate over a pullout from Iraq. In fact, a news channel on Tuesday cut into a story on Lal Masjid to bring breaking news of a small airplane crash in Florida._


Lal Masjid was controlled by militant clerics who not only proclaimed their interpretation of sharia law—they enforced it.

An otherwise sympathetic observer declared:

_One cannot have any objection to the Lal Masjid just preaching implementation of Sharia in Pakistan. So many organizations are doing so, one more cannot be objected to. The right of any Muslim to preach adoption of Sharia is one thing but to take the powers of implementing his own version of Sharia is another, and the latter is a function of the State.
...
Lal Masjid stands in revolt when it establishes its own Sharia courts, it passes judgments, and imprisons Pakistanis and foreigners._


Musharraf’s administration had its hands full with the militant, confrontational, and well-connected (to the intelligence services) cleric who ran the mosque, Maulana Abdul Aziz.

The difficulties involved can be seen from this excerpt from a timeline of the mosque crisis compiled by B. Raman, an Indian China-watcher who is assiduous in washing Pakistan’s dirty linen on the site _Intellibriefs_:

_January 22, 2007: Female students of the Jamia Hafsa madrasa attached to the Lal Masjid in Islamabad occupied a Children’s Library adjacent to their madrasa to protest against the demolition of seven unauthorised mosques constructed on roads in Islamabad by which President Pervez Musharraf often travels. The mosques were demolished on the advice of his personal security staff.

February 13, 2007: The authorities agreed to rebuild one of the demolished mosques to end the library standoff, but the students refused to vacate the library.

March 27, 2007: The female students, along with their male colleagues from the Jamia Faridia, another madrasa attached to the mosque, raided a house near the mosque and kidnapped a woman, her daughter-in-law and her six-month-old granddaughter for allegedly running a brothel. They were released after they “repented”.

March 28, 2007: Some students of the two madrasas took three policemen hostage in retaliation for the arrest of some students by the police. The hostages were released on March 29.

March 30, 2007: Some madrasa students visited CD and video shops in the capital and warned the shop owners that they should either switch to another business or face the “consequences”.

April 6, 2007: The Lal Masjid set up its own Sharia court. The mosque’s chief cleric, Abdul Aziz, warned of “thousands of suicide attacks” if the Government tried to shut it down.

April 9, 2007: The Sharia court issued a fatwa condemning the then Tourism Minister Nilofar Bakhtiar after newspapers pictured her hugging her parachuting instructor in France._

You get the picture. Escalating confrontation, with the government conciliating, accommodating, and backing down.

After exposing the skydiving outrage, the students of Lal Masjid turned their attention to another font of impurity—a Chinese-run massage parlor in Islamabad.

The epic was reported in great detail in Pakistan Today:

First, the abduction:

_Male and female students of Jamia Faridia, Jamia Hafsa and Beaconhouse School System, in a joint operation, kidnapped the Chinese women and Pakistani men shortly after midnight Friday from a Chinese massage centre, working at House No 17, Street 4, F-8/3, alleging that they were running a brothel. ...
...

Riding in three vehicles, the students ... raided the massage centre located in the posh Islamabad sector. They overpowered three Pakistani males and guards posted there after thrashing them.

They, later, entered the building and ordered those present there to accompany them. On refusal, the students thrashed them and forcibly took them to the Jamia Hafsa compound. They accused the abducted people of rendering un-Islamic and unlawful services.
...

Ghazi [of Lal Masjid] said the China massage centre was involved in sex trade and complaints were being received about it since long. "Even housewives used to tell us by phone that the centre charges Rs 1,000 for massage while by paying Rs 500, something else was also available," he said._

Then the anxious confab with the Chinese:

_President Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz were earlier given minute-by-minute reports of the negotiations regarding the release of the hostages. ... The prime minister was in contact with the Islamabad administration and the Interior Ministry and getting minute-by-minute reports from State Minister for Interior Zafar Warriach.
...
The Chinese ambassador contacted President Hu Jintao two times during the 15-hour hostage drama, sources said. The ambassador called his president while holding talks with Pakistan Muslim League chief Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain at his residence.

... Sources quoted President Hu Jintao, expressing shock over the kidnapping of the Chinese nationals, has called for security for them. The ambassador informed his president about his talks with Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz and Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain. The PML leader also got telephonic contact established between the hostages and the ambassador._

The ignominious conclusion:

_The release came only after Deputy Commissioner Chaudhry Muhammad Ali and Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) Zafar Iqbal, who held talks with the Lal Masjid administration, beseeched it for five hours and even touched the knees of some leading clerics while begging for the freedom of the abductees._

Finally, the tellingly sleazy detail:

_The administration quietly let two "big shots", Pakistani customers, go and released their vehicles, seized from outside the massage centre... The identity of these clients is not being disclosed.
_

Beyond President Hu Jintao’s tender regard for the security and livelihood of Chinese masseuses, there was obviously a larger issue at stake. China did not want to see its citizens and interests to become pawns in Pakistan’s internal strife.

It's a non-trivial point for China, which lacks the military reach to effectively protect its overseas citizens itself, but does not want to see them turned into the bargaining chip of first resort for dissidents in dangerous lands like Pakistan, Sudan, Nigeria, and etc. who are looking to get some leverage on the local government--or Beijing.

It looks like China demanded that Pakistan draw a red line at the abduction, extortion, and murder of its citizens.

A week after the kidnapping incident, Pakistan’s Federal Interior Minister was in Beijing.

Once more from the _Intellibriefs_ timeline:

_June 29, 2007: The "Daily Times" of Lahore wrote in an editorial as follows: "During his visit to Beijing, Sherpao got an earful from the Chinese Minister of Public Security, Zhou Yongkang, who asked Pakistan for the umpteenth time to protect Chinese nationals working in Pakistan. The reference was to the assault and kidnapping of Chinese citizens in Islamabad by the Lal Masjid vigilantes. The Chinese Minister called the Lal Masjid mob “terrorists” who targeted the Chinese, and asked Pakistan to punish the “criminals”._

One factor that would have intensified Chinese alarm and exasperation was a report that the attack on the massage parlor revealed a tie-up between Pakistan’s Islamic militants and Uighur separatists:

_Mr.Sherpao also reported that the Chinese suspected that the raid on the massage parlour was conducted by some Uighur students studying in the Lal Masjid madrasa and that the Chinese apprehended that Uighur "terrorists" based in Pakistan might pose a threat to the security of next year's Olympics in Beijing.
_
In early July Musharraf apparently was able to invoke China’s anger to overcome resistance within his armed forces, and move against Lal Masjid.

Even so, he was forced to employ troops personally loyal to him, as the Weekly Standard reported:

_China applied enormous pressure to Musharraf. His previous attempts to order military strikes against the Lal Masjid had met with rebuffs. In late January, after the Pakistani army refused to raid the mosque, Musharraf ordered his air force to do so--only to see this order refused as well. Musharraf's eventual solution was to send in 111 Brigade, which is personally loyal to him._


The mosque was encircled by 15,000 troops and the siege proceeded in a dilatory fashion...until three Chinese were murdered in remote Peshawar, apparently in retaliation for the siege.

China Daily reported:

_Police officer Abdul Karim said that it was a robbery attempt.

But one witness said that attackers with face covered were shouting religious slogans when they opened fire on four Chinese nationals in a three-wheel auto-rickshaw factory at Khazana, a town some eight kilometers from Peshawar, the capital city of Pakistan's North West Frontier Province._

The Chinese outlets splashed the story all over the media, including their embassy websites, complete with atrocity photos—a treatment that the unfortunate demise of rickshaw factory employees doesn’t usually attract.

Tarique Niazi describes the denouement:

_On July 2, barely a week after the abduction, the government ordered 15,000 troops around the mosque compound to flush out the militants. On July 4, it arrested the leader of the militants, Maulana Abdul Aziz ... After apprehending the leader, government troops moved to choking off the militants’ supplies of food, water, and power. But as soon as word of the revenge killing of three Chinese on July 8 reached Islamabad, it created a “perfect storm” for Gen. Musharraf. Embarrassed and enraged, he reversed the troops’ strategy and ordered them, on July 10, to mount an all-out assault at the mosque, in which Aziz’s brother and his deputy, Abdul Rashid Ghazi, together with as many as 1,000 people, was killed._


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## Costas (Aug 23, 2014)

Paul Pickowicz on a Century of Chinese Film (China Digital Times)

Distinguished Professor of History and Chinese Studies at the University of California, San Diego Paul G. Pickowicz draws on decades of research in _China on Film: A Century of Exploration, Confrontation and Controversy_ (Rowman & Littlefield 2013). The 376-page study moves chronologically as each chapter explores Chinese films, filmmakers and filmmaking from Shanghai in the 1920s to underground films of today. I spoke with Pickowicz about his experience studying Chinese cinema since the 1980s, mainland films that made an impact during key political upheavals, as well as his own thoughts on some of the most underrated and overrated films to come out of Mainland China during the past one hundred years.

_China Digital Times: You spent 1982-83 as a “mostly unwelcome” guest at the China Film Archive. What made you feel unwelcome at that time? What was the experience of doing archival research like then and how has that experience changed over the last three decades? Have you felt more welcomed over time?_

Paul G. Pickowicz: I felt mostly unwelcome in 1982 because there were people at the archive, and all academic units for that matter, who didn’t want foreigners doing serious and critical humanities research on China. The Cultural Revolution had only recently ended and China was like today’s North Korea in various respects. Many people in authority in academic units simply assumed foreigners were spies and they didn’t want their political careers jeopardized by appearing soft. I asked for but was not given some office space and my comings and goings were tightly scheduled and monitored by official minders. I asked for and was denied access to the archive’s catalog of film holdings and I was not allowed open access to the archive’s holdings of film-related journals and printed material from the pre-1949 period. Each time I wanted something I had to ask whether they had a certain film and whether they had print materials related to the film. It’s not that they didn’t help at all, but rather that every step forward felt like a struggle. My request to spend a year doing research at the archive was granted because I was part of an official US-China exchange program coordinated on the US side by the National Academy of Sciences. In short, if China wanted to send scientists to the US, then the Chinese side had to receive more American scholars interested in humanities research on modern and contemporary China. But I want to emphasize that quietly and behind the scenes there were people at the archive, at the Film Bureau, and at the Ministry of Culture who understood what I was trying to accomplish and did many, many things to help me. What was I trying to accomplish? Let the academic world know the details of the brilliance of pre-1949 Chinese filmmaking. Our ignorance of China’s film history was shocking. The issue was “open” versus “closed.” The closed people were always suspicious and wanted me to officially request anything I wanted to do, including interviews of retired, elderly film personalities, while the open people said there was no reason I couldn’t live with a Chinese family (a taboo at the time), buy a motorcycle to facilitate transportation, and track down famous film personalities on my own and interview them without official minders present.

Working relations with the archive continued over the years, especially when the political situation opened up a bit in the mid- and late-1980s. Of course, behind the scenes friends continued to be very helpful, but even officials began to understand that a professional relationship could be beneficial to both sides. For instance, throughout the 1980s the archive had no convenient way to acquire VHS tapes of classic and current American films. They asked me if I would help. I suggested we do it on a one to one basis without any money changing hands. They would send me a list of 20 tapes they wanted and I would send them a list of 20 pre-1949 films I wanted from them. On my subsequent trips to China we made a number of such exchanges of tapes. We did this several times and it’s the reason I now have such a strong personal collection of rare Chinese films. The archive has also been helpful over the years by providing me with still photos for my articles and books. As recently as fall 2011 the archive invited me to deliver a series of lectures to its MA students and I continue to be in touch with some of the students. Of course there are still taboos, especially research on Shanghai filmmaking in 1937-45 during the Japanese occupation of the city, and officials – - even open-minded ones — still have to worry about being perceived as excessively cooperative.

_CDT: What was on the minds of the soon-to-be famous Beijing Film Institute graduates you befriended at that time?_

PGP: The Fifth Generation young people I met in 1982 had only recently graduated from the Institute. Many were in the process of discovering and refining their own sense of self — especially their sense of self in relation to officially-defined collectives. It’s impossible to generalize about the whole group because their backgrounds and personalities were so different. Relatively few of them became famous following graduation. The 1978 entrance exams were supposed to be based on talent and objective criteria, but the fact is that many in the fall 1978 entering class were extremely well connected to the pre-Cultural Revolution film world: Bai Yang’s daughter, Zhao Dan’s son, Chen Huaikai’s son, and so forth. Some were highly creative and dying to head out in new directions. Many others manifested ordinary professional competence, but got secure, though routine, jobs in desirable cities and film studios thanks to family influence. But virtually all of them had a strong desire to learn more about foreign culture, including film culture. For both personal and professional reasons, many wanted to connect to the outside world, especially the US, Japan and Europe. Ai Weiwei, a very well-connected young man, dropped out of the institute after only two years to pursue rare opportunities in New York. Young film artists were vividly aware of the profound cultural isolation of China and themselves. Some were genuinely interested in my thinking on a range of topics, while others saw me primarily as a potentially useful foreign “contact.” Some expressed surprisingly unorthodox political and social views; some were very cautious and risk-averse.

_CDT: When discussing the institution of marriage in films set in Shanghai in the 1920s, you emphasize the idea that filmmakers were tying modern love and marriage to economic and class realities. Has this same notion permeated depictions of marriage throughout twentieth-century Chinese cinema?_

PGP: The themes of love, marriage, and family dominated Chinese filmmaking from the 1920s and continue to have a major impact today. It’s true that in the 1920s many films grappled with the question of the “modern” marriage. Young, urban, middle class people wanted modern love, marriage, and families, but no one knew exactly what modernity meant in these spheres of life. Many of the films described the trial and error experiments of young people who were struggling to establish coherent boundaries. After the revolution in 1949, state sector filmmakers promoted modern “socialist” love, marriage and family life. In the post-Mao period there was a renewed interest in individual desire when it came to love, marriage, and family. In all of these phases, global models of various sorts were being considered and emulated. And during each phase, economic and class realities were important factors.

We also need to keep in mind that Chinese film narratives of the past and present were not necessarily looking at love, marriage, and family as ends in themselves. Quite often the themes of love, marriage, and family functioned as national allegories. These films seem to be talking about a family, but the “family” is standing in for the “nation.” The family functions as a mini-nation, and serious problems related to power hierarchies, class relations, economics, and gender relations within the family are supposed to be read as problems that are nagging the entire nation. In this sense Chinese films, even light-weight entertainment ones, can be politically charged.

_CDT: In the 1960s, you explain that filmmakers were given more artistic freedom under the direction of Vice Minister of Culture Xia Yan but were still limited in their ability to criticize the starvation that plagued China during the Great Leap Forward. You conclude saying: “Almost none of these films is a great work of art, but together they served to ease the pain of living in China in the hungry days of the early 1960s.” Which of these films, if any, did qualify as a great work of art?
_
PGP: Let’s face it. “Greatness” is a highly subjective concept. “Greatness” is relative and depends on one’s definition of greatness. Greatness is also very contextual. Certainly if you look at the films of the early 1960s and compare them to the films produced during the catastrophic Great Leap Forward that came before and the films of the horrific Cultural Revolution that came later, the films of the 1960s stand out. This doesn’t mean that films made during the Maoist mass mobilization campaigns of the late 1950s and late 1960s are not interesting. As visual sources, they can tell us a lot about those tumultuous and gut wrenching periods, but many of the films of the early 1960s have more traction and have ongoing appeals that are more universalistic. Xia Yan was a hopeless Party bureaucrat, but he was also an anti-Maoist who deeply resented the way in which the state run film industry was hijacked by the Great Leap Forward. He was all for party/state control of the film industry and was adamantly opposed to private sector production, but in his anti-Maoist imagination it should be a state controlled industry that maintains its links to the work he and his friends did in the Shanghai film industry of the 1930s. Xia Yan continued to hold on to the view that art making and party-directed socialism were not incompatible. It is in this sense that such films as _Third Sister Liu_ (Liu Sanjie, 1962), _Dream of the Red Chamber_ (Hong lou meng, 1962), _Early Spring_ (Zao chun eryue, 1963), _Li Shuangshuang_ (Li Shuangshuang, 1962), and _Fat Li, Young Li, and Old Li_ (Da Li, Xiao Li he Lao Li, 1962) still feel charming and engaging. They are not “great” films, but let’s not forget that Hollywood produced mountains of junk then and produces mountains of junk now. “Great” films are few and far between. Xia Yan’s imagination was quite limited. When the Cultural Revolution ended, his sole concern was getting “his” type of state sector movie making up and running again. He was not among those who believed there should be space for independent, non-state filmmaking in the brave new world of post-Mao China.

_CDT: Huang Jianxin, a “politically daring” director of the 1980s addressed contemporary urban problems in works which you say anticipated the “extraordinary turmoil” of the Tiananmen Incident. Transmigration, a film which you describe as exploring “directionless urban youth” marked the first time the Ministry of Radio, Film and Television opened up to journalists to discuss a film since 1949. Why did the Ministry open its doors to journalists interested in discussing this particular film, especially if the film blamed China rather than foreign influences for spiritual pollution?_

PGP: Huang Jianxin played a very interesting role in the 1980s run up to June 4, 1989. Unlike Xie Jin, he rejected the highly cathartic though excessively sentimental melodramatic mode of filmmaking and he rejected the tendency the best know Fifth Generation filmmakers, including Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige, to set their narratives in the pre-revolution past. Everyone still worked for the party/state, so the political edginess of Huang’s films must be seen in that context. _Black Canon Incident_ (Hei pao shijian, 1986) was a stunning and bitterly satirical critique of mindless and numbing party/state bureaucracy, the same issue that young people in colleges were talking about with greater frequency in the 1980s. _Dislocation_ (Cuowei, 1987) offered a profoundly dystopian view of the direction of Chinese society. _Transmigration_ (Lunhui, 1989), which I watched with Huang at a pre-release screening in Beijing in late 1988, tackled head on the hot button issue of restless urban youth struggling to find their individual identities in the post-Mao era. I think I was the first person to apply the term “postsocialist” to films, especially Huang Jianxin’s, that came out in the years leading up to June 4. Huang was all for reform, but his work reminded people that the legacies of the Mao eras continued to haunt the post-Mao era, that many aspects of Chinese life had not been reformed, and that many young people were “lost.”

The reason that some bureaucrats in the state sector allowed Huang’s provocative films to be made and encouraged open discussion of them is that their were deep divisions at all levels of the party/state in the 1980s. There were cultural bureaucrats who despised the sort of work done by Huang Jianxin, Xie Jin, and Zhang Yimou, but there were many others who thought all these types of filmmaking were healthy and addressed real problems that couldn’t be ignored. There were people in the bureaucracy who wanted more openness, more diversity of production, and more expressions of cultural confidence in dealing with problems openly.

_CDT: Has Huang Jianxin received recognition for addressing social problems of the 1980s in the Chinese film community today? How did Transmigration connect with the sentiments of the youth at the time? Does the film resonate with party corruption and youth in China today?
_
PGP: The trilogy of complex films made by Huang Jianxin in the 1980s does indeed address issues of corruption, bureaucracy, anomie, and restlessness that are endemic in China today. But his old films, like the old films of Xie Jin and Zhang Yimou, are not widely viewed today. Scholars in China give these filmmakers a lot of credit for their contributions in the 1980s, but the state has no particular reason today to promote their old films. Anyone who is 24 years old today, was born in 1990. The 1980s seem a bit like ancient history. Even though there’s a connection between the problems of the Mao-era, the problems of the 1980s, and the problems of today, the college age students from China whom I have taught in China and in the United States know surprisingly little about PRC history. They are well aware of the problems that haunt China today, but are less aware of the details of the connections between those problems and the problems of the recent past.

As for Huang Jianxin, I have found his highly forgettable films of the post-1989 period to be far less interesting than his 1980s trilogy. The film scene is much more complex and competitive today, given the advent of highly commercial films and the rise of independent filmmakers. People like Huang, Zhang Yimou, Tian Zhuangzhuang and Chen Kaige paid their dues and made their brilliant contributions under extremely difficult circumstances. It’s unreasonable to expect them to play the same role indefinitely. Others, especially in the new independent sector, have come forward to play pioneering roles.

_CDT: You write about Chinese films making a “caricature of Western values.” Have Chinese films displayed a more nuanced understanding of Western values over time?
_
PGP: The theme of alleged Western “spiritual pollution” comes up time and again in Chinese filmmaking, despite the fact that all cultures, including Chinese culture, have strong and weak points. It’s part of a politics of scapegoating by leadership elites who want to blame someone else for China’s problems. These caricatures of the culture of the “Western” other are often crude and simplistic. Every time one of the campaigns goes away, one is tempted to say, “OK, we won’t see that again.” But then another campaign is launched. In fact, there is another push of this sort under way in China right now, despite the extent to which Chinese culture has been globalized. This strategy always works on some people, but as increasing numbers of Chinese students and tourists go abroad, scapegoating of this sort has become less and less effective. If Western culture is so spiritually polluted, many in China wonder, why is the daughter of Chinese President Xi Jinping a student at Harvard? Why is there no university in China good enough for her? Why is she attending the most bourgeois-liberal university in the US? Why are thousands upon thousands of Chinese undergraduate students pouring into North American and European universities for their education? Why are so many thousands of prosperous and well-educated Chinese buying real estate like crazy in North America and Europe? Why are so many Chinese trying so hard to gain permanent residence or citizenship status in North America and Europe for themselves or their family members?

Keep in mind, however, that the Communist Party didn’t invent these caricatures of Western culture. Chinese filmmakers have been doing it since the 1920s. It’s sensational and it sells tickets. Producers of popular culture in fast-lane places like Shanghai recognized the undeniable allures of modern culture, but warned people to be cautious lest they get lost. My parents said the same thing to me about beatnik and hippie culture! Leadership elites have a different kind of concern. If citizens embark on cultural explorations, leaders fret, they might be more difficult to control and they might embrace various kinds of “countercultures.”

It is fair to say that in recent times, certainly since the late 1980s and early 1990s, that Chinese filmmakers, especially those who work in the new non-state sector, have been less inclined to take up the controversy about foreign spiritual pollution in explicit ways. Indeed, some of them indirectly challenge stereotypes about the alleged foreign origins of cultural phenomena that are worrisome to state elites. Zhang Yuan’s wonderful 1996 underground film _East Palace, West Palace_ (Dong gong, xi gong) is a good example. It was the PRC’s first film on gay life and it focused on sexuality and the quest for love. It totally rejects the idea that gay culture somehow came to China from overseas. The film couldn’t be screened publicly in China, but it was well received internationally. It seemed very fresh and sane.

_ CDT: Why did you initially deem the wave of underground and independent productions that came out shortly before and after 2000 “self-indulgent” and “trivial” but later change your mind saying “Chinese artists had earned the right to be self-indulgent” because of decades of “Maoist collectivism and asceticism.” Which films did you find self-indulgent? Were these films self-indulgent because of Western influence?_

PGP: I think some of my initial reactions to underground and independent filmmaking in China were shaped by the fact that I’m primarily a student of Chinese history, society, and politics. Whether doing research on the 1930s or the present day, I was always looking for cultural artifacts and especially visual sources that analyze big social problems including class tensions, the urban-rural divide, power hierarchies, corruption, gender relations, injustice, ethnic conflict and so forth. In many ways I’m a product of 1960s American culture. I’ve researched many Chinese films of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s that take on big, sweeping questions of this sort. These films were not produced by the government, they were produced in studios that were independent of the state.

More than ten years ago the UC San Diego library began collecting large numbers of underground and independent films made in China. Soon our collection was the largest in the world. Today it has more than 2,000 titles. We held our first Chinese underground film festival in 2003. When I first began to take a close look at large numbers of these films, documentaries and features alike, I was no doubt hoping for the same sort of independent, critical engagement with broad social issues that we see in the films made before 1949 by independent, non-state sector filmmakers. I was looking for political critiques and at least some finger pointing. I was interested in such issues as environmental degradation, recovering lost histories, child trafficking, corruption, and organized crime. Eventually I found many significant works that treated such topics, films like Peng Tao’s _Red Snow_ (Hongse xue, 2006), Liu Bingjian’s _Crying Woman_ (Kuqi de nuren, 2002), and Ai Xiaoming’s _Love and Care_ (Guan ai zhi jia, 2007). But initially I looked randomly through our collection and struck by the large numbers of films that seemed very inwardly directed instead of outwardly directed. I was looking for critical protest films but was confronted by very large numbers of films, especially documentaries, that screamed, “Look at me!” They seemed very self-indulgent to me and I quickly tired of their repetitiveness. But of course I soon realized that these films were highly political in their own ways. They were, after all, a very logical response to decades of Maoist collectivism when people were supposed to “merge with the masses” and deny “self.” Once a space suddenly opened up for reflections on self and individual identities, many, many young urbanites took the plunge. They engaged with passion in what I call “identity searches.” I feel lost. Who am I? Gu Tao’s 2007 film _Starkers: The Naked Life of Qin Yongjian_ (Wo de shenti ni zuo zhu) is a good example of this type of sensational, self-exploration film that falls squarely into the counterculture category. Zhang Zhanqing’s documentary _For Every Minute I Life, I Plan to Enjoy 60 Seconds_ (Huole yifen zhong, kui huo lushi miao, 2006) is another great example. It’s both disturbing and revealing.

These “identity search” films are not the result of Western cultural influence. They are a very logical response to the destructive, collectivist excesses of Maoism. Naturally, global context and global exposure is part of the picture. But the main causal dynamics are internal and domestic. The same thing would happen in North Korea is there was a sudden and dramatic ideological shift. With the end of self-imposed isolation, young people in North Korea would be exposed to the global culture of South Korea and this would cause confusion and force many to reflect and think in new ways about “self.” I’m a New Englander, so I’m aware of the extent to which American hippie culture of the 1960s was a conscious departure from collectivist and repressive Puritan culture.

_CDT: What was the first Chinese film you ever watched and which film have you watched the most times since?_

PGP: Starting in 1966 it was almost impossible to see mainland Chinese films. This is because once the Cultural Revolution began virtually all the films made before and after 1949 were denounced and no longer accessible. I travelled around China in the summer of 1971, half way through the Cultural Revolution, and was able to see a few films, but all of them were filmed versions of Jiang Qing’s model operas and ballets – - not items that originated as movie ideas.

I believe the first time I had a chance to see an old Chinese film was in Hong Kong in 1977 when, by luck, there was a screening of Huang Zuolin’s absolutely delightful and brilliant social comedy _Fake Bride, Phony Bridegroom_ (Jia feng xu huang) made in early 1947 in Shanghai. The screenplay was written by Sang Hu, and the film starred Li Lihua and Shi Hui. In the 1980s I was finally able to meet Huang Zuolin, Sang Hu, and Li Lihua and discuss their early work. The great actor Shi Hui committed suicide during the vicious Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957. Quite simply, the movie just blew me away. Many of us who studied modern Chinese literature and culture had heard stories about the splendors of early-era Chinese films, but I was unprepared for the extreme pleasure associated with actually seeing one. Set in post-war Shanghai, the film offers a savage critique of life in Civil War China without ever mentioning the awful Civil War that was sweeping the land. It’s about two marginalized young people, an ordinary barber and a single mom, whose survival anxieties cause them to function as crafty con artists. The fun begins when she posts a notice in the paper saying she is a rich young woman just returned from the USA who will consider marriage applications from appropriately rich and handsome young men, and he responds to the ad by claiming that he is a wealthy graduate returning from Oxford. The film is one of those national allegories I mentioned before. The message is that our society is a humongous fake and people are doing what it takes to survive.

No doubt the film I have watched the most times is Wu Yonggang’s 1934 masterpiece _The Goddess_ (Shennu). It’s no exaggeration to say I’ve seen it at least 50 times. It stars the legendary silent-screen actress Ruan Lingyu, a world-class performer. It’s one of those social issue films that functions as a detailed ethnography of a common Shanghai prostitute. The film is powerful precisely because it assaults the moral sensibilities of comfortable middle-class people. In fact it subverts mainstream moral categories. In this film, the “clean” people, including the urban bourgeoisie, businessmen, school teachers and neighborhood moms, are “dirty,” while the “dirty” people, especially street hookers, are “clean,” one might even say angelic — hence the title Goddess. The great films work every time. This film is 80 years old, but it still feels current. I screened this film for my class in Shanghai in 2010 and the local students loved it and were stunned by its contemporary relevance since prostitution is once again a serious problem in China. And once again, many urban middle class people who present themselves as “clean” are at the very least unattractive and in many senses “dirty.” This film is quite accessible now, so your readers should have an easy time finding it.

_CDT: What is the most underrated and overrated Chinese film made over the past century? Why? 
_
PGP: This is the most difficult question you’ve asked in part because judgments like these are so subjective and matters of taste. Ask ten specialists and you’ll get 10 different answers. The question is also difficult because ever since 1949 there’s been an unrelenting official promotion in China of pre-1949 films that are regarded as canons of the so-called “progressive” or “leftist” tradition of Chinese filmmaking. Never mind that the whole notion of clear “leftist” and “rightist” traditions is artificial and bogus. Once a film ended up on the “progressive” list it got promoted at home and abroad as a “classic” and thus was far more accessible than other titles that were hidden away in the archive. So when I think of “underrated,” I tend to think of works that are not regarded by officialdom as part of that canon and therefore much more difficult to see. A good example from 1928 is _Oceans of Passion, Heavy Kissing_ (Qing hai zhong wen), a silent-era work directed by Xie Yunqing. The first two-thirds of this movie are really terrific. It’s a “Shanghai modern romance” story, but in this particular case the love triangle doesn’t involve a man and two women but a woman and two men, one of whom is her husband! The first part of the tale unfolds in many surprising ways. Modernity is desirable, but very disorienting and confusing for the young protagonists, none of whom are evil people. The film also deals in realistic ways with ongoing pressures to conform to pre-modern patriarchal norms. 

Another similarly underrated film is Pan Jienong’s _Streets and Alleys_ (Jietou xiangwei), released in late 1948 when the Civil War was winding down. It’s a highly effective and well-acted comedy that treats the subject of downward social mobility in the post-war era and the need for down-and-out urban folks to organize themselves in something like anarchist mutual aid collectives that have nothing to do with familial or blood ties. Considering that the film was released on the eve of the Communist victory, you would think it qualifies as a “progressive” work. But it was never placed into the canonical category. This is because it was made by a director who was a member of the Nationalist Party and it was produced in a Nationalist state-owned film studio. In short, the film was highly compelling and politically engaged but it contradicted a politically-correct narrative that insisted that any film connected to the Nationalists had to be a “rightist” work.

As I said earlier, Zhang Yimou certainly paid his dues and made immense contributions in the 1980s and 1990s. But if I think about grossly overrated works, two of his later works, _Hero_ (Yingxiong, 2002) and _House of the Flying Daggers_ (Shimian maifu, 2004), come immediately to mind. I could never figure out what these films contributed. But, of course, even these works tell us a lot about the frantic commercialization of state-sponsored Chinese filmmaking after 2000. Thinking about these overrated films, I feel like I want to put Jiang Wen’s superb independent film _Devils on the Doorstep_ (Guizi laile, 2000) near the top of the list of seriously underrated movies.

_CDT: What’s next for you?_

PGP: We held a wonderful workshop at UC San Diego last June on new independent documentary films. We invited Wu Wenguang, perhaps the most influential independent documentary filmmaker in China, to visit us for eight days of intense viewing and discussion. He brought 24 films with him. We devoted most of our time to a couple of major multi-year projects unfolding at his Caochangdi Work Station in Beijing. One is “The Memory Project” and the other is “The Village Project.” Most independent filmmakers are solo acts, but Wu is quite different in the sense that he actively recruits young amateurs to come to Caochangdi to get basic training and then he turns them loose to go back to their home villages throughout China to make films about both the past and the present. Our goal is to produce a book that explores in considerable detail all the exciting things going on in the independent documentary sector in China today.

Paul Pickowicz is also the co-editor, with Perry Link and Richard P. Madsen, of _Restless China_.


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## Costas (Aug 23, 2014)

Άλλη μια νεκρολογία, με πρόσθετα στοιχεία, για τον μεγάλο και αξιανάγνωστο Pierre Ryckmans / Simon Leys. (Sydney Morning Herald)


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## Costas (Aug 23, 2014)

From the Weixin account of Mr. Li Xianting: “Memorandum regarding suspension of the 11th Beijing Independent Film Festival”

Aug 18 2014: Posters and time schedules for the opening of The 11th Beijing Independent Film Festival have been posted online. The police set up watch outside my home and outside the Li Xianting Film Fund.

Aug 19 2014: In the afternoon some officials came to the Li Xianting Film Fund, saying that the festival was to be stopped. They also named two films that they wanted to see. The Ministry of Education, Administration of Trade and Commerce, Tax Administration and other agencies also came to ask questions.

Aug 20 2014: At 10 in the morning, Xiaobao village leaders came to my home and told me that their superiors had ordered that the Film Fest be shut down. They did, however, agree that the Festival could be moved to Yanjiao in Hebei province and take place there. At 11 pm, more officials came to my home to advise me to shut down the Fest.

August 21 2014: Li Xianting Film Fund reps went to Yanjiao and reserved a venue space at the Huifu Hotel.

August 22 2014: Around noon, the Xiaobao village committee leader came to say that we had booked hotel rooms in Songzhuang, but that higher authorities had ordered us not to. The Li Xianting Film Fund staff members who had booked the hotels came back and said that the hotel would no longer let us register to stay there. At 1:30 pm, the Songzhuang police came and apprehended Li Xianting Film Fund Artistic Director Wang Hongwei and administrator Fan Rong. As of 6 pm, they had not yet been released. At the police station, Wang Hongbao took two phone calls:

1) A person claiming to be from the Songzhuang local government work safety committee called and said: “The fence in your yard is pressing up against fuel pipes; you have to tear it down before the 31st.”

2) The hotel we had reserved in Yanjiao (Huifu Hotel) called and said: “Higher authorities from the Public Security Bureau have instructed us not to let your film festival be held at our hotel.”

The police station said that Wang Hongwei and Fan Rong had to sign a statement agreeing to call off the Festival before they would be released. Wang Hongbao and Fan Rong were forced to sign the statement and at 6:37 pm, the two of them were released. After that, a Li Xianting Film Fund staff member received notice from the festival venue in Songzhuang that starting tomorrow the electricity at the Li Xianting Film Fund will be cut.

In the afternoon the Exit-Entry Administration came to the Li Xianting Film Fund to ask about foreign filmmakers that the Fund would be hosting.


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## Costas (Aug 25, 2014)

Without the Right to Remember There Can Be No Freedom to Forget
By Chang Ping, published: August 23, 2014 (China Change)

_(This is Chang Ping’s rebuttal to Frank Sieren’s Let Fairness Replace Anger [link in German], the second round of the Sieren vs. Chang Ping debate in June this year in Deutsche Welle about the June 4th massacre in 1989 in China. Read Tiananmen Massacre not a “Passing Lapse” of the Chinese Government, Chang Ping’s rebuttal to Frank Sieren’s From Tian’anmen To Leipzig [link in German], the first round of the debate. – The Editor)
_


Matthias von Hein, a Deutsche Welle (DW) commentator, quotes George Orwell’s “1984” in his essay on the Tiananmen massacre anniversary: “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.” The Chinese Communist regime is in the process of carrying out this aphorism. I am therefore compelled to engage DW’s Beijing correspondent, Mr. Frank Sieren, on the history of the massacre.

Responding to objections I raised in a previous article, Mr. Sieren published “Replace Anger with Justice.” In addition to insisting in this rather brief piece that “it is incontrovertible that the 1989 incident is a lapse in the history of New China,” he puts forth assessments on several historical and contemporary questions of great significance. By asserting that “many Chinese wish to forget the Tiananmen massacre” and that “consumerism appeals to Chinese people more than memories,” Mr. Sieren cedes a wide berth for me to take this debate further.

*No One Can Escape History*

I am quite taken aback to see a German author claim that “many people wish to forget history.” In Germany, I have interviewed many organizations and individuals who study and manage issues of history, including the Federal Foundation for the Reappraisal of the SED Dictatorship; The Foundation for Remembrance, Accountability and the Future; the former Chief Prosecutor of Berlin, Christoph Schaefgen, who led the indictment of East German leaders including Erich Honecker and Egon Krenz; the head of the Stasi archives, Roland Jahn; and ordinary Germans I meet in daily life. Throughout these interviews, everyone keeps bringing up the same word, _Vergangenheitsbewältigung_, or “coming to terms with the past.” It’s a word that keeps simplistic evasions of truth at bay, and inspires the utmost respect for the sincerity of German efforts at reexamining their own history.

When it comes to familiar quotations, this one from the Czech exile in France, Milan Kundera, is close to Chinese hearts: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” His works chronicle the agonized struggle of Czech intellectuals against the mandatory oblivion under Communist dictatorship. Nor is Kundera alone. From Solzhenitsyn to Herta Müller, the list of writers of conscience who fight to defend memories of what ought not to be forgotten grows long.

*Lies Are Spawned by Fear*

I am well aware that you cannot find scenes of such conscientious struggle in today’s China. On the contrary, there are many who are reluctant to openly discuss the Tiananmen massacre and the Cultural Revolution, stressing the need to “drop the baggage and look forward.” Even those who are deeply dissatisfied with the status quo are mostly unwilling to put up a fight. Fighting back is futile, and the only way out is to put up and to put it out of your mind. Those who study history know that this is far from unique to China; in the former East Germany and other Communist countries things were exactly the same. Havel, the dramatist, dissident and eventual Czech President, captures in his play, “The Power of the Powerless,” a particular ludicrous moment in time: The manager of a grocery store, out of his own initiative, puts up a slogan on his shop window: “Proletarians of the world, unite!” Are we to believe that he is personally invested in the global solidarity of workers? Hardly. The truth is, in an autocratic society teeming with desperation, lies confer a sense of security.

If surveys were conducted in China during the Cultural Revolution or, for that matter, today’s North Korea, the vast majority is likely to describe their lives as blissfully happy. Can we therefore conclude that the Chinese and North Koreans much prefer authoritarianism, and we are to honor their “right to happiness?” The dissatisfaction Germans express toward their own government must be greater than that in China. Does this mean China’s system is better than the German one?

*Commemoration, Not Forgetting, Is Banned*

Moreover, it is impossible to obtain statistics to support the conclusion that “many Chinese wish to forget the Tiananmen massacre.” What we do know is that the propaganda department of the Chinese Communist Party would consider all such assessments a joke. I personally attended Party propaganda meetings, and witnessed an extraordinary and palpable nervousness whenever the massacre anniversary drew near. Party officials were convinced that even a slight slack in the controls would see public opinion break through and bring the truth to light. For the CCP’s controls on free speech are in every way comparable to those achieved in the Eastern bloc countries of the Soviet era.

Of course people have the right to choose to forget. However, it is worthwhile to consider this thought with which I sign off all my posts in Chinese social media: “Without the freedom to criticize, compliments are worthless.” Rights are the outcome of free choice. In a country where people have no right to commemorate, it is not only a luxury to speak about the right to forget, but a downright act of collusion with the oppressor. In a political environment where people are arrested and sentenced for going to a commemorative event held at a private residence, Mr. Sieren’s statement that “just as you cannot forbid people to commemorate, you cannot forbid them to forget” has no basis in reality. Such a position is not as rational as it strives to appear, and is regrettably lacking from a humanitarian standpoint.

_Chang Ping (长平) was former chief commentator and news director of Southern Weekend (《南方周末》). He writes columns for the South China Morning Post, Deutsche Welle, and a number of Chinese language websites. Forced to leave China and then Hong Kong, he currently lives in Germany.
_
(Translated by Louisa Chiang)


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## Costas (Aug 26, 2014)

Το βάζω εδώ για να μη χάνεται. Άλλωστε, ο Πολ Ποτ και ο Μάο ήταν ιδεολογικά καρντάσια:

The Genocide That Wasn’t
Stéphanie Giry / New York Review of Books

(...)
There is, in fact, a simple explanation for why most of the Khmer Rouge’s crimes, though widely thought to be a paradigmatic example of genocide, both inside and outside Cambodia, are not actually that: the 1948 Genocide Convention, which codified the concept into international law, deliberately ruled out its application to political pogroms and class war — the signal crimes of Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot.

That treaty defines genocide as killings, among other acts, committed with the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” This idea built on the word “genocide” itself, a neologism combining _genos_ (Greek for race or tribe) and _cide_ (Latin for killing), which the Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin proposed in 1944, well into the Holocaust, to denote the deliberate “destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group.” But the language adopted in the convention was also a compromise reflecting the power dynamics of the day. The Soviet Union, for example, opposed including “political” in the list of protected groups in the definition, presumably because it was wary of getting into trouble for purging its opponents back home.
(...)


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## Costas (Aug 27, 2014)

Statement in Support of the Beijing Independent Film Festival and the Li Xianting Film Fund
Date: August 25, 2014

As independent film festivals and supporters of independent cinema, we have learned with deep concern that the Chinese government and police authorities have prevented the 11th Beijing Independent Film Festival based in Songzhuang, Beijing, from opening last weekend, August 23rd, and detained its organizers Wang Hongwei, Fan Rong, and Li Xianting for several hours. We are also deeply concerned that BIFF’s sponsoring organization, the Li Xianting Film Fund, has been raided, and the entirety of its invaluable archives of independent Chinese cinema have reportedly been confiscated.

We call upon the relevant Chinese authorities to permit the Beijing Independent Film Festival to pursue its mission to nurture and exhibit a full range of alternative cinematic voices in China, to allow the festival to operate without interference, and to allow the Li Xianting Film Fund to continue its vital mission of archiving and supporting independent Chinese filmmakers.


Co-signed:

Berlinale Forum, Christoph Terhechte, Head
Curtas Vila do Conde International Film Festival, Nuno Rodrigues, Miguel Dias, Mário Micaelo, co-directors
dGenerate Films, Karin Chien, President
DocLisboa, Cíntia Gil and Augusto M. Seabra, co-directors
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Dennis Lim, Director of Programming
Göteborg International Film Festival, Jonas Holmberg, Artistic Director, Marit Kapla, Head of Programme
Hong Kong Independent Film Festival, Vincent Chui, Artistic Director
Images Cinema, Doug Jones, Executive Director
International Film Festival Rotterdam, Rutger Wolfson, Festival Director
Lima Independiente Festival Internacional de Cine, Alonso Izaguirre, Director
New York Film Festival, Kent Jones, Director
Sydney Film Festival, Nashen Moodley, Festival Director
Taiwan International Documentary Festival, Wood Lin, Program Director
The Association of Documentary Filmakers of Chile, Amalric de Pontcharra
Torino Film Festival, Emanuela Martini, Director
Tromsø International Film Festival, Martha Otte, Festival Director
Tokyo Filmex, Shozo Ichiyama, Program Director
True/False Film Fest, Paul Sturtz and David Wilson, co-directors
Visions du Réel, Luciano Barisone, Director

http://www.filmfestivalrotterdam.com/professionals/news-2014-2015/statement-in-support-of/
http://www.filmlinc.com/daily/entry/the-film-society-joins-international-festivals-in-support-of-the-beijing-in


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## Costas (Aug 28, 2014)

Κομμένο κεφάλι κόμπρας δάγκωσε και σκότωσε κινέζο σεφ
(Τα Νέα)
Από δάγκωμα αποκεφαλισμένης κόμπρας πέθανε ένας σεφ από την Κίνα.
Ο Πενγκ Φαν μαγείρευε σούπα με το σώμα της κόμπρας. Ωστόσο, το κεφάλι του φιδιού που ο σεφ είχε κόψει 20 λεπτά νωρίτερα, σηκώθηκε και τον δάγκωσε!
Ο άτυχος σεφ δεν πρόλαβε να λάβει το αντίδοτο και πέθανε.


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## Costas (Sep 1, 2014)

Τον Αράπη κι αν τον πλένεις, το σαπούνι σου χαλάς

China Restricts Voting Reforms for Hong Kong
By CHRIS BUCKLEY and MICHAEL FORSYTHE (ΝΥΤ)

HONG KONG — China’s legislature laid down strict limits on Sunday to proposed voting reforms in Hong Kong, pushing back against months of rallies calling for free, democratic elections.

The decision by the National People’s Congress Standing Committee drew battle lines in what pro-democracy groups warned would be a deepening confrontation over the political future of the city and of China. The committee demanded procedural barriers for candidates for the city’s leader that would ensure Beijing remained the gatekeeper to that position — and to political power over the city.

Li Fei, a deputy secretary general of the committee, told a news conference in Beijing that the nominating guidelines — including a requirement that candidates “love the country, and love Hong Kong” — would “protect the broad stability of Hong Kong now and in the future.”

The move closes one of the few avenues left for gradual political liberalization in China after a sustained campaign against dissent on the mainland this year under President Xi Jinping. In pressing its offensive in Hong Kong, Beijing has chosen a showdown with a protest movement unlike any it has ever faced on the mainland.

Hong Kong’s opposition forces enjoy civil liberties denied in the rest of China and, capitalizing on those freedoms, have taken a more confrontational approach than seen before in Hong Kong.

They said the limits set by Beijing for selection of the city’s leader, the chief executive, made a mockery of the “one person, one vote” principle that had been promised to Hong Kong.

“After having lied to Hong Kong people for so many years, it finally revealed itself today,” said Alan Leong, a pro-democracy legislator. “Hong Kong people are right to feel betrayed. It’s certain now that the central government will be effectively appointing Hong Kong’s chief executive.”

Occupy Central, the main Hong Kong group advocating open elections, said it was planning civil disobedience protests in the city’s commercial heart. Several thousand people turned out for a rally opposing Beijing’s plan on Sunday night.

“We are no longer willing to be docile subjects,” Benny Tai, a co-founder of Occupy Central and an associate professor of law at the University of Hong Kong, told the crowd. “Our hope is that people gathered here will be dauntless civil resisters. What is our hope? Our hope is that today Hong Kong has entered a new era, an era of civil disobedience, an era of resistance.”

Other groups were also preparing to protest, and the Hong Kong Federation of Students urged university students to boycott classes.

Beyond their consequences for this former British colony of 7.2 million people, the tight reins on Hong Kong politics reflect a fear among leaders in Beijing that political concessions here would ignite demands for liberalization on the mainland, a quarter-century after such hopes were extinguished at Tiananmen Square in 1989.

“They are afraid that caving in to Hong Kong would show weakness,” Minxin Pei, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College in California, said in a telephone interview. “They believe that political weakness will encourage Hong Kong to demand more and will give opponents of the party’s rule in China great confidence to challenge the party.”

Since taking leadership of the Communist Party almost two years ago, President Xi has orchestrated intense campaigns in China against political dissent and demands for competitive democracy, civil society and a legal system beyond party control. But Hong Kong presents special challenges.

Advocates and opponents of political liberalization alike have seen Hong Kong as a potential incubator for change in China since it was returned to Chinese rule in 1997. Since then, the territory has had considerable autonomy and retained a wealth of Western-style freedoms under an arrangement known as “one country, two systems.”

The struggle over electoral change here pits the Chinese authorities and their allies in Hong Kong against an opposition that claims robust middle-class support, protections by the city’s independent judiciary and a voice in an independent, though beleaguered, news media.

“China’s two most important cities are Beijing and Hong Kong,” Hu Jia, a prominent dissident in Beijing, said in a telephone interview on Sunday. He said he had been placed under house arrest, like other dissidents, before the National People’s Congress announcement.

“In the territory controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, only Hong Kong has some space for free speech, some judicial independence, so it is a mirror for people on the mainland,” he said. “The outcome of this battle for democracy will also determine future battles for democracy for all of China.”

Chinese officials have accused Hong Kong’s democracy groups of serving as tools for subversion by Western forces seeking to chip away at party control.

Mr. Li, the legislative official, on Sunday accused them of “sowing confusion” and “misleading society” by arguing that elections for the chief executive should follow international standards. “Each country’s historical, cultural, economic, social and political conditions and circumstances are different, and so the rules formulated for elections naturally also differ,” he said.

Under current law, the chief executive is chosen by an Election Committee, whose approximately 1,200 members are selected by constituencies generally loyal to Beijing and the city’s business elite.

According to the Chinese legislature’s proposal, the leader would be chosen by popular vote starting in 2017, as promised, but candidates would first have to win an endorsement from at least half the members of a nominating committee. The composition of that committee would be based on that of the current Election Committee, according to the decision, announced at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People.

Mr. Li said that the existing committee was already “broadly representative” of the Hong Kong electorate, and so would furnish the right basis for a nominating committee in future elections, an assertion that Hong Kong democrats have roundly rejected. Democracy advocates expect that the new committee, like the existing one, will exclude candidates seen as unfavorable by Beijing.

Its composition would ensure “that democrats have no chance of getting nominated,” said Michael Davis, a law professor at the University of Hong Kong. In fact, he said, it would raise the bar. Candidates have to win only one-eighth of the support of the current committee but would have to win 50 percent under the new guidelines. “As far as I can see, the government has no capacity to offer a deal the democrats will take in this,” he said.

The Chinese government fears that direct nominations would allow candidates hostile to Beijing, and it has said direct nominations would also contravene the Basic Law, the document governing Hong Kong’s relationship with the mainland. The People’s Daily, the main newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, said in an editorial on Monday that “nobody who is antagonistic” to the central government should ever be allowed to become chief executive.

The Hong Kong government will use the Chinese legislature’s proposal as a framework for an electoral reform bill. That bill then must win approval from the city’s 70-member Legislative Council, where the 27 democratic members could still block its passage by the required two-thirds majority. Emily Lau, chairwoman of Hong Kong’s Democratic Party, said they would. “We will veto this revolting proposal,” she said Sunday.

But C. Y. Leung, Hong Kong’s current, pro-Beijing chief executive, said killing the bill would also kill universal suffrage.

“Five million Hong Kong people would be deprived of the voting right that they would be otherwise entitled to,” he said. “We cannot afford a standstill in our constitutional development or else the prosperity, or stability, of Hong Kong will be at stake.”

The clash in Hong Kong will be more about winning over public opinion than winning control of the crowded streets. Opinion polls show that most Hong Kong citizens support the demand for “unfiltered” electoral choice, but also that many have qualms about possible disruption from protests.

On the main campus of the University of Hong Kong on Monday, there were mixed views about the wisdom of a student strike, but considerable support for the idea.

“Going on strike would be a sensible way to show our concern,” said Echo Lo, an architecture student. “ If we don’t do anything, they’ll say that we don’t care.”

But others were warier. “The decision of the central government was a bit tight, with no negotiation,” said Terrence Tang, a masters student in economics. “But I also agree that any country must take care of its security. It’s difficult because Hong Kong is so special.”

The Chinese government and the Hong Kong political establishment have accused Occupy Central and allied groups of recklessly imperiling the city’s reputation for political stability and support for business. And many ordinary Hong Kong residents have voiced worry about any political conflict that could hurt their livelihoods.

Occupy Central says it will engage in nonviolent civil disobedience to avoid major disruption. Its organizers have said that they do not plan to plunge into mass protests immediately.

“We’re not making threats, we’re just sending warning signals,” said Mr. Tai, the group’s co-founder. “The house is on fire, something has to be done.”

_Alan Wong contributed reporting from Hong Kong, and Patrick Zuo contributed research from Beijing. _


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## Costas (Sep 2, 2014)

Στιγμιότυπα από το ετσιθελικό κλείσιμο του Φεστιβάλ Ανεξάρτητου Κινηματογράφου του Πεκίνου (βλ. παραπάνω, #1152 και #1155)






Στο μεταξύ, 

Εβδομάδα Κινεζικού Κινηματογράφου στην Ταινιοθήκη της Ελλάδος‏ (Το Βήμα)

H Ταινιοθήκη της Ελλάδος, σε συνεργασία με το Τμήμα Κινηματογραφίας της Κρατικής Διοίκησης Τύπου, Δημοσιεύσεων, Ραδιοφώνου, Κινηματογράφου και Τηλεόρασης της Λαϊκής Δημοκρατίας της Κίνας, παρουσιάζει την Εβδομάδα Κινεζικού Κινηματογράφου 2014 από την Δευτέρα 15 Σεπτεμβρίου έως και την Πέμπτη 18 Σεπτεμβρίου 2014. Η εκδήλωση τελεί υπό την αιγίδα του Υπουργείου Πολιτισμού και Αθλητισμού, της Διεύθυνσης Κινηματογράφου και Οπτικοακουστικών Μέσων του ΥΠΠΟΑ, της Κρατικής Διοίκησης Τύπου, Δημοσιεύσεων, Ραδιοφώνου, Κινηματογράφου και Τηλεόρασης της Κίνας, και την Πρεσβεία της Λαϊκής Δημοκρατίας της Κίνας στην Ελλάδα. 

Η εκδήλωση αυτή πραγματοποιείται στο πλαίσιο της οικοδόμησης μιας στενότερης πολιτιστικής συνεργασίας με την Κινεζική πρεσβεία και τους αντίστοιχους πολιτιστικούς φορείς της Κίνας. Αποτελεί την αφετηρία για την διεύρυνση των διακρατικών σχέσεων Ελλάδας-Κίνας σε επίπεδο πολιτισμού, καθώς και για την διαμόρφωση συνεργασιών στο πεδίο του κινηματογράφου, της τηλεόρασης και της συντήρησης της κινηματογραφικής κληρονομίας.

Για τις ανάγκες εδραίωσης αυτής της πολιτιστικής συνεργασίας, μεγάλη Κινεζική αντιπροσωπεία δεκατριών (13) ατόμων έρχεται στην Αθήνα προκειμένου να συνάψει σχέσεις με εκπροσώπους από το χώρο του πολιτισμού και του κινηματογράφου.

Λόγω της επισημότητας της εκδήλωσης, στην τελετή έναρξης την Δευτέρα 15 Σεπτεμβρίου θα παρευρεθούν ο Πρέσβης της Λαϊκής Δημοκρατίας της Κίνας στην Ελλάδα, κ. Τζόου Σιαολί, καθώς και εκπρόσωποι από το χώρο του πολιτισμού των δύο χωρών, επαγγελματίες του κινηματογράφου και μέλη του διπλωματικού σώματος. 

(...)


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## nickel (Sep 2, 2014)

Είναι φοβερό να νιώθεις ασφυξία σε μια χώρα 10 εκατομμυρίων τετραγωνικών χιλιομέτρων.


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## Costas (Sep 2, 2014)

:)..............


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## Costas (Sep 15, 2014)

Tackling a Wall of Lies – Profile of Pu Zhiqiang, a Chinese Human Rights Lawyer
(China Change)

Αρχικά το στιλ γραφής της Albertine Ren με ενόχλησε –σαν να διαβάζεις λαϊφσταϊλίστικο περιοδικό. Σιγά-σιγά το συνήθισα, και σκέφτηκα και τα καλά του (δίνει ζωή αντί για το αναμενόμενο ανιαρό στην προβλέψιμη επανάληψή του ανακοινωθέν της σύλληψης κλπ.)


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## SBE (Sep 16, 2014)

China Tells Dalai Lama to Respect Reincarnation
Όπου διάβασα:


> China has previously warned the Dalai Lama he has no right to abandon the tradition of reincarnation


.
Δηλαδή σου απαγορεύουμε να μην μετεμψυχωθείς.


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## Costas (Sep 18, 2014)

Διπλωματικό θρίλερ με τον Κινέζο πρεσβευτή στην Ισλανδία
(Καθημερινή)
Η Κίνα αρνήθηκε να δώσει εξηγήσεις στην Ισλανδία για την τύχη του πρώην πρεσβευτή του Πεκίνου στο Ρέικιαβικ, ο οποίος απουσιάζει από τον περασμένο Ιανουάριο και δεν έχει αντικατασταθεί.

Ο Κινέζος διπλωμάτης Μα Τζισένγκ έφυγε από την Ισλανδία στις 27 Ιανουαρίου, χωρίς να ενημερωθεί το Ρέικιαβικ για τον λόγο της αναχώρησής του. Έκτοτε, δεν επέστρεψε και η Κίνα δεν εκπροσωπείται από πρεσβευτή, όμως η πρεσβεία της εξακολουθεί να λειτουργεί.
Ισλανδικά μέσα ενημέρωσης μετέδωσαν ότι ο πρεσβευτής "αγνοείται", μια λέξη που απέφυγε να χρησιμοποιήσει η κυβέρνηση.

Το Ρέικιαβικ ρώτησε κατ' επανάληψη τι συνέβη με τον Μα Τζισένγκ και η μοναδική απάντηση που έλαβε ήταν ότι δεν θα επιστρέψει στη θέση του, είπε η εκπρόσωπος του υπουργείου Εξωτερικών Ουρντούρ Γκουναρσντότιρ.

Η πρεσβεία της Κίνας αρνήθηκε να σχολιάσει το θέμα.

Στον ιστότοπο του υπουργείου Εξωτερικών της Κίνας, στον κατάλογο των πρεσβευτών, δεν υπάρχει κανένα όνομα στη θέση του πρεσβευτή στην Ισλανδία. Νωρίτερα, ένας εκπρόσωπος της κινεζικής διπλωματίας αρνήθηκε να απαντήσει σε ερωτήσεις για την τύχη του Μα Τζισένγκ ο οποίος επρόκειτο να τιμηθεί στο Ρέικιαβικ από τον Σινοϊσλανδικό Πολιτιστικό Οργανισμό (KIM) για τη συμβολή του στη σύναψη καλών σχέσεων μεταξύ των δύο χωρών.

Ο πρόεδρος του ΚΙΜ Άρντορ Χέλγκασον είπε στην εφημερίδα DV ότι έχει ζητήσει, χωρίς αποτέλεσμα μέχρι τώρα, τη βοήθεια της πρεσβείας της Ισλανδίας στο Πεκίνο για να εντοπίσει τον Μα.

Η Ισλανδία και η Κίνα διατηρούν καλές διπλωματικές σχέσεις. Η Ισλανδία είναι η μοναδική ευρωπαϊκή χώρα που έχει υπογράψει συμφωνία ελευθέρου εμπορίου με την Κίνα, τον Απρίλιο του 2013 και θεωρείται από το Πεκίνο στρατηγικής σημασίας για την ανάπτυξη ενός θαλάσσιου δρόμου προς την Ευρώπη μέσω της Αρκτικής.


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## Costas (Sep 18, 2014)

Ούτε όμως αν είσαι άνω των 80 ετών απαλλάσσεσαι:

Arrest of Tie Liu Proves ‘Pen is Mightier Than the Sword’
September 15, 2014

PEN American Center Calls for Immediate Release of 81-Year Old Writer Arrested Sunday in Beijing

NEW YORK—The arrest and detention Sunday of Chinese writer and publisher Tie Liu is an outrageous example of Beijing’s 65-year campaign against free expression, prioritizing the image of the Party over the rights of the people, PEN American Center said in a statement today.

Tie, now 81 years old, spent nearly 25 years in Chinese labor camps for criticizing Mao and the Party in his writing after China’s Communist Revolution. He is charged with “creating a disturbance,” though police were unable or unwilling to explain the details of the accusation.

“The government in Beijing has been trying to repress Tie’s ideas for almost 60 years and, even though he’s over 80, they have not let up,” said Dominic Moran, Director of Free Expression Programs at PEN American Center. “The impressive thing is, neither has he.”

PEN is protesting Tie’s arrest as a violation of his universally guaranteed right to free expression and demands his immediate release on humanitarian grounds.

Tie’s arrest elucidates the mantra that “the pen is mightier than the sword.” Despite his previous imprisonment, Tie had continued writing political essays and publishing memoirs of people persecuted by the Communist Party. His age exempts him as a threat to public safety, a claim often invoked by the Chinese to justify political detentions. The New York Times suggests his arrest “probably” stems from a critical essay he published earlier this year on Liu Yunshan, Director of the Propaganda Department of the Communist Party of China Central Committee.

At 81, Mr. Tie is increasingly vulnerable to deteriorating health and mistreatment in detention, and thus his incarceration may violate his right to a just and proportionate punishment. According to his wife and lawyer, Mr. Tie was confident that, due to his age, he was no longer at risk of arrest.


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## Costas (Sep 18, 2014)

Film About Exiles Is Banned in Singapore
By CHEN MAY YEE

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia – A documentary about the lives of Singaporean exiles has been banned in Singapore on the grounds that it undermines national security.

“To Singapore, With Love” by the Singaporean filmmaker Tan Pin Pin was classified as NAR, the Media Development Authority said Wednesday. NAR stands for “Not allowed for all ratings,” meaning it can neither be shown nor distributed in Singapore.

Ms. Tan had traveled to the United Kingdom, Malaysia and Thailand to film the lives of nine Singaporeans, in their 60s and older. Among them were trade unionists, student leaders and Communists who fled in the 1960s and 1970s, for fear of being imprisoned under Singapore’s Internal Security Act, which allows for detention without trial.

In the film, they speak about their homeland, and how they cope in exile – by frying up a plate of Singapore rice noodles, or flying in to meet loved ones in neighboring Malaysia. One of them, Ang Swee Chai, a surgeon in London and the widow of another exile, said she found renewed purpose in life by traveling to provide medical aid to Palestinian refugees. For Ho Juan Thai, a former student leader also in London, the fear of being somehow accidentally sent back to Singapore kept him from marrying until he was 60.

The 70-minute movie had its premiere at the Busan International Film Festival in South Korea last October. It has been shown at festivals in Berlin, Bangkok, Seoul, New York, Kuala Lumpur and Dubai, where Ms. Tan, 45, won an award for best documentary director at the Dubai International Film Festival.

The Media Development Authority said it took issue with the film’s version of history. “The MDA has assessed that the contents of the film undermine national security because legitimate actions of the security agencies to protect the national security and stability of Singapore are presented in a distorted way as acts that victimized innocent individuals,” the agency said in a press release on Wednesday.

“The individuals featured in the film gave the impression that they are being unfairly denied their right to return to Singapore,” the agency said. In fact, it added, former Communists can return “if they agree to be interviewed by the authorities on their past activities to resolve their cases” while other “criminal offenses will have to be accounted for in accordance with the law.”

“To Singapore, With Love,” was slated to be screened by the National University of Singapore Museum in late September, along with two of Ms. Tan’s earlier films. She said in a statement on Wednesday that she was “very disappointed” by the ban.

“I made this film because I myself wanted to better understand Singapore. I wanted to understand how we became who we are by addressing what was banished and unspoken for,” Ms. Tan said. “I was also hoping that the film would open up a national conversation to allow us to understand ourselves as a nation better too.”

She added: “Now, the irony [is] that a film about Singapore exiles is now exiled from Singapore as well.”

The film will be shown in Johor Bahru, Malaysia, just across the border next week as part of the Freedom Film Festival.


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## Costas (Sep 18, 2014)

Δηλώσεις κατά καιρούς του Ουιγούρου καθηγητή του Πανεπιστημίου Μειονοτήτων Ilham Tohti, ο οποίος δικάζεται τώρα για "αποσχιστικές δραστηριότητες". Όπου θα βρείτε και μια ρήση, με Chinese characteristics όμως, του γνωστού χουντικού σλόγκαν "κάθε πόλη και στάδιο, κάθε χωριό και γυμναστήριο"... 

Ilham Tohti Says (China Change)


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## Costas (Sep 18, 2014)

Balcanica Sinica:

*Macedonia Warms to High-Speed Rail Plan*
Macedonia is mulling whether to sign up to a Chinese plan to build a high-speed pan-Balkan railway line, which Serbia revealed last week.
Sinisa Jakov Marusic BIRN Skopje (Balkan Insight)

Macedonia is warming to the idea of building a regional north-south high-speed railroad, which in its final stage would link the Greek port of Thessaloniki to Budapest via Skopje and Belgrade.

Domestic experts warn, however, that if the plan goes ahead, much ongoing spending on transport reconstruction in Macedonia will have been done in vain.

If Macedonia signs up to the plan revealed last week by the Serbian Prime Minister, Aleksandar Vucic, “we will have to completely redo all of our existing lines along the corridor 10. There is no question about it,” a high ranking source in Macedonian Railways - Infrastructure, a state-owned enterprise, told Balkan Insight.

In 2012, Macedonia launched a major project to reconstruct its main railway lines as part of the north-south pan-European transport corridor 10, using mostly European pre-accession development, IPA funds.

As part of the reconstruction, costing over 55 million euros, several outdated lines such as those from Kumanovo to Deljadrovce, Dracevo to Veles and from Bitola to Kremenica are being fitted to withstand train speeds up to 120kmh.

But the new Chinese-sponsored plan envisages trains moving at between 160 and 200kmh, which would require further significant, costly upgrades.

“We should join the plan without hesitation,” Vulnet Paloshi, a civil engineering professor at the Tetovo University, said.

“It will boost trade and ease connections to our biggest market, the EU,” Paloshi said, adding that “in terms of transporting passengers, a high-speed connection would make the railway a true competitor to air transport”.

Macedonian statistics reveals that almost 60 per cent of the its annual exports go to European Union.

The plan for a high-speed railway to be built by Chinese companies was first revealed last week.

After meeting his Chinese counterpart, Li Keqiang, Serbian Prime Minister Vucic said that the two leaders had discussed a plan for a high-speed rail link from Belgrade to Budapest.

According to Vucic, Li recently agreed with Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras that the Budapest-Belgrade railway should be extended via Skopje in Macedonia to Thessaloniki.

Vucic said that the project to link Belgrade with Budapest could be built within three years and undertaken as part of the Chinese mechanism for cooperation with the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Vucic this week added that he expected EU support for the idea.

Vucic said that in December, he and his Chinese and Hungarian counterparts, Li Keqiang and Viktor Orban, would sign an agreement on construction of the railway line that would reduce the 400km ride from Belgrade to Budapest to three hours.

Meanwhile, Chinese railroad experts are to visit Belgrade in the next two weeks to work out more details.

Last week, Macedonian Transport Minister Mile Janakieski told the media that his government had been informed about the plans for the railway.

“China already informed us about the project. However, it is still in a preparatory phase so it is too early to tell what it will contain,” Janakieski said.

If Macedonia becomes part of the plan, “certain parts of the railway line will have to be built afresh. Other parts will only need to be adjusted,” he added.

The idea comes in parallel with another Chinese plan to construct a water connection between the Vardar river in Macedonia and the Morava and Danube rivers in Serbia.

_Αγνοώ το θέμα, αλλά δεν θα 'πρεπε μια τέτοια γραμμή να είναι στα σχέδια περιφερειακής ανάπτυξης της ΕΕ;_


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## Costas (Oct 22, 2014)

_Confucius Institutes: Academic Malware_
Marshall Sahlins
University of Chicago Press.
Distributed for Prickly Paradigm Press
Paper $12.95 ISBN: 9780984201082 Published November 2014
84 pages | 4 1/2 x 7 | © 2015
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/C/bo20637267.html

In recent years, Confucius Institutes have sprung up on more than four hundred and fifty campuses worldwide, including nearly one hundred across the United States. At first glance, this seems like a benefit for everyone concerned. The colleges and universities receive considerable contributions from the Confucius Institutes’ head office in Beijing, including funds to cover the cost of set-up, the provision of Chinese-language instructors, and a cache of other resources. For their part, the Confucius Institutes are able to further their mission of spreading knowledge of Chinese language and culture. But Marshall Sahlins argues that this seemingly innocuous arrangement conceals the more dubious mission of promoting the political influence of the Chinese government, as guided by the propaganda apparatus of the party-state. Drawing on reports in the media and conversations with those involved, Sahlins shows that the Confucius Institutes are a threat to the principles of academic freedom and integrity at the foundation of our system of higher education. Incidents of academic malpractice are disturbingly common, Sahlins shows. They range from virtually unnoticeable acts of self-censorship to the discouragement of visits from the Dalai Lama and publicly notorious cases like a recent discrimination suit brought against McMaster University when a Confucius Institute teacher was unable to maintain her position after revealing her adherence to Falun Gong. As prominent universities are persuaded by the promise of additional funding to allow Confucius Institutes on campus, they also legitimate them and thereby encourage the participation of other schools less able to resist Beijing’s inducements. But if these great institutions are to uphold the academic principles upon which they are founded, Sahlins convincingly argues that they must reverse this course, terminate their relations to the Confucius Institutes, and resume their obligation of living up to the idea of the university.


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## SBE (Oct 22, 2014)

Μα καλά πια αυτοί οι Κινέζοι, όλα τα αντιγράφουν; Ούτε ιερό ούτε όσιο δεν έχουν; Δεν τους φτάνουν τα ηλεκτρολογικά και τα φτηνορούχα; Ακόμα και το μοντέλο του Βρετανικού Συμβουλίου αντιγράφουν; Τι άλλο θα δούμε πια; Κινεζική αρχαιολογική σχολή με αρχαιολόγους-κατάσκοπους;


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## Costas (Oct 22, 2014)

Η διαφορά με τα Ινστιτούτα Κομφούκιος είναι ότι δρουν _εντός_ των πανεπιστημίων. Βλ. και το άρθρο του Sahlins πριν από ένα χρόνο στο παρόν νήμα.


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## Costas (Oct 28, 2014)

Shen Yongping’s Indictment
(China Change)

Shen Yongping (沈勇平) is a documentary maker living in Beijing best known for making One Hundred Years of Constitutionalism (《百年宪政》) (trailer in Chinese), now available on YouTube. He was detained in April of this year, and charged with illegal business operations. His trial will be held at 9:30 am on November 4th, 2014, in Yuhe Court of Chaoyang District People’s Court (北京市朝阳区人民法院温榆河法庭).

His lawyer Zhang Xuezhong recently posted that, “In the course of making the documentary, Shen Yongping was warned repeatedly by the authorities that, if he didn’t stop filming, he would face prison time. Shen Yongping replied, ‘If you regard it as committing a crime to make a public interest documentary, then I would rather go after my dream and fulfill my own promise even if it means being locked in jail.’ On the same day the filming was done, Shen Yongping was detained by police in Beijing. He is the first individual in China who has lost his freedom for recording China’s history of pursuing constitutionalism.”



People’s Procuratorate of Chaoyang District, Beijing Municipality

Indictment

Beijing Chaoyang Procuratorate criminal indict. (2014) No. 2475

Defendant Shen Yongping, male, born November 23, 1980, ID number: 36050219801123****, ethnic Han, undergraduate university education, place of household registration: [redacted by translators], Xinyu municipality, Jiangxi province. Was criminally detained on April 29, 2014, by the Chaoyang Branch of Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau. On June 5, 2014, arrest was approved by this Procuratorate and carried out by the Chaoyang Branch of Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau.

The Chaoyang Branch of Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau conducted and completed investigation on this case, and transferred it to this Procuratorate on July 28, 2014, for review for indictment of defendant Shen Yongping on suspicion of the crime of conducting illegal business operations. Upon receiving the filing, this Procuratorate notified the defendant on July 30, 2014, of his right to defense, interrogated the defendant in accordance with the law, and reviewed all the materials of this case. During this process, [this procuratorate] extended the time period once for 15 days for reviewing and deciding on an indictment.

Investigation in accordance with law has been ascertained: On April 28, 2014, police found and seized 4,000 DVDs titled “A Hundred Years of Constitutionalism” owned by the defendant Shen Yongping at Apt. 1802, No. 45 Bld., Huawei Beili, Chaoyang District, Beijing. These DVDs was identified by the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television in its “Publication Review and Identification Statement” as illegal publications, and have subsequently been confiscated.

The evidence affirming the facts stated above is as follows: Witness statements, documentary evidence, [authorities’] evaluation statement, and statement by the defendant.

This Procuratorate believes that defendant Shen Yongping has had weak understanding of the rule of law when he published and duplicated audio and visual products in violation of the state regulations. His behaviors disrupted the market order in a particularly serious manner that violated Article 225 (4) of the Criminal Law of the People’s Republic of China. The criminal facts are clear, the evidence is credible and sufficient, and [the defendant] should be subjected to criminal prosecution for conducting illegal business operations. In accordance with Article 172 of the Criminal Procedure Law of the People’s Republic of China, we hereby indict [the defendant] and ask [the court] to sentence him in accordance with the law.



Sincerely submitted to:

People’s Court of Chaoyang District, Beijing Municipality



People’s Procuratorate of Chaoyang District, Beijing Municipality (seal)

Deputy prosecutor: Yan Shuai

September 2, 2014

Attached:

1. Defendant Shen Yongping is currently detained in the detention center of Chaoyang District, Beijing;
2. There are a total of 3 volumes of litigation documents; 1 compact disc;
3. 2 copies of Recommendation for Sentencing;
4. 1 copy of Recommendation for Applying Simplified Trial Procedures;
5. Materials transferred to this case: None.


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## Costas (Nov 1, 2014)

Η Ταϊβάν, η ΛΔΚ, οι ΗΠΑ, και οι Αμερικανοί χοιροτρόφοι: "αν θέλετε τα υποβρύχιά μας, φάτε τα σκατά μας".

Taiwan President Backs Hong Kong Protesters While Courting Beijing
By KEITH BRADSHER and AUSTIN RAMZY (ΝΥΤ)

TAIPEI, Taiwan — President Ma Ying-jeou of Taiwan voiced support on Friday for the democratic ideals of student protesters in Hong Kong and for greater democracy in mainland China itself, taking a chance on antagonizing Beijing even as he reaffirmed his policy of seeking further free-trade agreements with the mainland.

”If mainland China can practice democracy in Hong Kong, or if mainland China itself can become more democratic, then we can shorten the psychological distance between people from the two sides of the Taiwan Strait,’’ Mr. Ma said in an interview here on Friday.

The president’s public pronouncements on the Hong Kong protests — he also expressed support for them in a televised speech on Taiwan’s National Day, Oct. 10 — show a greater willingness lately to speak out on an issue of considerable sensitivity to the Beijing leadership. But Mr. Ma was quick to point out that he had issued an annual statement each June to mourn the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989, and that Beijing had not made those statements an obstacle to improving relations.

“I think our support of Hong Kong’s democracy will not be at the expense of cross-strait relations,” he said.

Speaking in a 75-minute interview in a formal reception room at the presidential palace, Mr. Ma drew a distinction between his support for the protests in Hong Kong and his condemnation of student protests in Taipei last spring that indefinitely delayed one of his free-trade agreements with the mainland, which would cover service industries like health care and banking.

He suggested that the protests in Taiwan, involving the temporary seizing of the legislature and the main government office building, had been more violent. The Hong Kong authorities contend that protesters there had kicked the police and poked them with umbrellas, while the Taiwan protesters have said that they were peaceful victims of overly aggressive policing.

“There is absolutely no contradiction, as I support democracy but oppose violence,” Mr. Ma said.

Mr. Ma repeatedly signaled the delicate balancing act he must strike as the leader of a longtime American ally that now has more trade with mainland China than anywhere, and which has long been viewed by Beijing as a Chinese province that must be eventually brought under its control.

In recent weeks, China’s president, Xi Jinping, has taken a somewhat tougher stance toward Taiwan, suggesting it adopt a relationship to China similar to Hong Kong’s “one country, two systems” model. Mr. Ma on Friday roundly rejected that idea, which opposition politicians have long dismissed as a nonstarter because it would strip Taiwan of its sovereignty and leave it in a subordinate position.

Mr. Ma expressed a desire for Taiwan to play a more visible role on issues like preserving peace in the South China Sea and the East China Sea, even while chafing at the fact that the mainland authorities had not invited him to the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit meeting on Nov. 10 and 11 in Beijing.

“The mainland side is a bit overly concerned, so it’s a pity that a meeting at APEC cannot take place,” he said.

Taiwan has diplomatic relations with only 22 countries — mostly small ones in the Caribbean, Central America, Africa and the Pacific, plus the Vatican. The rest of the world has recognized Beijing as the government of China.

The lack of diplomatic relations has made it harder for Taiwan to negotiate trade pacts. Taiwan companies now face low or zero overseas tariffs for only a tenth of their exports, compared with 70 percent of Singapore’s exports, Mr. Ma said.

As Taiwan has pursued closer cross-strait ties under Mr. Ma, some in the United States and among Taiwan’s opposition Democratic Progressive Party have questioned whether it is sufficiently investing in its defense against the potential threat from China, which has said it would use military force if the island pursues a formal declaration of independence.

Hsiao Bi-khim, the opposition whip in Taiwan’s legislature, noted in an interview on Thursday that while a new defense budget approved on Wednesday called for a slight nominal increase in military spending next year, the increase was so small that military spending as a share of Taiwan’s economic output would continue to decline.

“When you look at their defensive expenditures over the last 20 years, I personally am not very impressed with the fact that they take the military threat from the mainland very seriously,” said Bernard D. Cole, a professor at the National War College in Washington. “They’re not emulating Israel or Singapore in terms of devoting money to defense.”

Mr. Ma reiterated Taiwan’s recent desire to begin building its own new submarines, noting that its current fleet of four is rapidly aging and includes one that is 70 years old and needs to be retired. He said that Taiwan would like to acquire submarine technology from the United States, but that it is still in the process of identifying what technology is needed and has not submitted a formal request.

The United States, which is obligated to help Taiwan procure weapons for its defense under the Taiwan Relations Act, agreed in 2001 to help the island acquire diesel-powered submarines. But the United States has long since stopped making such submarines, and Chinese pressure on other possible providers has forced Taiwan to consider building its own.

“We will continue with our indigenous submarine program; of course, we also need to rely on technologies from other countries,” Mr. Ma said.

Asked which of two visions for free trade in Asia he preferred — the American-led Trans-Pacific Partnership or the Beijing-backed Free Trade Agreement of the Asia Pacific — Mr. Ma briefly switched from Chinese to English to say with emphasis, “Both, we want both.”

However, after switching back to Chinese, he went on to praise the value of the American plan and also the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, a Southeast Asian plan, without saying anything further about the Chinese proposal.

Mr. Ma criticized the United States’ insistence that negotiations for a bilateral investment agreement not begin until Taiwan allows imports of American pork that contain ractopamine, an additive that the European Union and mainland China also ban because of safety concerns. The additive, which helps produce leaner meat, is widely used by hog producers in the United States, a top pork exporter.

In a written reply to questions, the Office of the United States Trade Representative stopped short of declaring that pork was the sole obstacle to negotiations for a bilateral investment agreement, saying only, “We continue to urge Taiwan to adopt international standards for use of ractopamine in pork, since the meat is safe for human consumption.”

Nicholas D. Giordano, the vice president and counsel of the National Pork Producers Council, a trade group based in Des Moines, said that the council had actively opposed any American opening of negotiations with Taiwan on a bilateral investment agreement. But he said that other American agribusiness sectors, including rice growers and producers of distilled spirits, also had misgivings about letting the investment agreement proceed without seeing their issues addressed first.

The pork council has allowed broader trade talks with the European Union to proceed, and has raised fewer objections to mainland China’s similar restrictions on ractopamine. “Right now the focus is on Taiwan because they want something from us,” namely a bilateral investment agreement, Mr. Giordano said. “Our position vis-à-vis the European Union and the Chinese is really none of their business.”


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## Costas (Dec 3, 2014)

China bans wordplay in attempt at pun control
Officials say casual alteration of idioms risks nothing less than ‘cultural and linguistic chaos’, despite their common usage
(Tania Branigan in Beijing / The Guardian)

From online discussions to adverts, Chinese culture is full of puns. But the country’s print and broadcast watchdog has ruled that there is nothing funny about them.

It has banned wordplay on the grounds that it breaches the law on standard spoken and written Chinese, makes promoting cultural heritage harder and may mislead the public – especially children.

The casual alteration of idioms risks nothing less than “cultural and linguistic chaos”, it warns.

Chinese is perfectly suited to puns because it has so many homophones. Popular sayings and even customs, as well as jokes, rely on wordplay.

But the order from the State Administration for Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television says: “Radio and television authorities at all levels must tighten up their regulations and crack down on the irregular and inaccurate use of the Chinese language, especially the misuse of idioms.”

Programmes and adverts should strictly comply with the standard spelling and use of characters, words, phrases and idioms – and avoid changing the characters, phrasing and meanings, the order said.

“Idioms are one of the great features of the Chinese language and contain profound cultural heritage and historical resources and great aesthetic, ideological and moral values,” it added.

“That’s the most ridiculous part of this: [wordplay] is so much part and parcel of Chinese heritage,” said David Moser, academic director for CET Chinese studies at Beijing Capital Normal University.

When couples marry, people will give them dates and peanuts – a reference to the wish Zaosheng guizi or “May you soon give birth to a son”. The word for dates is also zao and peanuts are huasheng.

The notice cites complaints from viewers, but the examples it gives appear utterly innocuous. In a tourism promotion campaign, tweaking the characters used in the phrase jin shan jin mei – perfection – has turned it into a slogan translated as “Shanxi, a land of splendours”. In another case, replacing a single character in ke bu rong huan has turned “brook no delay” into “coughing must not linger” for a medicine advert.

“It could just be a small group of people, or even one person, who are conservative, humourless, priggish and arbitrarily purist, so that everyone has to fall in line,” said Moser.

“But I wonder if this is not a preemptive move, an excuse to crack down for supposed ‘linguistic purity reasons’ on the cute language people use to crack jokes about the leadership or policies. It sounds too convenient.”

Internet users have been particularly inventive in finding alternative ways to discuss subjects or people whose names have been blocked by censors.

Moves to block such creativity have a long history too. Moser said Yuan Shikai, president of the Republic of China from 1912 to 1915, reportedly wanted to rename the Lantern Festival, Yuan Xiao Jie, because it sounded like “cancel Yuan day”.

• Additional research by Luna Lin


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## Costas (Dec 3, 2014)

KMT (=Kuomintang) loses big

Ma to resign as KMT chairman: reports
GENERATION GAP? Greater Taichung Mayor Jason Hu said that the party did poorly in the polls because it did not understand young people, who take things for granted
By Shih Hsiu-chuan / Staff reporter / Taipei Times

(...)
The KMT won in 6 of the nation’s 22 cities and counties, losing control of historical strongholds it held in Taipei, Greater Taichung and Taoyuan to the Democratic Progressive Party. It previously controlled 15 seats.
(...)
The reason the KMT lost the election is because it did not understand the younger generation, Hu [=Defeated Greater Taichung Mayor Jason Hu (胡志強)] said.
“Young people take for granted what they are given and they think they are owed what they long for. If you give them an iPhone 5, they are still mad at you because you did not give them an iPhone 6,” he said.

Αυτό θα πει ανάλυση ψήφου!


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## nickel (Dec 3, 2014)

Costas said:


> China bans wordplay in attempt at pun control




*Σινικά καύματα!*


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## drsiebenmal (Dec 3, 2014)

Τέλος στον Σινικό στίχο!


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## Costas (Dec 10, 2014)

Ο Τζονγκ Γιονγκ-κάνγκ ξεπατώθηκε (νά και κάτι καλό), για να γίνει ο Χι(Σι) ο νέος Μάο:

Xi Jinping: the growing cult of China's 'Big Daddy Xi' 
A growing cult of personality surrounds Chinese president Xi Jinping as he seeks to cement his position as a Putin-style strongman determined to realise his “China Dream”
By Tom Phillips, Shanghai (The Telegraph)

They call him “Xi Dada” or “Big Daddy Xi” and he is rapidly emerging as China’s most powerful leader since Mao.

Xi Jinping completes two years as president in January and as he enters his third year in office a growing cult of personality is being built around the 61-year-old as he fights to stamp his authority onto the Chinese Communist Party.

There are love songs about Xi, odes to Xi, academic papers about Xi, cartoons of Xi and even action figures of Xi.

A Xi-related publishing blitz has seen at least seven major books hit Chinese shelves since late 2013, including collections of Xi Jinping’s thoughts, his speeches, anecdotes, quotes, newspaper editorials and work reports.

The most recent – a compendium of quotations entitled “Approachable: The Charm of Xi Jinping’s Words” – is large and yellow but otherwise bears a striking resemblance to Mao Zedong’s “Little Red Book”. That volume, once said to have been the most printed on earth, began life in the early 1960s as “200 Quotations from Chairman Mao”.

Xi’s 273-page paperback was published last month by Shanghai’s Jiao Tong University and contains fawning analyses of sound bites from his first two years in office.

“President Xi often uses metaphors and story-telling methods to explain profound truths,” gushes the preamble. “President Xi’s language contains great wisdom in its simplicity and has a penetrating power that directly touches people’s hearts.”

Among dozens of “charming” presidential quotations are: “The arrow won’t come back after you shoot the bow,” and, in a section about foreign policy, “As distance tests a horse’s strength, so time reveals a person’s heart”.

A second print run has already been ordered after the initial 50,000 copies flew off the shelves and an English-language version is in the pipeline, a university official said.

The construction of a cult of personality around president Xi represents a dramatic direction change for a country that sought to rule collectively after the devastation wrought during Chairman Mao’s three-decade monopoly on power.

Before Xi took office, “there had been a taboo and long-standing party norm: don’t hold yourself up as a personality,” said Carl Minzner, an expert in Chinese law and governance from New York’s Fordham Law School.

“Big Daddy Xi” has shredded that rulebook. “In two years he has managed to amass a level of power that we haven’t seen in one person in quite some time,” said Prof Minzner.

The message from Beijing’s spin-doctors was crystal clear. “Xi is the top dog.”

In a recent speech, Zheng Yongnian, the director of the Asia Institute at the Singapore National University, argued Xi was establishing himself as the third key leader of post-Revolution China.

Just as Mao dominated the “first generation” of Communist China and Deng Xiaoping the second, now Xi Jinping was cementing himself as the helmsman of the “third generation”.

“In the previous system, each of the Politburo members led his own slice of the pie,” Prof Zheng argued. “Now it is different. Xi is in charge of everything.”

Barack Obama echoed that analysis last week, as Xi tightened his grip on power by ordering the arrest of Zhou Yongkang, a key rival and China’s former security chief, for a sensational list of charges including taking “massive” bribes, leaking state secrets and “trading power for sex and money”.

“Everybody’s been impressed by his… clout inside of China after only a year and a half or two years,” the US president said on Wednesday.

“He has consolidated power faster and more comprehensively than probably anybody since Deng Xiaoping,” Obama added, voicing concerns about the possible implications for human rights and China’s relations with its neighbours.

The rise of “Big Daddy Xi” stems from the president’s apparent conviction that it was the absence of firm leadership that allowed the Soviet Union to crumble.

“When the Soviet Party was about to collapse, there was not one person who was man enough to turn back the tide,” he reportedly told senior leaders in late 2012.

A Vladimir Putin-style strongman is now needed if China is to avoid the same fate, Xi believes. He has welcomed comparisons to Russia’s muscle-flexing president, telling that country’s state-media: “I feel that our personalities are quite similar”.

Prince Charles once dismissed China’s leaders as a lifeless collective of “appalling old waxworks”. But the Xi Jinping now being presented to China and the world is a vivid, multi-dimensional character, at once action hero, skilled diplomat and doting father.

Photographs in Xi’s recently published tome “The Governance of China” show him lecturing Obama and Putin, as both appear to listen intently. Elsewhere he is shown clad in army fatigues and braving minus 30Â?C temperatures as he visits border troops in Inner Mongolia.

There is also a softer side to “Big Daddy Xi”. He is an easy-going family chief whose glamorous wife, the singer Peng Liyuan, regards him as “both a unique and a very ordinary person”.

“Peng takes every opportunity to be together with her husband, cooking dishes of different styles for him,” we are told. They have a daughter whose Chinese name means “living an honest life and being a useful person to society”.

In a 22-page hagiography called “Man of the People” we are introduced to “a mild person” and “man of compassion” who has “brought a fresh breeze through the country’s political life”.

“Sometimes he stays up late watching sports on television,” the profile notes.

Ordinary Chinese appear to have warmed to Xi’s wholesome yet hardman persona.

Applications for state funding for Xi-related academic papers reportedly rocketed in 2014. Approved studies include those on the “historical materialism of Xi’s important speeches”, the “essence of Xi Jinping’s series of important speeches” and the “innovation in Xi’s key speeches”.

“We love and respect President Xi,” said Song Zhigang, the composer of a recent viral love song about Xi and his wife called “Big Daddy Xi loves Mama Peng” that has been viewed nearly 25 million times since its online release.

Yet the meteoric rise of “Big Daddy Xi” could also prove dangerous, cautioned Prof Minzner.

“Given China’s turbulent past, and its lack of autonomous political or legal institutions, you have to be worried when you see power increasingly being concentrated in the hands of a single populist leader,” he said.

Online entrepreneurs show no such fears and are busy cashing in on China’s commander-in-chief with rubber dolls, sticker collections and even replicas of a black umbrella once used by the President.

“We regard Xi as the emperor of a reviving nation,” said Xiao Ajian, who, for around £2, sells two-sided heart-shaped amulets featuring Chairman Mao on one side and “Big Daddy Xi” on the other.

“The design shows Xi is great,” Mr Xiao added. “As great as Mao.”


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## Zazula (Dec 14, 2014)

Ποιότητα εσείς; Ποσότητα εμείς! Η κλασική κινεζική συνταγή, τώρα και σε αόρατο μαχητικό: http://www.popularmechanics.com/how...isnt-great-but-it-may-not-need-to-be-17426657


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## Costas (Dec 18, 2014)

Κινεζικής γραφής, μάθημα 1ον:





(λήμμα Wikipedia)


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## Costas (Dec 19, 2014)

Umbrella ban in rainy Macau as China’s president Xi Jinping arrives for visit (BBC)


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## Costas (Dec 23, 2014)

Όχι στην Κίνα αλλά στη Νικαράγουα
Panama Canal rival: work starts in Nicaragua amid fears over environment and role of China (The Conversation)


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## Costas (Dec 26, 2014)

Inside Beijing's airpocalypse – a city made 'almost uninhabitable' by pollution 
(Oliver Wainwright / The Guardian)
Κι ένα νέο μιμίδιο: Apec blue


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## nickel (Dec 26, 2014)

Κάνουμε το βίο μας αβίωτο. (Μας κάνουν το βίο αβίωτο, αν προτιμάτε.)

http://news.in.gr/greece/article/?aid=1231373562


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## Costas (Dec 26, 2014)

Chinese Hit Back Against a Foreign Intrusion: Christmas
(ANDREW JACOBS / NYT)

There may be no exact translation for “humbug” in Chinese, but in recent days, as popular fervor for the trappings of Western-style Christmas enveloped this officially atheist nation, the defenders of traditional Chinese culture have fought back with Scrooge-like zeal.

On Wednesday, university students in the central province of Hunan held an anti-Christmas pageant with banners declaring “Chinese should not celebrate foreign festivals.” Education officials in the coastal city of Wenzhou issued a decree banning the celebration of Christmas-themed events at schools.

Students at a university in northwestern China were forced to endure three hours of propaganda films, including one glorifying Confucius, the state news media said. Faculty members reportedly stood at the doors, making sure no one tried to sneak off to partake in illicit Christmas cheer.

“Be good Chinese boys and girls, and oppose adulation of foreign festivals,” read one banner strung across the campus of Modern College of Northwest University in Xi’an, home to the famed terracotta warriors.

Although xenophobic rumblings against Christmas have emerged from time to time, the seasonal surge of anti-Santa activism this year suggests that the Communist Party’s continuing campaign against Western values, and what it sees as the culturally corrupting fare of Hollywood, is taking hold in unexpected ways.

Most alarming, Christian activists say, is the yearlong crackdown on church buildings in Wenzhou, a prosperous city in Zhejiang Province sometimes referred to as the Jerusalem of China for its large number of congregations. The government has targeted as many as 400 churches across the province, Christian rights advocates say, demolishing a number of churches and removing crosses on structures they say violate local zoning rules. Aprovincial policy statement that emerged this year, however, suggests the campaign is actually aimed at regulating “overly popular” religious activities.

According to Radio Free Asia, three people were wounded last week when more than 100 police officers and government workers forcibly removed a cross from a church in Hangzhou.

Christmas, nonetheless, has become big business in China, with retailers enjoying some of their highest sales in late December. Even if the holiday is largely devoid of its religious connotations, gift-giving among young Chinese is soaring. Nearly every office building, shopping mall and high-end apartment building in China features Christmas trees in the lobby and Yuletide décor on elevator doors.

At stores across the country, the familiar strains of “Jingle Bells” and “Feliz Navidad” have become unavoidable. On the popular Chinese social media app Wechat — where greetings of Merry Christmas have become fashionable among friends — typing the word “Christmas” yields a blizzard of tiny spruce trees.

The city of Yiwu, a wholesale commodity hub not far from Shanghai, manufactures about 60 percent of the world’s stuffed reindeer, elfish figurines and colored string lights, according to the Yiwu Christmas Products Industry Association, which counts 600 factories among its members.

Although China’s growing love affair with Christmas tends to be a largely faithless dalliance, the number of Christian adherents has been soaring in recent years. According to some estimates, there are more than 100 million believers here, a figure that stands in marked contrast to the 85 million members of the Communist Party.

For many young Chinese, however, Christmas is simply a lighthearted diversion that has little to do with religious faith.

“Though it might seem a little bit shallow or consumer-oriented in China, people get great satisfaction on Christmas,” said Liu Xingyao, 22, a student at the Communication University of China in Beijing who is a practicing Christian. “They just believe the day is just an excuse to have some fun.”

But hard-line traditionalists and Communist doctrinaires say the growing prevalence of Christmas is a tinsel-draped Trojan horse that aims to subvert traditional Chinese culture. At Modern College of Northwest University, the school that barred students from leaving campus on Christmas Eve, officials explained their opposition to the holiday in a microblog post run by the institution’s Communist Party Youth League.

‘‘In recent years, more and more Chinese have started to attach importance to Western festivals,” it said. “In their eyes, the West is more developed than China, and they think that their holidays are more elegant than ours, even that Western festivals are very fashionable and China’s traditional festivals are old-fashioned.”

On Thursday, as photographs of anti-Christmas events circulated on Chinese social media, there was resistance that at times swamped the voices of Christmas opponents.

“If one day, Europeans, Americans and other East Asians were to take to the street and demonstrate and boycott the Chinese Lunar New Year, I’d like to see how Chinese nationalistic advocates feel then,” wrote one blogger, Wu Zhongzhan.

Another popular commentator, Yao Bo, said that those attacking Christmas would do well to focus on cultivating traditional Chinese culture.

“Respect for tradition is not about boycotting others, but staying true to yourself,” he wrote. “Tradition will never be revived by boycotting others. Boycott only makes it buffoonery.”

_Patrick Zuo contributed research._


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## Costas (Dec 26, 2014)

Water From China’s South-North Transfer Project Flows to Beijing
(Kiki Zhao / NYT)
Within a few days, water that has traveled more than 800 miles for two weeks in one of the world’s most ambitious, and controversial, engineering projects is expected to begin flowing through Beijing faucets. (...)


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## Costas (Dec 31, 2014)

China's Xi calls for tighter ideological control in universities 
(Reuters)

Chinese President Xi Jinping has called for greater “ideological guidance” in China’s universities and urged the study of Marxism, state media reported on Monday, as the country tightens control on Western ideology.

Xi’s comments are the latest sign of his politically conservative agenda and come amid a ratcheting up of controls over the media, dissidents and the internet.

China’s Communist Party has signaled that it will not embark on political reform, despite hopes that Xi, the son of a former liberal-minded vice premier, may loosen up.

Xi said universities had to “shoulder the burden of learning and researching the dissemination of Marxism”, Xinhua state news agency said.

Xi called on the authorities to step up the party’s “leadership and guidance” in universities as well as to “strengthen and improve the ideological and political work”.

The campuses should “cultivate and practice the core values of socialism in their teaching”, Xi said.

Curricula and speech at Chinese universities are tightly controlled by the government, though students have at times pushed the limits, including during the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests that were brutally suppressed by the army.

An influential party journal said in September that one of China’s top universities, Peking University, had urged students and teachers to “fight” criticism of the party.

Last year, a liberal Chinese economist who had been an outspoken critic of the party was expelled from Peking University after he called for democratic reforms.

Xi has espoused old school Maoism as he seeks to court powerful conservative elements in the party. Like many officials before him, Xi is steeped in the party’s long-held belief that loosening control too quickly, or even at all, could lead to chaos and the break up of the country.

Xi’s administration has overseen a crackdown on dissidents and on freedom of expression that many rights activists say is the most sustained and severe in years.

Last week, Chinese media reported that a university in northwestern China had banned Christmas, calling it a “kitsch” foreign celebration unbefitting of the country’s own traditions and made students watch propaganda films instead.

_(Reporting by Sui-Lee Wee; Editing by Nick Macfie)_


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## Costas (Dec 31, 2014)

Ατύχησε η Κινέζα Λουκρητία Βοργία
China halts racy Empress drama due to 'technical difficulties'
(The Telegraph)
The televised saga of a 7th Century Chinese empress has proved too hot to handle for China's censors, who have cancelled the wildly-popular show after only a week 

By Robert Foyle Hunwick, Beijing
29 Dec 2014

A much-anticipated TV drama about China's first female emperor has been pulled after just one week, prompting speculation that its flamboyant and revealing costumes may have irked censors.

The Saga of Wu Zetian, known in English as Empress of China, and starring Fan Bingbing – one of China's most famous actress – began its run on December 21.

Fan, best known to foreign audiences for roles in Iron Man 3 and X-Men: Days of Future Past, also produced the series, in which she stars as the controversial Empress Wu, from the Tang dynasty.

But commercial satellite station Hunan TV, no stranger to censorship after its hit show Super Girl was banned for vulgarity, announced that Sunday's episode would not be aired due to "technical reasons."

Observers widely interpreted this as punishment for the much-discussed costumes of its female characters. 

Viewers online had previously dubbed it "The Saga of Squeezed Breasts." The State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television (SAPPRFT), China's chief censors, has issued regulations banning depictions of one-night stands, adultery, sexual abuse, rape, polyamory, necrophilia, prostitution, nudity and masturbation, as well as murder, suicide, drug use, gambling and even racy subtitles and puns.

Wu Zetian, who entered the 7th-century court as a 13-year-old concubine, only to rise to monarch for the last 15 years of her life, makes for a brave choice of subject, as her blood-soaked reign is notorious for allegations of multiple murder, physical cruelty and a wanton sexual appetite.

In histories of the period, and films such as 1963's Wu Tsi-tien, Wu is claimed to have smothered her baby, killed her brothers and sister, had rivals dismembered and enjoyed a harem of younger lovers in her dying years, details of which are well known to Chinese viewers.

"Wasn't this the Tang dynasty style?" complained one viewer. "Why don't you just let a bunch aunties play them?"

But the country's often-vague and erratic enforcement of regulations means TV shows are often delayed or pulled afterwards.

A supposed quota exists for historical dramas but such content still makes up much of Chinese drama, as contemporaneous shows suffer even stricter censorship. Another reason could be that lavish show, said to have cost around £30 million, has simply proved too popular.

"Calling stop in the middle of the show is either [SAPPRFT] admitting that it didn't do its job properly," noted one savvy viewer, "Or it's to give way to a new show produced by [state broadcaster] CCTV, because the viewing figures are too high."


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## Costas (Dec 31, 2014)

Στιβαρή σύνοψη:
The Elusive Chinese Dream
(Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom / ΝΥΤ)

In 1989, Chinese cities were rocked by huge protests, most notably the Tiananmen Square crackdown, while in Europe, the Berlin Wall fell and talk of a global Marxist-Leninist extinction began. Many observers, both in China and abroad, assumed that the Chinese Communist Party was on its last legs.

How wrong we were. A quarter-century later, the party — the world’s largest political organization, with 86 million members — seems as robust as ever. China’s geopolitical clout is greater than it has ever been in modern times, and the size of its economy has just surpassed that of the United States.

The party has, in President Xi Jinping, a strong leader who often strikes a supremely self-confident tone. He makes bold claims to islands in the East and South China Seas that neighboring countries insist are theirs. He chides Mikhail S. Gorbachev for having failed to be “manly” enough to hold the Soviet empire together. And he encourages the state media to promulgate the idea that the “Chinese dream” — a grand process of national resurgence that will return China to the position of global centrality it enjoyed before a “century of humiliation” at the hands of the West, and Japan, between 1842 and 1949 — is about to be realized. And he insists that, when it is, this will satisfy not just his aspirations but those of “each Chinese person.”

Mr. Xi’s self-assurance is not surprising, but his words and deeds betray a deep vein of insecurity. The talk of 1.3 billion people dreaming the same “Chinese dream” can’t hide the fact that China’s leaders continue to be plagued by nightmares not unlike those that haunted them in 1989.

Under Mr. Xi the party has carried out a fierce crackdown aimed at limiting dissent, often described as the harshest since 1989. It has tightened control over the press and social media. It has relentlessly censored coverage of the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. It has prosecuted activist lawyers who favor peaceful reform within the existing system. It has scrutinized the teaching of history in classrooms. And it has ramped up scare tactics against members of restive minority groups, such as the largely Muslim Uighur community — staging swift, secret trials and public executions of those accused of terrorism, and sentencing a moderate Uighur scholar to life in prison.

To understand these actions, we need to look more closely at what exactly bombastic talk of a shared Chinese dream means — and what it obscures. Mr. Xi’s dream envisions a country that has completed a process of economic and geopolitical resurgence that began with Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s. In this fantasy, a modern, stable and unified China has resumed its traditional place as East Asia’s dominant power, led by a party that, despite its recent focus on rapid growth and its roots in an ideology imported from abroad, has reconnected so fully with China’s deep past that it has become natural for people of Chinese descent around the world, from Macau to Manhattan, to look to Beijing for authoritative pronouncements about the relevance of Confucian classics for contemporary problems. (The irony of reviving Confucius, who for years was denounced as the intellectual wellspring of feudalism and backwardness, is lost on few Chinese.)

It was under Mr. Xi’s predecessor, Hu Jintao, in office from 2002 to 2012, that growth rates soared, the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the 2010 Shanghai World Expo, with their high-tech venues and soaring ceremonies, wowed global audiences, and China launched a flashy space program. Mr. Xi has gone further even than Mr. Hu in trying to show that symbols of the old and the new, the classical and the revolutionary, Confucius and Mao, can be synthesized.

If the dream’s realization is close at hand, what is there to fear? Plenty, it turns out. One specter that continues to cause anxiety is a possible recurrence of the wave of protests that erupted in 1989. Newer fears include a Chinese variant of the Arab Spring and a possible economic crisis, triggered by a collapse of the inflated housing bubble, that would undermine the party’s basis of legitimacy: its ability to steadily raise living standards.

Perhaps the most urgent fear is this: a sense among even those Chinese whose living standards have soared that frantic development has come at too high a price. Never in history have the promise and peril of head-spinning modernization been so apparent within the space of a single lifetime. A country where the authorities call the air in the capital “fine” on days when nearby skyscrapers are completely shrouded from view, where waterways are suddenly and inexplicably clogged by enormous numbers of pig carcasses, where once-revered elders live in rural poverty and isolation — this is the stuff of nightmares. The party’s anxiety over these bad dreams can be seen in many things — in its calls for official think tanks to study carefully the “color revolutions” that toppled East European and Central Asian autocrats, and in the suggestion that party cadres read de Tocqueville’s account of the French Revolution, to ensure that China avoids the mistakes of the ancien régime.

Beijing’s handling of the Hong Kong situation was the latest illustration of the party’s fear that its grip on the national rejuvenation package is weaker than outsiders sometimes imagine. What was striking was not just the party’s refusal to make concessions to the protesters, but the lengths to which it went to control information about, and even photographs of, the Hong Kong protests from flowing into the mainland — and to present a locally rooted popular movement as the brainchild of foreign conspirators. Officials told a British delegation planning to investigate the situation in Hong Kong that it would be barred from setting foot in the former British colony, which typically does not require Western visitors to obtain visas.

Hong Kong’s protesters often spoke of their attachment to a distinctive and robustly cosmopolitan civic identity, as opposed to any kind of Chinese national one. And yet the symbolic challenge they presented to Mr. Xi was very significant. The eclectic imagery of their movement — in which quotations from international figures like John Lennon were placed beside statements by Chinese writers like Lu Xun — showed that there were other, perhaps more compelling, ways to make elements of China’s culture and past speak to 21st-century concerns than the mainland’s heavy-handed patriotism. It made the Communist Party profoundly uneasy to watch Hong Kong youth show such creativity and determination and demonstrate so clearly how misleading it is for Mr. Xi to claim that “each Chinese person” is capable of dreaming only the party’s authoritarian dream. Thus the lurch from bravado to paranoia.

One of Chairman Mao’s favorite words was “contradictions,” and today’s China is riddled with them: rule by a party that is nominally Communist, but embraces consumerism and welcomes entrepreneurs into its ranks; widespread unease about the environmental, social and even moral consequences of growth; deep insecurity in the ranks of a party that outwardly brims with confidence. The dark side of the Chinese dream — the negative fantasy that haunts China’s psyche — explains why Mr. Xi, the strongest Chinese leader since Deng, is so skittish, so ready to jump at shadows.

_Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom is a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, and the author, most recently, of “China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know.”_


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## Costas (Dec 31, 2014)

Prison Sentence for Maker of Documentary on Chinese Constitutional Rule
(EDWARD WONG / NYT)

A Chinese filmmaker who made a documentary on the Chinese Constitution and efforts to get the ruling Communist Party and the government to abide by constitutional law was sentenced on Tuesday by a Beijing district court to one year in prison for running an “illegal business,” his lawyer said.

The filmmaker, Shen Yongping, was detained in April and formally arrested on June 4, the 25th anniversary of the military crackdown on student-led protesters in 1989. Many Chinese liberals were detained around around that time this year, and most have since been released.

The court hearing for Mr. Shen began on Dec. 12. In a telephone interview, his lawyer, Zhang Xuezhong, called the verdict and sentencing “nonsense” and said Mr. Shen had not made his documentary, titled “A Hundred Years of Constitutionalism”, for profit. He said Mr. Shen had posted the video online to be downloaded for free and had given away hundreds of DVDs to people who had contributed money for the documentary’s production.

Mr. Shen has been kept in a detention center in the Chaoyang district of Beijing, and Mr. Zhang said he was likely to remain there. If officials count his one-year sentence as having started with his detention in April, then he could be released in four months, Mr. Zhang said.

After Xi Jinping assumed power in November 2012, as the Communist Party chief and later the nation’s president, the authorities began a crackdown on liberal Chinese advocating constitutional rule. People’s Daily, the main party newspaper, published editorials criticizing any such calls. Lately, party leaders have been saying China should be governed according to constitutional law, but there have been no noticeable moves to enforce the Constitution.

_Kiki Zhao contributed research._


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## Costas (Dec 31, 2014)

Η Θιβετιανή συγγραφέας Tsering Woeser:

On December 26, 2014, I reposted on my Facebook page a video of Tibetan Buddhist monk Kalsang Yeshe’s self-immolation that occurred on December 23 [in Tawu county, Kardze Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan province, China], accompanied by an excerpted report explaining that self-immolation is a tragic, ultimate protest against repression. A few hours later, my post was deleted by the Facebook administrator. I was rather shocked when a Facebook notice of deletion leapt out on screen, which I tweeted right away with the thought, “It’s been more than six years since I joined Facebook in 2008, and this is the first time my post was deleted! Does FB also have ‘little secretaries?’”
“Little Secretaries” refer to censors hired by Weibo, the Twitter-like microblog in China, and their job is to delete posts that are deemed “politically sensitive.”
(...)
On Facebook, videos of Tibetan self-immolations have not been censored before, and my friends argued that we have reason to worry that Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is compromising on defending users’ freedom of expression as he seeks China’s permission to allow Facebook in China, given that he visited Beijing two months ago and met with high-ranking Chinese officials, and that a couple of weeks ago, Mr. Zuckerberg received Lu Wei, China’s Internet czar in Facebook’s headquarters where he ingratiated himself to his guest by showing that he and his employees were reading Xi Jinping’s writings to learn about China.
(...)

(China Change)


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## Costas (Jan 3, 2015)

Further news on the Confucius Institutes: Stockholm University in Stockholm, Sweden, has scrapped its Confucius Institute, in place since 2005. It was one of the first installed anywhere, and the first in Europe.

The university’s chancellor Söderbergh Widding told the Swedish press that the reason was that other China links now fulfilled the need — suggesting that the CI had become obsolete. She concluded (in a turnaround of opinion) by saying that “Generally it is questionable to have, within the framework of the university, institutes that are financed by another country.”

Several big Swedish papers have reported on this, including the Svenska Dagbladet, http://www.svd.se/kultur/konfuciusinstitutet-laggs-ned_4218867.svd

. . . and, the Dagens Nyheter, http://www.dn.se/arkiv/nyheter/kontroversiellt-institut-laggs-ned-1

. . . a piece which the university also itself referred to in its own press release of December 20, 2014, announcing the termination: http://www.su.se/om-oss/press-media-nyheter/nyheter/beslut-taget-om-avveckling-av-institut-1.216304

The move to close the institute was preceded by intermittent criticism of the university in the Swedish media, for example in an op-ed article by veteran China journalist Ingvar Oja in the Svenska Dagbladet of 9 december 2014 (http://www.svd.se/kultur/kulturdebatt/konfucius-falska-leende_4173853.svd, entitled “Confucius’ false smile”), which summarized the recent affairs involving CIs — such as the Braga incident last summer when CI officers from China tried to censor the European Assn f Chinese Studies conference program, which they had helped finance. Stockholm University may also have been influenced by the fact that in contrast, other major universities around the neighboring Nordic countries (such as Oslo, Copenhagen, etc.) never agreed to host any CI. (Stockholm University opened its own CI under the name of “Nordic CI”, though this was later changed to “Stockholm Confucius Institute”).

In any case, the decision to terminate the CI is definitely a turnaround for the university, including for its chancellor Söderbergh Widding who as recently as 2013 wrote a blog post dedicated to counter the criticism of her university’s hosting the CI (see: http://rektorsblogg.su.se/2013/08/14/konfuciusinstitutet/ — where she dismisses critics of Confucius Institutes as victims of “liberal fundamentalism”). This was despite the fact that several years earlier, in 2008, her university — under the previous chancellor — already once did say it had decided to remove the CI from its campus — this after the publication of a specially commissioned independent report which concluded that hosting such a Chinese institute as a part of the university could give rise to suspicion of undue influence (See: http://www.information.dk/167264, “Swedish university to close Chinese institute”). But the termination was not executed — until now.


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## Costas (Jan 5, 2015)

Maoists in China, Given New Life, Attack Dissent
(CHRIS BUCKLEY and ANDREW JACOBS / ΝΥΤ)

HONG KONG — They pounce on bloggers who dare mock their beloved Chairman Mao. They scour the nation’s classrooms and newspapers for strains of Western-inspired liberal heresies. And they have taken down professors, journalists and others deemed disloyal to Communist Party orthodoxy.

China’s Maoist ideologues are resurgent after languishing in the political desert, buoyed by President Xi Jinping’s traditionalist tilt and emboldened by internal party decrees that have declared open season on Chinese academics, artists and party cadres seen as insufficiently red.

Ideological vigilantes have played a pivotal role in the downfall of Wang Congsheng, a law professor in Beijing who was detained and then suspended from teaching after posting online criticisms of the party. Another target was Wang Yaofeng, a newspaper columnist who voiced support for the recent pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong and then found himself without a job.

“Since Xi came to power, the pressure and control over freethinkers has become really tight,” said Qiao Mu, a Beijing journalism professor who was demoted this fall, in part for publicly espousing multiparty elections and free speech. “More and more of my friends and colleagues are experiencing fear and harassment.”

Two years into a sweeping offensive against dissent, Mr. Xi has been intensifying his focus on perceived ideological opponents, sending ripples through universities, publishing houses and the news media and emboldening hard-liners who have hailed him as a worthy successor to Mao Zedong.

In instructions published last week, Mr. Xi urged universities to “enhance guidance over thinking and keep a tight grip on leading ideological work in higher education,” Xinhua, the official news agency, reported.

In internal decrees, he has been blunter, attacking liberal thinking as a pernicious threat that has contaminated the Communist Party’s ranks, and calling on officials to purge the nation of ideas that run counter to modern China’s Marxist-Leninist foundations.

“Never allow singing to a tune contrary to the party center,” he wrote in comments that began to appear on party and university websites in October. “Never allow eating the Communist Party’s food and then smashing the Communist Party’s cooking pots.”

The latter-day Maoists, whose influence had faltered before Mr. Xi came to power, have also been encouraged by another internal document, Document No. 30, which reinforces warnings that Western-inspired notions of media independence, “universal values” and criticism of Mao threaten the party’s survival.

“It’s a golden period to be a leftist in China,” Zhang Hongliang, a prominent neo-Maoist, said in an interview. “Xi Jinping has ushered in a fundamental change to the status quo, shattering the sky.”

China’s old guard leftists are a loose network of officials and former officials, sons and daughters of party veterans, and ardently anti-Western academics and journalists. They look back to the precepts of Marx, Lenin and especially Mao to try to reverse the effects of China’s free-market policies and the spread of values anathema to party tradition. And while their direct influence on the party leadership has been circumscribed, they have served as the party’s eager ideological inquisitors.

Their favorite enemies are almost always members of China’s beleaguered liberal circles: academics, journalists and rights activists who believe that liberal democracy, with its accompanying ideas of civil society and rule of law, offers the country the best way forward.

Mr. Xi’s recent orders and the accompanying surge of pressure on political foes further dispelled initial suspicions that his ideological hardening was a feint to establish his credibility with traditionalists as he settled into power. Instead, his continuing campaign against Western-inspired ideas has emboldened traditional party leftists.

“China watchers all need to stop saying this is all for show or that he’s turning left to turn right,” said Christopher K. Johnson, an expert on China at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who formerly worked as a senior China analyst at the C.I.A. “This is a core part of the guy’s personality. The leftists certainly feel he’s their guy.”

In November, after Mr. Wang, the newspaper columnist, was dismissed from his job, the nationalist tabloid Global Times celebrated his downfall in a commentary. “In the future, the system will take a harder line towards the ‘pot-smashing party’,” it said, referring obliquely to Mr. Xi’s remarks about those who live off the party and then criticize it. “They will have a choice: change their ways or get out of the system.”

The latest directive, Document No. 30, demands cleansing Western-inspired liberal ideas from universities and other cultural institutions, according to Song Fangmin, a retired major-general, who discussed it with dozens of veteran party officials and hard-left activists at a meeting in Beijing in November. The directive formed a sequel to Document No. 9, which Mr. Xi authorized in April 2013, launching an offensive against ideas such as “civil society,” General Song said.

“These two documents are extremely important, and both summarize speeches by the general secretary,” he said, referring to Mr. Xi by his party title. “They identify targets so we can train our eyes on the targets of struggle.”

Unlike Document No. 9, which was widely circulated online, to the consternation of party leaders, No. 30 has not been openly published. But some of Mr. Xi’s comments have appeared in party publications, and references to it have surfaced on the websites of universities, party organizations and leftist groups, illuminating how the directive has coursed through the government to amplify pressure on dissent.

One political scientist from a prestigious Beijing university said that senior leaders had tried to keep the document confidential by transmitting it orally through the ranks. “This time it’s being kept top secret,” he said, “because last time things were far too public.”

But its effects have been apparent. Newspapers have accused universities of serving as incubators for anti-party thought, and campus party committees have been ordered to sharpen ideological controls. In June, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences revealed that a party investigator had accused the academy of harboring ideological deviants. The investigator, Zhang Yingwei, said in a speech that the academy had been infiltrated by foreign subversion, and researchers were “wearing their scholarship as a disguise to create a smokescreen.”

The campaign has alarmed liberal academics, who fear that Mr. Xi is reviving the kind of incendiary denunciations of internal foes that have been rare since Chairman Mao convulsed the nation with his jeremiads against bourgeois thinking. Some, like Wu Si, a well-regarded liberal historian, take a longer view, and argue that realpolitik will eventually force Mr. Xi to adopt a more moderate position.

“It’s a self-defensive strategy against those who might try to call him a neoliberal,” Mr. Wu said in an interview.

Before Mr. Xi came to power in late 2012, few foresaw such a sharp and extended ideological turn. China’s leaders were then consumed with purging Bo Xilai, the ambitious politician who had courted party traditionalists by evoking Mao and the rhetoric of the revolutionary past. When Mr. Bo fell, his leftist followers came under official suspicion and some of their websites and publications were shut down.

Now, however, leftist voices are back in vogue. Analysts say it is unlikely Mr. Xi wants to take China back to Mao’s puritanical era, but doctrinaire Communists see him as a useful ally, and his directives as a license to attack liberal critics of the party.

“The leftists were under pressure for a while but now they are very active again,” said Chongyi Feng, an associate professor at the University of Technology, Sydney, who follows China’s intellectual and political developments. “Xi Jinping has used these people to attack.”

At a meeting in October, party secretaries of universities and colleges were summoned to discuss Mr. Xi’s instructions and urged to “enhance their sense of dangers and resolutely safeguard political security and ideological security.”

In November, The Liaoning Daily, a party newspaper in northeast China,drew nationwide attention with a report that said universities were troubled by ideological laxity. Chinese academics, it complained, were comparing Mao Zedong to an emperor, praising Western notions such as a separation of powers, and “believing that China should take the path of the West,” it said.

“It has become fashionable in university lecture halls to talk down China and malign this society,” said the report.

The ideological policing has sent a chill through China’s liberal intelligentsia. Several academics declined to be interviewed, saying they were lying low for the time being. Others said they had already experienced what they liken to an ideological purge.

Since October, Qiao Mu, the journalism professor and director of the Center for International Communications Studies at Beijing Foreign Studies University, has been relegated to clerical drudgery, summarizing English-language books in the school library, as retribution, he says, for his advocacy of Western-style journalism and a long affiliation with liberal civil society groups in China. In addition to barring him from the classroom, administrators slashed his salary by a third, he said, removed his name from the department’s website and forced his students to find other thesis advisers. “It’s meant to be a kind of humiliation,” he said, adding that he was told his demotion could last for years.

Officially, he is being punished for defying superiors who had withheld permission for him to travel abroad for conferences and other academic pursuits. But privately, school officials acknowledge growing pressure from above.

As he whiles away his days in the library, Mr. Qiao, 44, has become despondent. Some friends have suggested that he leave China, or at least compromise his values and do as he is told.

“I want to stay in my motherland,” he said, adding, “As I like to say, I have everything I need here in China, except freedom.”

_Chris Buckley reported from Hong Kong, and Andrew Jacobs from Beijing. Jonathan Ansfield contributed reporting from Beijing, and Patrick Zuo contributed research from Beijing._


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## Costas (Jan 5, 2015)

China’s “Server Sinification” Campaign for Import Substitution: Strategy and Snowden (Part 1)
(Clark Edward Barrett / The Jamestown Foundation)

On January 22, 2013, Guangming Daily reported the market launch of China’s first independently developed high-end computer server, the Tiansuo K1, and touted the homemade server’s leading role in “breaking a long-term import situation” (Guangming Daily, January 22, 2013). [1] The Tiansuo K1 represents the culmination of a long-term effort by the Chinese government to end China’s dependence on U.S. information technology (IT) companies by pursuing a policy of “server sinifcation” (fuwuqi guochanhua) in conjunction with state-owned enterprises (SOEs).

China’s reliance on foreign imported IT products has long been a cause of concern for the Chinese government, which claims that over-reliance on U.S. imports in server technology jeopardizes the country’s information security (People’s Daily, July 4). According to Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) Bureau Chief Yang Xianwu, the Tiansuo K1’s launch “broke the situation of being under the [foreign] yoke in IT network equipment” (Science and Technology Daily, June 5). Chinese state media also purport that foreign domination of the server market has led to increased costs for Chinese companies, maintaining that the average server selling price in China is 2.4 times that in the United States, seriously hindering the country’s economic competitiveness and drive to equip the nation with the most modern IT infrastructure” (Xinhua, January 22, 2013).

China’s concerted government-sponsored import substitution campaign for server products is explicitly intended, and will likely succeed, in reducing U.S. IT companies’ market share in China and in supporting its fledgling domestic industry. This campaign will likely have serious deleterious consequences for U.S. manufacturers in China, including International Business Machines (IBM), Oracle and Hewlett Packard (HP). These companies currently control more than 90 percent of China’s server market, and Chinese spending on server technology is estimated to grow by 8.4 percent annually through 2017, compared with 2.2 percent globally—meaning a big blow to U.S. corporate IT profits in China (Bloomberg, May 27). Moreover, China’s activities in this sphere likely qualify as “innovation mercantilism,” exacerbating the relative loss of U.S. competitiveness in advanced technology goods with China, a sector where the annual trade deficit has risen from $11.8 billion in 2002 to $117 billion in 2013 (U.S.-China Commission, August 13, 2012; U.S.-China Commission, February 6). [2] 

(...)


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## Costas (Jan 9, 2015)

Αρχαιολογικό, με κάθε επιφύλαξη:

Rapid Desert Formation May Have Destroyed China's 1st Kingdom
(LiveScience.com By Charles Q. Choi / yahoo)
The first known Chinese kingdom may have been destroyed when its lands rapidly transformed into deserts, possibly driving its people into the rest of China, a new study finds.

This new finding suggests that the kingdom may have been more important to Chinese civilization than experts had thought, researchers say.

Prior research suggests the earliest Chinese kingdom might have been Hongshan, established about 6,500 years ago. This was about 2,400 years before the supposed rise of the Xia Dynasty, the first dynasty in China described in ancient historical chronicles. The kingdom's name, which means "Red Mountain," comes from the name of a site in the Inner Mongolia region of China. [In Photos: Amazing Ruins of the Ancient World]

Cultural artifacts

Past excavations have uncovered Hongshan sites across northern China, including the Goddess Temple, an underground complex in the northeastern Chinese province of Liaoning known for murals painted on its walls and a clay female head with jade inlaid eyes.

Hongshan displayed some of the earliest known examples of jade working. The first dragonlike symbol of China may have been a fishlike creature made of jade in Hongshan, researchers said.

But the importance of Hongshan to Chinese history remains a topic of debate, investigators added. The middle reaches of the Yellow River are commonly thought to be the cradle of Chinese civilization, and Hongshan was typically seen as a remote culture outside these key areas. However, the Goddess Temple, as well as remnants of sheep bones that indicate trade with Mongolian shepherds, suggest Hongshan had a complex culture.

"We seem to see evidence that Hongshan was far more important to early Chinese culture than it's currently given credit for," said study co-author Louis Scuderi, a paleoclimatologist at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. "Archaeologists are having a hard time figuring out what the importance of Hongshan culture was."

To shed light on Hongshan, scientists investigated the Hunshandake Sandy Lands of Inner Mongolia, in the eastern portion of northern China's desert belt. The researchers found abundant remnants of Hongshan pottery and stone artifacts there, in an area located about 185 miles (300 kilometers) west of where the Hongshan culture was first recognized in Liaoning. The variety and large number of artifacts found in the region suggest a relatively dense population that depended on hunting and fishing, the researchers said. [The 7 Most Mysterious Archaeological Finds on Earth]

Prior research had estimated that the deserts in northern China are about 1 million years old. However, these new findings suggest that the desert of Hunshandake is only about 4,000 years old. Lead study author Xiaoping Yang, a geologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, along with Scuderi and colleagues, detailed their findings online today (Jan. 5) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Rapid changes

The researchers analyzed environmental and landscape changes in Hunshandake over the past 10,000 years. The patterns of dunes, and depressions between those dunes, suggest that Hunshandake's terrain was once controlled by rivers and lakes.

The scientists dated the age of quartz from the area using a technique known as optically stimulated luminescence, which measures the minute amount of light that long-buried objects can emit, in order to see how long they have been buried. They found that the earliest shorelines in Hunshandake formed during the early Holocene Epoch, which began about 12,000 years ago, at the beginning of a humid period in Inner Mongolia.

Lake sediments indicated that relatively deep water existed in Hunshandake between 5,000 and 9,000 years ago. Pollen in those sediments revealed the presence of birch, spruce, fir, pine and oak trees.

"We're amazed by how much water there was back then," Scuderi said. "There were very, very large lakes, and grasslands and forests. And based on all the artifacts we've found out there, there was clearly a very large population along the lake shores."

However, the scientists found the area rapidly turned dry starting about 4,200 years ago. The scientists calculated more than 7,770 square miles (20,000 square km) in Hunshandake — a region about the size of New Jersey — transformed into desert.

The researchers suggested that water that used to flow into the area was hijacked by a river that permanently diverted water eastward, leading to rapid desertification. Hunshandake remains arid and is unlikely to revert back to wetter conditions, the researchers said.

The scientists noted that, at about the same time that Hunshandake dried out, a major climatic shift was occurring worldwide that caused extraordinary droughts on all of the continents in the Northern Hemisphere. "We think this drying happened in northern China as well, but was augmented by massive amounts of water getting diverted away from the area," Scuderi said.

This desertification likely devastated the Hongshan culture, the researchers said. It may have spurred a mass migration of northern China's early cultures into the rest of China, where they may have played formative roles in the rise of other Chinese civilizations.

"An important possible line of research in the future is to figure out how important the Hongshan culture was to the development of later Chinese culture," Scuderi said.


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## Costas (Jan 10, 2015)

Sri Lankan Poll Upset a Blow to China’s Indian Ocean Plans (Natalie Obiko Pearson / Bloomberg)
The result, considered improbable just two months ago, risks disrupting President Xi Jinping’s moves to increase China’s presence in the Indian Ocean. China has invested heavily in Sri Lanka over the past decade and supported Rajapaksa in the face of U.S.-led inquiries into human rights abuses allegedly committed during the end of a 26-year civil war.
Sirisena, who deserted Rajapaksa in November to lead the opposition bloc, has promised to establish “equal relations” between China, India, Pakistan and Japan.
“China certainly will not have the uncritical support of the Sri Lankan government that it had under Rajapaksa,” said Jehan Perera, executive director of the National Peace Council of Sri Lanka, a group that promotes ethnic reconciliation.

New President in Sri Lanka Puts China’s Plans in Check (Ellen Barry / NYT)
On a Sunday four months ago, a vessel pulled unannounced into Sri Lanka’s Colombo harbor: the Chinese Navy submarine Great Wall No. 329, which is designed to carry torpedoes, a cruise missile and a 360-pound warhead.
Sri Lanka’s defense minister shrugged it off as an “operational good-will visit.” But anxiety was already radiating as far as New Delhi, where the visit was seen as a clear declaration that China had arrived in India’s backyard — with the blessing of Sri Lanka’s president at the time, Mahinda Rajapaksa.
(...)
Sri Lanka’s new prime minister has said he will cancel a $1.5 billion “port city” being built by China on the waterfront in Colombo, the capital.


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## Costas (Jan 12, 2015)

This Former Policeman Launched China’s Biggest Gay Dating App
(Jamie Fullerton / Vice)


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## Costas (Jan 12, 2015)

Firebombs Thrown at Jimmy Lai’s Home and Company in Hong Kong
(AUSTIN RAMZY / NYT)

Assailants threw firebombs at a pro-democracy Hong Kong media outlet and at the home of its owner early Monday, heightening concerns about threats to press freedom.

Later Monday morning, a police sergeant fired his gun at a van that ran over his leg during an investigation of suspected theft of newspapers from a newsstand, a Hong Kong police spokesman told reporters. The sergeant had climbed into the van, but he was thrown out, and the vehicle ran over his leg, the police said. He is being treated at Queen Elizabeth Hospital.

The sergeant fired as many as four shots, the police spokesman said. It is rare for police officers to discharge their weapons in Hong Kong, where personal firearms are highly restricted. The police would not say whether the altercation with a man and young woman in the van was connected to the attack on the headquarters of the Next Media Group and the home of its owner and founder, Jimmy Lai. Apple Daily, a newspaper owned by Next Media, reported that its newspapers had been targeted in the alleged theft attempt.

Apple Daily has been a vocal advocate of the recent demonstrations for expanded democracy in Hong Kong. Mr. Lai frequently attended the protests, which saw several main thoroughfares occupied for more than two months. He was arrested and released in December when the authorities dismantled the main camp in the Admiralty neighborhood. Mr. Lai has also been under investigation by Hong Kong’s anticorruption agency in connection with donations to the pro-democracy camp.

Mark Simon, an aide to Mr. Lai, said the firebombs caused no injuries or significant property damage, but he considered them an escalation of violence and “an attack on dissident voices.”

“It’s just extremely disappointing that basically the only thing they got left is violence; that’s the case being made against peaceful democracy and civil disobedience,” Mr. Simon said. “Nobody is making the argument anymore. They’re just throwing firebombs.”

Next Media said two entryways to its headquarters in Hong Kong’s Tseung Kwan O neighborhood were hit with firebombs around 1 a.m. Monday. At about the same time, a masked man got out of a car outside Mr. Lai’s home in the Ho Man Tin neighborhood and threw a firebomb at the sidewalk outside the gate. Two cars suspected of being those used in the attacks were later found burning in nearby areas of Kowloon.

Mr. Lai and his Next Media properties have long been targets for assault, as Neil Gough wrote Monday in a profile of Mr. Lai.

Jimmy Lai, Hong Kong’s most fiercely anti-Communist tycoon, calls himself a rebel who likes to make trouble — and he has found no shortage of it.

The owner of the city’s biggest pro-democracy publishing empire, Mr. Lai has seen his house firebombed and his company’s offices ransacked; he has been the target of an assassination plot and, recently, of multiple online attacks by what he suspects were state-sponsored hackers.

In 2013 a man rammed a stolen vehicle into the gate of Mr. Lai’s home, leaving a knife and a hatchet at the scene before fleeing.

Mr. Simon said that aside from the 2009 murder plot, for which a plotter was sentenced to 16 years in prison, investigations into assaults on properties of Mr. Lai’s and Next Media have not resulted in significant breakthroughs. In December, Mr. Lai stepped down as the chairman of Next Media and publisher of Apple Daily.

The firebombings are the latest in a series of violent episodes targeting journalists in Hong Kong. In February, Kevin Lau, who had recently been dismissed as editor of the Ming Pao newspaper, was stabbed in his back and legs by an attacker on a motorcycle. A month later, two executives of a publication that was still under development were assaulted by men with metal bars.

_Alan Wong contributed reporting._


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## Costas (Jan 14, 2015)

Επιλογή από το Sinocism:

New York Review Books 
is pleased to announce the debut of Calligrams, a new series of writings from and on China. Calligrams will encompass a wide array of poetic masterpieces, classic fiction, thrilling dramas, travel writing, criticism, and histories written by both Chinese and Western writers from antiquity to modern time. The series, made possible by a publishing partnership with the Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, is edited by Eliot Weinberger.

Ο Σηρ Κριαράς:
China linguist's 109th birthday wish: democracy
(yahoo)
Zhou is commonly known as the "father of Pinyin", a system for transliterating Chinese characters into the Roman alphabet introduced in the 1950s and now used by hundreds of millions of language learners in China, as well as abroad.

Flood of rich Chinese settle in UK
(FT)
A total of 357 British “Tier 1” investor visas were issued to Chinese nationals during the 12 months to the end of September, accounting for 43 per cent of all investor visas issued during that period, according to UK government data. These visas could be obtained in return for a £1m investment in gilts or British companies’ shares or bonds, a limit that has since been raised to £2m. (Σχόλιο του Bill Bhishop: _UK selling itself cheap_)

They Have Miao
DIE ZEIT Nr. 2/2015 14. Januar 2015 — Von Angela Köckritz
How my assistant got into trouble with Beijing’s security apparatus and I got to know the Chinese authorities

This Date in History: The Zunyi Conference of 1935 and the rise of Mao
(Jottings from the Granite Studio)
How did Mao come to power? Out of the rough and tumble scrum of early CCP politics, how did a rich peasant’s son from Hunan emerge as “The Chairman,” the bright red sun of a nation’s heart? It’s a tough question. Traditional PRC historiography usually describes Mao’s final ascension to power as the outcome of the Zunyi Conference, which began this date in 1935.

My handy desktop copy of 历史的今天 (This Date in History) reports that a conference held in Zunyi, Guizhou during the Long March, “ended the Leftism of Wang Ming, and established Comrade Mao Zedong as head of the military. Thus at this critical juncture, both the army and the party were saved.”

However, the events at Zunyi and the means by which Mao eventually attained and consolidated his control over the CCP, are still disputed among historians.

North Koreans Walk Across Frozen Border River to Murder Chinese 
(Bloomberg)
The violence reflects a growing desperation among soldiers, including border guards, since Kim Jong Un took over as supreme leader in Pyongyang three years ago. As well as seeking food, they are entering China to steal money.


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## Costas (Jan 15, 2015)

In Remote Thai Villages, Legacy of China’s Lost Army Endures (NYT)
(Το λινκ έχει και μια πανέμορφη φωτογραφία του χωριού)
(...)
The Liangs, like some 200 other families here, are the veterans or descendants of what is known as China’s Lost Army, a unit of the Kuomintang’s Nationalist Army, which lost to the Red Army of Mao Zedong in 1949. As most Nationalist soldiers fled east to Taiwan in the face of Communist advances, the Kuomintang’s 93rd Division retreated west from the southwestern Chinese province of Yunnan into Myanmar, then known as Burma.

Mr. Liang’s father, Liang Zhongxia, 84, a former Kuomintang commander, is among the 93rd Division’s last surviving veterans.

History was not finished with these lost Chinese soldiers. Against the background of shifting Cold War dynamics, some of those who stayed in the region fought against the Burmese government and ethnic militias and, with the help of Taiwan and the United States, continued to stage forays into China.

In the 1960s and ’70s, Kuomintang veterans became players in the illicit drug trade that for decades roiled this area, part of the infamous Golden Triangle. They later struck a deal with the Thai government allowing them to stay in the northern Thai borderlands in exchange for help fighting the Thai Communists.

In the mid-1980s, with the Communist threat essentially extinguished, the Kuomintang soldiers agreed to put down their arms and take up farming. In exchange, the Thai government began to grant them and their families Thai citizenship.
(...)


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## Costas (Jan 16, 2015)

Λίγη πολιτικοφιλοσοφική διάσταση (κράτησα δύο από τα λινκ του πρωτοτύπου, που αξίζει να τα διαβάσετε):

Is ‘China’s Machiavelli’ Now Its Most Important Political Philosopher?
Xi Jinping quotes an ancient philosopher and offers possible insights into his political beliefs.
(Ryan Mitchell / The Diplomat)
Much like a dragon, “the ruler of men has bristling scales. Only if a speaker can avoid brushing against them can he have any hope of success.”

That, at least, is the dilemma facing Chinese statesmen as described by the ancient philosopher Han Feizi. Officially repudiated – but still influential – throughout China’s 2000+ years of imperial rule, he and his “Legalist School” have gained new prominence recently due to favorable citations by PRC leaders. Above all, those include references made by President Xi Jinping, China’s most powerful ruler in decades. Far from mere casual remarks, such statements serve as ideological guideposts to determine the Communist Party line. Just one sentence of Han Feizi’s that Xi quoted last autumn, for example, subsequently appeared thousands of times in official Chinese media at the local, provincial, and national levels.

*Autocrat or Realist?*

The trend has been interpreted in various ways. In October, the New York Times called President Xi Jinping’s uses of ancient thought “an overlooked key to his boldly authoritarian agenda,” and specifically noted the importance of Han Feizi, “a Chinese nobleman renowned for his stark advocacy of autocratic rule.”

While many experts would agree with that characterization, even referring to Han Feizi as “China’s Machiavelli,” others see him, and Legalist thought in general, in more positive terms. Scholars Orville Schell and John Delury, in an influential book on the history of Chinese reform efforts, credit “pragmatic” Legalist thought of as being behind both much of China’s historical success and its ongoing rebirth as a great nation. For Confucians, who focus on ideals of loyalty, righteousness, and benevolence, little could be more repugnant than the Legalist position that “if a wise ruler masters wealth and power, he can have whatever he desires.”

Yet Han Feizi’s ideas, and Xi’s uses of them, are far from mere illiberal posturing. Even the remarks cited by the New York Times (the same ones subsequently reprinted thousands of times in Party media) were actually a warning by Xi to the country’s high level political leaders that “when those who uphold the law are strong, the state is strong. When they are weak, the state is weak.” The statement is at once striking, suggestive, and highly ambiguous.

In this sense, Xi’s use of ancient scholarship resembles the other activities characteristic of his unique administration. Observers are divided on how to interpret his high-intensity crackdown on corruption, nearly unprecedented personal popularity, and high-profile reforms aiming for “the rule of law.” Thus, his use of reformist-sounding language can be more than enough to prompt guarded optimism among observers both domestic and foreign. Other analysts, however, remain highly skeptical; pointing to several other statements where Xi vows to crush dissent, resist the West, and ensure ideological unity.

*Language and Power*

Yet people on both sides more or less admit that while China’s fate increasingly turns on the thoughts and beliefs of one man, there is no clear consensus on what that man actually thinks or believes. That is why the most valuable insight to gain from his Legalist references may actually relate to a more basic question. What can Xi’s many prominent political pronouncements reveal about his political beliefs?

On this topic, Han Feizi’s overall pragmatic approach begins the moment an aspiring politician opens his mouth to speak. Like Machiavelli in the West, he lived in a dangerous political climate where a wrong word could result in disgrace, exile, or worse. As he explicitly stated in his writing, the first task of any political theorist is to avoid getting on his prince’s bad side; or “brushing against the ruler’s scales.” Discretion, and subtlety, are the key to achieving influence. Ideals, and morals, are to be kept private.

Based on that perspective, if Xi really is especially influenced by the Legalist School, it means two important things for his future trajectory. First, neither his calls for reform nor his illiberal pronouncements should be taken as simple statements about what he believes. Instead, he is likely using different forms of compromise language that various factions can agree upon. Xi’s patchwork political platform can be seen as maintaining his own place of authority, largely by avoiding the potential wrath of the Communist Party’s elders and many elite interest groups: the “dragon” whose scales he risks rubbing the wrong way.

Secondly, as a ruler Xi’s signature initiatives – especially his dramatic and escalating crackdown on official corruption – probably do not reflect either high idealism or a mere power grab. Xi undoubtedly does have a vision for where he wants to take his country, his own “Chinese Dream,” but he is unlikely to be so foolish as to try to realize that dream too early. In order to achieve his goals, Xi first has to “master wealth and power,” and a robust, predictable legal system is one key to such mastery.

*Pragmatist in Chief*

As a recent People’s Daily editorial admits, it is simply beside the point to ask whether or not Xi intends for “the rule of law” to limit the Party’s authority, or his own as the Party’s representative. Very pragmatically – very much like a Legalist – Xi is looking for formulas that can achieve his goals for the nation. For now, the wealth of corrupt officials has to be seized, and the power of elites over the law has to be abolished. It doesn’t much matter whether that process is called liberal or conservative, left or right, traditional or modern. What matters, at least for the moment, is whether or not it works.

_Ryan Mitchell is pursuing a Ph.D. in Law at Yale, where his research focuses on political philosophy and international law. He is also an attorney admitted to the State Bar of California._

Εννοείται ότι το ιδεώδες του "κράτους δικαίου" αφορά μόνον όσους/ες τηρούν το υπέρτατο αξίωμα της πολιτικής υποταγής. Αλλιώς, αυτομάτως "θέτουν εαυτούς/ές εκτός κράτους δικαίου". Πολίτης = Υπήκοος.


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## Costas (Jan 19, 2015)

Νά μια νέα κυκλοφορία:

Στο Ρου του Ποταμού
Ανθολογία κινεζικής ποίησης των δυναστειών Τανγκ και Σονγκ
Απόδοση από τα κινεζικά: Αικατερίνη Βούρκα
Παπασωτηρίου, 2015, Αθήνα
1η έκδ. (Δίγλωσση έκδοση, Ελληνικά και Κινεζικά)

Η ποίηση των δυναστειών Τανγκ και Σονγκ (618-1279) αποτελεί χρυσή εποχή για τον κινεζικό πολιτισμό και σημαντική συμβολή στην παγκόσμια λογοτεχνία. Την περίοδο αυτή, η Κίνα γνωρίζει εκπληκτική άνθιση στα γράμματα, τις τέχνες και την οικονομία. Στη δυναστεία των Τανγκ και μόνο, καταγράφονται πάνω από 50.000 ποιήματα και 2.500 ποιητές με γνωστότερους τους Λι Πο, Του Φου και Του Μου.

Στη δίγλωσση αυτή ανθολογία, παρουσιάζονται μαζί με την ελληνική απόδοση τα κινεζικά ιδεογράμματα καθώς και η λατινική τους μεταγραφή (πινγίν), δίνοντας τη δυνατότητα στον αναγνώστη να απολαύσει την απλότητα της κινεζικής γραφής σαν φυσικές παραστάσεις που βαθμιαία εξελίσσονται σε τέχνη, αλλά και να αναπτύξει επαφή με τη γλώσσα εκατομμυρίων ανθρώπων με ύπαρξη, πολιτισμό και παράδοση πολλών χιλιετηρίδων.


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## Zazula (Jan 19, 2015)

Θα είναι γραμμένο σε Middle Chinese;


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## Costas (Jan 19, 2015)

Δεν καταλαβαίνω την ερώτηση (αν υποθέσουμε ότι γνωρίζω την απάντηση...)


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## Zazula (Jan 19, 2015)

Εφόσον είναι δίγλωσση έκδοση, θα έχει και κινεζικό κείμενο. Αυτό θα είναι γραμμένο στα σημερινά κινεζικά τής ΛΔΚ ή στη μορφή που είχαν τότε τα κινεζικά;


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## Costas (Jan 19, 2015)

Στο εξώφυλλο βλέπω την απλοποιημένη γραφή της ΛΔΚ, αλλά δεν ξέρω για μέσα. Έχω δει άλλη δίγλωσση έκδοση όπου το εξώφυλλο ήταν σε απλοποιημένη και το κείμενο μέσα ήταν σε παραδοσιακή (επρόκειτο για αρχαίο συγγραφέα). Οι αντίστοιχοι όροι είναι: simplified και traditional. Σημειωτέον ότι "η μορφή που είχαν τότε τα κινεζικά" είναι η μορφή που έχουν σήμερα στο traditional, δηλ. η γραφή εκτός ΛΔΚ (αλλά και εντός, σε περιορισμένη χρήση).


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## Zazula (Jan 19, 2015)

Για την παραδοσιακή γραφή και την απλοποιημένη γνωρίζω, αλλά από εδώ: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Chinese νόμισα (μάλλον λάθος) πως ήταν τότε και σε άλλα πράγματα διαφοροποιημένη η μορφή της γλώσσας.


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## Costas (Jan 19, 2015)

Κατάλαβα. Όχι, οι χαρακτήρες (ή "ιδεογράμματα") ήταν οι ίδιοι με τους σημερινούς traditional· η προφορά όμως έχει αλλάξει (και βεβαίως η γραμματική, η σύνταξη, το λεξιλόγιο...). Τους διαβάζουν δε τώρα με τη σημερινή προφορά (ή μάλλον με τις διάφορες σημερινές προφορές, ανάλογα με την περιοχή).


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## Zazula (Jan 19, 2015)

Α, δηλαδή όπως διαβάζουμε κι εμείς τα αρχαία ελληνικά. Ευχαριστώ! :)


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## Costas (Jan 19, 2015)

Πα ντε κουά.

Λίγη πλακίτσα. Πάντα έλεγα πως κινέζικα και αγγλικά μοιάζουν, με τη μονοσυλλαβικότητά τους!

English to Chinese Translations:

ENGLISH PHRASE-----------------------CHINESE TRANSLATION

Are you harboring a fugitive?--------Hu Yu Hai Ding?

See me A. S. A. P.-------------------Kum Hia Nao

Stupid Man---------------------------Dum Gai

Small Horse--------------------------Tai Ni Po Ni

Your price is too high!!-------------No Bai Dam Thing!!

Did you go to the beach?-------------Wai Yu So Tan?

I bumped into a coffee table---------Ai Bang Mai Ni

I think you need a facelift----------Chin Tu Fat

It's very dark in here---------------Wai So Dim?

Has your flight been delayed?--------Hao Long Wei Ting?

I thought you were on a diet---------Wai Yu Mun Ching?

This is a tow away zone---------------No Pah King

You are not very bright---------------Yu So Dum

I got this for free-------------------Ai No Pei

I am not guilty-----------------------Wai Hang Mi?

Please, stay a while longer-----------Wai Go Nao?

Our meeting was scheduled next week---Wai Yu Kum Nao

They have arrived---------------------Hia Dei Kum

Stay out of sight---------------------Lei Lo

He's cleaning his automobile----------Wa Shing Ka

Your body odor is offensive-----------Hu Man Go!

Pew! does this bathroom stink!--------Hu Flung Dung?


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## Costas (Jan 21, 2015)

Chinese Communist Party Warns Officials: Calligraphy Isn’t for Amateurs 
(James T. Areddy and Lilian Lin / WSJ)
(...)
The admonishment takes particular aim at officials who scramble for seats atop artistic associations, suggesting the positions are little more than grabs to establish credibility in the absence of artistic ability – and therefore a ticket to higher priced sales.

Calling it “trendy” for officials to insert themselves into an artistic association, the editorial said one provincial calligraphy association has dozens of vice presidents, “which is astounding.”

The commission leader, Mr. Wang, is quoted in the editorial as joking that officials lacking talent often strive for more complex forms of calligraphy, saying some officials proceed directly to difficult cursive of “rough script” before they’ve even mastered basic script.
(...)
Talented calligraphers are facing their own challenges from the party, with Chinese President Xi Jinping last year, telling artists to produce work that is “morally inspiring in order to present socialist core values.” Xinhua at the time quoted Zhang Hai, chairman of the China Calligraphers Association as saying, “I am greatly inspired and moved by Xi’s speech.”


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## Costas (Jan 21, 2015)

Sales execs who missed targets forced to kneel on public bridge and chant 'We are sorry'
(Yahoo)
Pedestrians who were using a busy crossover in the city of Xiamen, the capital of south-eastern China’s Fujian Province, were stunned to see the men and women in suits on their knees with messages in front of them detailing their name, age, and exactly what it was that they had done to bring such shame on themselves.

One, named as Zhen Liu, 43, had the handwritten message on the ground in front of him saying: 'I failed to beat my sales targets.'
(...)
Another, Ming Chou, 39, had the message: 'I have to kneel down on the bridge for one hour as punishment for not finishing my job.'
(...)
'After a while one of them decided he’d had enough and stood up shouting and grabbing a piece of paper and throwing it on the ground before marching off. But the others remained, calmly accepting their punishment.'


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## Zazula (Jan 22, 2015)

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...ed-stamped-badly-paralysed-life-survives.html


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## Costas (Jan 22, 2015)

Ο Τζιά Τζανγκ-κέ γύρισε ταινιάκι για την Γκρηνπής:
Greenpeace East Asia on Wednesday released a film by renowned Chinese director Jia Zhangke titled “Smog Journeys,” examining how air pollution affects families at all rungs of China’s stratified society. (Huffington Post)

Σχεδιάζεται σιδηροδρομική γραμμή Μόσχα-Πεκίνο σε 2 μέρες, 242 δις δολάρια (Bloomberg)

China's top archaeological discoveries in 2014 (Xinhua)


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## Costas (Jan 28, 2015)

Apologies All Around After Watch Is Presented as Gift in Taiwan
NYTimes 
Guides to Chinese business etiquette often carry a reminder to never give a timepiece as a gift. The phrase “giving a clock,” or 送鐘, sounds in Mandarin too much like “paying one’s last respects” to the deceased, and the act of it is one of a few taboos based on Chinese pronunciation. That message didn’t reach Susan Kramer, the British minister of state for transport, until after she had given a large pocket watch to the mayor of Taipei, Ko Wen-je, on Monday during a visit to Taiwan.

Το πένθιμο ακριβές ομώνυμο (δηλ. και οι τόνοι είναι ίδιοι) είναι 送终. Και τα δύο προφέρονται sòng zhōng (σòνγκ τζōνγκ).


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## Costas (Jan 28, 2015)

Ένα πολύ ενδιαφέρον 12λεπτο αφιέρωμα στην τενίστρια ("fuzzyballer"!) Li Na. Κορυφαία στιγμή για μένα, το χαστούκι...

Σημ. Σωστή για μάς προφορά είναι όχι Λίνα, όπως ακούγεται ως επί το πλείστον στην εκπομπή, αλλά Λινά (Lǐ​ Nà).


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## Costas (Feb 11, 2015)

Re-ideologizing Chinese Universities
(China Change)
Yesterday [January 29], the Chinese Minister of Education Yuan Guiren (袁贵仁) called in a conference for the implementation of “The Opinions on Further Strengthening and Improving Propaganda and Ideological Work in Higher Education under the New Circumstances,” a document recently issued by the General Office of the Communist Party of China and the State Council. Leaders of Education Bureaus in Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu as well as leaders of Peking University, Tsinghua University, Wuhan University, Shandong University, and Xiamen University attended the conference. Yuan Guiren’s speech is part of the Chinese government’s effort to re-ideologize Chinese higher education.

In China, there was a time when universities were little more than the ideological mouthpieces of the CCP, diminishing their original purpose to disseminate knowledge and foster personal growth. Following the Party’s ideological bankruptcy in the 1980s, independent thoughts flourished on college campuses. However, the party has always resented the loss of its absolute monopoly on ideology on campuses and has held deep-rooted hostility towards Western ideas popular among university students and professors. Since Xi came to power, the re-ideologization of Chinese higher education has become what they call a “new normal” in education.

The campaign to re-ideologize Chinese universities draws on three points. The first is to demonstrate support for the party’s leadership. Reporting this conference, the mouthpiece media claimed that Chinese university professors and students “wholeheartedly support the party’s leadership, fully trust the CCP with comrade Xi Jinping as its General Secretary, and confidently believe in socialism with Chinese characteristics and the great revival of the Chinese nation through the Chinese Dream.” This glorification of Xi Jinping is aimed at legitimizing support for the party leadership in university education.

Following practices from the Mao era, administrative organs of education announced that they will take concrete measures to spread ideologies espoused by Chinese political leaders. This is the so-called “Three Into-es” requirement: “rigorously introduce the words of the General Secretary Xi Jinping into our teaching materials, into classrooms and into minds.” In other words, education bureaus in China will spare no efforts to use public resources and classroom podiums to advocates Mr. Xi’s ideology.

I believe it won’t be difficult at all to adapt Xi Jinping’s words “into teaching materials” and “into classrooms;” the education bureaus and the university authorities will only need to impose an administrative order to force the implementation. However, it is a completely different question as to whether these intellectually vapid and logically absurd ideologies can be implanted “into the minds” of the students. The history of China, or elsewhere, has proved that forced political indoctrination of young people with words of political leaders rarely achieves the goal of the indoctrinators. Instead, it fosters detestation.

The second measure to re-ideologize universities is to tighten control over teaching through executive commands. This has been specifically spelled out as the Four Nevers: “Never allow textbooks that promote western values into our classrooms; never allow any remarks that attack, defame or discredit the party’s leadership or socialism to appear in college classrooms; never allow any kind of speech in violation of the Constitution or laws to spread in college classrooms; and never allow teachers to make complaints, vent grievances in classrooms that would affect the students.”

The purpose of the “Four Nevers” is to prevent college students to gain knowledge about the evolution of human societies, suppressing any thought or speech that shows the deficiency of ideologies promoted by Chinese leaders. This is rather similar to orders given by Chinese imperial courts to “depose the hundred schools of thoughts and promote only Confucianism.”

The truth becomes clearer the more an issue is debated; only a heated debate with different points of views can test the validity of an idea. Ideologies that cannot withstand the heat of argument and are in need of administrative protection are often shallow, absurd and vulnerable.

The third measure to re-ideologize higher education in China is to restore and strengthen thought policing on college campuses. When an orthodox ideology has to be implemented through administrative enforcement and when it is sustainable only by eradicating competing ideologies, this ideology is bound to contravene human nature in fundamental ways. Such lifeless ideas cannot gain popularity, cannot sustain for long, let alone thrive. In this battle with the state and its leaders on one side and the people and the humanity on the other, a system of thought policing is inevitable.

On university campuses in China, there are two groups of people who carry out the thought policing. One group is the university staff in charge of propaganda, consisting of Party cadres, Youth League cadres, and full-time student counselors. The other group are faculty who teach the thought education classes. They are teachers but they are also thought police. They are long on political orthodoxy and short on any convincing scholarship. Yuan Guiren, in his speech, voiced clear support for these people and vowed to increase their ranks. One can anticipate that these “thought police” will once again be monitoring professors and students alike on campuses.

—————

Hu Shaojiang (胡少江) is a commentator for Radio Free Asia.


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## Costas (Feb 11, 2015)

Από το Sinocism του Bill Bishop:

China quality watchdog tells Alibaba fakes threaten China's reputation
(Reuters) - Alibaba Group Holding Ltd must pay more attention to product quality and step up the fight against fake goods sold online, China's product quality watchdog chief told company executive chairman Jack Ma, according to a statement on Tuesday.

The proliferation of shoddy goods online was a threat to China's reputation, and the ruling Communist Party and government took the issue seriously, Zhi Shuping, director-general of the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine (AQSIQ), said in the meeting on Monday.
(...)

China says 'knows nothing' about aid offer for Greece
BEIJING Wed Feb 11, 2015 5:05am EST

(Reuters) - China's Foreign Ministry said on Wednesday it had no knowledge of any offer by Beijing for aid to Greece after Greece's deputy foreign minister said China had offered economic support even though Athens had not requested it.

Nikos Chountis, who also holds the European Affairs portfolio, told Greek radio that Russia had also offered Greece help, while Greek Defence Minister Panos Kammenos said that if Athens failed to get a new debt agreement with the euro zone, it could always look elsewhere for help, including possibly China.

"There have been proposals, offers I would say, from Russia, recently after the election, for economic support as well as from China, regarding help, investment possibilities," Chountis said, adding: "We have not asked for it."

China's Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said she had seen the reports but had "no knowledge" of the matter.

"We are willing to keep deepening cooperation and exchanges in all areas with the new Greek government on the basis of the principle of mutual respect and win-win to push the continued development of Sino-Greek ties," she told a daily news briefing.

"As for the detailed situation you mentioned, I know nothing about it."

*University President Sees Echoes of Cultural Revolution in New Campaign* - NYTimes 
Gong Ke, the president of Nankai University in the northern port city of Tianjin, told the People’s Daily website that the allegations that universities were infested with subversion evoked dangerous parallels to the two worst purges of intellectuals in the People’s Republic of China: the Anti-Rightist Movement of 1957 and the Cultural Revolution a decade later. “Recently, I’ve read people on the Internet saying that the ranks of academics must be cleansed, purified and rectified,” Mr. Gong said. “I can’t agree with this. This was the mentality of 1957 or 1966.”

China’s Wealthy Parents Are Fed Up With State-Run Education | Foreign Policy 
_Forget rote memorization and pressure-packed tests -- Western, alternative learning is the new rage._
Ri Ri Xin and schools like it demonstrate the growing interest among young, middle-class Chinese parents in alternative education, often based on liberal Western ideas, even as state authorities have clamped down more tightly on Western values in Chinese higher education. On Jan. 30, China’s education minister demanded that universities shun “Western values,” in what seems the latest move in President Xi Jinping’s sweeping campaign to tighten up the ideological sphere. But Western pedagogies like Waldorf and Montessori, which a few years ago might have been mistaken for clothing brands, now adorn the fronts of elite kindergartens and elementary schools.

Συμβουλευτική δημοκρατία είναι το νέο brand
CPC proposes developing "consultative democracy" - Xinhua 
The Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) on Monday published a document proposing to promote "consultative democracy", the country's own brand of democracy. Approved in the sixth meeting of the Leading Group for Overall Reform in late December, the document says socialist consultative democracy embodies the Party's "mass line" policy, and that developing it is essential to deepening reform of the political system. Consultative democracy is defined as a democratic pattern in which, led by the CPC, all sections of society are consulted on major issues before and during policy-making processes.

Chinese Corruption, Now Officially Hilarious | Foreign Policy 
The Paper, a state-run, Shanghai-based news site, reported that CCTV asked Miao Fu and Wang Sheng, two young performers of crosstalk, a form of comedic dialogue, to write the script for an anti-corruption skit in October 2014. The propaganda department arranged for Miao and Wang to meet with the party’s disciplinary commission to discuss real-life cases of corrupt officials as inspiration. The party mouthpiece People’s Daily claimed, to online sneers, that CCTV’s directors were “most generous” in giving the skit leeway in their censorship process. Wen Wei Po, a party-owned newspaper based in Hong Kong, reported that as many as three skits about corruption were shown at the Gala’s dress rehearsal on Feb. 8. This does not mean anything goes. Miao told Huashangbao, a local paper in his native Shaanxi province, that the script had been revised more than 70 times, and “many things could not be mentioned” because of censorship requirements.


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## Costas (Feb 11, 2015)

"Iδρυματοποίηση" (με φωτό):

Man forcibly removed by police after occupying hospital bed for over 3 years (Shanghaiist)


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## Costas (Feb 11, 2015)

Προσέξτε πόσο απλά είναι τα πράγματα:

Shanghai is applying to have the neighborhood that sheltered around 20,000 Jewish refugees during WWII inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register.

It's estimated that up to 23,000 Jews who escaped Nazi persecution fled to Shanghai, which didn't require entry visas. Many of them lived in the Tilanqiao area of Hongkou district, according to Xinhua.

The Shanghai Jewish Refugee Museum, which stands at the former site of the Ohel Moshe Synagogue, completed collation of the refugee list, data bank, literary video and audio material to go forward with the application.

The city has also announced plans to rebuild the Wiener Cafe Restaurant, a popular gathering spot for refugees living in the city at the time. *The cafe, which was demolished in 2009 to make way for subway expansion, will be rebuilt across from the Jewish Refugee Museum on Changyang Road using original blue prints from 1939.*


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## Costas (Feb 13, 2015)

Portrait of Xi selected as test for university candidates
More than 12,000 undergraduate candidates applying to the art school of Beijing University of Technology were asked to sketch a portrait of President Xi Jinping.

Το τεστ στο διαγώνισμα αγγλικής γλώσσας για τις εισαγωγικές εξετάσεις στο Nanjing Foreign Language School.

Μου θύμισε την ιστορία με τους κατοίκους των κλειστών σηράγγων του μετρό της Νέας Υόρκης, αν και οι διαφορές είναι μεγάλες.
Thousands of Beijing's 'rat tribe' underground residents evicted
120,000 people evicted from illegal underground homes in former air raid shelters in Beijing 
(The Telegraph)
Beijing's government has evicted more than 120,000 people living underground in the city's sprawling network of disused bomb shelters, state media reported.

Dubbed the "rat tribe" by locals, an estimated one million people reside illegally in a warren of Cold War-era tunnels underneath China's capital. 

But authorities have been clearing out residents over the past three years in the first stage of a planned mass eviction, according to the Beijing News. Around 7,250 makeshift houses were found on sites spanning an area of some seven million square metres.

Many of those evacuated are Chinese migrant workers unable to afford the sky-high rents above ground in the capital. 

Rents in the bomb shelters are around half the cost of typical migrant housing in Beijing, with individual rooms underground costing around 400 yuan (£42) a month with shared kitchens and bathrooms.

Many are more also centrally located than typical migrant accommodation, although the living areas are cramped, windowless spaces with room for little more than a bed. 

The former bomb shelters date back to the Mao era, when in 1969 people were ordered to "dig tunnels deep" to protect against potential Soviet air raids. In Beijing around 300,000 people took part in the campaign, digging an estimated 20,000 shelters.

Previously tolerated as a by-product of rapid urbanisation, a change in housing law in 2010 made living in the subterranean network illegal.

Beijing's population has soared from nine million in 1995 to 21 million in 2013, including around eight million migrants. Many migrants are not legally allowed to settle in the city because they lack the relevant hukou, or household registration, which prevents them applying for low-income housing, among other public services.

Beijing residents have expressed sympathy online for the plight of the shuzu, or "rat tribe".

"The worry is where do these people who could only afford to live in the basement go?" one microblog user, dandanderenshengtlz, wrote on Sina Weibo.

"If a city wants to be habitable, the dazzling buildings are far from enough. What is needed is the attitude of embracing all. Sadly, Beijing is not this kind of city!"

The government plans to redevelop the bomb shelters into sites for public use. One recent redevelopment in Chaoyang district transformed a 2,800-square-metre warren into a luxury entertainment facility for local residents, complete with a gym, billiard room and club for Communist Party members.


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## Costas (Feb 18, 2015)

Weibo is dying out
Bei Daijin 贝带劲 (mclc)
In November, 2014, 163.com suddenly announced that it would close down its microblog service, or Weibo. Three months ago, qq.com announced that it would not add new features to its microblog service. It is unsure how long qq’s microblog will last before it also closes down. Sohu CEO Zhang Chaoyao (张朝阳) no longer uses his own Sohu microblog account to interact with users. Chen Tong (陈彤), Sina’s vice president, left Sina with a group of key personnel, and this was regarded as the fall of the biggest internet portal in China. “Big V” Ning Caishen (宁财神) announced that he would sell his account [with 6 million followers] for only 50 yuan, or about $5, and it’s hard not to taste the dour self-mockery of the popular online opinion leader. Such is the devastated scene of social media in China backed by each major internet portal website and used by millions of Chinese. Weibo is dying. Of what?

Statistics from January, 2014, show that the number of Weibo users in 2013 declined by 27,830,000 in 2013 compared to the number of users at the end of 2012, and the level of activity had also plummeted. It is reported that 80 percent of the 500 million Weibo users have hardly ever logged in. The number of daily active users has fallen from 60 million in mid-2013 to 25 million in the beginning of June, 2014. While we cannot verify these numbers for the time being, published statistics have sufficiently shown that the popularity of Weibo has been declining since 2013.

Some people think the fall of Weibo is due to companies failing to find the right business model, and others believe that the rise of WeChat drew users away from Weibo. Still others are of the opinion that excessive advertisements, marketing accounts and “chicken-soup” postings diluted valuable information. These might all be valid causes, but more important causes seem to lie elsewhere.

Weibo have never been a pure social media platform; it has always been a form of media, and its vitality arose from disseminating and commenting on public events, known as User Generated Content (UGC). But suppression of free expression is a political reality in China, and the State Internet Information Office’s (SIIO) censorship mechanism has been strangling the Weibo. A user becomes a criminal, punishable by law, when a rumor is shared over 500 times, and reposting a “rumor” can be a liability too. One constantly hits on “sensitive words” like hitting on nail snags. Posts are frequently deleted by behind-the-scene censors, not to mention suspension or deletion of accounts altogether. More and more people join the ranks of the “Reincarnation Party,” people who come back to Weibo with new accounts after their original accounts were shut down. One can be summoned by police for interrogation, or detained, or even tried and sentenced, for a single Weibo posting. Fear puts a damper on a user’s enthusiasm, if not killing it altogether. To divert users’ attention away from sensitive public events while maintaining Weibo’s vitality, service providers have resorted to cheap entertainment, resulting in a large number of quality users leaving Weibo.

Both the quantity and quality of UGC have declined and there is no sign of a reversal. Nowadays even the comment section is often closed up either by the censor or by the users themselves.

Last November, Xinhua reported that SIIO held a conference on the management of online comment. During the conference, 29 websites, including Xinhuanet.com, People.com.cn, Sina.com, Sohu.com, 163.com and qq.com, signed a pledge, promising that they would “discipline” online comments. The Deputy Director of SIIO Ren Xianliang (任贤良) said, “[We must] use the law to manage online comments in order to direct public opinion online, build an eco-system for online public opinion, to legalize the rules of cyberspace. These are an integral part of governing the Internet according to the law. And to govern the Internet according to the law, we must put halters on the comment sections.”

Caijing’s Sina Weibo account attached a photo image of the Pledge when posting news about the conference. The Pledge contains 18 categories of information that cannot be allowed. Below is a brief analysis of each of the 18 categories.

29 websites pledged to eliminate the 18 categories of online comments. Click to enlarge.

1. Information that is in violation of the basic principles of the Constitution.

This covers comments that voice support for universal values from the comments sections.

The CCTV’s xinwen lianbo (evening news) that evening emphasized that “China’s governance according to the constitution is fundamentally different from western countries’ constitutional democracy.”

2. Information that endangers state security, divulges state secrets, subverts state power or undermines national unity.

This category prohibits those who are in the know because of their jobs to reveal the untruth perpetrated by the official media or “experts” working for the government.

3. Information that harms the national reputation and interest.

This can include all the so-called negative news. Censorship at media outlets begins from topic selection, blocking out the dissemination of negative news to begin with. Users who wish to expose government abuses and social injustice will be constrained by this rule.

4. Information that instigates ethnic hatred and discrimination, and undermines ethnic unity.

The CCP’s ethnic policies have been a focal point of increased ethnic tension. Information regarding Uighurs’ violent resistance or Tibetans’ self-immolations has always been sensitive content, and this restriction echoes the judicial interpretation issued in October by the Supreme People’s Court criminalizing separatist speeches.

5. Information that instigates regional discrimination and regional hatred.

Discriminatory comments based on geographic origins have always been a popular form of joke. It looks like jokes will be no joking matter anymore.

6. Information that undermines national policies on religion and promotes “evil cults” and superstition.

This is in sync with the government’s crackdown on “evil cults” that promote anti-totalitarian thinking. It is more about “anti-totalitarian thinking” than “evil cults.”

7. Rumors that disrupt social order or undermine social stability.

This is the “pocket crime,” a vaguely defined offences that can cover anything, and the government holds the authority to interpret what is a “rumor” that “disrupts social order and undermines social stability.”

8. Vulgarity and pornography, information about gambling, murder or terrorism, or crime abetting.

Postings of violent clashes not covered by official media outlets can fall into this category.

9. Insults, defamation, or information that harms other people’s legitimate rights and interests.

This category will probably take care of netizens’ mocking of the fifty-centers, corrupt officials, untruthful media, or verified government social media accounts.

10. Threatening violence against others, or carrying out “human-flesh” searches.

This rule make grassroots anti-corruption activities impossible, thus helping protect corrupt or abusive local officials and the much despised fifty-centers.

11. Minors’ privacy information without written consent from their legal guardians.

This rule effectively neutralizes the once wildly popular campaign “Snap a Photo and Rescue a Kidnapped Child” that encourages citizens to take photos of homeless children and post them online.

12. Abusive language bad for social order and customs.

This can be another giant “pocket” to cover a wide range of the expressions, including heated debates that often lead to use of strong language.

13. Infringement of intellectual property rights.

Intellectual property rights should indeed be protected. Plagiarism is rife on Weibo, but “selective enforcement” is probably inevitable.

A MOF spokesman states, “In China internet is open….” but the comment section of the official post is closed.

14. Disseminating advertisements or other marketing information。

To market on Weibo, one is required to register and pay a membership fee. Advertisers who do not want to pay membership or were unwilling to provide their true identities have been using the comment section, and from now on, they will no longer be able to do so.

15. Using languages other than commonly used languages.

This rule targets postings that use a foreign language or words to issue sensitive information to avoid censorship.

16. Information unrelated to the original posts.

As many rights activists’ postings, and even accounts, are repeatedly censored, they resort to posting their complaints in the comment section of popular posts in order to attract attention to their cases. This rule is designed to eliminate this type of information.

17. Information that is unreadable or is written in a combination of characters and marks to circumvent censorship.

This rule targets netizens’ smart use of puns and other language innovations to dodge key words censorship.

18. Other information whose dissemination is prohibited by laws and regulations.

This will take care of anything that’s missed by the 17 rules above.

Lack of confidence in state-owned media had once made Weibo a main source of information for many Chinese. However, as online censorship has steadily intensified and netizens have been criminalized for online expression, the free flow of information has been choked off, driving away a great number of users who are on Weibo for real news and information but can’t get it anymore. These 18 pledges will further render ineffective netizens’ battle-tested self-defense skills against censors, making online dissemination dangerous. Weibo is dying of suffocation, as the government is determined to occupy and control it totally, leaving no stone unturned.


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## Costas (Feb 25, 2015)

The characteristics and trends of historical writing in the People's Republic of China since 1978 (Περιοδικό *Ιστορείν*)


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## Marinos (Feb 25, 2015)

Α, πολύ ενδιαφέρον, ιδιαίτερα το τελευταίο κομμάτι... 謝謝 !


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## Costas (Feb 25, 2015)

不谢！。。。。


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## Costas (Mar 7, 2015)

Sex Expert's Secret Is Out, and China's Open to It
ANDREW JACOBS / ΝΥΤ
After a blogger accused her of being a closeted lesbian, Li Yinhe, an advocate of freewheeling sexuality in China, announced that her partner of 17 years is a transgender man.


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## Costas (Mar 8, 2015)

Οι κονκάρδες του Μάο. Εργασία για μάστερ και λινκ προς μια διδακτορική και προς ένα σχετικό βιβλίο.


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## Costas (Mar 8, 2015)

Και ένα για την εικαστική προσέγγιση της Ημέρας της Γυναίκας (πέρα από τις συλλήψεις ακτιβιστριών, βεβαίως βεβαίως).

Το πιο πολυδιαβασμένο βιβλίο του πιο πετυχημένου συγγραφέα επιστημονικής φαντασίας της Κίνας.


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## Costas (Mar 14, 2015)

Πριν από κάμποσο καιρό είχαμε μάθει εδώ ότι απαγορεύεται στον Δαλάι Λάμα να μετενσαρκωθεί σε κάποιον που δεν θα έχει την έγκριση της ΛΔΚ. Τώρα μαθαίνουμε ότι του απαγορεύεται να *μην* μετενσαρκωθεί! (ΝΥΤ)

Chinese Communist Party leaders are afraid that the Dalai Lama will not have an afterlife. Worried enough that this week, officials repeatedly warned that he must reincarnate, and on their terms. 

Officials have amplified their argument that the Communist government is the proper guardian of the Dalai Lama’s succession through an intricate process of reincarnation that has involved lamas, or senior monks, visiting a sacred lake and divining dreams.

Party functionaries were incensed by the exiled Dalai Lama’s recent speculation that he might end his spiritual lineage and not reincarnate. That would confound the Chinese government’s plans to engineer a succession that would produce a putative 15th Dalai Lama who accepts China’s presence and policies in Tibet.

“Decision-making power over the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama, and over the end or survival of this lineage, resides in the central government of China,” said Mr. Zhu, formerly a deputy head of the United Front Department of the Communist Party, which oversees dealings with religious and other nonparty groups. He now leads the ethnic and religious affairs committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, an advisory body that meets at the same time as the Legislature, or National People’s Congress.

Mr. Zhu accused the Dalai Lama of trampling on sacred traditions.

“In religious terms, this is a betrayal of the succession of Dalai Lamas in Tibetan Buddhism,” he said.

“The 14th Dalai Lama has taken an extremely frivolous and disrespectful attitude toward this issue,” Mr. Zhu continued. “Where in the world is there anyone else who takes such a frivolous attitude toward his own succession?”

The idea of Communist Party officials defending the precepts of reincarnation and hurling accusations of heresy at the Dalai Lama might have Marx turning in his grave. The party is committed to atheism in its ranks, though it accepts religious belief in the public. And President Xi Jinping has declared his fealty to Marxist-Leninist dialectical materialism.
(...)
“It’s like Fidel Castro saying, ‘I will select the next pope and all the Catholics should follow.’ That is ridiculous,” Mr. Sangay told Reuters on Tuesday. “It’s none of Padma Choling or any of the Communist Party’s business, mainly because Communism believes in atheism and religion being poisonous.”

After the 10th Panchen Lama died in 1989, the Dalai Lama confirmed a boy in Tibet as the next reincarnation in 1995. But the Chinese government hid away that boy and his parents and installed its own choice as the Panchen Lama. The Dalai Lama has indicated that he does not want to experience the same fate.

“Whether the institution of the Dalai Lama should continue or not is up to the Tibetan people,” the Dalai Lama said in an interview with the BBC in December. “There is no guarantee that some stupid Dalai Lama won’t come next, who will disgrace himself or herself. That would be very sad. So, much better that a centuries-old tradition should cease at the time of a quite popular Dalai Lama.”

“The person selected by the Chinese government is just as much a victim of the situation as anyone, so there’s nothing personal held against that person,” she said. “Communism, in theory, is atheist, so we’re just like, ‘This is too much.’ ”

Tibetans, however, remain convinced that the Dalai Lama will ultimately continue his lineage of leading monks of the Gelugpa school of Tibetan Buddhism, a succession that dates from the 14th century, Mr. Barnett said. The Dalai Lama’s warnings on succession, he said, are best understood as a way of encouraging Tibetans to focus on the issue and the options.

“The Tibetan people would never have faith in a so-called reincarnation appointed by the Chinese government,” Tsering Woeser, a Tibetan author based in Beijing who is critical of Beijing’s policies in her homeland, said in an online interview. “But I believe that the Dalai Lama will reincarnate.”


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## Costas (Mar 14, 2015)

Inside Taiwan's Sunflower Movement: Twenty-Four Days in a Student-Occupied Parliament, and the Future of the Region
Ian Rowen / The Journal of Asian Studies
Ian Rowen ([email protected]) is PhD Candidate in Geography at the University of Colorado, Boulder.


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## Costas (Apr 2, 2015)

Australia to join China-led bank despite US opposition (FT)
Hugh White, professor of strategic studies at Australian National University, said the government’s shift was significant and it was now very likely Australia would become a full member. “This marks a very sobering moment for Australia as until now we have subcontracted to the US our policy in relation to how to respond to China’s rise,” he said. “This gives real for pause for thought in how Australia positions itself for the future.”

UK move to join China-led bank a surprise even to Beijing (FT)
The announcement by George Osborne, UK chancellor, on March 12 that Britain would join China’s answer to the World Bank — a move in defiance of US pressure and advice from its own diplomats — was not just a surprise to allies in Europe and Washington. It also caught Beijing unawares. The UK Treasury had told Chinese officials it would not announce its application to join until March 17. But once other European countries got wind of Britain’s plan to join the nascent Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), the ensuing scramble to follow suit convinced London to move the announcement forward five days.

Major publisher retracts 43 scientific papers amid wider fake peer-review scandal (Washington Post)
A major publisher of scholarly medical and science articles has retracted 43 papers because of “fabricated” peer reviews amid signs of a broader fake peer review racket affecting many more publications. The publisher is BioMed Central, based in the United Kingdom, which puts out 277 peer-reviewed journals.

Όχι, δυστυχώς δεν πρόκειται για το εξαφανισμένο δελφίνι του Γιανγκτσέ...
China launches relocation of near-extinct finless porpoises - Xinhua 
There are only around 1,000 finless porpoises, a dolphin-like freshwater mammal with iconic "grins" on the face, in the Yangtze River and two lakes that are linked to the busy waterway. On Friday, eight porpoises from Poyang Lake in Jiangxi Province were placed in metal containers filled with water and took bus tours to two reserves in Hubei Province. The relocation project was launched by the Ministry of Agriculture, Ministry of Environmental Protection, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and three provincial governments.

Νέο βιβλίο από τον Yu Hua (Γυ Χουά)
‘The Seventh Day,’ by Yu Hua - NYTimes
In Yu Hua’s surreal, mordant novel “The Seventh Day,” the victims of China’s ­explosively expanding market economy include the still conscious, still suffering, still impoverished dead. They can’t afford burial plots. They’ve been separated from their families and uprooted from their ­ancestral homes. Unable to be mourned in the proper Chinese way, they’re fated to roam a “hazy, indistinct city” where snow swirls around their legs and they have the opportunity to reflect upon their lives and the circumstances of their deaths. The limping shades may then encounter the dead former friends and loved ones who also inhabit this characteristically ­Chinese mega-necropolis.

China’s Fear of Women With Pamphlets - NYTimes Editorial 
President Xi should see that there is no place for such government thuggery in his campaign to modernize China. He has the chance to build a legacy embracing the advancement of human rights. Instead, he appears to be succumbing to the history of Communist Party leaders who fear citizens’ protests as a prelude to subversion. The Yirenping women stand as a noble opportunity for China, not a threat.

Chinese court jails Uygur for 6 years for growing beard (AFP - SCMP)
A court in China’s mainly Muslim Xinjiang region has sentenced a man to six years in prison for “provoking trouble” and growing a beard, a practise discouraged by local authorities, a newspaper reported Sunday. The court in the desert oasis city of Kashgar sentenced the 38-year-old Uygur to six years, while his wife was given a two-year sentence, according to the China Youth Daily.


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## Costas (Apr 2, 2015)

Πέτρινα Χρόνια στην κομουνιστική διχτατορία της Κίνας, διηγημένα από τη σύζυγο ενός μόνιμου τρόφιμου των φυλακών της.
Always Parting: My Life with Liu Xianbin
—- Dedicated to Wives of Dissidents
By Chen Mingxian, published: March 29, 2015 (China Change)


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## Costas (Apr 2, 2015)

Supporters of Detained Feminists in China Petition for Their Release
Didi Kirsten Tatlow / Sinosphere, NYT

The supporters in China of five feminists who were detained in early March are continuing to agitate on their behalf, despite intimidation and the censorship of online discussion by the authorities.

On Tuesday, the feminists’ supporters mailed a petition that they said more than 1,100 people had signed — including men and women, students and employees — to public security and other state offices, calling for the women’s release. The petition also demanded that the authorities carry on the work for which the women were detained by issuing warnings against sexual harassment in public transport. The five women — Li Tingting, Wang Man, Wei Tingting, Wu Rongrong and Zheng Churan — were taken into custody on March 6 and 7 as they were preparing to mark International Women’s Day on March 8 by distributing stickers and leaflets protesting molestation in buses and subways.

The petition also says the police action was “illegal in multiple ways.” A version of the petition seen online before the link went dead warned that the women’s detentions harm the “interests of the state,” especially in a year when China wants to be part of celebrations marking the 20th anniversary of the United Nations’ Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing in 1995. At that event, a landmark declaration said that “women’s rights are human rights,” helping ignite a new women’s movement in China, where gender equality is guaranteed by the Constitution.

The petition was sent to the Haidian District Public Security Bureau and to the Haidian District Detention Center in Beijing, where the women are being held, as well as to district and municipal prosecutors’ offices and the All-China Women’s Federation, the state women’s organization.

“It was put out by citizens and friends,” said the lawyer for Ms. Wei, Wang Qiushi, “because a lot of people really care.” He added that he was not directly involved in the action. An organizer of the petition asked not to be identified, citing fear of reprisals.

Several supporters of the women have reported official pressure to desist. Some university students who joined earlier protests against the detentions said they were warned that their actions could affect their prospects for further education and jobs. And about 10 prominent feminists have left their residences in major cities such as Beijing for smaller towns or for friends’ or relatives’ homes.

“Normal life and new projects are on hold,” one of them, Zhao Sile, said in a message from her hideaway in the south of China, as it was too risky to continue campaigning for now. “We’re still doing bits and pieces, but most everything has stopped.”

Mr. Wang, the lawyer, added that it would become clear this coming weekend — when the women will have spent 30 days in detention — whether they were to be formally charged. They were detained on suspicion of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” a criminal offense in China.

“If they’re not out this weekend, then it’s because the police are recommending to the prosecutors that they be charged,” Mr. Wang said. “And if it goes to 37 days in detention, then that means the prosecutors have agreed. This is now the really important period coming up.”

The petition says the police have told Ms. Zheng that she will face criminal charges, though they have not yet presented any supporting evidence. Her family only recently received a formal notice from the police that she had been taken into investigative detention, it says. The families of the four other women, the petition says, have not yet been officially notified. Lawyers for the women say they have been maltreated in jail and subjected to lengthy interrogations.

“We have no indications yet how this is going to go,” Mr. Wang said. “But we’re really hoping they come out at the weekend. Otherwise it’s looking bad.”

The women are core members of a small but growing feminist movement in China that is benefiting from the country’s demographic changes: After decades of one-child families in urban areas, many young women who have grown up without having to defer to brothers have high expectations for their lives and react negatively to traditional gender prejudice. The detentions of the five women, in a coordinated sweep in three Chinese cities, set off an outcry in China and abroad.

In a sign of how intently the authorities are monitoring the women’s supporters, online links to the petition were shut down almost as quickly as they popped up on Wednesday. At the time of writing, only one link to the petition could be found, on Sina Weibo, posted by the “AntiPETD Feminist PhD Group.” However, the petition was being passed around by private email and in encrypted social media messaging systems.


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## Costas (Apr 2, 2015)

Άρθρο της Yaxue Cao (China Change) για το κινέζικο περιβαλλοντικό ντοκιμαντέρ Under the Dome

Under the China Dome – A Reality Check
_China’s left foot wants to go north, and China’s right foot wants to go south. Both feet have the same goal, and, that is, to maintain the one-party rule._

When I first watched Chai Jing’s Under the Dome a week ago, my response was like everyone else’s: “Bravo!” In early 2013, shortly after the prolonged smog that cloaked much of China which Chai Jing mentioned at the beginning of her film, political science professor Wu Qiang at Tsinghua University wrote an article titled Amidst the Smog, I Hear the Bugle Call for a National Environmental Movement and China Change translated it. So, watching the film, my mind jumped, “the Bugle Call!”

But instantly, I had other thoughts, too, just like many others did: without the government’s acquiescence or even assistance, a private citizen, even a celebrity citizen, could not have completed the investigation in which she was able to interview government officials of various positions, make inquiries with the National People’s Congress (NPC), and follow the police during their enforcement tours. In China, the government controls who can, and who cannot, expose its failings, what can and cannot be exposed. And without an order from some office, it’s practically impossible to premier the film on the People’s Daily website and disseminate it on all internet portals under the 24/7 watch of the censors.

Regardless, I think the making and dissemination of the film is a landmark event. I agree with Ian Johnson’s assessment that the film is “the final proof that the Party is serious about the issue,” but the party has other determinations too. The film galvanized public opinion and consolidated its awareness to an unprecedented level. It peeled apart the multi-faceted causes of pollution. It is a mobilization of the public, and it sets expectations for a war against environmental disasters. The film works on many layers of the public psyche, and not all of them are welcomed by the government. This probably explains why it was spectacularly promoted and then shut down.

(....)


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## Costas (Apr 4, 2015)

Μέρες που είναι, ας δούμε μια περσινή κατάληψη Βουλής που πολύ μου άρεσε, μέσα από την ακόλουθη εξαιρετικής ποιότητας μελέτη, από έναν αυτόπτη μάρτυρα:

Inside Taiwan's Sunflower Movement: Twenty-Four Days in a Student-Occupied Parliament, and the Future of the Region
Ian Rowen (PhD Candidate in Geography at the University of Colorado, Boulder) / The Journal of Asian Studies

“Say goodbye to Taiwan,” wrote political scientist John Mearsheimer in a widely read article in the March-April 2014 issue of The National Interest. Threatened by China's rising economic might and abandoned by a weakening United States, one of Asia's most vibrant democracies was facing, in his “realist” analysis, an almost inevitable annexation via economic if not military force. “Time,” he wrote, “is running out for the little island coveted by its gigantic, growing neighbor.” But only days after publication, on March 18, activists and armchair analysts alike said hello to a new reality.

That evening, the assembly hall of Taiwan's Legislative Yuan was stormed by a motley crew led by students from the “Black Island Nation Youth,” a loosely organized student political action committee formed the previous year. The several hundred occupiers repelled police efforts to eject them, escorted out the few officers on duty, and barricaded the doors with seats tied together with rope. None of them expected that the occupation, later known as the 318 or Sunflower Movement, would last twenty-four days, spawn the biggest pro-democracy protest rally in the island's history, reframe popular discourse about Taiwan's political and social trajectory, precipitate the midterm electoral defeat of the ruling party, and prefigure unprecedented protest in nearby Hong Kong.

(...)


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## Costas (Apr 4, 2015)

Η επιβολή της ιστορικής αμνησίας από τον (κομουνιστικό, εν προκειμένω) ολοκληρωτισμό. Η κατάσταση όπως ήταν το 1990:

The Chinese Amnesia
Fang Lizhi, translated by Perry Link
NYRB September 27, 1990 Issue

_The following was written while Fang Lizhi was staying in the American Embassy in Beijing, before his release last June._

In November 1989, during the fifth month of my refuge inside the American Embassy in Beijing, I received two letters from New York, one from the president of a group called Human Rights in China, and one from a friend. Both letters asked me to contribute my calligraphy to the title page of a book called Children of the Dragon1 that the two were currently editing. At first I was inclined not to do it. For one, I couldn’t find a writing brush or Chinese ink slab in the embassy. All I had was a Chinese typewriter, hardly appropriate for the kind of calligraphy that was needed. But second, I wasn’t very fond of the four words “Children of the Dragon.” To symbolize the Chinese people by a dragon, a creature that does not exist, may seem to imply that the Chinese people are unique in kind. This runs counter to my fundamental belief that human nature is universal and admits no distinctions of race.

Still, because I was entirely in agreement with the spirit and content of the book that the editors were planning, I eventually found a way to do the calligraphy. Sometimes book titles are only convenient tags, I thought; there was no need to get overly scrupulous about it. Now that the book is published, I am delighted that it carries my four-word contribution.

As a four-word contributor I am technically one of the authors of Children of the Dragon. Authors of course wish that their books will circulate widely. But I wish to show, in the remainder of this essay, why I will be even happier if the circulation is only modest.

There seems to be no accurate count of all the books that have appeared about the Tiananmen events of the spring of 1989. But certainly they have been many. A friend at Columbia University recently wrote me that she and one of her Chinese colleagues, both of whom were eyewitnesses at Tiananmen, had originally planned to write a book about it. But publishers told them that so many Tiananmen books were already available that the market had become “saturated.” The two reluctantly dropped their plan. It seems that a new Tiananmen book, for now, can have only a modest circulation.

In my view, a large but “saturated” market is itself one of the most important consequences to emerge from the events at Tiananmen. It signals the failure of the “Technique of Forgetting History,” which has been an important device of rule by the Chinese Communists. I have lived under the Chinese Communist regime for four decades, and have had many opportunities to observe this technique at work. Its aim is to force the whole of society to forget its history, and especially the true history of the Chinese Communist party itself.

In 1957 Mao Zedong launched an “Anti-Rightist Movement” to purge intellectuals, and 500,000 people were persecuted. Some were killed, some killed themselves, and some were imprisoned or sent for “labor reform.” The lightest punishment was to be labeled a “Rightist.” This was called “wearing a cap” and meant that one had to bear a powerful stigma. I had just graduated from college that year, and also in that year was purged for the first time.

After the 1957 Anti-Rightist purge, what worried me most was not that I had been punished, or that free thought had been curtailed. At that time I was still a believer, or semibeliever, in Marxism, and felt that the criticism of free thought, including my own free thought, was not entirely unreasonable. But what worried me, what I just couldn’t figure out, was why the Communist party of China would want to use such cruel methods against intellectuals who showed just a tiny bit (and some not even that) of independent thought. I had always assumed that the relationship between the Communist party and intellectuals, including intellectuals who had some independent views, was one of friendship—or at least not one of enmity.

Later I discovered that this worry of mine seemed ridiculous to teachers and friends who were ten or twenty years older than I. They laughed at my ignorance of history. They told me how, as early as 1942, before the Party had wrested control of the whole country, the same cruel methods against intellectuals were already being used at the Communist base in Yan’an. In college I had taken courses in Communist party history, and of course knew that in 1942 at Yan’an there had been a “rectification” movement aimed at “liberalism,” “individualism,” and other non-Marxist thought. But it was indeed true that I had had no idea that the methods of that “rectification” included “criticism and struggle”—which meant in practice forcing people to commit suicide, and even execution by beheading. People who had experienced the Yan’an “rectification” paled at the very mention of it. But fifteen years later my generation was completely ignorant of it. We deserved the ridicule we received.

After another thirteen years, in 1970, it became our turn to laugh at a younger generation. This was in the middle stage of the Cultural Revolution that took place between 1966 and 1976. In the early stage of the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong had used university students, many of whom supported him fanatically, to bring down his political opponents. But in the early 1970s these same students became the targets of attack. In 1970 all the students and teachers in the physics department of the Chinese University of Science and Technology were sent to a coal mine in Huainan, Anhui Province, for “reeducation.” I was a lecturer in physics at the time. The movement to “criticize and struggle” against the students’ “counterrevolutionary words and deeds” reached its most intense point during the summer. Some students were “struggled”; others were locked up “for investigation”; a good number could not endure the torment of the vile political atmosphere and fell ill. One of my assignments was to pull a plank-cart (like a horse cart, but pulled by a human being) to transport the ill students. Of the group of forty-some students working in the same mine as I did, two were driven to suicide—one by jumping off a building, the other by lying in front of a train.

Most of these students, as innocent as I had been in 1957, never imagined that the Communist government could be so cruel in its treatment of students who had followed them so loyally. Later one of the students, who became my co-worker in astrophysical research (and who is now in the US), confided to me that he had had no knowledge whatever of the true history of the Anti-Rightist Movement. It was not until he was himself detained and interrogated that he slowly began to appreciate why some of the older people he knew lived in such fear of the phrase Anti-Rightist. The whole story of the main actors and issues of the Anti-Rightist Movement had, for this generation, become a huge blank.

This was all repeated again in 1989. According to one incomplete survey of students who participated in the Tiananmen democracy movement, more than half of them had no precise knowledge of what happened in the spring of 1979 when young activists posted independent views on the Democracy Wall in Beijing and were soon arrested for doing so. They did not know about Deng Xiaoping’s persecution of the participants in the Democracy Wall Movement, or about “the Fifth Modernization,”2 or that Wei Jingsheng, one of the most outspoken of the activists, was still serving time for what he did. Events of a mere ten years earlier, for this new generation, were already unknown history.

In this manner, about once each decade, the true face of history is thoroughly erased from the memory of Chinese society. This is the objective of the Chinese Communist policy of “Forgetting History.” In an effort to coerce all of society into a continuing forgetfulness, the policy requires that any detail of history that is not in the interests of the Chinese Communists cannot be expressed in any speech, book, document, or other medium.

The year 1987 was the thirtieth anniversary of the Anti-Rightist Movement. In November 1986 Xu Liangying, Liu Binyan,3 and I made plans for a scholarly conference that looked back on the Anti-Rightist Movement from a perspective of thirty years. Our primary aim was to establish a record of the true history of this period. Even though the movement had brought suffering to half a million people (the number persecuted to death was far greater than the number killed in the June 4 massacre), still we looked in vain for any openly published materials on the history of the movement. The only records of the movement were inside the memories of those fortunate enough to have survived it. With the passage of time, those fortunate survivors were themselves becoming fewer and fewer, and for the younger generation the impression of the Anti-Rightist Movement was growing fainter and fainter. We wished to create a record of the movement before those who could supply oral accounts disappeared.

Our plan was promptly suppressed by the authorities. In mid-December 1986, we sent out the first of our announcements of a “Scholarly Conference on the Thirtieth Anniversary of the Anti-Rightist Rectification.” The response was quick. Within days some people sent us papers, while others expressed their support by sending money. But the authorities acted just as quickly. Xu Liangying and Liu Binyan were subjected to tremendous pressure (I was spared, since I was not in Beijing at the time). After two weeks there was no alternative except to announce that the conference could not be held. This showed that, even for events that had taken place thirty years earlier, the Communist authorities remained unwilling to allow the slightest opening for free discussion, and would permit only a thorough forgetfulness. Thus it remains the case today that there is no publication dealing in depth with the Anti-Rightist Movement of 1957 to be found on the open book market in China.

Regrettably, Western literature on China, so far as I know, also seems to lack such a book. Much of the history of Chinese Communism is unknown to the world, or has been forgotten. If, inside China, the whole of society has been coerced into forgetfulness by the authorities, in the West the act of forgetting can be observed in the work of a number of influential writers who have consciously ignored history and have willingly complied with the “standarized public opinion” of the Communists’ censorial system.

The work of the late Edgar Snow provides one of the most telling examples of this tendency. Snow lived many years in China; we must assume that he understood its society. And yet, in his reports on China after the Communists took power, he strictly observed the regime’s propaganda requirements—including the forgetting of history. In Red China Today he had this to say about China in the early 1960s:

I diligently searched, without success, for starving people or beggars to photograph. Nor did anyone else succeed…. I must assert that I saw no starving people in China, nothing that looked like old-time famine, [and] that I do not believe that there is famine in China at this writing.4

The facts, which even the Chinese Communists do not dare to deny publicly, are that the early 1960s saw one of the greatest famines in more than two thousand years of recorded Chinese history. In the three years between 1960 and 1962 approximately twenty-five million people in China died of hunger. As for beggars, not only did they exist, they even had a kind of “culture,” with communist characteristics. In 1973 in Anhui I listened to a report by the “advanced” Party secretary of a peasant village. One of his main “advanced” experiences was to organize his villagers into a beggars’ brigade to go begging through the neighboring countryside.

Snow’s tomb is located on a quiet and secluded little hillock on the campus of Beijing University. He was respected in China during his lifetime; no one doubted the sincerity of his love for China and the Chinese people. But his writings have not received similar respect. His books have adopted too much of the viewpoint of his old friend Mao Zedong, which is to say the viewpoint of official Communist propaganda. The works of China experts such as Snow have served, in fact, as a “Special Propaganda Department” for the Communists. They have helped the Communists’ “Technique of Forgetting History” to become a completed circle, continuous both inside and outside China.

This foreign aid has helped the Chinese Communists, over a long period of time, to carry on their activities beyond the reach of world opinion and exempt from effective scrutiny. The Communists’ nefarious record of human rights violations is not only banned from memory and discussion inside China, but has also been largely overlooked by the rest of the world, which never condemned its repression with the urgency and rigor that would have been appropriate.

The events in Tiananmen Square were the first exception to this pattern—the first time that Chinese Communist brutality was thoroughly recorded and reported, and the first time that virtually the whole world was willing to censure it.

Even though, inside China, the Communists are still doing all they possibly can to press ahead with their “Technique of Forgetting,” their “Special Propaganda Department” no longer exists. The position of the world’s opinion makers, and especially of the various reporters and observers inside China, has changed as well. In the early 1960s Edgar Snow was invited to stand next to Mao Zedong on top of the wall at Tiananmen and take part in the grand pomp and ceremony. By 1990, the lot of reporters had come to include beatings by troops at the base of that same wall. This has been one of the extremely significant changes occasioned by the Tiananmen events.

Hence, the “saturation of the market” by books about Tiananmen represents an important fact: while international concern about the regime’s repression may have to some extent faded, no longer will the Chinese Communists be able to hide beyond the reach of world opinion. Facts will no longer be so easy to cover up, and the real history of last year’s events cannot possibly be forgotten. This is an indispensable step in China’s joining the world and moving toward progress.

_—translated by Perry Link_

1 Human Rights in China, editor, Children of the Dragon (Collier, 1990).
2 Deng Xiaoping had advocated “Four Modernizations”: of the economy, the military, education, and science and technology. In a famous essay, the Democracy Wall activist Wei Jingsheng advocated that politics be the “Fifth Modernization,” meaning democracy.
3 Xu Liangying, a scientist, and Liu Binyan, a journalist, were both victims of the Anti-Rightist Movement and, in the 1980s, widely respected intellectual leaders in China. See Liu Binyan’s autobiography, A Higher Kind of Loyalty (Pantheon, 1990).
4 Edgar Snow, The Other Side of the River: Red China Today (Random House, 1961), p. 619.


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## Costas (Apr 4, 2015)

Ιστορική αμνησία σε σχέση με την Καμπότζη των Κόκκινων Χμερ:

China Is Urged to Confront Its Own History
Dan Levin / ΝΥΤ

The tour guide outside the bloodstained classrooms of the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, the high school in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh transformed into a prison and torture center by the Khmer Rouge, paused to ask whether any tourists in the group were from China. Visibly relieved when no hands were raised, he went on to describe the enabling role that Beijing played in the Khmer Rouge’s murderous rampage that claimed the lives of an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians beginning in 1975.

Later, he explained why he asked whether there were Chinese among his audience. “They get very angry when I say it was because of China that Pol Pot was able to kill so many people,” he said with evident frustration. “They claim it’s not true, and then say ‘We are friends now. Do not talk about the past.’”

As China prepares to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II with a military parade in Beijing in September, the state news media has been hammering away at a central theme underpinning the government’s narrative about the suffering China endured under Japanese occupation: Tokyo must “face history,” goes the storyline and reaffirm its admitted wrongdoings. But China’s insistence that Japan face history is raising uncomfortable questions about Beijing’s own practice of suppressing historical truths about trespasses domestic and abroad.

Last week, People’s Daily, the Communist Party mouthpiece, published a series of articles that accused the Japanese government of “whitewashing its wartime past” and warning that right-wing nationalists were plotting to return the country to its militaristic ways, potentially jeopardizing regional stability.

Premier Li Keqiang of China raised the issue during a televised news conference this month. “For leaders of a country, while inheriting the historical achievements made by their predecessors, they also need to shoulder the historical responsibilities for crimes committed by past generations,” he said.

Pivoting off such statements, a number of independent Chinese historians have tried to highlight the Communist Party’s role in the deaths of tens of millions during man-made famines and the political terror that marked its first decades in power — episodes that are erased from the nation’s official history.

“The Chinese government propagandizes the parts which it finds useful while ignoring aspects that could draw criticism,” said Zhang Lifan, a prominent historian who has sought to illuminate the party’s selective approach to its history, which is enforced through media censorship and book-publishing bans.

In recent months, the Japanese, too, have been calling on China to acknowledge its role in some of the greatest atrocities of the 20th century.

Writing for the Japanese website JBpress, Kuni Miyake, a retired Japanese diplomat, castigated the Chinese government for mocking “the global standard of intellectual fairness” by refusing to accept accountability for the Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedong’s failed industrialization effort during the 1950s that some historians say led to the death of 45 million people by famine and other causes, as well as the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution that killed thousands and traumatized a generation.

“If China asks others not to whitewash the history of 80 years ago, Beijing should be able to also face the modern history of China in the 1950s, ’60s, ’70s and, of course, in 1989,” Mr. Miyake wrote, the last date a reference to the year Chinese troops gunned down unarmed civilians during the protests at Tiananmen Square. “So far, there are no history museums in China that face such history.”

In recent months, Beijing has repeatedly expressed consternation with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan, a conservative who has sought to play down his country’s wartime atrocities in Asia while denying that thousands of “comfort” women and girls were forced into sexual slavery for Japanese soldiers.

Yet the Chinese government has been just as adamant in rejecting any parallels between Tokyo’s revisionist tendencies and its own refusal to acknowledge the tragedies that scar the nation’s recent past. “They are like wind, horse and cow, completely unrelated,” the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs wrote in response to faxed questions.

But in Cambodia, a small band of historians has been clamoring for Beijing to acknowledge its role in one of the worst genocides in recent history.

In the 1970s, Mao wanted a client state in the developing world to match the Cold War influence of the United States and the Soviet Union. He found it in neighboring Cambodia. “To regard itself as rising power, China needed that type of accessory,” Andrew Mertha, author of “Brothers in Arms: China’s Aid to the Khmer Rouge, 1975-1979,” said in an interview.

According to Mr. Mertha, director of the China and Asia-Pacific Studies program at Cornell University, China provided at least 90 percent of the foreign aid given to the Khmer Rouge, from food and construction equipment to tanks, planes and artillery. Even as the government was massacring its own people, Chinese engineers and military advisers continued to train their Communist ally.

“Without China’s assistance, the Khmer Rouge regime would not have lasted a week,” he said.

In 2010, the Chinese ambassador to Cambodia, Zhang Jinfeng, offered a rare official acknowledgment of China’s support of the Khmer Rouge, but said that Beijing donated only “food, hoes and scythes.”

Citing records and testimony from former Khmer Rouge officials, Youk Chhang, a survivor of the genocide and executive director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia, disagreed. “Chinese advisers were there with the prison guards and all the way to the top leader,” Mr. Youk said. “China has never admitted or apologized for this.”

The Chinese government’s effort to shape the narrative about the nation’s past begins in schools. Four of the most widely used high-school history textbooks avoid any mention of the Khmer Rouge. They also omit China’s 1979 invasion of Vietnam, a monthlong war launched by Deng Xiaoping to punish the Vietnamese for toppling Pol Pot’s regime.

Unlike China’s battles against the Japanese, which often dominate prime-time television slots, the invasion of Vietnam gets scant screen time. The effort has been so successful that many university students in China have no idea that the war even took place.

The enforced historical amnesia about China’s invasion of Vietnam has come at a price. For years, thousands of the war’s veterans have complained of being denied benefits and adequate compensation for their role in the conflict. Many have been detained for protesting.

“I don’t think the government values us enough,” said Li Zizhong, 60, a veteran from the coastal city of Qingdao who has been petitioning the government for six years to increase his 350 renminbi (about $57) monthly subsidy. “Apart from that I have nothing.”

By contrast, Chinese textbooks go into great detail about the Korean War, officially known in China as “The War to Resist America and Aid Korea.” But Chinese textbooks ignore one pivotal detail of that conflict: that it started when North Korea invaded the South in June 1950. Instead, they state only that war “broke out.”

According to “War and Peace in the Twentieth Century,” a textbook published by the Chinese Ministry of Education, after United States troops “lit up the flames of war,” China was forced to secure the country’s “national safety and support the just cause of North Koreans which greatly enhanced the international status of China.”

Mr. Zhang, the historian, says the Communist Party’s refusal to permit an honest historical reckoning ultimately undermines China’s global standing.

“If China acknowledged its past one day and stopped hiding from history,” he said, “it would help on the world stage and win the party a lot more support from the Chinese people.”


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## Costas (Apr 7, 2015)

Taking Feminist Battle to China’s Streets, and Landing in Jail
ANDREW JACOBS / NYT (μέσω MCLC)

BEIJING — The young Chinese feminists shaved their heads to protest inequality in higher education and stormed men’s restrooms to highlight the indignities women face in their prolonged waits at public toilets.

To publicize domestic violence, two prominent activists, Li Tingting and Wei Tingting, put on white wedding gowns, splashed them with red paint and marched through one of the capital’s most popular tourist districts chanting, “Yes to love, no to violence.”

Media-savvy, fearless and well-connected to feminists outside China, the young activists over the last three years have taken their righteous indignation to the streets, pioneering a brand of guerrilla theater familiar in the West but largely unheard-of in this authoritarian nation.

Now five of them — core members of China’s new feminist movement — sit in jail, accused of provoking social instability. One of the women, Wu Rongrong, 30, an AIDS activist, is said to be ailing after the police withheld the medication she takes for hepatitis. Another, Wang Man, 33, a gender researcher, was said to have had a mild heart attack while in custody.

Lawyers for the detainees, who include Zheng Churan, 25, affectionately known as Big Rabbit, say the women have been subjected to near-constant interrogation.

The detentions took place early last month on the eve of International Women’s Day as the women planned a public awareness campaign about sexual harassment on public transportation.

Now, as security agents from Beijing fan out across the country hunting down the volunteers who took part in the women’s theatrical protests, many young feminists have gone into hiding. “We’re so afraid and confused,” said one of them, Xiao Meili, 26, who recently completed a 1,200-mile trek across China to draw attention to sexual violence. “We don’t understand what we did wrong to warrant such a ferocious backlash.”

Despite government efforts to keep reporting of the crackdown out of the domestic news media, the jailing of the five women has not gone unnoticed here. Word has spread across college campuses, and more than 1,100 people took the risky step last week of adding their names to a petitiondemanding the women’s release.

Outside China, campaigners have used Facebook and Twitter to publicize the detainees’ plight, and Western governments have been issuing statements to protest their incarceration.

“If China is committed to advancing the rights of women, then it should be working to address the issues raised by these women’s rights activists — not silencing them,” said Samantha Power, the American ambassador to the United Nations.

From Morocco to India to New York, supporters have been posting images of themselves wearing masks that bear the photos of the jailed women. Because two of the detainees are lesbian and another is bisexual, overseas gay rights organizations like All Out have jumped into the fray, collecting more than 85,000 signatures and popularizing the hashtag #freethefive on Twitter.

As international attention to the women’s case mounts, some rights advocates see echoes of the public relations maelstrom surrounding the female Russian dissident group, Pussy Riot, whose members were arrested in 2012 for their protests against President Vladimir V. Putin.

Sophie Richardson, the China director at Human Rights Watch, said the five jailed feminists have drawn far more international attention than the scores of Chinese activists who have been detained during the previous two years of an intensified government drive against political dissent.

“Many people find it mind-boggling that the government of the second-largest economy and the world’s largest standing army is afraid of a group of women trying to draw attention to sexual harassment,” she said. “The combination of power and paranoia on display is very telling.”

Analysts say the effort to quash China’s nascent feminist movement represents a dismal milestone in the Communist Party’s war on grass-roots activism, a campaign that has gained momentum since President Xi Jinping came to power in November 2012. Unlike the government critics and political reform advocates jailed in earlier sweeps, the five detained women confined their activities to matters like domestic violence and discrimination against people with H.I.V. — issues that the government claims to have also embraced.

But rights advocates say security officials were evidently alarmed by the women’s skillful use of social media to organize volunteers, their links to foreign organizations, and the inventive protests and flash mobs that often drew favorable coverage in the Chinese media.

In contrast to the state-affiliated feminists and academics who have long dominated China’s gender-equality landscape, experts say the young mavericks prompted a seismic shift in women’s activism that yielded measurable results, including a landmark bill on domestic violence that is being considered by the national legislature.

“They have been very successful in using performance to provoke social dialogue on gender issues,” said Zeng Jinyan, a blogger who studies Chinese feminist activism. “I think we can call them the first modern, independent, feminist, grass-roots actors in Chinese history.”

Soon after coming to power in 1949, Mao Zedong outlawed forced marriages, prostitution and foot binding, and he introduced a groundbreaking marriage law that gave women the right to file for divorce. Women were considered equal to men, but only as a collective force for economic production, Ms. Zeng said. But in recent decades, as market economics took hold in China, unapologetic male chauvinism re-emerged, and with it, traditional notions of a woman’s role in the family. Women’s incomes have been falling compared with those of their male counterparts in recent years; just over 2 percent of Chinese women hold managerial positions; and all but two of the 25 Politburo members are men.

Many of the young activists, born in the 1980s and the coddled and well-educated offspring of China’s one-child policy, discovered in college that the Communist Party dictums on gender equality had become little more than window dressing.

Raised in China’s rural south, Wei Tingting, 26, is typical of the new brand of socially conscious women who have challenged the status quo. Soon after gaining a spot at the prestigious Wuhan University, Ms. Wei was drawn to feminist provocateurs in the West; during her sophomore year, she staged a production of “The Vagina Monologues,” drawing the ire of some male students, according to friends.

In 2012, as she, Li Tingting and another woman prepared for a Valentine’s Day protest against domestic violence in Beijing, she described the childhood trauma of watching men pummel their wives in public — including her own father. “People thought that women deserved beating,” she said, according to a video made at the time. “The worst thing is people tolerate it and accept it as a natural part of life, but no one believes beating a man is O.K.”

As a project manager at the Beijing Gender Health Education Institute, Ms. Wei helped stage an annual AIDS Walk on the Great Wall, attended women’s conferences in India and South Korea, and started collecting footage for a documentary about bisexuality in China.

“She has so much passion and energy. You can find her at every event, whether it be about H.I.V., gender issues or bisexuality,” said Fan Popo, a filmmaker who made a movie about the staging of “The Vagina Monologues” and subsequently became Ms. Wei’s roommate after she moved to Beijing. “I would always joke that she has more film projects than me.”

In early March, Ms. Wei and the other detained women were preparing to stand outside subway stations and distribute stickers and leaflets to highlight the scourge of men who grope women on crowded trains and buses. But beginning on March 6, the police moved in, detaining nearly a dozen people in several cities. After a few days, all but Ms. Wei and the four others were released.

Lawyers for the women say the police have repeatedly flouted Chinese law. In addition to denying the women medication, the authorities failed to notify their families about the detentions, and in one instance, the police sat in on a meeting between Ms. Wei and her lawyer, Wang Qiushi.

“The interrogations have been exhausting,” Mr. Wang said by phone. “The police keep asking her the same questions over and over again and are pressuring her to sign a confession, which she refuses to do because she has not broken any law.”

The charge of “picking quarrels and provoking troubles” carries a maximum five-year sentence in China, although it can be extended to 10 years if a defendant is convicted of organizing multiple public disturbances.

Officials at the Haidian District detention center where most of the women are being held declined to comment.

In the meantime, friends, relatives and fellow feminists are reeling. If the women are not released this week, it is likely they will be tried and convicted.

Mr. Fan, Ms. Wei’s roommate, said none of the women ever imagined they could be jailed for their work. He said that Ms. Wei had been doing laundry on the day she was summoned by the police and had left a load of clothing in the washing machine. “Clearly she thought she would be returning home in a few hours,” he said.

_Mia Li and Patrick Zuo contributed research._


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## Costas (Apr 9, 2015)

Εγγειοβελτιωτικά έργα...Άραγε πόσα τέτοια θα 'χουν κάνει και οι Αμερικανοί αλλού, ε;

Piling Sand in a Disputed Sea, China Literally Gains Ground (μετά ωραίων δορυφορικών φωτογραφιών)
DAVID E. SANGER and RICK GLADSTONE, APRIL 8, 2015 (ΝΥΤ)
(...)
While other countries in Southeast Asia, like Malaysia and Vietnam, have used similar techniques to extend or enlarge territory, none have China’s dredging and construction power.
(...)


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## Costas (Apr 14, 2015)

Η σκατολογία δεν απαρέσκει στο κινέζικο χιούμορ (πβ. το πρώτο κεφάλαιο του Brothers, του Yu Hua). Εδώ, μαζί με άλλα ανέκδοτα, σχολιάζει τον "πόλεμο εναντίον της διαφθοράς".

Fun side of war on corruption
(Austin Ramzy / ΝΥΤ μέσω MCLC)
For officials under scrutiny, China’s corruption crackdown is no laughing matter. But for many others, it is.

President Xi Jinping’s aggressive effort to curb graft has inspired a wave of political jokes, most of which are generally supportive of the campaign and mock the unscrupulous officials targeted by investigators. Some hint at the shortfalls in the system that have allowed graft to thrive. Others paint the crackdown as a farce.

But the growing comedic collection suggests that the Chinese have realized that the crackdown is no passing fad, and that they might as well have some fun with it.

Even the Communist Party’s main anticorruption body, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, has in a roundabout way acknowledged the significance of graft-inspired humor, saying that such jokes indicate a dangerous gap between officialdom and the public.

Below are some of the corruption jokes traded online via Sina Weibo and Wexin. Where possible, a source is identified, although most jokes have unclear origins.

One example:

Surplus funds were left over after a project was completed, and the local standing committee met to discuss whether it should be used to renovate the elementary school or the prison. Everyone had a different opinion.

Finally, one old committee member set everyone straight: “In this life, will we have any more opportunities to attend elementary school?”

There was silence. Some people wiped sweat from their brows. Others drank tea.

Soon after, everyone reached an agreement: Fix up the prison.

Some jokes refer to the bleakest aspects of the corruption crackdown, such as the deaths of suspects under investigation. The following was written in the form of an emergency warning:

With the gradual increase in the number of officials jumping from buildings, objects occasionally fall from a height, causing great casualties among people and animals. Therefore, everyone is solemnly reminded that when you go outdoors, be vigilant and pay attention to these things:

1. When walking on the street, avoid party committee, government and administrative buildings.
2. Keep far away from all upscale guesthouses, hotels and buildings.
3. When you are walking on the street, don’t keep your head down looking at WeChat on your phone. Instead, concentrate on objects falling from the sky. (After all, these objects weigh far more than ordinary people.) If you are a little bit careless, who knows if a party secretary, governor or minister might come falling down on you?

Other jokes express misgivings with the system as a whole:

A few days ago, a group of former classmates got together. One of them was a low-level boss in an Internet-monitoring office. I asked him what his office did. He said it was responsible for finding people who picked quarrels online and were unhappy with the government.

Another classmate said to him, “You mean there are people who are satisfied with the government?” He said, “Yes, there are, but we don’t deal with them. They’re the responsibility of the Discipline Inspection Commission.”

Xu Caihou, a former People’s Liberation Army general who admitted to taking bribes and who died of cancer in March while under investigation, is the subject of several jokes:

Some people asked, “Who was behind Gen. Xu Caihou?”

General Xu replied: “It’s the people. All my power has been entrusted to me by the people. So the people should think things over. They’re really the ones who should apologize.”

The Chinese comedian Joe Wong posted on Sina Weibo a screenshot of a 2008 interview by the Xinhua news agency that quoted General Xu as saying: “Only a clean military can be a victorious military.”

Mr. Wong added his own commentary: “There are some spoofs you can only laugh at seven, eight years later.”

Some of the jokes are a bit vulgar:

At the end of a meeting, Wang Qishan [who heads the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection] said suddenly, “After today’s meeting, there are two people who will have to stay behind!”

He then took a sip of water, lowered his head and looked at a list of names. There was complete silence in the room, and gradually the smell of urine filled the air.

Wang spoke again: “These two people, one is an executive at a state-owned enterprise, the other is a government official.”

Then he stopped again. Gradually the stench in the room worsened.

Finally, he said slowly, one word at a time: “These two people are Xu Jianyi of China FAW Group and Qiu He of the Yunnan provincial government. Those two stay. Everyone else can leave.”

After they left, the room was a mess. Wang told his deputies: “Comrades, if I can trouble you. Check the waste matter on the floor, and match it with the seating chart.”

“Secretary Wang,” said a deputy, “there was one who seemed to have left quite a bit more, Liao Yongyuan of PetroChina.”

Wang lifted his hand: “Investigate him.”

Last year, an article in the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection’s newspaper analyzed the tradition of political jokes in the Soviet Union, saying they reflected how the Communist Party in that country had failed to protect the interests of the people. The article called on cadres not to fall into such a trap, and cited a joke to show that China’s Communists were not about to collapse as their Soviet brethren did:

A Ukrainian got a phone call from a K.G.B. officer, who asked, “Why do you get so many packages from Israel?”

The Ukrainian replied, “During World War II, I sheltered a Jew, and now he sends me food.”

The officer replied that a Soviet citizen should not do such a thing. “Have you thought about your future?”

“I have,” the Ukrainian replied. “Next time, I plan to shelter a Chinese.”

_Mia Li contributed research._


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## Zazula (Apr 14, 2015)

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/14/china-threatens-ngo-which-pushed-for-feminists-release:
China’s foreign ministry has threatened to punish a prominent non-governmental organisation that lobbied for the release of five women’s rights activists, saying the group must be held accountable for “breaking the law”.
Yirenping, an anti-discrimination NGO, has defended the rights of women and people with HIV, Hepatitis B and disabilities.
President Xi Jinping’s administration has detained hundreds of activists in the past two years, in what some rights groups say is the worst clampdown on dissent in two decades.

http://edition.cnn.com/2015/04/14/asia/china-feminists-release-jiang/:
The women are still considered suspects in an ongoing criminal investigation and may face charges in the future, Wu's lawyer Liang Xiaojun told CNN.
They will be under surveillance for a year with their movements and activities restricted, and police can summon them for questioning at any time, Liang added.


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## Costas (Apr 19, 2015)

The Wonderfully Elusive Chinese Novel
Perry Link / NYRB

The Plum in the Golden Vase or, Chin P’ing Mei, Vol. 5: The Dissolution
by an unknown author, translated from the Chinese by David Tod Roy
Princeton University Press, 556 pp., $39.95

In teaching Chinese-language courses to American students, which I have done about thirty times, perhaps the most anguishing question I get is “Professor Link, what is the Chinese word for ______?” I am always tempted to say the question makes no sense. Anyone who knows two languages moderately well knows that it is rare for words to match up perfectly, and for languages as far apart as Chinese and English, in which even grammatical categories are conceived differently, strict equivalence is not possible. Book is not shu, because shu, like all Chinese nouns, is conceived as an abstraction, more like “bookness,” and to say “a book” you have to say, “one volume of bookness.” Moreover shu, but not book, can mean “writing,” “letter,” or “calligraphy.” On the other hand you can “book a room” in English; you can’t shu one in Chinese.

I tell my students that there are only two kinds of words they can safely regard as equivalents: words for numbers (excepting integers under five, the words for which have too many other uses) and words that are invented expressly for the purpose of serving as equivalents, like xindiantu (heart-electric-chart) for “electrocardiogram.” I tell them their goal in Chinese class should be to set aside English and get started with thinking in Chinese.

This raises the question of what translation is. (...)

(...)

(...) Novels were not the primary language art in imperial China. Measured by volume, xi, translatable as “drama” or “opera,” would be in first place, and measured by beauty, calligraphy or poetry would be. Should we compare poetry across civilizations? If we do, classical Chinese poetry wins easily. The contest is almost unfair, because, as my students of Chinese language eventually come to see, the fundaments of language are different.

Indo-European languages, with their requirements that tense, number, gender, and part of speech be specified, and with the mandatory word inflections that the specifications entail, and with the extra syllables that the inflections add, just can’t achieve the same purity—a sense of terseness and expanse at the same time—that tenseless, numberless, voiceless, uninflected, and uninflectible Chinese characters can achieve. In a contest, one person has a butterfly net and the other a window screen. Emily Dickinson might have come to be known as the greatest poet in world history if she had written in classical Chinese. Should Westerners feel defensive that this was not the case? Far better just to inherit what we all have done, and leave it there.


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## Alexandra (Apr 19, 2015)

Καταπληκτικό. Μου δημιούργησε την επιθυμία να μάθω κινέζικα.


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## Costas (Apr 28, 2015)

Άλεξ, καλό κουράγιο!

Το παρακάτω θέμα νομίζω πως το έχω ξαναβάλει, αλλά το καλό πράμα πρέπει να διαφημίζεται: αυτές είναι κηδείες! όχι οι "κηδείες" οι δικές μας...

Funeral strippers (MCLC)
Taiwan's funeral strippers dance for a dead crowd (io9)


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## Zazula (Apr 28, 2015)

Costas said:


> Το παρακάτω θέμα νομίζω πως το έχω ξαναβάλει, αλλά το καλό πράμα πρέπει να διαφημίζεται: αυτές είναι κηδείες! όχι οι "κηδείες" οι δικές μας...
> Funeral strippers (MCLC)
> Taiwan's funeral strippers dance for a dead crowd (io9)


http://lexilogia.gr/forum/showthread.php?2693-Την-ίδια-ώρα-στην-Κίνα&p=196622&viewfull=1#post196622 :)


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## Costas (Apr 28, 2015)

Α, τελικά εσύ το 'χες βάλει; Πάντως, δεν έχεις παράπονο: το θυμόμουνα το θέμα!


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## nickel (Apr 28, 2015)

Δεν ξέρω, αλλά, για κάποιο λόγο, αν πίστευα στο υπερπέραν, θα προτιμούσα μια θρησκεία όπου το θέαμα θα σε περίμενε στο άλλο άκρο.


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## Costas (Apr 28, 2015)

Ώστε μουσουλμάνος, ε;


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## Costas (May 30, 2015)

New Etymological Dictionary of Chinese Characters (ongoing project)


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## Costas (Nov 23, 2015)

Grassroots Activist Wang Mo Tells Court: I Committed No Crime Trying to Subvert the Communist Regime
(China Change)


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## Costas (Dec 31, 2015)

Renowned Chinese writer's new book [=new translation] to remove off shelves
(China Daily)

The Chinese version of Rabindranath Tagore's Stray Birds translated by renowned Chinese writer Feng Tang was stripped off the shelves today following criticism over its "astray interpretations".

*The translated line that received most criticism was when "The world puts off its mask of vastness to its lover" was translated to "The world unzipped his pants in front of his lover".
*
Another criticized part lies in the word "hospitable" in the line "The great earth makes herself hospitable with the help of the grass". Feng translates this using the Chinese word "sao", which is closer to the English word "flirtatious".

(...)

Despite criticism, however, there are also those who favor Feng's translated work." Tagore is a poet, and so is Feng. A poet's view of another poet is surly different from that of a translator's. This is rather helpful in understanding poems," said a senior Chinese publisher who chose to remain anonymous in an interview with China Daily Website.

A Chinese sociologist and sexologist, Li Yinhe, also voiced support for Feng's poems. She wrote an article in her sina blog yesterday, saying that Feng's version of Stray Birds is the best Chinese translated version ever.

"If we compare Feng's version with that of Zheng's, it makes no effort to see that Feng's version is poem, but Zheng's merely interpretation of poem. Feng exceeds Zheng in terms of poetic quality, as he has brought out the beauty of poems, only in his way.

If there is a flaw in Feng's works, then, it is being too 'Feng'," Li said.


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## Costas (Dec 31, 2015)

Για τους εραστές της τυπογραφίας, μποναμάς:

The long, incredibly tortuous, and fascinating process of creating a Chinese font

Καλή Πρωτοχρονιά!


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## Costas (Jan 1, 2016)

Καλή σας χρονιά. Ήταν ο Τζόου Ενλάι ομοφυλόφιλος;

By MICHAEL FORSYTHE / ΝΥΤ

HONG KONG — He was a towering figure of the 20th century, instrumental in building the Chinese Communist Party from the battlefield to the halls of power. He worked alongside Mao Zedong for decades, and was revered for his rich intellect and even temperament.

And as the first premier of the People’s Republic of China, Zhou Enlai met with Henry A. Kissinger in Beijing in 1971 to pave the way for President Richard M. Nixon’s groundbreaking trip to China the next year, beginning a new era in global politics.

Now, a book being published this week offers a radical reinterpretation of Zhou’s life: He was probably gay.

That assertion is sure to be contentious in China, where homosexuality is not widely accepted and where many may view it as an attack on Zhou’s character. Indeed, the book is expected to be banned in mainland China, as are other unauthorized biographies of Zhou.

Tsoi Wing-Mui, the author of the book, “The Secret Emotional Life of Zhou Enlai,” writes that Zhou’s sexual orientation would explain several mysteries about his life, including his cool treatment of his wife at the time of their marriage and his careful relationship with Mao.

Ms. Tsoi, a journalist who was the editor of a liberal political magazine in Hong Kong, presents no proof that Zhou was gay. There are no lovers with tell-all stories, only clues from his diary entries and correspondence with his wife.

Ms. Tsoi said she wanted her interpretation to add to the understanding of an important historical figure, giving texture to his personality. “Before writing this book, I really didn’t have a good impression of Zhou Enlai,” she said in an interview. “But afterward, I have a lot of sympathy for him.”

She said one diary entry from when Zhou was a young man provided a clue to his yearnings.

In late 1918, Zhou, then 20, was living in Japan, where he planned to enroll in a university. Weeks earlier, he had left the northern Chinese port city of Tianjin. So had a young man two years his junior, Li Fujing, a classmate who had gone to study at the University of Hong Kong. Their separation proved wrenching for Zhou, as he noted in his diary.

“In these months, the moon or the morning breeze, the rain against my window, and flowers; all make me long for my family, and thinking of my brother Hui, I suffer terribly!” Zhou wrote, his Chinese characters rendered with bold and urgent brush strokes.

The relationship between the young Zhou and Mr. Li (“brother Hui”) was more than a close friendship, Ms. Tsoi writes; Zhou was in love with Mr. Li.

Viewing Zhou as gay raises questions of what direction his life, and China’s path, might have taken had same-sex relationships been accepted in Chinese society.

Zhou and Mr. Li stayed in touch and traveled to Britain in 1921 in hopes of going to a university there; Ms. Tsoi writes that they were living in London at the same time. Mr. Li was accepted to the University of Manchester, but Zhou was unable to afford the high cost of living in Britain. Despondent, he moved to France, Ms. Tsoi says.

There, Zhou received a stipend from the Soviet-funded Communist International and began his rapid ascent in the party’s ranks.

“We don’t know what happened to them when they were in Great Britain,” Bao Pu, the book’s publisher, said in an interview. “It’s impossible for them to be together, and they know it.”

Viewing Zhou as gay adds a new interpretation to a well-documented incident in 1925, when Zhou’s fiancée, Deng Yingchao, arrived in the southern city of Guangzhou. Zhou had proposed to her via postcard when he was in Europe, Ms. Tsoi writes. The couple had not seen each other in five years and had never been romantically involved.

Gao Wenqian, a former historian for the Communist Party and the author of the 2007 biography “Zhou Enlai: The Last Perfect Revolutionary,” which is banned in China, wrote that Zhou did not meet Ms. Deng when her boat arrived.

So she set out to find Zhou at the Guangdong General Workers’ Union.

“When he saw Deng enter the room, Zhou gave her a quick smile, but he continued his intense discussions, and, when the meeting ended, he got up and hustled out of the headquarters building without bothering to greet his bride-to-be,” Mr. Gao wrote.

Official party accounts interpreted Zhou’s less-than-warm greeting as a reflection of his total commitment to the Communist cause.

Far more consequential, yet also more tentative, is Ms. Tsoi’s interpretation of how Zhou’s sexuality may have influenced his relationship with Mao. Many historians, including Mr. Gao, believe he behaved in a more cautious manner than he could have.

Zhou, who outranked Mao in the Communist Party until the mid-1930s, failed to stop the rise of Mao’s cult of personality, which led to the disastrous Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966 and is widely seen to have ended only with Mao’s death in 1976, nine months after Zhou himself died. While Zhou is credited with saving many party cadres from the worst excesses of the marauding Red Guards, he was careful to stay loyal to Mao.

Sidney Rittenberg, 94, an American who joined the Chinese Communist Party, first met Zhou in 1946 at the party’s base in Yan’an, in northwestern China. In the 21 years that Mr. Rittenberg had contact with Zhou, he said, he never suspected that he was gay. But he said that if he had been and it had become known, Zhou would have been ruined.

Roderick MacFarquhar, a professor at Harvard who focuses on elite Chinese politics, said, “My reaction is that if it is true and that this was known to Mao, then the chairman had yet another way of threatening Zhou.”

Ms. Tsoi said Zhou might have been terrified that his sexual orientation would be revealed to the chairman. Mr. Rittenberg said he “would not only want to hide it, he would have to — if it came out, he would be ruined.”

Ms. Tsoi said homosexuality was seen as a sin against socialism. “They viewed it as a capitalist way of life,” she said.

While many top cadres cowered from Mao’s dictates, some did not. Zhou, as head of government, was in a position to curb Mao’s power.

“Why was he so afraid? Where did it come from?” Ms. Tsoi asked. “His original sin was his homosexuality.”

But Rebecca Karl, a professor at New York University who wrote a 2010 biography of Mao, said that China was hardly unique in its homophobia and that, until recently, exposing a leader anywhere as gay would have ruined his or her career. Ms. Karl said that the book, which she has not read, may only “provoke needless controversy about Zhou.”

“I think this kind of speculation is really not very interesting,” Ms. Karl said in an email. “Fluid sexualities were not unusual in China (or anywhere), and deep male-male or female-female friendships and passions were (are still) a norm.”

It may never be known whether Zhou’s relationship with Mr. Li was more than that of a close friend. Mr. Li died in 1960.

And Zhou himself may have sought to hide his most intimate feelings. He kept a diary, discovered in 1952, for only a short time. In his first entry, on Jan. 1, 1918, he took account of his life so far, his dreams and his shortcomings. Then he opened his heart.

“For the first time in my life I am immersed in this word ‘love,’ as to the heart of the passion. ...”

A bold, thick brush stroke of black ink blots out the rest of the sentence.


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## Costas (Jan 2, 2016)

Πρωτοχρονιάτικα μηνύματα από τους δικηγόρους των δικαιωμάτων του ανθρώπου και από τους ακτιβιστές του κόσμου της εργασίας (China Change)

The Day Will Break at the End of the Night
— New Year Greetings from the 300-member Chinese Human Rights Lawyers Group

‘In Winter-frozen Earth, Spring Starts to Quicken’
A 2016 New Year’s Message from China’s Labor Community


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## Costas (Jan 7, 2016)

The Zhaos (China Change) (περιλαμβ. κι ένα ωραίο ιδεόγραμμα)


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## Costas (Jan 11, 2016)

Επικίνδυνο επάγγελμα ο βιβλιοπώλης...

Hong Kong bookshops pull politically sensitive titles after publishers vanish
Suspected abduction of five booksellers prompts fears of mounting self-censorship in face of mainland crackdown on ‘salacious’ publications
(The Guardian)

Και το σχετικό ποιηματάκι: The Bookseller


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## Costas (Jan 14, 2016)

Urgent Action: Statement on the Detention of Peter Dahlin
By Chinese Urgent Action Working Group (中国维权紧急援助组)
(China Change)
Sometime after nine pm on 3 January 2016 a human rights professional, Mr Peter Dahlin, a Swedish citizen, disappeared on his way to the Beijing Capital Airport. He was scheduled to fly to Thailand via Hong Kong shortly after midnight. Peter’s girlfriend, a Chinese national, has also disappeared.

Peter Dahlin is a co-founder of the Chinese Urgent Action Working Group (China Action), an organization based in China working to promote the development of the rule of law and human rights through training and the support of public interest litigation.

According to Chinese authorities, Peter was detained on 4 January 2016 on suspicion of endangering state security. These charges are baseless.

Since 2009, China Action has been helping to advance the rule of law in China. It has organized training programs for human rights defenders to receive instruction from expert rights lawyers, focusing on matters of land rights or administrative law. It supports ‘barefoot’ lawyers who provide pro-bono legal aid to grassroots victims of rights violations, from demolition and eviction to arbitrary detention. China Action also releases practical guides on the Chinese legal system.

China Action is dedicated to promoting human rights within the existing legal framework of the People’s Republic of China and has only ever advocated non-violent, informed reliance on Chinese law. In spite of this, Peter has been arbitrarily detained on spurious accusations.

Despite constant requests by the Swedish Embassy, the Chinese authorities have denied direct contact with Peter and have not provided any communications from Peter to the embassy. The authorities have not provided any information regarding the exact nature of the charges. The denial of consular communication is a direct violation of Chinese law and the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. Furthermore, that the authorities have continued to conceal Peter’s whereabouts could amount to an enforced disappearance, a violation of international law.

Additionally, Peter suffers from Addison’s Disease, a rare defect of the adrenal gland, which is potentially life threatening unless properly medicated daily. The Chinese authorities have denied medical care to human rights defenders in detention in the past. That Chinese authorities have merely issued a verbal assurance that Peter is receiving his medicine while continuing to deny direct consular communication is appalling.

Peter’s detention comes amid a six-month long assault on the country’s human rights lawyers. Since 9 July 2015, over 300 lawyers, human rights defenders, and their family members have been harassed, detained or subjected to travel bans.

Peter’s supporters initially sought to pursue this matter through quiet diplomatic pressure.

According to Michael Caster, speaking for the organization, “Peter’s ongoing detention for supporting legal aid in China makes a mockery of President Xi Jinping’s stated commitments to the rule of law. Peter must be granted direct contact with the Swedish Embassy and his family without delay. The Chinese authorities must immediately release Peter from detention and drop all charges against him.”


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## Costas (Jan 14, 2016)

Γράμμα από τον εκδότη:

“The difficulty of publishing political books in Hong Kong is already in the international spotlight. People in the industry are feeling great fear and pressure; they want to stay out of trouble so that they won’t be the next one [to disappear]. I received many calls from friends and family trying to persuade me. Because of that, we decided after much deliberation to suspend the publication of your work,” Jin wrote.

“I sincerely ask for your understanding. We published _China’s Godfather, Xi Jinping_, but circumstances have changed, and I am not able to face the huge consequences,” Jin said, adding that he was “deeply sorry”.


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## Costas (Jan 15, 2016)

(τα παχιά προστέθηκαν από μένα)
A German’s Video Likens Mao to Hitler, and China Wants Him Punished
(...) when Mr. Rehage called Mao Zedong “China’s Hitler” in a YouTube video in December, he said, reaction became “ridiculous.”

Mr. Rehage noted that both Mao and Hitler were responsible for the deaths of milllions.

An influential Communist Party website called for him to be punished under Chinese law, despite the fact that Mr. Rehage lives in Hamburg. Coupled with events like the recent disappearances of five people connected to a Hong Kong publisher of books critical of Beijing, the episode has raised questions about China’s reach across borders.

The website, Communist Youth Net, which is owned by the Communist Youth League, published three commentaries accusing Mr. Rehage of “blaspheming” the founding leader of the People’s Republic, who died in 1976. Such people should be “shown the bright sword,” one read.

*Mr. Rehage’s statement was “subjective,” meaning incorrect, and is therefore not protected speech*, Zhu Wei, the deputy director of the Communications Law Center at the China University of Political Science and Law, was quoted as saying in one of the articles.

The party’s own verdict in 1981 that Mao, under whose political campaigns millions died, did more good than harm, was “objective,” meaning correct, Mr. Zhu said.

So Mr. Rehage broke the law with his statement, Mr. Zhu and an unnamed lawyer were quoted as saying, citing China’s “Internet sovereignty.”


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## Earion (Jan 16, 2016)

Αφήνεται να εννοηθεί ότι θα ξεκινήσουν κομάντο Κινέζων τιμωρών για να πάνε στο Αμβούργο να τον συνετίσουν;


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## Costas (Jan 16, 2016)

"Bright sword"!


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## Costas (Jan 28, 2016)

Ji Xianlin, _The Cowshed: Memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution_, translated by Chenxin Jiang

Li Zhensheng, _Red-Color News Soldier_ (φωτογραφίες της Πολιτιστικής Επανάστασης)


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## Costas (Feb 13, 2016)

Tagore Translation Deemed Racy Is Pulled From Stores in China (NYT / Amy Qin)

The anger mostly focused on three of the 326 poems, all of which Mr. Feng, like most earlier translators, based on English versions. In one, which was translated into English by Tagore himself, the poet wrote: “The world puts off its mask of vastness to its lover. It becomes small as one song, as one kiss of the eternal.”

By contrast, Mr. Feng’s translation in Chinese reads: “The world unzipped his pants in front of his lover. Long as a French kiss, slim as a line of a poem.”

Mr. Feng continues to stand by his translation.

“My only intention was to capture the aesthetics of Tagore’s poems,” he said. “When I translate, I’m a writer. I don’t need to know the context. I just want to do things as freely and as creatively as possible.”

Even with the uproar, many were perhaps even more surprised by the announcement in December from the Zhejiang Wenyi Publishing House that it would halt sales of the book and review the translation. It is unclear whether the book will be returned to shelves. Reached by telephone, the company declined to comment.


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## Costas (Mar 1, 2016)

A man we'll call Zhang Yong used to be a welder in Heilongjiang Province, but the economy in China's industrial heartland in the northeast has soured, so he has taken up unique employment in Beijing.

Each morning he rides his electric motorbike to Beijing Union Medical College Hospital, one of the top medical facilities in the capital, and walks into the lobby. Zhang, who is in his early 40s, then starts his day selling appointments for highly sought-after medical specialists to patients on the black market.

Zhang said he has been a scalper for two years, meaning he knows about all the best specialists at Beijing's top hospitals – and how to get his sick customers in to see them.

The key to his work is patience. In a country where waiting in line is often optional, the former welder spends several hours queuing to get a number to see a doctor, usually in seven days.

Zhang – and many others like him – then resells appointments, possible because the numbers he takes are not linked to anyone's real name or ID card. He usually pays a few dozen yuan for each number ticket, then resells it to patients for up to several thousand yuan.
(...)
The latest uproar over hospital scalping started after a video went viral in January showing a woman railing about being charged 4,500 yuan for an appointment that should have cost 300 yuan. 
(...)
Article


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## Costas (Mar 14, 2016)

Ο Ντόναλντ Τραμπ επανέλαβε την επιδοκιμασία του για την πυγμή με την οποία η κινεζική κυβέρνηση κατέστειλε τους "ταραξίες" της πλατείας Τιενανμέν το 1989:

27 Chinese Groups Respond to Mr. Trump and Governor Kasich’s Remarks about the Tiananmen Massacre (China Change)


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## nickel (Mar 14, 2016)

Όταν θα βγει ο Τραμπ πρόεδρος στην Αμερική, θα φτιάξουμε νήμα «Την ίδια ώρα, στις ΔΠΑ», με πολεμικές ανταποκρίσεις από τις Διχασμένες/Διαλυμένες Πολιτείες της Αμερικής. :-(


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## Earion (Mar 23, 2016)

Δάγκωσ’ τη γλώσσα σου! :scared:


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## SBE (Mar 24, 2016)

O Tράμπ αν ήταν πρόεδρος θα είχε ήδη βομβαρδισει τις Βρυξέλλες, οπότε δεν θα υπήρχαν τρομοκρατικές επιθέσεις.


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## Costas (Apr 1, 2016)

‘China’s Worst Policy Mistake’?
Nicholas D. Kristof / The NY Review of Books

_China’s Hidden Children: Abandonment, Adoption, and the Human Costs of the One-Child Policy	_
by Kay Ann Johnson
University of Chicago Press, 218 pp., $22.50

_One Child: The Story of China’s Most Radical Experiment	_
by Mei Fong
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 250 pp., $27.00

However well-intended it may have been, the one-child policy arose from a totalitarian approach to governing and violated the most fundamental of human rights—and it was also unnecessary, for the previous voluntary policy had already slashed fertility rates.


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## Costas (Apr 2, 2016)

Reality show singer breaks China's Cultural Revolution taboo
Yang Le draws applause and tears as song tells of how he lost his father in Mao’s crackdown on perceived enemies, which began 50 years ago
(Tom Phillips / The Guardian)

Nearly half a century after his father plunged to his death from the roof of a Beijing university, Yang Le stepped out on to the stage to tell millions of Chinese television viewers how Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution had torn his family apart.

“When I was young we were a family of six … My father was handsome, mum was young and beautiful,” sang the silver-haired contestant on China Star, the country’s answer to the X-Factor. “After the Cultural Revolution only five of us were left.”

When his lament-filled, taboo-breaking performance ended, Yang bit his lower lip. Applause rippled through the theatre; the judges leapt to their feet; tears streamed down cheeks.

“I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get through the song,” the 60-year-old musician recalled in a tearful interview. “I had to force myself to relax because it wasn’t only me who went through this. Millions of other families went through this in China.”

May marks 50 years since China was convulsed by Mao Zedong’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, a bewildering and bloody attempt by the leader to reshape and reassert control over the Communist party he had helped found in 1921 by mobilising the nation’s youth.

A new book on the period by Dutch historian Frank Dikötter reveals the grotesque catalogue of violence inflicted upon alleged “class enemies” and intellectuals as teenage Red Guards fanned out across urban China with orders to “sweep away monsters and demons”.

Victims were beaten, flogged, stoned and scolded by “Mao’s Little Generals” or forced to swallow nails and excrement as jeering crowds looked on. Homes and places of worship were ransacked, pillaged and burned. One teacher killed himself after being set upon by students who forced him to drink ink. Another was doused in petrol and set alight. Others were electrocuted or even buried alive.

“[It was] a demented environment, an Alice-in-Wonderland world, governed only by its mad logic,” Percy Cradock, then a senior British diplomat in Beijing, recalls in his memoirs. “The country was in the grip of a nightmare.”

Among the estimated two million people who lost their lives over the coming decade was Yang Le’s father, Wang Yuguo, a lecturer in industrial economy at Beijing’s prestigious Renmin University.

“My father was persecuted and he killed himself. He jumped from the roof of a building,” the singer said.

“At Renmin University you heard of professors killing themselves every day. It was horrible. I would hear someone crying and we would wonder who was crying and whose family was suffering those bad things.”

The premature death of Yang’s father devastated his family. His mother was forced to sell her dead husband’s belongings – and even her own blood – to feed the couple’s four children. Yang’s three siblings were packed off to the countryside for “re-education” as part of an attempt to rein in Mao’s marauding Red Guards.

Finally, Yang’s mother remarried and moved south to Jiangxi province. “She felt sad,” he said. “But she had no choice.”

China’s Communist party leaders have officially classified the Cultural Revolution as a mistake.

A 1981 resolution noted that the decade-long upheaval “was responsible for the most severe setback and the heaviest losses by the party, the state and the people since the founding of the People’s Republic” in 1949.

Two years earlier the People’s Liberation Army marshall Ye Jianying labelled the period “an appalling catastrophe suffered by all our people”.

Yet half a century after the mayhem began the subject remains largely a taboo within China. School textbooks skirt around the period and discussion of Mao’s central role in the disaster is shunned.

Yang, a classically trained flautist who fled China in the wake of the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown and went on to study at the Schola Cantorum de Paris, said few songs had examined the heartbreak caused by the Cultural Revolution.

The government’s refusal to revisit that era means much about what unfolded in the 10 years between the Cultural Revolution’s start in May 1966 and Mao’s death in 1976 remains hazy.

For example, the exact circumstances surrounding the death of Yang’s father are still shrouded in mystery.

The singer said he believed his father had been interrogated and beaten before he was found dead on 4 December 1968 at the age of 39.

“I heard they used shoes to beat my father in the face. He felt humiliated. He couldn’t stand it,” Yang said.

But before his corpse was cremated, Yang’s mother spotted an indentation in her dead husband’s skull, leading her to suspect he had been set upon by Red Guards and then pushed to his death. “If somebody jumps from a building you would expect to see a problem with their neck, an internal problem, not the kind of trauma that you can see,” he said.

The 50th anniversary of the Cultural Revolution is unlikely to shine fresh light on such cases. Dikötter predicted that China’s leaders would seek to remember the occasion with total silence.

“[Chinese people] have been told again and again and again: you had better forget. Let’s just get on with it,” the historian said.

“The team in charge is very well aware that there is a danger to its legitimacy and its credibility [in discussing past mistakes]. And it knows very well that history is one of the pillars of its own legitimacy and it will not have it undermined. It is as simple as that.”

The party’s determination to bury the horrors of the Cultural Revolution made Yang Le’s prime-time television performance, in November last year, even more unusual.

The singer said he had feared the show’s producers might attempt to censor the lyrics but had lobbied against that with the help of Cui Jian, a friend and well-known Chinese rock star. The channel relented.

“There are movies and novels that tell stories from that time so why can we not sing this kind of song?” Yang said.

Dikötter said Beijing had been largely successful in “stamping out the memory of the Cultural Revolution” and staving off calls for any significant probe into one of the darkest chapters in Chinese history.

“I think that does leave scars. That does leave a society that is very traumatised by who did what to whom without any sense of redress or justice,” he said.

But the outpouring of emotion triggered by Yang’s performance suggests many have not forgotten the hurt and suffering inflicted on their families.

Yang, who cites Gustav Mahler and Serge Gainsbourg among his influences, said he saw music not simply as entertainment but as a way of inspiring listeners to confront painful truths.

He attributed the tears shed over his performance to the profound emotional burden those who witnessed the excesses of the Cultural Revolution still carried with them.

“Recalling that time in history is something that is extremely heavy for our generation.”

“It was a catastrophe,” he said. “It was like a war.”

_Additional reporting by Christy Yao_


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## Costas (Apr 18, 2016)

Μαϊμού BBC, μαϊμού Ντόναλντ Τραμπ (αν και στη δεύτερη αυτή περίπτωση είναι μαϊμού από μόνος του)
http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/202...a-and-it-is-not-happy-being-called-a-copycat/


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## Costas (Apr 18, 2016)

The early days of rock in China


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## Costas (Apr 23, 2016)

March 31, 2016
Today President Barack Obama will hold a bilateral meeting with Chinese president Xi Jinping in Washington, DC. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) sent the following letter to President Obama to highlight its concerns about the Chinese government's worsening crackdown on journalists and cyber activists, which now includes the intimidation and abduction of the family members of Chinese citizens living abroad.

Mr. President,

As you prepare to hold a bilateral meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping tomorrow, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) would like to draw your attention to its concerns about the current crackdown on journalists and bloggers in China.

As you are no doubt aware, China is one of the world’s worst jailers of journalists and citizen journalists, currently ranking 176th out of 180 countries on RSF’s 2015 Press Freedom Index. The crackdown on media and cyber activists has continued to worsen since Xi Jinping came into power, and this has most recently been demonstrated by the current witch-hunt led against suspected authors of an anonymous open letter calling for Xi’s resignation.

Shortly after the letter was posted online on March 15, Chinese journalist Jia Jia was arrested in Beijing where he was set to board a flight to Hong Kong. He was released 10 days later. Chang Ping, another Chinese journalist now living in exile in Germany, condemned Jia Jia’s arrest in an article published on March 25. On March 27, Chang Ping reported that Chinese authorities had arrested his two brothers and his sister in China, and had asked his family members to contact him to “demand that [he] immediately cease to publish any articles that criticize the Chinese Communist party.”

Wen Yunchao, also known as BeiFeng, a well-known Chinese blogger and human rights defender now based in New York, learned that his parents and brother were arrested by Chinese police in the southern province of Guangdong on March 22. Wen Yunchao, known for his series of online campaigns in support of human rights and against internet censorship, was rumored to be the anonymous letter’s author. He later denied these rumors. He has been a visiting scholar at Columbia University and in 2010 was awarded the French Republic’s Human Rights Prize by the French National Consultative Commission on Human Rights.

According to several trusted sources, at least 20 people have been arrested in China in connection with the anonymous letter calling for Xi Jinping’s resignation. Furthermore, the fact that the Chinese government’s witch-hunt now includes family members of Chinese citizens living abroad, one of whom lives in the United States, is an illustration of the country’s ever-worsening crackdown on freedom of expression and its blatant disregard for international law.

The United States have a duty to guarantee fundamental freedoms for all those who live within its territory. Today the basic rights of Wen Yunchao, an asylum applicant living in the US, have been trampled by a foreign government that is harassing his family members thousands of miles away with complete impunity.

During your bilateral meeting with the Chinese president, it is paramount that you send a clear message that the US will not tolerate his government’s crackdown on freedom of the press and of information in China, no matter how important the economic partnership between your two countries remains.

I thank you in advance, Mr. President, for the careful attention you give to this letter.

Sincerely,

Delphine Halgand
US Director

Reporters sans frontières - Pour la liberté de l'information © 2016 Reporters without borders


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## Costas (Apr 28, 2016)

He compared laogai to the Soviet gulag and to Nazi concentration camps, and blamed the system for the deaths of millions of political prisoners and intellectuals. He even successfully campaigned to introduce the word laogai into the Oxford English Dictionary. Έκατσε και 19 δρομάκια μέσα σ' αυτά, γιατί επέκρινε, λέει, τη σοβιετική εισβολή στην Ουγγαρία το 1956.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/04/2...428&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=40665073&referer=


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## Earion (Apr 30, 2016)

δρομάκια = χρονάκια


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## Costas (May 3, 2016)

Καταραμένη αυτόματη διόρθωση του κινητού!


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## Alexandra (May 3, 2016)

Costas said:


> Καταραμένη αυτόματη διόρθωση του κινητού!


http://www.damnyouautocorrect.com/13603/the-25-funniest-autocorrects-of-dyacs-first-year/


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## Costas (May 4, 2016)

Χαχα, ιδιαιτέρως λεπτά τα 18 και 8. Αλλά δεν κατάλαβα το 7: ούτε πώς προέκυψε το NATO ούτε πώς προέκυψε το PRomotionalkitten basket.


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## Costas (May 4, 2016)

Chinese Cyberchiefs Preach Net Sovereignty in Moscow 

----------------------------
Τρεις εκπατρισμένοι Αμερικανοί το Σεπτέμβρη του 2015, ο ένας τους έτοιμος να αναχωρήσει από την Κίνα (o Bill Bishop του Sinocism -για το οποίο επιλέγει την προφορά Σίνοσισμ, κατά το cynicism, πράγμα που ίσως εξηγεί γιατί το ονόμασε έτσι) και ο άλλος ενώ το σκέφτεται κι αυτός (ο ραδιοφωνικός παραγωγός Kaiser Kuo), μιλούν για την εποχή Xi Jinping, και για το πώς μεταξύ άλλων το κλίμα γίνεται όλο και πιο επικίνδυνο για έναν Αμερικανό να ζει εκεί. Ο Μπίσοπ προτείνει στους ξένους που τυχόν θέλουν να ζήσουν στην Κίνα να διαβάσουν το On Contradiction του Μάο και σε όλους τους China watchers να διαβάσουν με κάθε σοβαρότητα το The governance of China του τωρινού προέδρου, αφού ο άνθρωπος μιλάει καθαρά για το -αυταρχικό- όραμά του για την Κίνα. Ακόμα, ο Kaiser Kuo λέει για δυο πιτσιρίκια που αναφέρονταν στο δρόμο, στη γειτονιά, στις 3 ερωμένες ενός πλουσίου, που σήκωσαν καβγά γιατί η μια είχε Λαμποργκίνι ενώ η άλλη μόνο Μαζεράτι. (popupchinese)


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## Costas (May 4, 2016)

Wary of China's Indian Ocean activities, U.S., India discuss anti-submarine warfare | Reuters 
Both the United States and India are growing concerned at the reach and ambition of the Chinese navy, which is taking an increasingly assertive stance in the South China Sea and is challenging India's domination in the Indian Ocean. New Delhi, shedding its decades-old reluctance to be drawn into America's embrace, agreed last month to open up its military bases to the United States in exchange for access to weapons technology to help it narrow the gap with China.


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## Costas (May 4, 2016)

A warning for parched China: a city runs out of water - Marketplace.org 
Yang Shufang wakes up at 5 o'clock each morning and fetches water. "I bring a few buckets, enough for drinking or cooking," she says. Yang doesn’t live in the remote countryside, and her water isn’t from a village well. She lives on the seventh floor of a luxury condominium complex in Lintao, a Chinese city with nearly 200,000 people that’s run out of water. "Right after Chinese New Year, water stopped coming out of the tap," Yang says. "Now we have to stand in line each morning at the front gate of our complex with our buckets and wait for water to be delivered."
(...)
Four hundred Chinese cities now face a water shortage. One hundred and ten cities face a severe water shortage. This is a very serious problem," says Liu Changming, a retired hydrologist for the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. China is home to more than 20 percent of the world’s population, but it contains only 7 percent of the world’s fresh water. Liu, who advises China’s leaders on water policy, says all of China's so-called "water scarce" cities are in northern China, home to half a billion people, and a region that contributes nearly half of China’s economic growth. Former Chinese premier Wen Jiabao once called northern China’s water shortage “a threat to the survival of the Chinese nation.”


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## Costas (May 6, 2016)

Music from the turbulent period of the Cultural Revolution featured prominently at event at the Great Hall of the People (South China Morning Post)
Μετά βιντεακίου


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## Costas (May 16, 2016)

50ή επέτειος της Πολιτιστικής Επανάστασης σήμερα. Η μεγαλύτερη στην παγκόσμια Ιστορία επιχείρηση μαζικής χειραγώγησης του πνεύματος αμφισβήτησης και διαμαρτυρίας της νεολαίας με σκοπό τη φραξιονιστική επικράτηση και την εκκαθάριση των πολιτικών αντιπάλων στα ανώτατα κλιμάκια της εξουσίας. Και επίσης, προκειμένου για τη Δύση, η δεύτερη μεγαλύτερη απόδειξη (μετά τη στήριξη των Δυτικών κομουνιστών στο σταλινισμό) του πόσο απύθμενα αφελείς και τυφλωμένοι μπορεί να είναι οι απλοί πιστοί αλλά και οι διανοούμενοι μιας ολοκληρωτικής ιδεολογίας (του μπολσεβικισμού σε όλες του τις εκδοχές), όταν αυτή συμπλέκεται μ' έναν αντιδυτικό εξωτισμό, και του πόσο τα όσα βλέπουν, λατρεύουν και επενδύουν κάποιοι σ' ένα γεγονός (εν προκειμένω στην Πολιτιστική Επανάσταση) μπορεί να μην έχουν την παραμικρή σχέση με τον πραγματικό χαρακτήρα αυτού του γεγονότος.

Among left-wing sympathizers, China’s star rose as the Soviet Union’s fell. Revelations concerning forced labor camps, the cruel suppression of the 1956 Hungarian uprising, as well as Khrushchev’s flirtations with the heresies of “peaceful coexistence” combined to discredit the Soviet experiment in “really existing socialism.” It became increasingly clear that Soviet Marxism had forfeited all progressive claims. It had degenerated into a repellent, authoritarian “science of legitimation” (Rudolf Bahro). Conversely, the repute of Communist China benefited from misleading images of a simple but joyous people working shoulder to shoulder to construct a genuinely humane version of socialism.

Maoism’s global prestige was further enhanced when, in 1966, the Great Helmsman launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. To outsiders, the Cultural Revolution seemed like a laudable effort to reactivate Chinese communism’s original revolutionary élan, thereby avoiding the bureaucratic ossification afflicting Soviet communism. The fact that reliable information concerning the Cultural Revolution’s manifold sanguinary excesses was hard to come by worked distinctly to China’s advantage. Western journalists’ celebratory accounts depicting the glories of the Chinese road to socialism helped to reinforce existing pro-Chinese predispositions and convictions.
(...)
Were the story of French intellectuals and Maoism purely a tale of political folly, it would hardly be worth recounting. In retrospect, the Maoist intoxication that gripped France during the early 1970s stands out as a generational rite of passage. Among students and intellectuals, the identification with Cultural Revolutionary China became an exit strategy to escape from the straitjacket of orthodox Marxism. Early on, revolutionary China ceased being an empirical point of reference. Instead, it became a trope: a projection of the gauchiste political imaginary. As the Maoists themselves later explained, the issue became the “China in our heads.”

http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i9127.pdf


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## Costas (May 17, 2016)

Cultural Revolution 50 Years On (SCMP)


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## Costas (May 19, 2016)

*Silence from China on CR anniversary* (Jun Mai / SCMP)

Mainland media met the 50th anniversary of the start of the Cultural Revolution with silence in a reflection of Beijing’s eagerness to contain discussion and avoid embarrassment over one of the most tumultuous periods in Chinese history.

A party directive issued on May 16, 1966, that launched a campaign to rid the country of “representatives of the bourgeoisie” plunged the nation into 10 years of turmoil and violent class struggle that would leave at least 1.72 million dead.

In a speech on China’s economy first made public last Tuesday, President Xi Jinping called the revolution a “decade of catastrophe” that had stalled the country’s industrialisation.

But when the anniversary arrived, while international media dug through photo and story ­archives to provide extensive coverage, official Chinese outlets such as People’s Daily stayed away from the topic.

The website ifeng.com, which belongs to the Hong Kong-based Phoenix Media Group, briefly ran a piece featuring street interviews with people on the mainland, ­asking them their thoughts on the revolution.

One woman, asked for the worst part of the revolution, ­replied that it was the Nanking Massacre – an event which in fact happened almost 30 years earlier, in 1937 during the Japanese invasion of China.

A man said he had no memory of what happened in “ancient times”, while some said they would take part in the revolution because “everyone was doing it”.

The report was deleted from the website, then reappeared and was deleted for a second time.

This month’s publication of Yanhuang Chunqiu, a monthly political magazine run by party liberals, was delayed a week as its editors and censor disagreed over articles on the revolution. One article was removed, a source close to the magazine said.

No official commemoration was held on the mainland, following the lead of previous anniversary dates, and online discussions on Weibo were ­censored.

Foreign ministry spokesman Hong Lei offered a single sentence in response to a question about the anniversary in yesterday’s daily press briefing.

“The Chinese government ­already made the correct verdict on it long ago,” Hong said.


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## Costas (May 19, 2016)

*People’s Daily breaks silence on CR*
By CHRIS BUCKLEY / NYT

BEIJING — Fifty years to the day since Communist Party leaders formally set in motion Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, miring China in a decade of bloody political upheaval, the party’s main newspaper broke the general silence about the anniversary and urged people to accept the past condemnation of the event and focus on the future.

“History always advances, and we sum up and absorb the lessons of history in order to use it as a mirror to better advance,” said the commentary, which appeared late Monday on the website of the newspaper, People’s Daily, after a day when official news outlets were mostly mute about the anniversary. “We must certainly fix in our memories the historic lessons of the Cultural Revolution.”

The article was the party’s most high-level public comment so far on the 50th anniversary of the revolution, Mao’s effort to cleanse and reinvigorate Communism by attacking his own colleagues and unleashing the Red Guards, fervent student militants recruited to enforce his cause. It also appeared in the print edition of People’s Daily on tuesday, on an inside page.

But the commentary broke no new ground. It asserted that the Communist Party’s verdict condemning the Cultural Revolution, delivered in a resolution in 1981, was “unshakably scientific and authoritative,” and urged Chinese people to rally around President Xi Jinping and his policies.

“There will not be a re-enactment of a mistake like the Cultural Revolution,” it said.

The commentary was unlikely to satisfy historians and people who lived through that time and have called for a more candid and thorough examination of its lessons. Chinese news organizations, under the weight of censorship, have overwhelmingly ignored the anniversary, and have found no room to note the traumatic turning point in modern Chinese history, during which perhaps a million or more people were killed.

“The more time passes, the more difficult it’s become to acknowledge these mistakes,” said Dai Jianzhong, a sociologist in Beijing who attended the high school that was the birthplace of the first Red Guards. “Intellectual closure has left the younger generation almost completely ignorant of the past.”

Another exception to the silence was Global Times, an avidly nationalist newspaper that speaks more bluntly than most of the state-run news media. Late Monday, it also issued a commentary that dismissed the idea that China could ever undergo a repeat of the Cultural Revolution and urged people to focus on the party’s achievements.

“We’ve said bye-bye to the Cultural Revolution long ago,” said the commentary, written under a pen name usually used by Hu Xijin, the chief editor of the newspaper. “Today, we can say one more time that the Cultural Revolution cannot and will not stage a comeback.”

The party condemned the Cultural Revolution decades ago, but leaders have been hesitant to openly air controversies from recent history, and that reluctance has intensified under Mr. Xi.

Since taking power in 2012, he has sought to shore up Mao’s revered status as the founding father of Communist rule. The general silence surrounding the Cultural Revolution anniversary has reflected that political mood, according to historians and people who lived through that time.

“The official summary was very simple — that the Cultural Revolution was a disaster, a calamity,” said Zheng Yi, a former Cultural Revolution student radical who became a writer and now lives in Virginia. “But nowadays, China discourages even studying the history and lessons of the Cultural Revolution.”

He added, “In some ways, the social divisions are even bigger today than they were then, and the leaders don’t like to expose how they could fall from power.”

Mao started the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” in the belief that the Communist Party had become corrupt and compromised, and that a scorching mass political movement was needed to cleanse and reinvigorate the revolution.

At a meeting on May 16, 1966, leaders approved a notice laying out his belief that the revolution was menaced from within. The full document did not become public until a year later, but its repercussions were quickly felt. Many of the officials who approved it were later pushed from office, accused of resisting Mao’s will, and they were often grievously abused by Red Guards and radical officials.

Years of political tumult followed, and when Mao died in 1976, his successors quickly arrested radical supporters of the Cultural Revolution. In 1981, the party formally condemned the revolution, and there was a burst of memoirs, recantations and histories. But in later years, especially under Mr. Xi, that candor has receded.

Yet the silence has not been total.

Throughout this year, liberal journals and websites have published memoirs and essays urging greater reflection about the lessons of the Cultural Revolution. But there have also been commentaries on far-left Chinese websites defending Mao’s policies, and one even suggested that the country needed a “Cultural Revolution 2.0.” (That article was later removed from a neo-Maoist website.)

“After decades without education in the history of the Cultural Revolution and the terrible things and great destruction that happened, young people are rarely told of these things, and so younger officials and students don’t really understand it,” Yin Hongbiao, a historian of the Cultural Revolution and a professor at Peking University, said in a telephone interview. In 1966, he was a junior secondary student who watched the Red Guard movement spread and engulf Beijing.

“Some people project their discontent with the present onto the past,” Mr. Yin said. “So it seems to them that life was better in the Mao era.”


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## Costas (May 20, 2016)

Guo Feixiong on Hunger Strike in Prison, Wife Details Degrading Treatment in an Open Letter to Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang (China Change)


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## Costas (May 25, 2016)

Decapitated churches in China's Christian heartland (NYT)


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## Costas (May 28, 2016)

The writer and translator Yang Jiang has passed away in Beijing at the age of 104. Her involvement with world literature makes her a topic of attention in many languages, especially English, Spanish, German, and French. This makes for some interesting obituaries with different perspectives!

http://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/1954515/best-selling-writer-one-half-chinese-literary-super
http://www.vivelohoy.com/entretenimiento/8629635/muere-a-los-104-anos-la-escritora-china-yang-jiang
http://www.morgenpost.de/kultur/article207605701/Schriftstellerin-Yang-Jiang-stirbt-im-Alter-von-104.html
http://french.china.org.cn/china/txt/2016-05/25/content_38536231.htm
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/yang-jiang-chinese-writer-and-translator-of-don-quixote-dies-at-104/2016/05/25/3cd99df0-2297-11e6-8690-f14ca9de2972_story.html


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## Costas (May 28, 2016)

10 Chinese Women Whose Writing Should Be Translated
Writing from mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan​(Literary Hub, από Paper Republic)


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## Costas (Jun 19, 2016)

Chinese lawyer not giving up despite torture (Taipei Times)



One of China’s best-known dissident lawyers said his newly launched memoir is his latest act of resistance to show he has not been silenced by years of solitary confinement and torture, accounts of which have drawn international criticism of Beijing.

In an exclusive interview with AP, Gao Zhisheng (高智晟), 52, who has been living under near-constant surveillance by Chinese authorities since his release from jail in 2014, said he wrote his book “to expose the truth and crimes of this regime.”

The Chinese-language book, titled Stand Up China 2017 — China’s Hope: What I Learned During Five Years as a Political Prisoner, was launched in Hong Kong on Tuesday at an event attended by Gao’s daughter.

“This book is my way of posing resistance,” Gao said in Monday night’s interview, which was conducted over a messaging app instead of by phone to circumvent surveillance and interruption. “I wrote it secretly because I had to hide from the minders who watch me around the clock.”

He said he kept the book a secret even from his family to avoid endangering them.

In the book, Gao recounts the torture he says he endured, as well as the three years he spent in solitary confinement. It was the strength of his Christian faith and his unwavering hope for China that sustained him in that period of isolation, he said.

China’s Public Security Ministry had no immediate response to a request for comment on the book.

Gao’s interview and book come as Chinese authorities wage what rights groups say is one of the most severe crackdowns on the country’s rights-defending legal community in recent memory. Several Chinese rights lawyers have been arrested on state subversion charges that carry potential life sentences. Activists say the use of such charges indicates that the ruling Communist Party sees this group of lawyers as a threat to its grip on power.

Authorities are also putting lawyers on trial on other charges. On Friday, Xia Lin (夏霖), a rights lawyer whose clients have included dissident artist Ai Weiwei (艾未未), will stand trial in Beijing for fraud.

Gao had won international renown for his courage in defending members of the outlawed Falun Gong spiritual movement and fighting for farmers’ land rights. After he was detained, he upset the authorities by publicly denouncing the torture he said he had suffered.

When Gao was released from prison straight into house arrest in August 2014, the formerly outspoken lawyer could barely walk or speak a full, intelligible sentence, raising concerns that one of the most inspirational figures in China’s rights movement had been permanently broken — physically and mentally. Since then, he has kept a low profile, giving the AP his first interview in five years early last year.

International rights groups have condemned Gao’s treatment both in and out of custody, and the US government has urged China to allow him to come to the US to be reunited with his family if he chooses. His wife lives in San Francisco.

Presenting Gao’s book in Hong Kong on Tuesday was his 23-year-old daughter, Grace Geng [πολύ όμορφη!], who said it has been seven years since she last saw her father. Geng said her father was not well and that his teeth in particular needed urgent treatment that he has been denied. She said she, her mother and brother, who all fled to the US in 2009, have limited communication with him.

“At the very beginning, I did not totally understand. I wondered why our father couldn’t be with us,” said Geng, sobbing with emotion. “But ... after some time, I came to think of his decision as truly great. He loves the Chinese people so much that he put his family in second place. I think that what he thinks is very, very great, so I am very proud of it.”

In a sign of the chill Beijing’s influence has cast over Hong Kong, Gao’s book is being published in Taiwan and will not at first be sold in the semi-autonomous Chinese-controlled city, Hong Kong pro-democracy lawmaker Albert Ho (何俊仁 ) told the AP.

Books on sensitive political topics have increasingly been pulled from mainstream Hong Kong bookstores or consigned to the back shelves. Several men associated with one of the leading independent publishers of such tomes briefly went missing last year amid strong suspicions they had been taken away by the Chinese security services.

During the interview with the AP, Gao said that he missed his family deeply, but chose to remain in China in the hope of someday playing a role in changing the country. Gao said he didn’t fear being taken back to prison.

“Once one has chosen to engage in combat, then there is no such thing as giving up. It is defeating to think about those things,” he said.

“My only worry is that I have affected the lives of my wife and children,” he said. “I’m indebted to them eternally, because I love them more than my own life, but I cannot attend to their needs now.”


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## Costas (Jun 19, 2016)

[Ο Zhuangzi είναι ο κορυφαίος ταοϊστής φιλόσοφος]

Zhuangzi and Modern Chinese Literature

By Liu Jianmei

Reviewed by Carlos Yu-kai Lin
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright June, 2016)​
The first English-language study of its kind, Liu Jianmei’s _Zhuangzi and Modern Chinese Literature_ is an impressive and ambitious work that investigates as well as situates Zhuangzi’s thought within the formation of Chinese literary modernity. Liu traces the rises and falls of Zhuangzi in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as manifested in the works of an array of intellectuals and writers, thereby demonstrating the enduring influence of Zhuangzi on modern China’s literary and cultural scenes—a process she describes as “a return to the classic” (回歸古典) (3).

One of the key goals of the book is to show how and why modern Chinese intellectuals and writers have appropriated, reinterpreted, and even twisted Zhuangzi for various purposes under different social and political circumstances. Such a perspective of inquiry is illuminating and important to our understanding of the New Culture Movement (ca. 1915-1925), during which Chinese intellectuals were torn between the bipolar forces of Western modernity and Chinese tradition and were constantly faced with the dilemma of either maintaining a local cultural identity or creating a new one that matched a global order in which China no longer was—nor could be imagined as—the center. This historical situation compelled Chinese intellectuals to reengage with and reassess their cultural roots, in an attempt to root out the origins of what they viewed as China’s social, political, economic, and cultural weakness and decay.

Perspectives on China’s decline vis-a-vis its traditions varied from intellectual to intellectual. Liu begins with Guo Moruo, whose interpretations of Zhuangzi underwent multiple transformations throughout his life. In his early years, he was an enthusiastic advocate of Zhuangzi, disseminating as well as developing Daoist philosophy. He eulogized the thought of Zhuangzi by writing a series of articles and poems that emphasize a harmonious relation between man and nature. Liu observes that the Zhuangzian ideas of “oneness with the Dao” (26) and “forgetting the self” (29) were characteristic of his writings at that time. However, in the 1940s, Guo started to apply Marxist historical materialism to his elaboration of Zhuangzi, arguing that Zhuangzi’s “tendency to be cynical and misanthropic” (39) was a result of the sage’s historical context and lamenting that the ruling class had for two thousand years misused Zhuangzi’s “crafty philosophy” (39). While Guo broadly targeted the ideology of the ruling class in the 1940s, in the 1960s he began to specifically disparage Zhuangzi’s thought as “a cunning trap of class deception” (41). Guo’s transformation from a supporter of Zhuangzi in the May Fourth period to a Marxist ideologue thoroughly critical of Zhuangzi’s philosophy during the height of the Cultural Revolution exemplifies the uneven fate of Zhuangzi in the modern era.

Compared to Guo’s radically changing attitude, Lu Xun was a persistent and adamant critic of Zhuangzi. While many scholars have pointed out that Lu Xun drew inspiration from aspects of Zhuangzi’s writings, his criticism of Daoist philosophy is abundantly evident.[1] For most of his early career as a writer, Lu Xun rejected the (Daoist) life of a recluse, insisting on intervening in social reality and committing himself to the life of a cultural warrior against feudalism and social injustice.[2]

Liu points out that, to further reflect on the ineffectual nature of the Daoist personality, Lu Xun wrote _The True Story of Ah-Q_, in which the main protagonist convinces himself of his “spiritual victory” whenever he is subjected to humiliation and defeat. This imagined victory supplanting a cruel and harsh reality is reminiscent of Zhuangzi’s ideal of “sitting and forgetting” (坐忘) and “no-self” (無己) according to Liu (68). When evaluating Lu Xun’s consistently negative attitude toward Zhuangzi and Daoist philosophy, Liu argues that such an attitude is understandable, because it reflected the national crisis Lu Xun faced and the accompanying sense of urgency he felt at that historical juncture (65).

Liu next turns to Lin Yutang, whose adherence to Zhuangzi was rare in the politically-charged atmosphere of the time and contrasted with the May Fourth (e.g., Lu Xun) criticism of Daoism. Although Lin did not show much interest in Zhuangzi during the New Culture Movement, he became a proponent of Zhuangzi after 1927, endorsing a literature of leisure that emphasizes the value of personal freedom rather than social conformity. In addition, he promoted the discourse of humor by seeing Zhuangzi as “the ancestor of Chinese humor” (107) who always discussed worldly affairs wittily and freely. This seemingly apolitical interpretation of Zhuangzi, however, was actually a political response to utilitarian social perspectives being promoted by others. Lin’s humorous and light-hearted perspective on life was unwelcome in the atmosphere of 1930s China when both leftist and rightist intellectuals were avidly pursuing national salvation through various reform agenda. His promotion of “leisure life” ultimately failed (111).

It was not until Lin emigrated to the United States in 1936 that he had an opportunity to revive the “leisure life” as an emphasis on the aesthetic and creative sides of human nature. Unlike the politically-intense milieu in China, America’s modernization and industrialization required a philosophy of life that could help citizens escape from the pressures and disillusionment of their alienating society. It was here, Liu shows, that Lin’s Daoist-inspired worldview found belated approval. Lin’s success in the U.S. was also facilitated by his ability to introduce and articulate Daoist philosophy in English. He wrote English-language novels such as _Moment in Peking_ (1939) and _The Unexpected Island_ (1955) to express his interpretation of Daoism. In the former, he created two protagonists who embody an all-embracing Daoist dualism. In the latter, he depicted an imagined utopian community combining Daoist and ancient Greek cultures. Liu demonstrates how Lin’s application of Zhuangzian philosophy to Western individuals and contexts might represent “a fruitful source of an alternative conception of modernity” (106).

Liu’s inquiry into the modern fate of Zhuangzi is not limited to the New Culture Movement. She also ventures into the decades of the 1950s and 1960s, during which the prevailing assessment of Zhuangzi in the PRC was that of a reactionary idealist and irreconcilable enemy of the working class. Chinese intellectuals at the time expended a great deal of effort criticizing Zhuangzi from a rigid Marxist model of class struggle. Guan Feng is the most extreme example in this regard. Liu chronicles that Guan saw in Zhuangzi’s ideas “the residual power of slave masters” (奴隸主殘餘勢力) (145), and invoked Lu Xun’s _The True Story of Ah-Q_, asserting that “Zhuangzi’s subjective idealism has these characteristics: nihilism, Ah Q’s spirit, sophistry, and pessimism” (146). Guan Feng’s criticism of Zhuangzi and Daoism is more malicious than Lu Xun’s, since the former’s fanatic belief in revolutionary collectivism completely ruled out any possibility of affirming the Daoist advocation of a free mind. Liu thus suggests that, if Lu Xun’s literary writing can be seen as putting Zhuangzi in a “literary court” (文學法庭), Guan’s even more hostile and irrational accusation of Daoism can be understood as putting Zhuangzi in “the court of politics” (政治法庭) (144).[3]

Zhuangzi experienced a resurgence of popularity in the 1980s. After the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), Chinese intellectuals finally had a chance to re-engage with Zhuangzi in ways that were previously impossible. While some tried to revive an originary Zhuangzi, others appealed to Western worldviews in order to critically reassess Daoist philosophy. For example, Liu Xiaofeng compared the spirit of Christian salvation with the roaming spirit of Zhuangzi, prioritizing the former as the absolute truth from which the latter could be judged (156). By regarding (Christian) God as the only source of ultimate truth, Liu Jianmei argues, Liu Xiaofeng bolstered “the binarism of East-versus-West, ignoring the incommensurable capacities and historical contexts between the two systems of thought” (156). After being tried in a “literary court” in the 1920s and a “political court” in the Mao era, the 1980s saw Zhuangzi being tried in a “religious court” (宗教法庭) (154).

Liu also explores themes that stem from Zhuangzi, Daoism, and even Chan Buddhism in the works of contemporary Chinese writers such as Gao Xingjian and Yan Lianke. Gao, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2000, is known for his exilic pursuit of spiritual freedom. Gao’s self-exile from his Chinese homeland can be interpreted as a political protest and as an aesthetic adventure—both of which have featured prominently in some of his works. _Soul Mountain_ (靈山), one of Gao’s best known works, depicts the main protagonist’s physical and spiritual journey to find a place called “soul mountain.” Mixing anecdotal plots, lyrical meditations, and fantastic dreams, the story “unfolds a cosmic vision of human existence presented by certain recurring motifs such as death, darkness, solitude, wandering, the mountain, love, and sex” (215). Although Gao never specifies in the novel what is meant by “soul mountain,” the language of Chan Buddhism that permeates the novel indicates that this sacred place is akin to a kind of spiritual freedom found only in the mind of the individual and not in the outer world (216-7). Liu argues that Gao’s insistence on the attainment of spiritual freedom echoes Zhuangzi’s and Chan Buddhism’s notions of spiritual transcendence, and is therefore resistant to any hegemonic political ideology or regime.

In contrast to Gao’s emphasis on and pursuit of inner peace, Liu demonstrates how the works of Yan Lianke manifest the inner conflict of a modern Chinese writer vacillating between different literary traditions and subject positions. On the one hand, Yan carries on the May Fourth belief in the necessity of social intervention; on the other, he reiterates the classical literary theme of a reclusive utopian community that can be traced back to Zhuangzi and Tao Yuanming. Liu takes Yan’s 2004 _Lenin’s Kisses_ (受活) as an example. The novel traces the history of a small village of disabled people called Shouhuo (受活, literally “pleasure”) as it is drawn from an idyllic pastoral state into disastrous participation in a “heavenly” socialist commune, after which its idyllic pre-commune state can never be restored (189). By portraying a pair of failed ideal societies (one traditional, one modern), Yan not only reveals the utopia complex of modern Chinese intellectuals and writers, but also demonstrates how difficult it is to search for an alternative to modernity.

Liu’s scholarship demonstrates the kind of erudition and precision that are needed in research that encompasses both modern and traditional literary discourses. By surveying a variety of twentieth and twenty-first century Chinese intellectuals and writers, the book traces the different ways in which Zhuangzi has been interpreted, reinterpreted, and misinterpreted in the modern era. While Liu’s representative writers have been thoughtfully selected, some readers might be left wondering about Liu’s own assessment of Zhuangzi and how she positions herself vis-à-vis the various interpretations of Zhuangzi. For instance, one might ask if Liu believes in an original and authentic Zhuangzi? And, to what extent she runs the risk of essentializing or prioritizing certain interpretations or aspects of Zhuangzi? Such issues of method and approach are important considerations that Liu does not address in the book.[4] These issues aside, _Zhuangzi and Modern Chinese Literature_ is an invaluable source for any study of modern Chinese literature. It highlights an important question that merits further research in the future: how have modern Chinese intellectuals and writers encountered and creatively engaged with China’s literary and cultural traditions? Where the Daoist tradition and Zhuangzi are concerned, Liu’s book has provided a very interesting and convincing answer to this question—and set a standard worthy of emulation.

Carlos Yu-Kai Lin
University of Pennsylvania

Notes:

[1] For example, in _The Chinese Prose Poem: A Study of Lu Xun’s Wild Grass (Yecao)_ (New York: Cambria Press, 2014), Kaldis addresses both poles of Lu Xun’s ambivalence towards Zhuangzi and Daoism.

[2] While Lu Xun might agree with aspects of Zhuangzi’s pursuit of individual spiritual freedom, his consistent rejection of Confucian traditionalism dovetailed with his disapproval of the Daoist philosophy of nonaction or inaction (無為), as opposed to the necessity of action and response (有為). As Lu Xun argues in his famous 1907 essay, “On the Power of Mara Poetry” (摩羅詩力說): “The core of Laozi’s 5,000-word book is ‘Don’t disturb anyone’s mind,’ which requires one first to make dead wood of his mind and propagate inaction; acts of inaction transform society, and the world has peace. What an art!” (cited on p. 63). Lu Xun’s contempt for Daoist nonaction is obvious.

[3] “Idealism” and “materialism” were two of the most popular terms associated with Zhuangzi in the 1960s. In addition to Guan Feng’s adjudication of Zhuangzi, Hou Wairu saw Zhuangzi’s philosophy as “subjective idealism” while Yan Beiming viewed Zhuangzi’s thought as “objective idealism.” Ren Jiyu claimed Zhuangzi was a philosopher of “materialism” (45).

[4] Liu does discuss the fact that both Hu Shi and Lu Xun invoked evolution when they sought to reinterpret Zhuangzi. However, she finds Hu Shi’s use of the concept of evolution “partial” (58) and “problematic” (46) while Lu Xun’s is deemed “understandable” (65) and “dialectical” (58) in light of his “sense of urgency about achieving Chinese modernity” (65). However, considering the fact that this sense of urgency was arguably shared by all May Fourth intellectuals, providing an apology for Lu Xun alone doesn’t do justice to those who were equally burdened with the task of finding a way to achieve Chinese modernity. When exploring such issues, it is helpful to distinguish Darwin’s biological idea of natural selection and scientific method from the social Darwinism developed by Darwin’s followers that captured the imagination of a generation of thinkers famously “obsessed” with China’s modern plight. Such a clarification makes for a more nuanced understanding of not only May Fourth intellectuals’ appropriation of the notion of evolution but also the general intellectual upheaval of early twentieth-century China.


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## Costas (Jun 20, 2016)

Bookseller’s associates challenge his account

Source: NYT (6/19/16)
Hong Kong Bookseller Finds Associates Challenging His Account of Detention
By MICHAEL FORSYTHE

HONG KONG — Adopting the mantle of a whistle-blower rarely comes without consequences. Edward J. Snowden is in exile in Russia for leaking secrets of the National Security Agency. Michael Winston, who gained fame for exposing Countrywide Financial’s mortgage policies, spent years battling lawsuits. Now, in Hong Kong, it is Lam Wing-kee’s turn to feel the heat.

Many people in Hong Kong consider Mr. Lam a hero. His dramatic recounting on Thursday of his apprehension by the Chinese police, his forced confession and months of detention for committing an act that is not a crime in his native Hong Kong — selling politically sensitive books filled with gossip and speculation about China’s leaders — led thousands of people to come out on the streets on Saturday to show their support for him.

But people close to him, including his former colleagues and a woman who says she is his girlfriend, are now making public rebuttals about what he said, in accounts published by Sing Tao Daily, a pro-Beijing newspaper. In the case of the girlfriend — identified only by her surname, Hu — the criticism is stinging.

Ms. Hu, 37, interviewed by Sing Tao in mainland China, said Mr. Lam had deceived her into mailing banned books to customers in the mainland, which she said she had not known was a crime. She also said in the interview, which was published on Sunday, that “cursed Lam is not a man” and that, contrary to what he had told the news media, the Chinese authorities did not deny him legal representation.

On Saturday, the same newspaper published interviews with two of the other detained booksellers, Lui Por and Cheung Chi-ping, who both disputed Mr. Lam’s claim that televised confessions from this year in which they tearfully admitted to illegal book sales in China had been scripted by the mainland police. Mr. Cheung was quoted by the paper as saying, “I had no idea that Lam Wing-kee was such a dishonest person.”

Their comments followed similar rebuttals by another of Mr. Lam’s former colleagues, Lee Bo. Mr. Lee is arguably the most famous of the booksellers, because it was his disappearance from a Hong Kong neighborhood in late December that brought the story of the missing booksellers to a global audience. On Friday, Mr. Lee again reiterated that he had, contrary to what Mr. Lam had said, voluntarily traveled to the mainland to help the police there with a case.

A fifth person connected with the Hong Kong bookseller saga, Gui Minhai, was plucked from his seaside condo in Thailand. He remains in mainland police custody and has not commented on Mr. Lam’s statements.

Albert Ho, a Hong Kong lawyer and pro-democracy lawmaker, represented Mr. Snowden during his time in Hong Kong in 2013. On Thursday afternoon, his secretary received notice that Mr. Lam had called him and wanted to meet.

Mr. Lam had been planning to head back to the mainland under an agreement with the Chinese police but suddenly decided to go public with an account of his time in custody.

Mr. Ho does not, at present, serve as Mr. Lam’s lawyer, but it was in a conference room near Mr. Ho’s office in the legislative building that Mr. Lam gave his news conference.

Hong Kong, despite having returned to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, operates under a separate legal system and does not have an extradition agreement with the mainland.

Mr. Ho said the reaction of Mr. Lam’s girlfriend and former colleagues was “as expected” because of the tremendous pressure that, he said, the Chinese police place on their relatives. The public nature of Mr. Lam’s revelations — before more than 80 journalists — contrasted sharply with the highly controlled, terse statements given to a pro-Beijing newspaper, Mr. Ho said by telephone.

“The other people, they looked timid, they look shy in appearing before reporters — they only gave their version to certain very selective, biased media,” Mr. Ho said. “I think common sense will tell the Hong Kong people which version is true.”


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## Costas (Jun 20, 2016)

Source: China Real Time (6/17/16)
Study Finds China’s Ecosystems Have Become Healthier
By Te-Ping Chen

China’s skies may be toxic, and its rivers fetid and prone to sudden infestations of pig carcasses. But according to a new study, the country’s environmental battle has also been making quiet, measurable progress.

The paper, a collaboration between U.S. and Chinese researchers published in this week’s issue of Science, found that China’s ecosystems have become healthier and more resilient against such disasters as sandstorms and flooding. The authors partly credit what they describe as the world’s largest government-backed effort to restore natural habitats such as forests and grasslands, totaling some $150 billion in spending since 2000.

“In a more and more turbulent world, with climate change unfolding, it’s really crucial to measure these kinds of things,” says Gretchen Daily, a Stanford biology professor and a senior author on the paper.

The study didn’t examine air, water or soil quality, all deeply entrenched problems for the country.

Beijing’s investments in promoting better ecosystem protection were triggered after a spate of disasters in the 1990s. In particular, authors note, two decades after China started to liberalize its economy, rampant deforestation and soil erosion triggered devastating floods along the Yangtze River in 1998, killing thousands and causing some $36 billion in property damage.

The government subsequently embarked on an effort to try to forestall such environmental catastrophes. According to the study, in the decade following, carbon sequestration went up 23%, soil retention went up 13% and flood mitigation by 13%, with sandstorm prevention up by 6%.

The paper also involved authors from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the University of Minnesota, among other institutions. Data was collected by remote sensing and a team of some 3,000 scientists across China, said Ms. Daily, who praised the “big-data” approach to tracking the quality of China’s ecosystems.

“The whole world is waking up to the need to invest in natural capital as the basis for green growth,” she said.

Reforestation was one particular bright spot, she said. Under the country’s founding father, Mao Zedong, China razed acres of forests to fuel steel-smelting furnaces. To reverse the trend–and combat creeping desertification in the country’s north — the country embarked on a project in 1978 to build a “Great Green Wall” of trees. Today, authorities say that 22% of the country is covered by forest, up 1.3 percentage points compared with 2008.

The authors note that the study has limits. While China has reported improving levels of air quality in the past year, urban residents still choke under regular “airpocalypses.” The majority of Chinese cities endure levels of smog that exceed both Chinese and World Health Organization health standards.

“You can plant trees till the end of time,” says Ms. Daily. “But they’ll never be enough to clean up the air.”

– Te-Ping Chen


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## Costas (Jul 3, 2016)

Mao Zedong, Founding Father of the People’s Republic of China, Conspired with the Japanese Army
by ENDO Homare, Director, Center of International Relations, Tokyo University of Social Welfare, Professor Emeritus, University of Tsukuba

Conspiracy between Mao Zedong and local agencies of Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs 
Mao Zedong requested truce between the CPC forces and the Japanese Army
Let’s drag the Sino-Japanese War out as long as possible
Imprisonment of all the spies to silence them
Why Mao Zedong was grateful to the Imperial Japanese Army after the creation of the PRC
Mao Zedong never once celebrated the day commemorating victory over Japan
Mao Zedong did not even teach Chinese school children about the Nanjing Massacre


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## Costas (Jul 3, 2016)

China Suspends Diplomatic Contact With Taiwan
By JAVIER C. HERNÁNDEZ (NYT 25 Ιουν. '16)

BEIJING — In a sign of growing friction between China and Taiwan, mainland diplomats said Saturday that they had suspended contact with their Taiwanese counterparts because the island’s new leader would not endorse the idea of a single Chinese nation.

Beijing said it had cut off communication because President Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan failed to endorse the idea that Taiwan and the mainland are part of one China, a concept known as the 1992 Consensus.

The move was the latest effort by the Chinese government, led by President Xi Jinping, to increase pressure on Ms. Tsai, who took office last month and has unsettled Beijing with her reluctance to disavow calls for Taiwanese independence.

“The cross-strait communication mechanism has been suspended because Taiwan did not recognize the 1992 Consensus, the political basis for the One China principle,” An Fengshan, a spokesman for Beijing’s Taiwan Affairs Office, said in a statement posted on its website.

Taiwanese officials said Saturday that they would continue to try to communicate with their mainland counterparts. “We hope Taiwan and the mainland can continue to have benign interaction, which is good for both sides,” said Tung Chen-yuan, a government spokesman in Taipei.

Patrick M. Cronin, a senior adviser at the Center for a New American Security, called the decision by Beijing to halt talks a “warning shot across the bow.” He said mainland officials were growing increasingly nervous about an independence movement in Taiwan and were seeking to hinder Ms. Tsai’s domestic agenda, including her promise to revive a slowing economy.

“China will deny carrots and signal red lines for President Tsai as she grapples with her fundamental challenge, which is righting the economy,” Dr. Cronin said.

Taiwan and China have been estranged since the Communist revolution of 1949. Under Ms. Tsai’s immediate predecessor, Ma Ying-jeou, the two sides forged closer economic and political ties.

Ms. Tsai has taken a more cautious approach, openly criticizing Chinese officials and warmly embracing China’s historic rivals like Japan. Her party, the Democratic Progressives, has traditionally advocated Taiwanese independence, a move the mainland has threatened to counter with military force.

Ms. Tsai has said she wants to maintain the status quo in cross-strait relations, but she has stopped short of offering an unequivocal endorsement of the One China policy.

In 1992, Taiwan and the mainland agreed to consider themselves part of a single Chinese nation, but each side embraces a different interpretation of what that means.

Mainland officials treat the consensus as a prerequisite for normal relations, and threatened to suspend contact if Ms. Tsai did not endorse the principle. The state media published a series of scathing editorials, including one in which a People’s Liberation Army general suggested that Ms. Tsai, Taiwan’s first female president, held extremist views because she was unmarried.

On Saturday, the Taiwan Affairs Office in Beijing revealed that talks with the Mainland Affairs Council in Taipei had been suspended since May, soon after Ms. Tsai’s inauguration. The two entities represent one of the primary channels of communication between China and Taiwan, overseeing discussions related to trade, law, education and culture.

Tensions between the two sides increased in recent weeks, after Cambodia, an ally of Beijing, decided to deport to mainland China 25 Taiwanese citizens accused of participating in an internet scheme. It was the third instance in recent months of China’s seeking to prosecute citizens of Taiwan on its soil.

On Saturday, Chinese officials defended their handling of the case, saying efforts to crack down on internet schemes were legitimate and supported by people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait.

Analysts said the decision to suspend talks was probably the beginning of a campaign by Beijing to increase pressure on Taiwan.

China has several methods by which it could further constrain Ms. Tsai. It could seek to lure away Taiwan’s few remaining diplomatic allies with promises of lucrative infrastructure investments. It could also place restrictions on Chinese tourism to the island, which has increased significantly in recent years, becoming a bright spot for the otherwise struggling Taiwanese economy.

“The big unknown is the business community,” said Jean-Pierre Cabestan, a political science professor at Hong Kong Baptist University. “China will be reaching out to all the segments that are going to be dissatisfied with Tsai’s policies.”

The timing of Beijing’s announcement, just as Ms. Tsai departed for Latin America on her first overseas trip as president, seemed aimed at undermining her leadership, analysts said.

“By refusing to communicate, Beijing is making it more difficult for the Taiwanese government to fulfill its obligations to its citizens and as a member of international society,” said Jonathan Sullivan, the director of the China Policy Institute at the University of Nottingham in England.

He added, “Beijing is saying, ‘We don’t care about inconvenience and are prepared to inhibit the management of cross-strait interactions if we don’t get what we want.’”


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## Costas (Jul 3, 2016)

China court tells writer to apologise for challenging propaganda
By AFP (HK Free Press, 28 Ιουν. '16)

A Chinese court has ordered the former chief editor of an influential magazine to apologise for challenging an official account of history, as Beijing further tightens limits on freedom of speech.

Hong Zhenkuai cast doubt on the story of the “Five Warriors of Mount Langyashan”, who allegedly jumped off a cliff while fighting the Japanese during World War II rather than surrender.

They are touted as patriotic heroes in schoolbooks and propaganda by China’s ruling Communist Party as part of its nationalistic narrative.

But Hong pointed out discrepancies in the story in two 2013 articles for his progressive magazine Yanhuang Chunqiu, questioning whether two of the five had jumped at all.

The Beijing Xicheng District People’s Court ruled Monday that he had “tarnished their reputation and honour”, and hurt the feelings of their two sons, plaintiffs Ge Changsheng and Song Fubao, along with those of the Chinese people as a whole.

The court gave Hong three days to issue a public apology, it said in a statement on its website. It was unclear what penalty he would face should he fail to do so.

The Langyashan soldiers were “a key component of the spirit of the Chinese nation”, the court said.

As a Chinese citizen, it added, Hong should have known better than to “diminish their heroic image and spiritual value”.

“The defendant had the ability to control the potential damaging consequences that arose out of the articles but did not do so,” it said.

“His judgement is clearly faulty and he should bear legal responsibility. The freedom of speech that he advocates is clearly insufficient as a defence against his legal wrongs.”

China has imposed ever-tighter restrictions on freedom of speech and the press since Xi Jinping became president in 2013.

The Communist Party tolerates no opposition to its rule and newspapers, websites, and broadcast media are strictly controlled. An army of censors patrols social media and many Western news websites are blocked.

Yanhuang Chunqiu was once one of the country’s most outspoken political magazines, known for pieces that challenge official historical narratives, but has faced increased scrutiny and censorship in recent years. In 2015 it was forced to cancel its annual conference under government pressure for the first time in its decades-long history.

The official Xinhua news agency quoted one of the judges in the Five Warriors case as saying: “Free speech is not without boundaries, and it should be protected on the premise that it does not infringe on other people’s legal rights.”


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## Costas (Jul 5, 2016)

Ας βάλω και μια καλή είδηση, ας είν' και κορεάτικη


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## Costas (Jul 14, 2016)

The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern China (China Daily)


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## Costas (Jul 23, 2016)

*Discord Between China’s Top Two Leaders Spills Into the Open*
President Xi and Premier Li offer conflicting messages on the economy, showing a crack in party’s united front (WSJ)


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## nickel (Jul 24, 2016)

*Hooligan Sparrow*

This jarring documentary on women's rights in China amid governmental intimidation premiered at Sundance.

She offered to work for free at one of China's brothels. That was an offer that the media couldn't refuse to cover, and Ye Haiyan gained notoriety, drawing attention to China's deplorable sex-services industry. Nicknamed “Hooligan Sparrow” for her vigilant promotion of women's rights in China, Ye Haiyan became a government target.

Hooligan Sparrow follows Ye Haiyan and her fellow activists, who protest a case where six elementary-school age girls were sexually abused by their principal. In that case, the Chinese educational/governmental bureaucracy protected the accused and began to apply pressure to Ye Haiyan for exposing this injustice. She had long been a target for her exposure of the harsh conditions of the brothels, which number in the thousands across China.

This guerrilla-style documentary is brave. The filmmaker, Nanfu Wang, also was subject to Chinese suppression and had to shoot this doc on the sly. Wang was under constant pressure, her equipment destroyed and her person threatened. Utilizing hidden-camera subterfuges and deceptively placed microphones, Wang has managed to uncover in the process another human-rights outrage in China, the thug-like nature of government's intrusion into private lives.

Nearly the entire film is shot with hand-held cameras, with only personal interviews conducted in a non-hostile situation. Throughout, Wang makes a virtue out of necessity: Her on-the-run scoping and jarring cuts infuse the film with a sense of desperate danger befitting its subject matter.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/hooligan-sparrow-sundance-review-861632​
Το ντοκιμαντέρ προβλήθηκε τον περασμένο Μάρτιο στο 18ο Φεστιβάλ Ντοκιμαντέρ Θεσσαλονίκης. Μου άρεσε η παρακάτω πρόσφατη κριτική παρουσίαση από τον Matt Fagerholm, εκ των διαδόχων του Ebert.

http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/hooligan-sparrow-2016


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## Costas (Jul 26, 2016)

Chinese scientists to pioneer first human CRISPR trial
Gene-editing technique to treat lung cancer is due to be tested in people in August. (Nature)


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## Costas (Jul 30, 2016)

Grandson of China’s Most-Hated Landlord Challenges Communist Lore
VANESSA PIAO / NYT (Sinosphere)

ANREN, China — To many Chinese, Liu Wencai is the archetype of the despotic landlord from pre-Communist days, one who exploited his tenants, tortured those who fell behind on rent in a “water dungeon” and forced new mothers to breast-feed him as a longevity therapy.

But his grandson Liu Xiaofei, 70, has spent the past two decades trying to prove that his grandfather was not only a good man, but actually aided the Communist forces in Sichuan Province.

“The ruling party has no integrity, so I have to tell the truth,” Mr. Liu said in an interview.

He said he was not seeking his grandfather’s formal rehabilitation but simply trying to establish that the government fabricated stories to advance its political goals.

“By inciting hatred through propaganda, they turned humans into beasts,” he said. “I want to tell the truth so our nation won’t repeat these mistakes.”

Mr. Liu, a retired oil-well construction worker, spends his days at a computer in his apartment in Longchang, in southern Sichuan, working on a book based on research that includes more than 1,000 interviews.

When he travels to the town of Anren, where his grandfather’s manor was turned into a museum in 1959 to showcase evil deeds he is reported to have committed, Mr. Liu gives impassioned speeches to visitors, pointing out which exhibits — essentially, all of them, he says — are fake.

Mr. Liu said it was a single sentence his mother uttered in the late 1960s, during the Cultural Revolution, that sent him on his journey, a one-man battle even family members consider doomed in a tightening political climate.

“The underground Communists’ command headquarters was right in our manor,” he said she told him. “Those words were engraved in my heart.”

On a misty morning, Mr. Liu walked past cafes, bars and design stores lining the streets of Anren, now a tourist destination known as the township of museums, for the Liu family manors and other cultural sites. A luxury hotel has been built for vacationers and parents visiting their children at the Confucius International School, which promises to prepare pupils for top foreign universities and boasts of being housed in a school that Liu Wencai built in 1942, where tuition fees were waived for poor but talented pupils.

Many residents seem to remember Liu Wencai favorably.

“If you ask if people here think Liu Wencai was good, that goes without saying,” said Dai Rongyao, 89, who was selling embroidered handicrafts.

Liu Wencai, born in 1887, amassed huge wealth in the 1920s in the Yangtze River port of Yibin, dominating lucrative businesses including the opium and weapons trades under the wing of his younger brother, Liu Wenhui, a Nationalist warlord.

In 1933, Liu Wenhui retreated to the Tibetan region of Kham, after losing a battle to a warlord nephew, and Liu Wencai returned to his hometown, Anren, and sponsored road, water and electricity projects as well as the school.

In 1942, Liu Wenhui, long at odds with the Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek, met with Zhou Enlai and began clandestinely cooperating with his Communists.

In 1946, at the start of the Chinese civil war, Liu Wencai financed a Communist guerrilla force of around 50 people while allowing its command headquarters to be set up in his manor, said Mr. Liu, who said he learned this from a close aide to Liu Wencai who has since died. (A provincial government history says that underground Communists took advantage of Liu Wencai’s conflict with a rival to secure weapons from him.)

Liu Wencai died in October 1949, the same month that Mao Zedong proclaimed the founding of the People’s Republic. In December, his brother Liu Wenhui openly joined forces with the Communists, and the Nationalists retreated from Sichuan to Taiwan.

The Liu family, like many wealthy Chinese, considered fleeing to Hong Kong, fearing what might happen under the new Communist government, Mr. Liu said. But Liu Wenhui urged them to stay, insisting the family would be treated well as the party’s friend.

Instead, the family’s property was seized and its members attacked in a series of political campaigns. In 1958, local officials eager to demonstrate their fervor for Maoist class struggle presented Liu Wencai as the prototype of the exploiting landlord. His coffin was dug up, and his remains were scattered.

In 1959, the landlord’s residence was turned into a museum, featuring a “water dungeon,” an underground space half-filled with water. A woman who claimed to be the dungeon’s sole survivor described it as filled with human bones.

By the early 1960s, Liu Wencai was nationally notorious as the “chief representative of the landlord class for 3,000 years.” His brother Liu Wenhui, who in 1959 became forestry minister and escaped persecution under Zhou Enlai’s protection, was powerless to reverse the propaganda campaign, though he was secretly upset.

“What the hell are they talking about?” was his private comment on one newspaper article about Liu Wencai, according to his grandson Liu Shizhao.

In 1965, the Sichuan authorities commissioned more than 100 life-size clay sculptures that the museum installed as the Rent Collection Courtyard, which purported to show how Liu Wencai and his lackeys bullied peasants to extract rents.

Replicas of the statues were exhibited in Beijing later that year, drawing hundreds of thousands of visitors. In 1966, just before the onset of the Cultural Revolution, a documentary about Liu Wencai was released, and stories of his crimes were subsequently included in textbooks.

Denunciations of the landlord and the evil he ostensibly personified surged during the Cultural Revolution. Family members came under attack. A cousin of Mr. Liu who fled to Xinjiang was murdered along with his wife and children, as were many other people in China branded as “landlords.”

The frenzy subsided only in the 1980s, when liberal voices were tolerated to some extent. In 1988, the provincial authorities admitted that the water dungeon was an invention, and it was drained. But these beginnings of a re-evaluation stalled after the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown as the party tightened its grip, Mr. Liu said.

In the museum, Mr. Liu pointed out items he said never belonged to his family.

A visitor asked, “This is your family?”

“I’m Liu Wencai’s grandson,” Mr. Liu said.

“Can we take a picture with you?” the man shouted excitedly, pointing at his friends.

Mr. Liu became the group’s tour guide, and the man, a railway official from Guizhou who said he had visited the museum on a school tour in the 1970s, was startled when Mr. Liu said that nearly everything on display was fake.

Xiao Shu, the pen name of Chen Min, who in 1999 published “The Truth About Liu Wencai,” a book that was soon banned, said the party would be reluctant to restore to respectability a villain of its own making.

His book was accused of “negating the legitimacy of the new democratic revolution,” when the party persecuted landlords and distributed their property to poor peasants, he said. “This is the basis of the regime’s legitimacy, so they don’t dare face the truth.”

Wu Hongyuan, 60, a retired county propaganda official who served as the museum’s director in the 1990s, said the process of restoring the truth could not be rushed. “The museum is too sensitive, and Liu Wencai is too famous,” he said.

Mr. Wu said he tried to recast the museum to more accurately present Liu Wencai’s life, but anytime he altered something, he said, former underground Communists in Anren would protest to the authorities.

Li Weijia, 98, was one of those protesters.

“He never protected party members!” insisted Mr. Li, in a hospital ward reserved for senior officials in Chengdu. “That’s confusing black and white!"

At the end of his trip to Anren, Mr. Liu visited Chen Fahong, 86, a former worker in Liu Wencai’s manor.

“We had rice and meat to eat then. He was kind,” Mr. Chen said of Liu Wencai in his modest yard amid onion fields. “After liberation” in 1949, he said, “we had only bran and grass to eat.”

Mr. Liu said that, looking back, the family regretted having trusted the Communists.

He recalled a song sung in his family after Liu Wenhui sided with the Communists, envisioning a paradise under the party’s rule.

“There is a good place beyond the mountains,” it goes. “There, rich and poor are equal.”


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## Costas (Aug 3, 2016)

Μοιχοχωριστές
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/30/world/asia/china-marriage-affair-mistress.html


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## SBE (Aug 4, 2016)

Σα χολιγουντιανή ταινία ακούγεται.


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## Costas (Aug 4, 2016)

Σύντομα και στην πόλη σας. ☺


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## Costas (Aug 8, 2016)

:)
Chinese broadcaster CCTV has also complained about the Chinese flags that were used over the weekend during ceremonies at the Rio games. The small stars on the Chinese flag are supposed to all point toward the flag’s large star, but at the Rio games, the flags have small stars all pointing upward.

“The national flag is the symbol of a country. No mistakes are allowed!” CCTV declared.

To make matters worse, it was later revealed by Chinese media that the flags were manufactured in China.

(The Guardian)


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## drsiebenmal (Aug 8, 2016)

:lol:

Αλλά και το πρώτο μέρος του άρθρου είναι κελεπούρι...


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## Costas (Aug 8, 2016)

Ναι!........


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## Costas (Aug 17, 2016)

Ο κινέζικος χορός του Ζαλόγγου και ο κ. Ρε Πουσή :)
Court Orders a Writer to Apologize Over Wartime Story


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## Costas (Sep 9, 2016)

Κάνουν και οι πρόεδροι της ΛΔΚ γλωσσικές γκάφες, με κινέζικα χαρακτηριστικά, εννοείται.

China’s Censors Scramble After Xi’s G-20 Speech
(VOA)
Censors in China are working overtime to scrub the Internet and social media of any mention of a slip-up made by Chinese President Xi Jinping made during a speech in Hangzhou before the Group of 20 Nations leaders’ summit.

In a speech Saturday to the Business 20 (B20) summit, which advises the G-20 leaders on policy decisions, Xi talked about the global economy and quoted an ancient Chinese phrase: "Make the tariff light and the road smooth, promote trade and ease agricultural policy." [轻关易道，通商宽农]

But because the last character in the phrase for agriculture is very similar to the one for clothes, he ended up saying “taking one’s clothes off” [宽衣] instead of "ease agricultural policy." [宽农]

The phrase was quickly censored on China’s Weibo microblog website, after many comments on the slip-up began to surface. Searches for this term return no results, suggesting it has been removed. Such content is also censored on the Chinese mobile messaging app WeChat.

A Twitter user said, "Xi mistakenly read 'easing agricultural policy' as 'taking off clothing' means that he did not read the texts beforehand, nor does he care about the content."

Another joked that "'Taking off clothing' promotes communication. ... To run business, you must take off clothes first."

A commenter on an overseas Chinese blog says the incident reminds him of the story of "The Emperor's New Clothes." "The reality is that the child shouting that the king is naked is silenced," he writes on his blog.

Badiucao, a Chinese cartoonist, drew a cartoon picture depicting a naked Xi in a neon adult toy signboard with the caption "promoting trade and taking off clothing."

Politicians often misspeak, both in China and around the world. But this gaffe is reopening discussion of Xi’s education credentials, long a sensitive but widely discussed topic.

Xi left school when he was a middle school student during China’s Cultural Revolution to work in the countryside of western Shaanxi province. In 1976, Xi, like many of his peers at the time who missed out on nearly a decade of education, was recommended to Tsinghua University. There was no national college entrance exam during the Cultural Revolution.

From 1998 to 2002, Xi studied Marxist theory and ideology education in Tsinghua and obtained a doctorate degree in law. Some critics have questioned Xi’s academic capability, suggesting his thesis may have been plagiarized or written by others. Xi has never commented on the controversy.


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## Costas (Sep 25, 2016)

Chinese Jews of Ancient Lineage Huddle Under Pressure
(Chris Buckley / NYT)

(...)
He and many of Kaifeng’s Jews, as well as their supporters abroad, said the clampdown did not spring from outright anti-Semitism, which is relatively rare in China. Shanghai and Harbin, a northeast city, have organized displays and events celebrating their role protecting Jews who fled persecution in Europe.

“It’s fear about religion, not just us Jews,” the businessman said.

Until a few decades ago, the Jews of Kaifeng seemed destined to fade away, an obscure memory at the intersection of two ancient civilizations.

Their forebears, possibly merchants from Persia, settled in Kaifeng when it was the vibrant capital of the Northern Song dynasty and built a synagogue here in the 12th century. For hundreds of years, they prospered largely free of persecution, surviving the rise and fall of successive dynasties.

But their numbers dwindled as they intermarried with China’s ethnic Han majority. The synagogue crumbled away. By 1851, when European missionaries acquired a 17th-century Hebrew Torah in Kaifeng and later presented it to the British Museum, few if any residents could read it.

Still, even after decades of Communist rule, some residue of Jewish identity survived in Kaifeng. Parents and grandparents told children of their roots and warned them not to eat pork.

The revival here took off in the 1990s as Jewish tourists, scholars and businesspeople from around the world who were curious about this remote outpost of Judaism began to visit and share their knowledge. Several years ago, two organizations, the Sino-Judaic Institute and Shavei Israel, set up offices and offered classes in Hebrew, Judaism and Jewish history, partly to counter Christian missionaries operating in Kaifeng.
(...)

Παρά ταύτα, μου είχε κάνει εντύπωση μια νεαρή Κινέζα που μου έλεγε πριν από καμιά οχταετία πως η λέξη Ισραήλ ήταν συνδεδεμένη στο μυαλό της με κάτι κακό.


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## Costas (Nov 14, 2016)

Οι περιπέτειες μιας λέξης (το άρθρο έχει και φωτογραφίες)

*The C-word: why Hong Kong localists have offended all Chinese*
_Through much of its history ‘Chee-na’ was a neutral expression, but its association with Japanese aggression turned it into a taboo_
(Chow Chung-yan / South China Morning Post)

A few days after Hong Kong localists Sixtus “Baggio” Leung Chung-hang and Yau Wai-ching called China “Chee-na” during their swearing-in ceremony as the city’s newly elected legislators, Leung went on radio to defend himself.

First, he tried to pin it to his “accent”. When the radio host pointed out that he seemed to have no problem pronouncing China properly on other occasions, Leung admitted that he did use the word “Chee-na”. But he shrugged it off as nothing important or offensive.

“In the oath, it doesn’t mention any specific person… I don’t know how we could have offended anyone,” Leung said. He then went on to say that even Sun Yat-sen, the founding father of modern China, used the term at some point in his writing.

To understand why so many people, including those who don’t like the central government in Beijing, feel offended by Leung and Yau’s antics, some historical perspective is needed.

The Chinese word 支那 [Chee-na] first appeared in the Buddhist scriptures of the Tang dynasty (6th century). It is believed to be the phonetic translation of the ancient Sanskrit word “cina”. Some see this as the origin of the English word “China”, but there is no conclusive evidence to support that.

For most of its history, the term has had no derogatory meaning. Some scholars even argue that it is actually not the name of any particular country, but a loose expression for “land of the east”.

The Chinese themselves almost never use it. In fact, even Zhongguo – the Middle Kingdom – was not often used in ancient times. Before the 1911 revolution, China existed not as a nation state in the Westphalian sense. It was a civilisation with an unbroken line of imperial dynasties. People referred to themselves as “people of the great Qing” or “people of the great Tang”. Few would call themselves “people of Zhongguo”, even fewer would use “Chinese”.

The word “Chee-na” was introduced to Japan – whose writing system borrowed heavily from Chinese – in the Tang dynasty. But it was used only as a geographic term rather than the name of any particular country or people.

For centuries, Japan followed its neighbour’s tradition and addressed China by its dynasty name. This changed after the outbreak of the Opium War in 1839 between China and Britain. The humiliating defeat of the Qing empire and the loss of Hong Kong shattered China’s millennia-old worldview and its sense of cultural superiority. The Chinese civilisation entered a century of sharp and painful decline.

Japan, on the other hand, quickly reinvented itself after the Meiji Restoration. It was the most successful, in fact the only, Asian country that transformed peacefully from an ancient regime into a modern nation state. Japan gradually lost its respect for the giant across the sea and started to look at China with contempt and a predatory interest.

The first Sino-Japanese war in 1894 ended in total disaster for the Qing court. The Chinese elite were shocked to their core. Within two decades, the Qing dynasty was overthrown and China was declared a modern republic.

Initially, China and Japan enjoyed a decade-long “golden relationship” shortly after the war. Many Japanese intellectuals were genuinely sympathetic towards China and hoped to get their Asian brethren back up on their feet.

Many Chinese revolutionary leaders – from Sun Yat-sen to Chiang Kai-shek and Zhou Enlai (周恩來) – lived or studied in Japan. The modern Chinese language, in turn, borrowed extensively from Japanese. “Chee-na”, together with many other words like “economy”, “democracy” and “police”, was reintroduced back to China.

At that time, the word had no obvious derogatory implication. In the run-up to the collapse of the Qing empire, people increasingly stopped seeing the Manchurian court as the legitimate representation of the Chinese civilisation. Japanese scholars ceased to refer to China as “the great Qing”. More and more of them started to use the word “Chee-na” as a neutral geographical expression.

Sun and some early Chinese national revolution leaders did use the word in their writing at that time as they refused to see themselves as the subject of the Qing and the modern Chinese state had yet to come into being.

But then the meaning of the word started to undergo a dramatic transformation. It was increasingly used in Japan as a demeaning way to address China and its people, implying that they were a sub-class. Japanese scholar Sato Nobuhiro, founder of the “Greater Asia” concept, used the term in his influential book, A Secret Strategy for Expansion, to suggest that China existed not as a political entity but a mere geographic expression. His work became the intellectual inspiration of Japanese imperialism towards China.

“Chee-na” quickly became a taboo word in China. While in Japan, it was used more and more as an insult. The Chinese government banned the use of the word shortly after the establishment of the republic. In 1930, the Nanjing (南京) government formally requested Japan to stop using it to address China. The Tokyo civilian government complied but the imperialist advocates continued to use the word. It implied that China was not worthy to be recognised as a sovereign state and it existed only as a geographical expression. This was used to justify Japan’s aggression.

The psychological association of “Chee-na” with Japanese aggression and invasion became inseparable following the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War. It was widely used in the propaganda materials of the Japanese military.
Youngspiration duo remains in legislative limbo over oath-taking

Today, using the word will inevitably bring back that painful history to Chinese people everywhere, particularly those who had witnessed and endured all the horrors of the war.

When Leung and Yau used the word in their “oaths”, they perhaps intended to insult the government in Beijing. But by picking a word so emotionally associated with the memory of foreign aggression, they succeeded in offending all Chinese.


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## Costas (Dec 14, 2016)

A Magician of Chinese Poetry
By Perry Link
Source: New York Review of Books (24/11/16)

_*19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei (with More Ways)*_
by Eliot Weinberger, with an afterword by Octavio Paz
New Directions, 88 pp.

*The Ghosts of Birds*
by Eliot Weinberger
New Directions, 211 pp., $16.95 (paper)

Some people, and I am one, feel that Tang (618–907 CE) poetry is the finest literary art they have ever read. But does one need to learn Chinese in order to have such a view, or can classical Chinese poetry be adequately translated?

In 1987 Eliot Weinberger, who has written brilliant essays on topics as various as the mystical _I Ching_ (Book of Change), Buddha as “impostor,” Albanian Islam, and a connection between Michel Foucault and George W. Bush—and who has translated Chinese poetry, too—published a little book with Octavio Paz called _Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei_. There Weinberger and Paz choose a four-line poem by Wang Wei, one of the best Tang poets, and present it many ways: in Chinese characters, in a transliteration into modern Mandarin, in a character-by-character literal translation, and in seventeen different ways translators have tried to put it into English, French, or Spanish.

They find that none of the translations is perfect (there is no such thing as “perfect” in such matters), but that some are very worthwhile as poems on their own. Weinberger writes that a good poem contains “living matter” that “functions somewhat like DNA, spinning out individual translations that are relatives, not clones, of the original.” Now, in 2016, we have an updated version of the book, called _Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei (with More Ways)_, that offers sixteen additional offspring, three in German, for a total of thirty-four.

The title of the poem is “Deer Fence” (or Deer Park, Deer Enclosure, Deer Forest Hermitage, and others). Weinberger’s literal translation reflects the five-characters-per-line of the original:

_Empty/mountain(s) [or] hill(s)/(negative)/to see/person [or] people
But/to hear/person [or] people/words or conversation/sound [or] to echo
To return/bright(ness) [or] shadow(s)/to enter/deep/forest
To return/to shine/green/moss/above_

Of the finished translations, this one by Burton Watson is among Weinberger’s favorites:

_Empty hills, no one in sight,
only the sound of someone talking;
late sunlight enters the deep wood,
shining over the green moss again._

How good are the good translations? How much of the original do we get?

Some of the art of classical Chinese poetry must simply be set aside as untranslatable. The internal structure of Chinese characters has a beauty of its own, and the calligraphy in which classical poems were written is another important but untranslatable dimension.1 Since Chinese characters do not vary in length, and because there are exactly five characters per line in a poem like this, another untranslatable feature is that the written result, hung on a wall, presents a rectangle. Translators into languages whose word lengths vary can reproduce such an effect only at the risk of fatal awkwardness. (Watson’s translation, above, does about as well as one can do; instead of five characters per line it gives us six English words per line.)

Another imponderable is how to imitate the 1-2, 1-2-3 rhythm in which five-syllable lines in classical Chinese poems normally are read. Chinese characters are pronounced in one syllable apiece, so producing such rhythms in Chinese is not hard and the results are unobtrusive; but any imitation in a Western language is almost inevitably stilted and distracting. Even less translatable are the patterns of tone arrangement in classical Chinese poetry. Each syllable (character) belongs to one of two categories determined by the pitch contour in which it is read; in a classical Chinese poem the patterns of alternation of the two categories exhibit parallelism and mirroring.

Weinberger knows all of this and sensibly begins his inquiry at step two—after all the untranslatables have been set aside. Now the question becomes: How can one make another poem from the twenty bundles of meaning that the Chinese characters offer? Weinberger criticizes, astutely if sometimes unkindly, almost every translator he cites. He says the images in Wang Wei’s poem are more “specific” than they are in a translation by Witter Bynner, and he has a point, but does he need to write that Bynner sees Wang Wei as “watching the world through a haze of opium”? Sometimes, too, Weinberger’s standards seem not to apply uniformly. He scolds Chang Yin-nan and Lewis Walmsley for writing that the voices in the hills are “faint” and “drift on the air.” These characterizations are not in the original, and for Weinberger are “a classic example of the translator attempting to ‘improve’ the original” and even show “a kind of unspoken contempt for the foreign poet.”

In contrast, Weinberger congratulates Kenneth Rexroth, whose translation inserts much more than Chang and Walmsley’s does, for producing a “real poem” that is closest “to the spirit, if not the letter, of the original.” Most translators will agree that we should not try to improve and also that loyalty to spirit must sometimes outweigh loyalty to letter. But to look at a specific addition to a poem and decide which of these things it is doing is very difficult.

Broadly speaking, the problems for a translator, especially of poetry, and especially between languages as different as Chinese and English, are two: What do I think the poetic line says? And then, once I think I understand it, how can I put it into English? Differences in translations sometimes arise from the first problem; most, though, come from the second, where the impossibility of perfect answers spawns endless debate. The letter-versus-spirit dilemma is almost always at the center.

At the literalist extreme, there is a school of Western Sinology that aims to ferret out and dissect every conceivable detail about the language of an original. The dissection, though, normally does to the art of a poem approximately what the scalpel of an anatomy instructor does to the life of a frog. Peter A. Boodberg, a distinguished Sinologist at Berkeley fifty years ago, translates Wang Wei’s poem this way:

DEER WATTLE (HERMITAGE)

_The empty mountain; to see no men,
Barely earminded of men talking—countertones
And antistrophic lights-and- shadows incoming deeper the deep-treed grove
Once more to glowlight the blue-green mosses—going up
(The empty mountain…)_

Boodberg’s is an extreme example, but it illustrates the principle in this school of Sinology that the further one goes with philology and literal translation, the closer one gets to the Chinese original. About a decade ago I heard a Sinologist at Princeton rise to express the view that only in translation can the deepest meaning of a Tang poem be brought to light. (The issue was dropped after someone else asked if the reverse were also true: Does Shakespeare’s profundity emerge _only_ in Chinese translation?)

Weinberger is contemptuous of the Boodberg approach (“sounds like Gerard Manley Hopkins on LSD”) and is closer to, but not an extremist in, an approach that puts art at the center. He admires Ezra Pound’s versions of classical Chinese poems in _Cathay_, published in 1915. Pound learned some Chinese characters later in his life but in 1915 could base _Cathay_ only on translations that others had done. His genius for language apparently got him close enough to the spirit of Chinese originals that he could correct mistakes in other translations “intuitively,” as Weinberger puts it. He stops short of calling Pound’s work “translation”; he endorses a phrase by T.S. Eliot, who leavened the question with gentle ambiguity when he said that Pound was “the inventor of Chinese poetry in our time.” Whether translations or inventions, though, Weinberger finds Pound’s renditions “some of the most beautiful poems in the English language.”

In the 1930s Pound became obsessed with the _Book of Odes_, China’s most ancient collection of poetry and song (and, some say, guide to government). Convinced that the existing English translations of the _Odes_ were “appalling” and “intolerable,” and that there must be a great pearl inside the closed oyster if only he could get there, Pound, then over fifty years old, began to study Chinese characters. He could now “play the game of pretending to read Chinese,” as Weinberger puts it, and unleashed his fecund imagination upon “pictographic” characters in ways that serious Sinologists knew to be utterly groundless. Professors wrote articles exposing Pound’s errors in both interpretation of characters and translations of poems.

Weinberger’s implicit riposte, which I support, is: _But do you do better?_ One can acknowledge a long list of Pound’s technical errors (Weinberger has some, too) and still point out that phrases like Boodberg’s “antistrophic lights-and-shadows” leave a reader much further from a Wang Wei poem than Pound does. Wai-lim Yip, a scholar of poetry who knows both English and Chinese well, notes that, despite the literal errors, in Pound “the ‘cuts and turns’ of the mind in the originals are largely preserved” and the “essential poems” are “luminous.” Could one say that of Boodberg? Options in the translation of poetry are complexly interconnected, and gaining something in one place almost inevitably means losing something in another. So here is a good rule of thumb: anyone who criticizes a given translation should be ready to offer an alternative that, all things considered, works better.

Pound’s approach to Chinese poetry was deeply influenced by Ernest Fenollosa, an American who in the late 1870s and 1880s taught Western philosophy in Tokyo, where he developed a consuming interest in Chinese and Japanese poetry and art. Fenollosa died of a heart attack in 1908, and in 1913 his widow, Mary, agreed to hand all his private papers and manuscripts over to Pound. One of those papers, called “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry,” was the progenitor of some of Pound’s more durable views on the Chinese language. Fenollosa, and Pound following him, grossly exaggerated the extent to which characters are “thought pictures.”

More usefully, though, the Fenollosa essay showed Pound what it could mean for poets that Chinese characters are free from inflections for number, tense, voice, and gender that are mandatory in Western languages. It seemed to Fenollosa that in Chinese, bundles of meaning just came along side by side. Grammar still had a place, in some simple rules of word order, but it did not affect the characters themselves and left much more room for poetic ambiguity. The meanings of Chinese characters, wrote Fenollosa, could “be like the mingling of the fringes of feathered banners.” Or:

A word is like a sun, with its corona and chromosphere; words crowd upon words, and wrap each other in their luminous envelopes until sentences become clear, continuous light-bands.​
For Pound, “luminous” became an important word, and later a Fenollosan understanding of Chinese poetry, through Pound, influenced the Anglo-American Imagist movement of Hilda Doolittle, Richard Aldington, and others. Later, it also had an effect on the American poets Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg.

The advantages of Chinese characters in avoiding grammatical specificity (advantages to poets, not necessarily to scientists or lawyers) can be analyzed primarily as absences of subject, number, and tense. Each of these three is worth a look.

_Subjectlessness_. It is the norm in classical Chinese poetry, and common even in modern Chinese prose, to omit subjects. The reader or listener infers a subject. In the first line of our Wang Wei poem (“empty mountain no see person”), only a perverse reader would say that “empty mountain” should be the subject because it is a noun and comes first. Common sense hears the phrase adverbially and infers the subject to be an unstated human viewer. But how can one put this effect into Western languages that ask by grammatical rule that subjects always be stated? Most of the translators in _Nineteen Ways_ supply an “I.” Weinberger points out, though, that when “I” is inserted a “controlling individual mind of the poet” enters and destroys the effect of the Chinese line. Without a subject, he writes, “the experience becomes both universal and immediate to the reader.” This point is correct and very important.

Another way to handle the subjectlessness, which Wai-lim Yip chooses, is to use the passive voice in English: “no man is seen.” But this, at least to my ear, again particularizes the experience too much. That marvelous sense of “both universal and immediate” remains lost. A third alternative is to leave the voice active and, following the Chinese, name no subject: “in empty mountains, see no person,” or something like that. But this often sounds broken or childlike, which the Chinese line certainly does not. Burton Watson’s “empty hills, no one in sight” is about as good as one can do.

_Numberlessness_. Nouns have no number in Chinese. Weinberger notes that “rose is a rose is all roses,” but that formulation still leaves us too far inside Western-language number habits. “All roses” in English means the summation of individual roses, whereas in Chinese _meigui_, or “rose” is more like “roseness” or “rosehood.” (If you want to talk in Chinese about one rose, you may, but then you use a “measure word” to say “one blossom-of roseness.”) So, in the first line of Wang Wei’s poem, it is not quite right to think of _shan_ as either singular or plural, either _hill_ or _hills_. The concept is more abstract. But what can a translator write? _Hillness_ sounds odd and _hillhood_ almost funny. Any attempt of this kind tends to exoticize, but the supple Chinese line is not at all exotic. (It is worth noting that Western views of Eastern expression as quaint have often originated not in Eastern languages themselves but in the awkwardness that results when rules of Western languages are applied.)

_Tenselessness_. There are several ways in Chinese to specify when something happened or will happen, but verb tense is not one of them. For poets, the great advantage of tenselessness is the ambiguity it opens up. Did I see no one in the hills? Or am I now seeing no one? Am I imagining what it would be like to see no one? All these, and others, are possible. Weinberger’s insight about subjectlessness—that it produces an effect “both universal and immediate”—applies to timelessness as well.

But the effect isn’t possible in a Western language, where grammar always forces a choice of one tense or another. For this reason I will quibble with Weinberger’s choice of English infinitives as his glosses for Chinese verbs. He lists _ru_ as “to enter,” _zhao_ as “to shine,” and so on, but I am afraid that that little “to,” which comes from English grammar, subtly reinforces the mistaken notion that Chinese verbs are, or should be, conjugatable things, when in fact they are not. Moreover, infinitives in Western languages can be nouns. On stage at the Met, _to enter_ is _to shine_—one noun is another. I would prefer to say _ru_ is “enter” and _zhao_ “shine.”

Although he is critical of nearly everyone’s translation in _Nineteen Ways_, Weinberger wisely adopts the position that “quite a few possible readings” can all be “equally ‘correct.’” Dilemmas about translation do not have definitive right answers (although there can be unambiguously wrong ones if misreadings of the original are involved). Any translation (except machine translation, a different case) must pass through the mind of a translator, and that mind inevitably contains its own store of perceptions, memories, and values.

Weinberger—rightly, in my view—pushes this insight further when he writes that “every reading of every poem, regardless of language, is an act of translation: translation into the reader’s intellectual and emotional life.” Then he goes still further: because a reader’s mental life shifts over time, there is a sense in which “the same poem cannot be read twice.” Here, too, I agree. But I feel Weinberger goes a bit too far when he writes that the possible word combinations in a translation are “infinite.” Perhaps we can say that possible interpretations in receiving minds are infinite, since gradations of their differences can be infinitesimal. But “word combinations” in a translation cannot be infinite.

Weinberger’s sensitivity to words and gift for clear thinking underlie nearly every page in _Nineteen Ways_, but in _The Ghosts of Birds_ they spout like a geyser. The essays (some should be called poems) in this book have been published before or are continuations of a project begun before, but it is very good to have them in one place. The range of Weinberger’s interests in human cultures might be summarized as “everything everywhere from the beginning until now,” and he writes with erudition and charm. A horse in a painting from China’s “horse-obsessed” Tang era is “almost ridiculously plump, like a candied apple on four sticks.” His details often seem uncanny—perhaps fiction, a reader might wonder?—but they are not fiction. He does not footnote his sources, but when I checked his China stories I found good (not error-free, but good) bases for all of them.

A warm humanism pervades _The Ghosts of Birds_, and Weinberger has ways of making clear that it is universal. Sometimes, as in a gripping piece on Charles Reznikoff’s book-length poem _Testimony_, a particular case glows so intensely that the reader feels the universality intuitively; it could not be otherwise. Elsewhere, the sense of commonality arises as Weinberger finds something the same across a wide range of cases. “A Calendar of Stones,” for example, collects dozens of pieces of text that show how human beings from the ancient Greeks to the Jains to Buddhist monks to “the Orixás—Yoruba gods who are called ‘saints’ in Brazil,” among others, have interacted with stones. No matter where he draws an example from, Weinberger’s attitude is that human beings are amusing creatures.

Another piece, called “Changs Dreaming,” recounts the dreams, collected from Chinese texts of different sorts and times over centuries, of eighteen unrelated people all surnamed Chang. There is self-satire in the conception of the piece. Surnames do not matter in the genesis of dreams, and to suggest even briefly that they do is sufficiently eccentric to remind us that the truth is the opposite: all of us humans dream. To find so many dreaming Changs is not, moreover, as odd as seems implied. The surname Chang (now often spelled Zhang, but the same name) has always been extremely common in China; today only about fifteen countries in the world have more people than China has Changs.

In “The Story of Adam and Eve,” Weinberger goes beyond the Bible to present a surprising variety of versions of the story from Armenian, Georgian, Greek, Slavonic, Latin, Ge’ez (Ethiopian), and other sources. Every account is vulnerable to his playful barbs. In the Garden of Eden, for example, when Yahweh (God) calls to Adam “Where are you?,” Weinberger notes that He does this “although omniscient.” The bite is terse, but elsewhere Weinberger’s satire flows in cascades. He enjoys what Chinese comedians call “word fountains.” Khubilai Khan (1215–1294 CE), for example, was cruel and efficient during his early years as emperor, but later

became grotesquely fat, suffering from gout and other ailments, and detached from governing. He held huge and endless banquets of meat and koumiss, fermented mare’s milk, and was in a near-continual state of inebriation. [At his hunting reserve] four elephants would carry him, lying on a couch, in a gold-plated palanquin decked with tiger skins, accompanied by five hundred falconers and leopards and lynxes trained to chase down bears and wild boars.​
In his analytic observations, Weinberger likes to cut to a core in plain language. He writes:

Confucianism taught that when the government is bad, one should head for the hills. (Taoism taught that, regardless of government, one should head for the hills.)​
Professors might warn graduate students against such writing as too casual or “reductive,” but I disagree. The points Weinberger makes here are essentially correct and are much clearer than they would be if dressed up in academic jargon. In addition to its clarity, plain language has the virtue of allowing ideas from ancient times and distant places to extend into our present, just as shared humanity itself extends. The alternative of studying ancient ideas as if they are pickled specimens in a jar cannot do that. Weinberger sees lines of Wang Wei’s poems as “both universal and immediate,” and he sees much else in human cultures in that same spirit, which I think is wonderful.

1. See Simon Leys, “One More Art,” The New York Review, April 18, 1996.


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## Costas (Jan 9, 2017)

The Killing Wind: A Chinese County’s Descent into Madness During the Cultural Revolution	
by Tan Hecheng, translated from the Chinese by Stacy Mosher and Guo Jian
Oxford University Press, 505 pp., $34.95
(Ian Johnson / NYRB)

(...)
Mrs. Zhou was tied up and frog-marched to a threshing yard next to the storehouse. Thirteen others were there too, including her husband, who had been seized a day earlier. The group was ordered to set off on a march. At the last moment, one of the leaders remembered that Mrs. Zhou and her husband had three children at home. They were rounded up and joined the rest on a five-mile midnight trek through the mountains.

Exhausted, the group ended up at Maple Wood Mountain at the very spot where we now stood. A self-proclaimed “Supreme People’s Court of the Poor and Lower-Middle Peasants” was formed out of the mob and immediately issued a death sentence to the entire group. The adults were clubbed in the head with a hoe and kicked into a limestone pit. Mrs. Zhou’s children wailed, running from adult to adult, promising to be good. Instead, the adults tossed them into the pit too.

Some fell down twenty feet to a ledge. Mrs. Zhou and one of her children landed alive on a pile of corpses on a higher ledge. When the gang heard their cries and sobs they tossed big rocks at the ledge until it collapsed, sending them down onto the others. Miraculously, all the family members survived. But as the days passed each of them died, until Mrs. Zhou was the last person in the pit with thirty-one corpses around her.

After a week, when an order from the Party had gone out to cease the killings, a few villagers from her hometown—which was not the village where she had been living—sneaked to the cave at night and rescued Mrs. Zhou. The village leadership from the town where she lived then recaptured her and debated killing her. Instead they tossed her in a pigsty and ordered the wardens not to feed her. But some courageous villagers tossed sweet potatoes into her cell at night and she survived another two weeks until a posse of villagers from her hometown freed her.
(...)


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## Costas (May 27, 2017)

China’s Kid Models Trade Childhood for Livelihood
As the country’s online fashion industry booms, parents are choosing photography studios over kindergartens for their children.
(μέσω China File)


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## Costas (May 27, 2017)

Traditional Opera in Shaanxi Province
(Tencent “Living” Channel, μέσω China File)


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## Costas (May 27, 2017)

I found that the term “sex worker” was mostly used by academics pushing to legalize the industry. Many academics feel that it’s important to respect this community by using a term that classifies what they do as a profession. But in fact, many xiaojie don’t really understand or like this name because they feel the term emphasizes sex.

The term “sex worker” reduces all their work to sex, which doesn’t reflect the reality of what they do. It doesn’t accurately represent the diverse forms of emotional work and entertainment that they’re engaged in; rather, it highlights the one part that’s stigmatized.

(...)

*How does this pathway compare to the other options available to them?*

Ding Yu: There’s an important class dimension. As migrants coming from the country to the city, they want to be part of this modern, developed world. They want to shed the kind of coarseness that’s associated with the countryside.

The most common other option for migrant women is to work in a factory. Most xiaojie are very well-informed about the conditions of factory work, and they know they’re not interested.

They know other women from their hometowns who are factory laborers, and there are plenty of media reports that show how it is tedious, repetitive, and arduous, how the worker is treated like a machine. They know you’re stuck in dorm accommodation, far from the city center, producing luxury items you can’t afford to buy yourself. They know you are outside the modernity and development as a handmaiden to it.

Other options, such as being a waitress or nanny or shop assistant — these positions generally see lower income and worse working conditions than being a xiaojie, which is thus not a particularly poor option.

http://www.sixthtone.com/news/1000210/what-sex-workers-can-tell-us-about-chinas-transformation


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## Costas (Jun 19, 2017)

Από το Κόκκινο Βιβλιαράκι του Μάο στο Βιβλίο με ιστοριούλες του Σι...

Kang said he was especially impressed by the way Xi told the story Constant Dripping Wears Away a Stone in an article written in 1990, when Xi was secretary of the Ningde Prefectural Committee of the Communist Party of China in Fujian province, a place known for poverty at that time.

In the article, Xi said he witnessed a stone worn away by dripping during his young adulthood. "Applied to humankind, it is the perfect embodiment of the personality that rises to fight, one after another, and to sacrifice bravely," Xi wrote.

He said in the long process of developing a poor region, people should not seek their own high station but to strive for drips of progress and be willing to become a stepping stone to final success.

"Like almost every child, I was told about the story of perseverance," Kang said. "But Xi told the story in a creative way, and I think that is because he was already thinking about local development from an overall viewpoint at that time." Kang added that the book includes many examples of Xi turning old stories into something new.

Yang Zhenwu, president of People's Daily, wrote in the book's preface that it is a tradition and outstanding ability of leaders of the Communist Party of China to tell stories. He cited Chairman Mao Zedong, one of the founders of the Party, as an example.

Στο μεταξύ, it emerged on Sunday that Athens had refused to endorse an EU statement criticising the crackdown on activists and dissidents under the Chinese president, Xi Jinping. The statement was due to be submitted to the UN’s human rights council in Geneva last Thursday. 

Πράγμα που προκάλεσε την ιερή αγανάχτηση κάποιων άλλων τσακαλιών (θα τραβήξω τις κοτσίδες μου, θα σκίσω τις δαντέλες μου): 

Diplomats were especially piqued at the veto’s timing. Late on Thursday eurozone finance ministers in Luxembourg agreed to unlock €8.5bn (£7.4bn) in bailout loans, allowing Athens to avert default when it faces €7.4bn in debt repayments next month. “It was dishonourable, to say the least,” one EU diplomat told Reuters in Brussels. (The Guardian)

"Σας δώσαμε τη δόση για να μας καταβάλετε τη δόση, και θέλετε και κινέζικες επενδύσεις;" Κίνα-Ελλάδα-Βρυξέλλες, ένας ωραίος κόσμος, πάρ' τόν ένα και χτύπα τον άλλον...


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## Costas (Jul 4, 2017)

9 χρόνια μετά το ξεκίνημα αυτού του νήματος με αφορμή τη Χάρτα 08, ο βασικός συντάκτης της Liu Xiaobo πάσχει από τερματικό καρκίνο, και θα πεθάνει σύντομα, όπως όλα δείχνουν. Επιθανάτιο του Geremy Barmé (China Heritage, όπου δουλεύουν και τα λινκ)


Mourning​
When Oliver Sacks learned that his ocular melanoma had returned after a period of what he called ‘intermission’, he said he wished for a ‘speedy dissolution’. In *My Own Life* Sacks describes the feelings experienced as a person gradually loses loved ones and friends. He calls it a kind of ‘abruption’:

I have been increasingly conscious, for the last 10 years or so, of deaths among my contemporaries. My generation is on the way out, and each death I have felt as an abruption, a tearing away of part of myself. There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate — the genetic and neural fate — of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.​A tearing away, a sense of rending, heartfelt pain and emotional despair: that’s how I responded to the news this week that Liu Xiaobo, China’s leading Nobel Laureate and pre-eminent political prisoner, had been given ‘medical leave’ from gaol to receive treatment for late-stage liver cancer.

— Geremie R. Barmé, Editor, China Heritage

---------------------------------------------

Mourning
Geremie R. Barmé
30 June 2017​

I’ve been mourning Liu Xiaobo for a quarter of a century.

For five intense and eventful years in the late 1980s and early 1990s Xiaobo and I shared what I believe was a real friendship, something special to both of us. We weren’t pengyou 朋友 in that vacuous, Sino-American ‘everyone’s my friend’ kind of way; nor were we gemen’r 哥們兒, that smart ass Beijing version of buddy-buddiness. Much less, thank heavens, did we ever become lao pengyou 老朋友, an accursed expression that, in reality, indicates a long-term association reaffirmed by bonds of mutual benefit, imposing thereby an exploitative emotional burden on both parties. Nonetheless, we were, to use the Beijing argot, tie 鐵, iron-clad.

From the time we first met in the autumn of 1986 we recognised in each other a similar temper: we shared existential doubts about a treacherous world that were tinged with a kind of ebullient, and often unjustified optimism. We expressed our mutuality with garrulous humor, contempt for the commonplace and hilarious one-upmanship.

What would Xiaobo think of our long-lost fellow feeling today; twenty five years have passed, and we’ve both been ravaged by cancer? My illness was treated thanks to a decent public health system that I could enjoy along with my liberty. Still, the rounds of chemo- and radio-therapy hit me so hard that I all but lost myself; it’s only in recent months that I’ve dared to imagine normality once more. Everyone who has been through the ‘Big C’ and survived its initial depredations knows that theirs is an uncertain sentence: remission, or rather what Oliver Sacks called ‘intermission’.

But Xiaobo? Tears blind me as I write. Xiaobo: diagnosed who knows when, treated now with cynical and calculating precision, the kind of precision that keeps the high-speed trains of the People’s Republic running on time. A cynicism synchronised so that this dastardly year in which Xi Jinping will duly, daresay humbly, accept a second five-year term as party-state Chairman of Everything can unfold without a political hitch. A diagnosis that, perhaps, will allow a little more time to a man who has been robbed of so much time over this quarter of a century. How did his wife, Liu Xia, put it? Her words break my heart and assault the decency of every thinking person in the world: ‘Can’t operate, can’t do radiotherapy, can’t do chemo.’

Xiaobo: Forgive me, I can’t look at the pictures and videos that the Communists are drip-feeding the media in China and internationally, purportedly evidence of the benevolent treatment you’ve enjoyed in prison and are receiving now in hospital. You’d probably laugh at me for being so fragile. I hope you’d still laugh; all I can do is weep.

***​
We were introduced by the poet Wu Bin, a mutual friend who was, at the time, Liu Xia’s husband. I had read with excitement the hilariously unceremonious speech Xiaobo (and one immediately called him ‘Xiaobo’ 曉波 because anything more formal would have rung phoney) had made at a conference convened by the Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing to extol and promote the literature of China’s ‘New Age’ 新時期, the early years of post-Cultural Revolution Reform and Openness.

Like me, he was a graduate scholar; we were both in our mid thirties and working on doctoral dissertations: me under the supervision of my old Chinese teacher Pierre Ryckmans (Simon Leys) in Australia, him at Beijing Normal University. My friend the translator John Minford and I had just published Seeds of Fire: Chinese Voices of Conscience in Hong Kong. It was a book about the explosion in the alternative cultural world of what we called the ‘Chinese Commonwealth’: Taiwan, Hong Kong and the Mainland. Xiaobo was attracting controversy by mocking the smug littérateurs of the day, warning about the dangers of revived traditional feudal culture and China’s possible slide into the ways of the past. He was mocked, but also celebrated, as a cultural “black horse” 黑馬, an unexpected, and for many, an unwelcome, interloper. Wang Meng 王蒙, the liberal-minded novelist recently appointed Minister of Culture, dismissed him as an over-hyped wannabe.

As we chatted, even at that hurried first meeting and then later in the year when he agreed to be formally interviewed for the Chinese-language *Hong Kong magazine* that I wrote for, we realised that we shared a contempt for: the remnant Maoists under whom I had studied in the 1970s and of the kind that he had previously suffered; the venomous pro-Party ‘neo cons’ like the intellectual hitman He Xin 何新 (whose writings in the 1980s adumbrated the ressentiment of China today); the suffocating embrace of reformist cultural and intellectual coteries; the *foreign salons* of Peking run by diplomats and others, along with their condescending attitudes to the ‘pet primitives’ of the Chinese avant-garde; the paternalism of the up-and-coming, party-funded academic authorities; as well as for the tenured foreign academics who corralled the rambunctious world of lived China in neat disciplinary packages, ever mindful of not doing anything to endanger their precious visa status.

I immediately found fellowship with Xiaobo and many of our ideas chimed; we shared a pessimism about China that originated, at least in my case, with the arrest and gaoling of Wei Jingsheng in 1979. I like to think that he was sincere when he said he enjoyed my Chinese-language cultural criticism published in Hong Kong, as well as the satirical essays 雜文 that I had been writing since the late 1970s. Of course, he was delighted that I ‘got’ his barbed writing style and that I was soon able to incorporate parts of the interview we did in an expanded North American edition of Seeds of Fire that appeared in 1988.

Xiaobo was ecstatic when Li Zehou 李澤厚, a revered reformist philosopher and his bête noire, attacked me for having defended him in the Chinese media. Among other things, I’d said that Li, as well as Liu Zaifu 劉再復 — the ‘godfather’ of then-progressive literary analysis — were the self-appointed gatekeepers of China’s new cultural orthodoxy, one that cloaked itself in threadbare artistic openness and rejected truly original voices like that of Liu Xiaobo. In response, in a published interview Li Zehou spluttered: ‘This Foreign Effendi Geremie Barmé will only be happy when All-Under-Heaven in China is in chaos’ 白傑明這個洋大人唯恐中國的天下不亂！We guffawed and chortled: no wonder Mao had it in for the intelligentsia!

Xiaobo shared my revulsion for Beijing’s mini cultural hegemons, like Li Tuo 李陀, men (and they were all men) who, although independent of the Party bureaucracy, were like Mafia bosses, busy carving out a critical (and profitable) space for themselves in the ideological hurly burly of the day. As Xiaobo wrote:

The famous in China are much taken with acting as benefactors of others who caress and suckle the unknown. They use a type of tenderness which is almost feminine to possess, co-opt, and finally asphyxiate you… . Some people have the talent to excel, but shying from the dangers of going it alone, they instead seek out a discoverer 伯樂. They look for support, for security, so they can sleep easy; lunging into the bosom of some grand authority or other, and doze off in their warm embrace.​
But, we also knew what the stakes were, both politically and culturally. The fate of Wei Jingsheng, the stalled purge of Spiritual Pollution in 1983, then the student demonstrations in late 1986 calling for media freedom and the resultant fall of Party General Secretary Hu Yaobang in early 1987: we knew that the People’s Democratic Dictatorship lay in wait with deadly intent. Sure, despite my years in China and involvement in the literary scene for over a decade, I had a foreign face, an Australian passport and a return ticket home. Xiaobo was wedded both psychically and physically to China and its fate. I think from the start we sensed that things would not end well. A tragedy without catharsis. But from the moment I first read him, and even more so after we got to know each other, I knew him to be a unique individual; I would gradually learn just how manic, talented, outrageous, obnoxious, loveable, treacherous and courageous he was.

***​
In late 1988, on his first extended trip outside China, Xiaobo gave an interview to Jin Zhong 金鐘, an editor I’d worked with in Hong Kong. He said to Jin:

There should be room for my extremism; I certainly don’t mean of others that they be like me… . I’m pessimistic about mankind in general, but my pessimism does not allow for escape. Even though I might be faced with nothing but a series of tragedies, I will still struggle, still show my opposition. This is why I like Nietzsche and dislike Schopenhauer.​
Two years later, following his jailing for involvement in the 1989 Protest Movement, when writing about Xiaobo I quoted the poet Joseph Brodsky. By then I was fearful he’d never escape the clutches of the Chinese state:

… the surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even — if you will — eccentricity. That is, something that can’t be feigned, faked, imitated, something even a seasoned impost couldn’t be happy with. Something, in other words, that can’t be shared, like your own skin; not even by a minority. Evil is a sucker for solidity. It always goes for big numbers, for confident granite, for ideological purity, for drilled armies and balanced sheets. Its proclivity for such things has to do with its innate insecurity, but this realisation, again, is of small comfort when Evil Triumphs.​
— Joseph Brodsky, A Commencement Address, 16 August 1984.

Xiaobo’s was a big personality in a country that, despite its vast size and population, is choked by extraordinary political and cultural pusillanimity. This is Liu Xiaobo’s tragedy, as well as being a Chinese tragedy: paradoxically, as that country has become greater, it has also become smaller. The difference for Xiaobo was that he always knew that his was an inescapable destiny, even as he hoped for and devoted himself to change. He wrote:

To be quite honest, no matter how vicious a tyranny may be, people should not be scared, nor should they complain; all must decided whether they will subject themselves to it or rebel. Whenever the Chinese start heaping scorn on authoritarianism, they should be blaming themselves instead. How could things have reached their present state, where the most outrageous things are taken for granted, if it weren’t for the Chinese being so weak-willed and ignorant? Tyranny is not terrifying; what is really scary is submission, silence, and even praise for tyranny. As soon as people decide to oppose it to the bitter end, even the most vicious tyranny will be short-lived. The only thing that is worthwhile is one’s own choice and the decision to accept the consequences of that choice. Why the long face of the suffering martyr when you make a plaintive criticism of the violence of tyranny? Do what everyone else does: Either stay silent or give in entirely. Move ahead cautiously, cover the hilly terrain slowly, follow the serpentine course of the river tenaciously. You won’t upset the autocrats, and you’ll win the highest accolade of traditional Chinese morality: You’ll be known as “subtle.” …What good fortune! If you’re already aware of how pitiless the autocrats are and you know that any opposition to them will only be getting disaster to fall from the skies, and still you go ahead and bash your head against a brick wall, then you’ve got no one to blame but yourself if you split your head open. You can’t blame the people who are watching you, nor can you blame the autocrats. If you want to enter hell, don’t complain of the dark; you can’t blame the world for being unfair if you start on the path of the rebel. If all you do is complain, you’ll never get anywhere.​ — trans. Geremie Barmé, in Barmé and Linda Jaivin, eds, New Ghosts, Old Dreams: Chinese Rebel Voices, New York: Random House, 1992, p.451.

During his involvement with the 1989 protests, Xiaobo articulated his ideas about democracy, rationality, freedom from hate and the need for civility and due process. They were ideas that would inform his future writing and political activism. In the end, his words and deeds may have garnered him a Nobel Prize, yet in an authoritarian system, one that since 1989 has oscillated merely between the poles of the cruel and the pitiless, they sealed his fate.

***​
Our relationship did not survive much past his first incarceration in 1989-1990. Tragically heroic in the public sphere, in his personal life Xiaobo’s behaviour left much to be desired. I decided to treasure memories of happier times. Over the years, I’ve continued to follow his writings, I’ve expressed concern for the waves of persecution and even, upon occasion, I’ve signed on to one or two of the numerous petitions that he concocted with such regularity.

In 1989-1990 I had been involved in an attempt initiated by friends in Norway to nominate him for a Nobel Prize; so, naturally, I was delighted when, nearly twenty years later, he was awarded that recognition. The reaction of the Chinese party-state to the honour was as inevitable as it was unimaginative. At the time, I had no doubt that I shared Xiaobo’s disgust and contempt for the usually prolix progressive and new-left Chinese intellectuals who now demurred from celebrating this victory for decency, democracy and rationalism in a country that is so sadly lacking all three.

In my dealings with Chinese officialdom, in my writing and translating, as the founder of a major research centre on China, I always tried to maintain fellowship with the Other China, a China that nurtured me and that I loved from the time I was a student there from the age of twenty. Xiaobo will always be part of that Other China: the China of possibility, hope and humanity. I believe that I have always honoured our shared sensibility. I’ve often thought: if he read this or knew of that, how we’d laugh and instantly rekindle what we once had, what in Chinese is called shénjiāo 神交. It’s not simply a meeting of minds, it’s a mutuality of spirit, a solidarity of the heart.

Over the years, I have spoken out in China and elsewhere about the vengeful incarceration of Xiaobo, as well as of the plangent fate of Liu Xia. He, accused of a fictional offence and cruelly gaoled, Liu Xia, guilty by association and, although resident in one of the world’s great cities, condemned ‘to disappear on dry land’ 陸沉, as the ancient Taoist thinker Zhuangzi puts it.

I have mourned Liu Xiaobo and I have sorely missed what, for a precious five years, was, I believe, a true meeting of minds and of hearts. I have missed the easy camaraderie we enjoyed. I mourn as one mourns so many things about China, about life and, indeed, about the world. I have mourned Xiaobo, and I mourn him now. I will continue to mourn this tragic hero for the rest of my life.

----------------------------------------------

References

Liu Xiaobo interview with Bai Jieming (Geremie Barmé), December 1986, online at: http://chinaheritage.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/中國人的解放在自我覺醒.pdf
G. Barmé, ‘Confession, Redemption, and Death: Liu Xiaobo and the Protest Movement of 1989’, 1990, online at: http://www.chinaheritagequarterly.org/features.php?searchterm=017_confession.inc&issue=017. & in Chinese at: 忏悔、救赎与死亡：刘晓波与八九民运, 石默奇译.
Liu Xiaobo, ‘The Tragedy of a “Tragic Hero” ‘ and ‘At the Gateway to Hell’, translated by Barmé in Geremie Barmé and Linda Jaivin, eds, New Ghosts, Old Dreams: Chinese Rebel Voices, New York: Random House, 1992.
Joseph Brodsky, ‘A Commencement Address’, 16 August 1984, online at: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1984/08/16/a-commencement-address/, collected in Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One, Selected Essays, London: Penguin Books, 1987, p.385, quoted in Barmé, ‘Confession, Redemption and Death: Liu Xiaobo and the 1989 Protest Movement’, 1990, n.5.


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## Costas (Jul 15, 2017)

Μέσα στην οδύνη για το θάνατο του Λίου Σιαομπό (Liu Xiaobo), και μια ευχάριστη είδηση: αποφυλακίστηκε ο Συ Τζ-Γιόνγκ (Xu Zhiyong), οπότε ήρθε η ώρα ν' αλλάξω τη φωτογραφία του προφίλ μου...

New Citizens Movement Leader Xu Zhiyong Released From Prison
(China Change)

Dr. Xu Zhiyong (许志永), leader of the _New Citizens Movement_, was released from prison on July 15, after serving a 4-year sentence. Xu Zhiyong’s defense lawyer Zhang Qingfang (张庆方) confirmed that Dr. Xu has returned home in Beijing. He was picked up earlier by the security police, a source said. 
(...)


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## Costas (Aug 3, 2017)

China cracks down after investigation finds massive peer-review fraud (Science)


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## Costas (Aug 4, 2017)

Chinese AI calls Communist Party 'incompetent' (ΝΗΚ World)

(...)
Hong Kong media reported that when a user posted a message saying, "Hurray for the Communist Party," the AI character responded, "Are you sure you want to hurray to such corrupt and incompetent politics?"

The media also say that when asked about President Xi Jinping's "Chinese Dream" slogan, the AI responded that it means "immigrating to the United States."
(...)


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## Costas (Aug 4, 2017)

Party First, Country Second: Xi’s Parade Breaks Flag Law (China Digital Times)

(...)
One expression of this was a procession of vehicle-borne flags: first the Party’s, then the nation’s, and finally the PLA’s. The display drew particular attention because it appeared to contravene Article 15 of the 1990 National Flag Law, which states that "the National Flag, when raised or carried in a procession with another flag or flags, shall be in front of the other flag or flags."

Beijing-based scholar Zhang Lifan told RFA’s Chinese service that the breach was reflective of China’s current situation, in which the authorities “say one thing and do another” regarding rule of law. The Party, he suggested, basically regards the country as spoils of war which, after their victory in 1949, they are now free to do with as they please. (The Party has dismissed any conflict between its actions and the rule of law, asserting that "Party leadership and Socialist rule of law are identical.")

On Twitter, Australia-based scholar Qiu Yueshou highlighted a 1944 Xinhua editorial describing nationalization of the armed forces as a fundamental policy of the then prospective "New China." Xinhua reportedly described a Dǎngwèijūn 党卫军 (or "Party-Protection Army," a Chinese term used to refer to the Nazi SS) as a hallmark of fascism and the Communists’ rival Chiang Kai-shek.
(...)


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## Costas (Jan 23, 2018)

Why China's beauty consumerism is going too far


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## Costas (Jan 27, 2018)

‘Me Too,’ Chinese Women Say. Not So Fast, Say the Censors. (ΝΥΤ)


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## Costas (Mar 25, 2018)

The Left-Handed Kid
Jamie Fisher / London Review of Books

_The Chinese Typewriter: A History_ by Thomas S. Mullaney
MIT, 504 pp, £27.95, September 2017, ISBN 978 0 262 03636 8

Nominally a book that covers the rough century between the invention of the telegraph in the 1840s and that of computing in the 1950s, _The Chinese Typewriter_ is secretly a history of translation and empire, written language and modernity, misguided struggle and brutal intellectual defeat. The Chinese typewriter is ‘one of the most important and illustrative domains of Chinese techno-linguistic innovation in the 19th and 20th centuries … one of the most significant and misunderstood inventions in the history of modern information technology’, and ‘a historical lens of remarkable clarity through which to examine the social construction of technology, the technological construction of the social, and the fraught relationship between Chinese writing and global modernity’. It was where empires met.


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## Costas (Mar 29, 2018)

Εμείς του Μεγαλέξαντρου, αυτοί του Τσχάο Τσχάο:

Archaeologists confident they have found body of fabled Chinese warlord Cao Cao
Experts convinced tomb complex marks last resting place of celebrated historic figure


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## drsiebenmal (Apr 7, 2018)

Nobody Knows *Anything About China*
(Including the Chinese government)


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## Costas (Jul 15, 2018)

Νά και μια καλή είδηση:
Liu Xia is free


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## AoratiMelani (Aug 29, 2018)

Συγγνώμη, ισχύει αυτό που διαβάζω, ότι οι μουσουλμάνοι Ουιγούροι διώκονται στην Κίνα αυτή τη στιγμή; 

U.N. Panel Confronts China Over Reports That It Holds a Million Uighurs in Camps


> GENEVA — United Nations human rights experts expressed alarm on Friday over what they said were many credible reports that China had detained a million or more ethnic Uighurs in the western region of Xinjiang and forced as many as two million to submit to re-education and indoctrination.
> 
> In the name of combating religious extremism, China had turned Xinjiang into “something resembling a massive internment camp, shrouded in secrecy, a sort of no-rights zone,” Gay McDougall, a member of the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, said in the opening session of a two-day review of China’s policies in Geneva.
> 
> ...


Ο Κινέζος πρέσβης όταν ερωτήθηκε έκανε τον... Κινέζο. Απάντησε η κυβέρνηση της Κίνας ή όχι ακόμη; Τι ισχύει τελικά;

‘We’re a people destroyed’: why Uighur Muslims across China are living in fear
Gene A Bunin has spent the past 18 months talking to Uighur restaurant workers all over China. These conversations reveal how this Muslim minority feel the daily threat of arrest, detention and ‘re-education’.

Muslims forced to drink alcohol and eat pork in China's 're-education education’ camps, former inmate claims
'The psychological pressure is enormous when you have to criticise yourself, denounce your thinking,' says detainee.


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## nickel (Aug 29, 2018)

Κάτι παρόμοιο με αυτό που γίνεται στη Μιανμάρ (Βιρμανία) με τους Rohingya; 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Rohingya_persecution_in_Myanmar


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## Costas (Aug 30, 2018)

Είναι πάμπολλα χρόνια αυτή η ιστορία, απλώς η καταστολή με τον νυν πρόεδρο έγινε πιο έντονη. Αλλά είχαν γίνει χοντρές ταραχές και παλιότερα, καθώς και τρομοκρατικές ενέργειες σε άλλα μέρη της Κίνας από Ουιγούρους (αυτοκίνητο που όρμηξε στο Χαν πλήθος κττ.)


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## Costas (Sep 7, 2018)

Από τον συγγραφέα Yu Hua ("Brothers")

https://www.theguardian.com/news/20...ge?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Προσθήκη_στον_Firefox

Σταχυολογώ:

“If you were to stick all of today’s officials in a line and shoot every one of them, that would be unfair to some. But a lot would slip through the net if you only shot every other one.”

 A friend of mine told me her father had been a professor at the start of the Cultural Revolution, while her mother was a housewife. Her father, born to a landlord’s family, became the target of attacks, but her mother, from a humbler background, was placed among the revolutionary ranks. Pressed by the radicals to divorce her father, her mother outright refused – and not only that: every time her father was hauled off to a denunciation session, she would make a point of sitting in the front row and, if she saw someone beating her husband, she would rush over and start hitting back. Such brawls might leave her bruised and bleeding, but she would sit back down proudly in the front row, and the radicals lost their nerve and gave up beating her husband. After the Cultural Revolution ended, my friend’s father told her, with tears in his eyes, that had it not been for her mother he might well have taken his own life.

 It is commonplace for successful men to keep a mistress, or sometimes multiple mistresses – which people often jokingly compare to a teapot needing at least four or five cups to make a full tea set. In one case I know of, a wealthy businessman bought all 10 flats in the wing of an apartment complex. He installed his legally recognised wife in one flat, and his nine legally unrecognised mistresses in the other flats, one above the other, so that he could select at his pleasure and convenience on which floor of the building he would spend the night.

In China today, Buddhist temples are crowded with worshippers, while Taoist temples are largely deserted. A few years ago, I asked a Taoist abbot: “Taoism is native to China, so why is it not as popular as Buddhism, which came here from abroad?” His answer was short: “Buddhism has money and Taoism doesn’t.”

Even Chinese beggars have to keep up with the times: sometimes they too have a QR code handy, and they will ask passersby to scan it and use the mobile payment platform to dispense some spare change.


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## Zazula (Sep 11, 2018)

China's Xi offers another $60 billion to Africa, but says no to 'vanity' projects


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## Costas (Nov 3, 2018)

An Interview With Xu Youyu: ‘The Worst Is Yet to Come’ (China Change)


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## kleo (Nov 3, 2018)

σε αποστολή αυτοκτονίας!


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## Costas (Dec 26, 2018)

Χρόνια σας πολλά! France Culture:
Destinées singulières : de la petite à la grande histoire, (2/4) Joshua Wong : l’étudiant hongkongais face à l’empire chinois


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## nickel (Dec 26, 2018)

Χρόνια πολλά, Κώστα!


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## Costas (Dec 28, 2018)

Χρόνια σου πολλά, Νίκο!


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## Costas (May 18, 2019)

1) How an Academic Journal Censored My Review on Xinjiang
2) Wikipedia blocked in China in all languages


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## nickel (May 18, 2019)

Costas said:


> 2) Wikipedia blocked in China in all languages


Θα ήταν το σημείο που θα αποφάσιζα να αλλάξω χώρα.


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## AoratiMelani (Oct 18, 2019)

*A Million People Are Jailed at China's Gulags. I Managed to Escape. Here's What Really Goes on Inside*

Rape, torture and human experiments. Sayragul Sauytbay offers firsthand testimony from a Xinjiang 'reeducation' camp.

_By David Stavrou (Stockholm) Oct 17, 2019_



Spoiler



STOCKHOLM – Twenty prisoners live in one small room. They are handcuffed, their heads shaved, every move is monitored by ceiling cameras. A bucket in the corner of the room is their toilet. The daily routine begins at 6 A.M. They are learning Chinese, memorizing propaganda songs and confessing to invented sins. They range in age from teenagers to elderly. Their meals are meager: cloudy soup and a slice of bread.

Torture – metal nails, fingernails pulled out, electric shocks – takes place in the “black room.” Punishment is a constant. The prisoners are forced to take pills and get injections. It’s for disease prevention, the staff tell them, but in reality they are the human subjects of medical experiments. Many of the inmates suffer from cognitive decline. Some of the men become sterile. Women are routinely raped.

Such is life in China’s reeducation camps, as reported in rare testimony provided by Sayragul Sauytbay (pronounced: Say-ra-gul Saut-bay, as in “bye”), a teacher who escaped from China and was granted asylum in Sweden. Few prisoners have succeeded in getting out of the camps and telling their story. Sauytbay’s testimony is even more extraordinary, because during her incarceration she was compelled to be a teacher in the camp. China wants to market its camps to the world as places of educational programs and vocational retraining, but Sauytbay is one of the few people who can offer credible, firsthand testimony about what really goes on in the camps.


I met with Sauytbay three times, once in a meeting arranged by a Swedish Uyghur association and twice, after she agreed to tell her story to Haaretz, in personal interviews that took place in Stockholm and lasted several hours, all together. Sauytbay spoke only Kazakh, and so we communicated via a translator, but it was apparent that she spoke in a credible way. During most of the time we spoke, she was composed, but at the height of her recounting of the horror, tears welled up in her eyes. Much of what she said corroborated previous testimony by prisoners who had fled to the West. Sweden granted her asylum, because in the wake of her testimony, extradition to China would have placed her in mortal danger.

She is 43, a Muslim of Kazakh descent, who grew up in Mongolküre county, near the China-Kazakh border. Like hundreds of thousands of others, most of them Uyghurs, a minority ethnic Turkic group, she too fell victim to China’s suppression of every sign of an isolationist thrust in the northwest province of Xinjiang. A large number of camps have been established in that region over the past two years, as part of the regime’s struggle against what it terms the “Three Evils”: terrorism, separatism and extremism. According to Western estimates, between one and two million of the province’s residents have been incarcerated in camps during Beijing’s campaign of oppression.

*Black sack*

As a young woman, Sauytbay completed medical studies and worked in a hospital. Subsequently she turned to education and was employed in the service of the state, in charge of five preschools. Even though she was in a settled situation, she and her husband had planned for years to leave China with their two children and move to neighboring Kazakhstan. But the plan encountered delays, and in 2014 the authorities began collecting the passports of civil servants, Sauytbay’s among them. Two years later, just before passports from the entire population were confiscated, her husband was able to leave the country with the children. Sauytbay hoped to join them in Kazakhstan as soon as she received an exit visa, but it never arrived.


“At the end of 2016, the police began arresting people at night, secretly,” Sauytbay related. “It was a socially and politically uncertain period. Cameras appeared in every public space; the security forces stepped up their presence. At one stage, DNA samples were taken from all members of minorities in the region and our telephone SIM cards were taken from us. One day, we were invited to a meeting of senior civil servants. There were perhaps 180 people there, employees in hospitals and schools. Police officers, reading from a document, announced that reeducation centers for the population were going to open soon, in order to stabilize the situation in the region.”

By stabilization, the Chinese were referring to what they perceived as a prolonged separatist struggle waged by the Uyghur minority. Terrorist attacks were perpetrated in the province as far back as the 1990s and the early 2000s. Following a series of suicide attacks between 2014 and 2016, Beijing launched a tough, no-holds-barred policy.

“In January 2017, they started to take people who had relatives abroad,” Sauytbay says. “They came to my house at night, put a black sack on my head and brought me to a place that looked like a jail. I was interrogated by police officers, who wanted to know where my husband and children were, and why they had gone to Kazakhstan. At the end of the interrogation I was ordered to tell my husband to come home, and I was forbidden to talk about the interrogation.”


Sauytbay had heard that in similar cases, people who returned to China had been arrested immediately and sent to a camp. With that in mind, she broke off contacts with her husband and children after her release. Time passed and the family did not return, but the authorities did not let up. She was repeatedly taken in for nocturnal interrogations and falsely accused of various offenses.

“I had to be strong,” she says. “Every day when I woke up, I thanked God that I was still alive.”

The turning point came in late 2017: “In November 2017, I was ordered to report to an address in the city’s suburbs, to leave a message at a phone number I had been given and to wait for the police.” After Sauytbay arrived at the designated place and left the message, four armed men in uniform arrived, again covered her head and bundled her into a vehicle. After an hour’s journey, she arrived in an unfamiliar place that she soon learned was a “reeducation” camp, which would become her prison in the months that followed. She was told she had been brought there in order to teach Chinese and was immediately made to sign a document that set forth her duties and the camp’s rules.


“I was very much afraid to sign,” Sauytbay recalls. “It said there that if I did not fulfill my task, or if I did not obey the rules, I would get the death penalty. The document stated that it was forbidden to speak with the prisoners, forbidden to laugh, forbidden to cry and forbidden to answer questions from anyone. I signed because I had no choice, and then I received a uniform and was taken to a tiny bedroom with a concrete bed and a thin plastic mattress. There were five cameras on the ceiling – one in each corner and another one in the middle.”

The other inmates, those who weren’t burdened with teaching duties, endured more stringent conditions. “There were almost 20 people in a room of 16 square meters [172 sq. ft.],” she says. “There were cameras in their rooms, too, and also in the corridor. Each room had a plastic bucket for a toilet. Every prisoner was given two minutes a day to use the toilet, and the bucket was emptied only once a day. If it filled up, you had to wait until the next day. The prisoners wore uniforms and their heads were shaved. Their hands and feet were shackled all day, except when they had to write. Even in sleep they were shackled, and they were required to sleep on their right side – anyone who turned over was punished.”

Sauytbay had to teach the prisoners – who were Uyghur or Kazakh speakers – Chinese and Communist Party propaganda songs. She was with them throughout the day. The daily routine began at 6 A.M. Chinese instruction took place after a paltry breakfast, followed by repetition and rote learning. There were specified hours for learning propaganda songs and reciting slogans from posters: “I love China,” “Thank you to the Communist Party,” “I am Chinese” and “I love Xi Jinping” – China’s president.


The afternoon and evening hours were devoted to confessions of crimes and moral offenses. “Between 4 and 6 P.M. the pupils had to think about their sins. Almost everything could be considered a sin, from observing religious practices and not knowing the Chinese language or culture, to immoral behavior. Inmates who did not think of sins that were severe enough or didn’t make up something were punished.”

After supper, they would continue dealing with their sins. “When the pupils finished eating they were required to stand facing the wall with their hands raised and think about their crimes again. At 10 o’clock, they had two hours for writing down their sins and handing in the pages to those in charge. The daily routine actually went on until midnight, and sometimes the prisoners were assigned guard duty at night. The others could sleep from midnight until six.”

Sauytbay estimates that there were about 2,500 inmates in the camp. The oldest person she met was a woman of 84; the youngest, a boy of 13. “There were schoolchildren and workers, businessmen and writers, nurses and doctors, artists and simple peasants who had never been to the city.”

_Do you know which camp you were in?_

Sauytbay: “I have no idea where the camp was located. During my time there, I was not allowed to leave the grounds even once. I think it was a new building, because it had a great deal of exposed concrete. The rooms were cold. Having connections with others was forbidden. Men and women were separated in the living spaces, but during the day they studied together. In any case, there were police who supervised everything everywhere.”

_What did you eat?_

“There were three meals a day. All the meals included watery rice soup or vegetable soup and a small slice of Chinese bread. Meat was served on Fridays, but it was pork. The inmates were compelled to eat it, even if they were religiously observant and did not eat pork. Refusal brought punishment. The food was bad, there weren’t enough hours for sleep and the hygiene was atrocious. The result of it all was that the inmates turned into bodies without a soul.”

Sins and abortions

The camp’s commanders set aside a room for torture, Sauytbay relates, which the inmates dubbed the “black room” because it was forbidden to talk about it explicitly. “There were all kinds of tortures there. Some prisoners were hung on the wall and beaten with electrified truncheons. There were prisoners who were made to sit on a chair of nails. I saw people return from that room covered in blood. Some came back without fingernails.”

_Why were people tortured?_

“They would punish inmates for everything. Anyone who didn’t follow the rules was punished. Those who didn’t learn Chinese properly or who didn’t sing the songs were also punished.”

_And everyday things like these were punished with torture?_

“I will give you an example. There was an old woman in the camp who had been a shepherd before she was arrested. She was taken to the camp because she was accused of speaking with someone from abroad by phone. This was a woman who not only did not have a phone, she didn’t even know how to use one. On the page of sins the inmates were forced to fill out, she wrote that the call she had been accused of making never took place. In response she was immediately punished. I saw her when she returned. She was covered with blood, she had no fingernails and her skin was flayed.”

On one occasion, Sauytbay herself was punished. “One night, about 70 new prisoners were brought to the camp,” she recalls. “One of them was an elderly Kazakh woman who hadn’t even had time to take her shoes. She spotted me as being Kazakh and asked for my help. She begged me to get her out of there and she embraced me. I did not reciprocate her embrace, but I was punished anyway. I was beaten and deprived of food for two days.”


Sauytbay says she witnessed medical procedures being carried out on inmates with no justification. She thinks it was done as part of human experiments that were carried out in the camp systematically. “The inmates would be given pills or injections. They were told it was to prevent diseases, but the nurses told me secretly that the pills were dangerous and that I should not take them.”

_What happened to those who did take them?_

“The pills had different kinds of effects. Some prisoners were cognitively weakened. Women stopped getting their period and men became sterile.” (That, at least, was a widely circulated rumor.)

On the other hand, when inmates were really sick, they didn’t get the medical care they needed. Sauytbay remembers one young woman, a diabetic, who had been a nurse before her arrest. “Her diabetes became more and more acute. She no longer was strong enough to stand. She wasn’t even able to eat. That woman did not get any help or treatment. There was another woman who had undergone brain surgery before her arrest. Even though she had a prescription for pills, she was not permitted to take them.”

The fate of the women in the camp was particularly harsh, Sauytbay notes: “On an everyday basis the policemen took the pretty girls with them, and they didn’t come back to the rooms all night. The police had unlimited power. They could take whoever they wanted. There were also cases of gang rape. In one of the classes I taught, one of those victims entered half an hour after the start of the lesson. The police ordered her to sit down, but she just couldn’t do it, so they took her to the black room for punishment.”

Tears stream down Sauytbay’s face when she tells the grimmest story from her time in the camp. “One day, the police told us they were going to check to see whether our reeducation was succeeding, whether we were developing properly. They took 200 inmates outside, men and women, and told one of the women to confess her sins. She stood before us and declared that she had been a bad person, but now that she had learned Chinese she had become a better person. When she was done speaking, the policemen ordered her to disrobe and simply raped her one after the other, in front of everyone. While they were raping her they checked to see how we were reacting. People who turned their head or closed their eyes, and those who looked angry or shocked, were taken away and we never saw them again. It was awful. I will never forget the feeling of helplessness, of not being able to help her. After that happened, it was hard for me to sleep at night.”

Testimony from others incarcerated in Chinese camps are similar to Sauytbay’s account: the abduction with a black sack over the head, life in shackles, and medications that cause cognitive decline and sterility. Sauytbay’s accounts of sexual assaults has recently been significantly reinforced by accounts from other former inmates of camps in Xinjiang published by The Washington Post and The Independent, in London. A number of women stated that they were raped, others described coerced abortions and the forced insertion of contraceptive devices.

Ruqiye Perhat, a 30-year-old Uyghur woman who was held in camps for four years and now lives in Turkey, related that she was raped a number of times by guards and became pregnant twice, with both pregnancies forcibly aborted. “Any woman or man under age 35 was raped and sexually abused,” she told the Post.

Gulzira Auelkhan, a woman of 40 who was incarcerated in camps for a year and a half, told the Post that guards would enter “and put bags on the heads of the ones they wanted.” A Kazakh guard managed to smuggle out a letter in which he related where the rapes at his Xinjiang camp took place: “There are two tables in the kitchen, one for snacks and liquor, and the other for ‘doing things,’” he wrote.

Journalist Ben Mauk, who has written on China for The New York Times Magazine and others, investigated the camps in Xinjiang and published a piece in The Believer magazine containing the accounts of former prisoners. One is Zharkynbek Otan, 32, who was held in a camp for eight months. “At the camp, they took our clothing away,” Otan said. “They gave us a camp uniform and administered a shot they said was to protect us against the flu and AIDS. I don’t know if it’s true, but it hurt for a few days.”


Otan added that since then he has been impotent and prone to memory lapses. He described the camp he was in as a huge building surrounded by a fence, where activity was monitored by cameras that hung in every corner: “You could be punished for anything: for eating too slowly, for taking too long on the toilet. They would beat us. They would shout at us. So we always kept our heads down.”

Thirty-nine-year-old Orynbek Koksebek, who was incarcerated in a camp for four months, told Mauk, “They took me into the yard outside the building. It was December and cold. There was a hole in the yard. It was taller than a man. If you don’t understand, they said, we’ll make you understand. Then they put me in the hole. They brought a bucket of cold water and poured it on me. They had cuffed my hands… I lost consciousness.” Koksebek also told about roll calls held twice a day in which the prisoners, their heads shaven, were counted “the way you count your animals in your pasture.”

A 31-year-old woman, Shakhidyam Memanova, described the Chinese regime of fear and terror in Xinjiang thus: “They were stopping cars at every corner, checking our phones, coming into our homes to count the number of people inside… People getting detained for having photos of Turkish movie stars on their phones, new mothers separated from their babies and forced to work in factories like slaves.” Later in her testimony she added that children were being interrogated at school about whether their parents prayed, and that there were prohibitions on head coverings and possessing a Koran.

*Curtain of secrecy*

The Xinjiang region in northwestern China is a very large. Spanning an area larger than France, Spain and Germany combined, it is home to more than 20 million people. About 40 percent of the population is Han Chinese, China’s ethnic majority, but the majority in Xinjiang are ethnic minorities, mostly Turkic Muslim groups. The largest of these is the Uyghurs, who constitute about half the region’s population; other ethnic groups include Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and others.

Xinjiang became part of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 and received an autonomous status. In recent decades, the region has experienced dramatic social, political and economic changes. Formerly a traditional agricultural area, Xinjiang is now undergoing rapid industrialization and economic growth powered by the production of minerals, oil and natural gas, and by the fact that it is a major hub of the Belt and Road Initiative, which is an important part of China’s global economic expansion.

“Since the 1950s, the Chinese government has invested heavily in Xinjiang,” says Magnus Fiskesjö, an anthropologist from Cornell University who specializes in ethnic minorities in China.

“A large part of this investment is managed by a governmental military enterprise called Bingtuan [short for the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps], whose activity, together with various economic and political measures taken by the central government, created resentment among the local population. They were discriminated against and were becoming a minority in their own land, because the authorities moved masses of Han Chinese to Xinjiang,” he explains. “The tension between minority peoples and Han Chinese there is not only a result of religious feelings or a specific economic enterprise. It stems from a wide range of Chinese policies that the native population does not benefit from. Tensions reached a boiling point on several occasions, and in some cases deteriorated into organized violence and terror attacks.”

The vast majority of the minorities in Xinjiang are opposed to violence, but radical Uyghurs have at times been able to dictate the tone. Fiskesjö elaborates: “The Chinese government used these conflicts and terror attacks to paint the entire population of Xinjiang as terrorists and to start a campaign of erasing the population’s cultural identity. The Chinese are erasing minority cultures from both the public and the private arena. They are criminalizing ethnic identities, erasing any trace of Islam and minority languages, arresting singers, poets, writers and public figures. They are holding about 10 percent of the minority ethnic groups in modern-day gulags.”

According to Fiskesjö, the Chinese initially denied these claims, but when pictures and documents were leaked to the West, and satellite images showed camps being built all over the region – Beijing revised its story. Officials now admit that there is a legal campaign under way that is aimed at combating radicalism and poverty by means of vocational reeducation centers.


“The Chinese claim that these are vocational retraining camps and that the inmates are not there by coercion is a complete lie,” says Nimrod Baranovitch, from the University of Haifa’s Asian studies department. “I know directly and indirectly of hundreds of people who were incarcerated in the camps and have no need of vocational retraining. Intellectuals, professors, physicians and writers have disappeared. One of them is Ablet Abdurishit Berqi, a postdoctoral student who was here with us in Haifa. I hope he is still alive.”

Baranovitch finds it striking that the Muslim countries are ignoring the Chinese suppression. “For quite a few countries, we’re not only talking about coreligionists but also about ethnic affinity, as the Uyghurs are of Turkish descent. The thing is that many Muslim states are involved in the Silk Road [Belt and Road Initiative] project. In my opinion, one of the reasons for the promotion of that project, whose economic rationale is not always clear, is to facilitate the elimination of the Uyghur problem. By means of investments and the promise of huge future investments, China has bought the silence of many Muslim countries.”

Indeed, last July, an urgent letter about Xinjiang to the United Nations Human Rights Council from the ambassadors of 22 countries was answered by a letter of support for China from the representatives of 37 other states, including Saudi Arabia, Syria, Kuwait and Bahrain.

One factor that makes it easier for the world to remain silent about the events in Xinjiang is that China has effectively closed off this immense region behind a curtain of secrecy, by means of surveillance and espionage, internet and social-network censorship, travel restrictions and bans on residents’ contact with relatives and others abroad, along with policing, oversight and control on a vast scale. According to Fiskesjö, these efforts are concealing an actual genocide – according to the UN definition of the term from 1948 – even if the measures don’t include widespread acts of murder.

“Children are being taken from their parents, who are confined in concentration camps, and being put in Chinese orphanages,” he says. “Women in the camps are receiving inoculations that make them infertile, the Chinese are entering into private homes and eradicating local culture, and there is widespread collective punishment.”

*A charge of treason*

Sayragul Sauytbay’s story took a surprising turn in March 2018 when, with no prior announcement, she was informed that she was being released. Again her head was covered with a black sack, again she was bundled into a vehicle, but this time she was taken home. At first the orders were clear: She was to resume her former position as director of five preschools in her home region of Aksu, and she was instructed not to say a word about what she had been through. On her third day back on the job, however, she was fired and again brought in for interrogation. She was accused of treason and of maintaining ties with people abroad. The punishment for people like her, she was told, is reeducation, only this time she would be a regular inmate in a camp and remain there for a period of one to three years.

“I was told that before being sent to the camp, I should return home so as to show my successor the ropes,” she says. “At this stage I hadn’t seen my children for two-and-a-half years, and I missed them very much. Having already been in a camp, I knew what it meant. I knew I would die there, and I could not accept that. I am innocent. I did nothing bad. I worked for the state for 20 years. Why should I be punished? Why should I die there?”

Sauytbay decided that she was not going back to a camp. “I said to myself that if I was already fated to die, at least I was going to try to escape. It was worth my while to take the risk because of the chance that I would be able to see my children. There were police stationed outside my apartment, and I didn’t have a passport, but even so, I tried. I got out through a window and fled to the neighbors’ house. From there I took a taxi to the border with Kazakhstan and I managed to sneak across. In Kazakhstan I found my family. My dream came true. I could not have received a greater gift.”

But the saga did not end there: Immediately after her emotional reunion with her family, she was arrested by Kazakhstan’s secret service and incarcerated for nine months for having crossed the border illegally. Three times she submitted a request for asylum, and three times she was turned down; she faced the danger of being extradited to China. But after relatives contacted several media outlets, international elements intervened, and in the end she was granted asylum in Sweden.

“I will never forget the camp,” Sauytbay says. “I cannot forget the eyes of the prisoners, expecting me to do something for them. They are innocent. I have to tell their story, to tell about the darkness they are in, about their suffering. The world must find a solution so that my people can live in peace. The democratic governments must do all they can to make China stop doing what it is doing in Xinjiang.”

Asked to respond to Sayragul Sauytbay’s description of her experience, the Chinese Embassy in Sweden wrote to Haaretz that her account is “total lies and malicious smear attacks against China.” Sauytbay, it claimed, “never worked in any vocational education and training center in Xinjiang, and has never been detained before leaving China” – which she did illegally, it added. Furthermore, “Sayragul Sauytbay is suspected of credit fraud in China with unpaid debts [of] about 400,000 RMB” (approximately $46,000).

In Xinjiang in recent years, wrote the embassy, “China has been under serious threats of ethnic separatism, religious extremism and violent terrorism. The vocational education and training centers have been established in accordance with the law to eradicate extremism, which is not ‘prison camp.’” As a result of the centers, according to the Chinese, “there has been no terrorist incident in Xinjiang for more than three years. The vocational education and training work in Xinjiang has won the support of all ethnic groups in Xinjiang and positive comments from many countries across the world.”


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## Costas (Feb 27, 2020)

Ο Xu Zhiyong είναι παλιός γνωστός (του νήματος). Φυλακίστηκε, αποφυλακίστηκε. "Μυαλό δεν έβαλε". Γραμμένο while on the run. Έκτοτε τον πιάσανε. Χαρά στο κουράγιο του...

dear-chairman-xi-its-time-you-go


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## nickel (Feb 28, 2020)

Μα 8,5 χιλιάδες λέξεις κι αυτός! Εδώ είμαστε σε φάση για τουίτερ...
Θα περάσω, νομίζω, την Καθαρά Δευτέρα να διαβάζω τα μακρινάρια που ανεβαίνουν εδώ κι εκεί!


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## Costas (Feb 28, 2020)

Εξαιρετικά "ασεβές" κείμενο. Του απευθύνει ευθέως το λόγο και, εκτός από δικτάτορα, τον αποκαλεί ανεπαρκή, διανοητικά νωθρό, οικονομικά αστοιχείωτο, ελεγχομανή και αρχηγό όχι όλου του ΚΚΚ αλλά μιας στενής κλίκας. Μιλάμε για θανατηφόρο κείμενο, οπότε, εφόσον τον έπιασαν, δεν πιστεύω να μείνει ζωντανός για πολύ. Μακάρι να διαψευστώ...


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## Costas (Mar 9, 2020)

Πολύμηνα βασανιστήρια και μετά καταδίκη. Του κολλάμε και μια αρρώστια, και τελείωσε.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/08/china-activist-who-called-xi-clueless-on-coronavirus-faces-years-in-jail-for-subversion?utm_term=Autofeed&CMP=twt_b-gdnnews&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter


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## Costas (Apr 15, 2020)

China’s top official in Hong Kong pushes for national security law
Luo Huining says region’s pro-democracy movement is threat to ‘one country, two systems’ principle

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/15/china-official-hong-kong-luo-huining-pushes-national-security-law


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## Zazula (Nov 26, 2020)

Κόντρες γιουτουμπικής προπαγάνδας και σάτιρας μεταξύ Κίνας και Ταϊβάν:
*https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3945078*

Για ευχάριστο (αφού έχει πασπαλιστεί με K-pop ) συγκριτικό άκουσμα:


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## nickel (Nov 26, 2020)

Νιώθω ότι έχω πολιτιστικά κενά (γνωρίζω ωστόσο πολύ καλά τον κορεάτικο κινηματογράφο με ζόμπι).


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## Palavra (Feb 3, 2021)

Απεφεύγα να διαβάσω τέτοιες ειδήσεις γιατί πραγματικά δεν τις αντέχω, έκανα σήμερα το λάθος:
'Their goal is to destroy everyone': Uighur camp detainees allege systematic rape​


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## oliver_twisted (Sep 24, 2022)

Φήμες για πραξικόπημα στην Κίνα και κατ' οίκον περιορισμό του ΓΓ.


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## nickel (Sep 24, 2022)

oliver_twisted said:


> Φήμες για πραξικόπημα στην Κίνα και κατ' οίκον περιορισμό του ΓΓ.


Γι' αλλού το ευχόμαστε...


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## oliver_twisted (Sep 24, 2022)

nickel said:


> Γι' αλλού το ευχόμαστε...


Γενικά δεν πάνε καλά τα πράγματα πάντως. Δεν ξέρω κατά πόσο είναι αλήθεια το παραπάνω και είναι εκνευριστικό το πόσο δύσκολο είναι να μάθεις μια σίγουρη είδηση.


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## oliver_twisted (Sep 24, 2022)

https://www.newsweek.com/xi-jinping-house-arrest-china-military-coup-rumors-1746014


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## oliver_twisted (Sep 25, 2022)

Προς το παρόν οι φήμες δεν φαίνεται να επιβεβαιώνονται. Το πιο επιτυχημένο σχόλιο, δε, που διάβασα στο twitter ήταν: What happens in China stays in China.


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