An exploration of virtual experiences and environments in and about China.
From a children’s book entitled: 画童学画, 武器装备 (Drawing & Learning for Children, Arms Equipment):
I love the way the page is compartmentalized for its many uses: learning to draw, learning the character, the phrase, and even a place for stickers.
Via Danwei, via sinosplice.
From a comic entitled 江湖 (temporary translation: "Sword Society").
As always, translations in maroon.
Just finished the eye-opening Will the Boat Sink the Water? The Life of Chinese Peasants, the English translation of The Chinese Peasant Investigation 中国农民调查, originally published in 2004 and banned two months after publication. It’s a fast, good read, and sounds awfully familiar if you’ve read any Chinese history–case after case of Chinese peasants trying desperately to make end-runs around violent, corrupt local officials. So I decided to check out the online peasant presence, beginning at the most obvious place: a Baidu search for "peasant net" 农民网. It yields 38,300 sites (next stop Google.com, which yields 162,000). I’ll review some of the top-ranked sites over the next couple of weeks.
ChinesePeasantNet中国农民网 looks like it is maintained by a government body in Hebei province, perhaps in Zhangjiakou municipality (it’s a bit hard to tell: the "About Us" at the bottom of the page is not a hyperlink). At first glance one is struck by the relative "clean-ness" of the site. It’s uncluttered by Chinese standards, with fewer menu choices and more white space. As fits a .gov site, the focus is on communications from the topdown–including the texts of laws and regulations. Will the Boat Sink the Water points out how important it is for rural people to have access to these texts, as they can use them to force official recognition of illegal activities, once they know exactly which activities ARE illegal. Front and center on the page is "Agricultural News." Overall impression: this is a one-way communication site. BBS or photo forums are absent.
At the bottom of the page is something rather intriguing–links to township and village level websites. Click through to Maoshan Village, for instance, where you’ll begin with an official statement:
Joy Chan 陈佼, who regularly posts insightful comments on China’s IT/Web2.0 world, posted an informal analysis of Chinese video-sharing sites 视频站点 on Nov. 6 that has gotten a lot of play in the Chinese blogosphere.
Chan points out that Google’s purchase of Youtube caused some anxiety among video sites in China, since it’s a path that none of them can hope to follow–there are no companies like Google in China who would be interested in buying a video site. He then shares what he calls a"crude and subjective" analysis of Chinese video sites’ Alexa traffic rank, in the hopes of starting a wider conversation. Here are some excerpts in rough translation:
After Youtube’s meteoric rise there have been a lot of Chinese imitators, probably something like 1-200 of these types of sites. Here I use Alexa’s TOP SITES traffic rank as well as my own understanding to look at the top 7 video sites that are completely modeled on Youtube: 我乐网（www.56.com), Mofile（www.mofile.com), 我秀（www.5show.com), 土豆网
（www.tudou.com), 爆米花（www.pomoho.com), UUME（www.uume.com), 六间房
（www.6rooms.com）
…All of the 7 have received venture funding.
Comparison of Alexa Rank 8/3/06-11/3/06
Even the top-rated Chinese site, Mofile, is only 265 on Alexa. None have really broken through in terms of traffic and talk of "video sharing sites exploding in China" is no more than just that–talk. Of course, there’s still a lot of room for growth.
Victor Hsu, or guccio, day-time job banker in Shanghai, is the main guy behind Moleskiner.cn (打造中文谱写的Moleskine传奇 (Creating a Handwritten Chinese Moleskine Legend).
On his Flickr, he’s detailed him and his friend (an MS employee)’s "just Geeky!" collection:
Items of interest: x4 Moleskines, MUJI stationary (sketchbook, pen bag & pencil box), Hipster PDA, HP iPAQ, Treo and Ubuntu Linux DVDs.
For the full list (labeled in Chinese) at the original photo on Flickr.
Here’s one way to use Molive, the citizen journalism site where folks post pictures of the strange and wonderful things around them in China: bringing everyday street-level publicity efforts, the kind you see all the time in Chinese cities, to a wider stage. An apprentice journalist in Nanjing decided to help an old man passed by on the way to work, who is looking for his son. The father was apparently camped out near the news agency–many poor people make direct appeals to the public via print and news media for help. Link.
Mr. Ma is from a village outside of Nanjing and has been carrying his sign around with a photo of his son, sleeping on the streets and getting food and money for survival from passersby.
Journalist posted on Nov. 13, 9:49 [rough translation]: I took this in the morning on my way to work. Even though I work in a news agency, I’m only studying so there was no way I could help him. Reporters have been interviewing him for the past couple of days but it hasn’t made it into the papers. This time he was waiting for a reply from the reporters. I’ve taken his picture and put it on the web in the hopes that everyone will forward it and help him find his son as soon as possible. This old man is named Ma Wencan, from [XX] county, [XX] village, and his son’s name is Ma Peixue. His son is 23 years old and 1.65 meters in height. Ma Peixue left home in June of 2005. His father says that he left home because his parents had arranged a marriage for him and they had married after only twenty days. They’d only been married for 2 weeks or so, hadn’t even picked up the marriage certificate, when Ma Peixue told his father that he did not get along with his new wife and didn’t want to live with her. Father Ma Wencan gave him a bitter scolding for this, upon which Ma Peixue left home, with nothing, not even any ID. It’s been two years since he left home, during which Ma Wencan has been looking for him all over, sleeping on the streets, but not begging like some others do. Some kindhearted people have voluntarily given him food and money. Just as I was leaving, Ma Wencan thanked me over and over for putting his situation on the Internet. He said people had told him about the strong dissemination power of the Internet, that more people would know, and asked for people’s help in finding the person named Ma Peixue. Contact number: 0558——7826024
This excerpt from a submission to the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, written in 2002, still stands strong for anyone trying to understand how the goverment affects the Internet in China. David Cowhig covered the Internet for the Environment and Technology Section of the US Embassy in Beijing for many years. Check out the entire piece–it’s readable and remains highly relevant.
China might be thought of as a decentralized de facto federal state
that lacks federal institutions that facilitate central control and
coordination such as the federal court system and regional offices of
central government ministries. China is best understood not so much as
a Big Brother state but as a loose collection of thousands of
provincial and local Party and government little brothers. Many of the
provincial little brothers have only nominal allegiance to Big Brother
in Beijing. Local officials want to control media not just for
Beijing’s purposes but also to prevent Beijing to know about their own
shortcomings. Many orders and regulations from the central government
are ignored from the outset or forgotten after only a few months.
One corollary of the China’s shortcomings in the rule of law area is
that local governments are not conscientious in obeying orders from
Beijing. The result has been that the central government implements
policies by national campaigns that are intense for a short time but
then swiftly fade away. New regulations are issued not as amendments to
old ones but as de novo regulations - apparently a tacit admission that
the old ones have faded from memory.
…What does this mean for the Internet? New tough rules are issued each
year but are not systematically enforced. Where enforced, enforcement
fades after a few months.
It sounds like a kind of guerilla statecraft.
For complete original text, per reader request, read on…and note, only 15 million Internet users in China in 2001.
Continue reading ‘not Big Brother, rather a loose collection of Little Brothers’
Just discovered China Daily’s wonderful treasure trove, Newscartoon site. Trying to puzzle through cartoon dialogue is a pleasurable challenge for me (Jason, however, seems to have no trouble!) — and it’s a really different way to understand what’s important in China at the moment, and how current events are being interpreted, at least from an official point of view. The site also includes links to homepages of many of its cartoonists. And at the very bottom of the site you’ll find links to dozens of other cartoon, Flash, and animation sites. Enjoy!
"Our research reveals that Chinese armor is just too thick!" [Document he's holding reads: Document on Trade with China] See artist Luo Jie’s other works.
"Son, where are you?" [SIGN ON WALL: BLACK NETBAR, i.e., illegal Internet cafe] By Ma Jiancheng.
You can find the top 100 Chinese websites, calculated daily, at China Internet Index System (CIIS) 中国互联网指数 . Today’s top 10 are: 1) Baidu.com; 2) QQ.com; 3) Sina.com.cn; 4) Netease 163.com; 5) Sohu.com; 6) cn.yahoo.com; 7) Taobao.com; 
TOM.com; 9) Vnet.cn (who knew?); 10) Soso.com.
CIIS is a joint effort by Internet research and incubator Chinalabs.com (directed by Bokee.com CEO Fang Xingdong) and the National Bureau of Statistics. It was born in 2004 as CISI, but was revamped and relaunched this year in October as CIIS. They use their own standard, "CIIS value," to evaluate the direction of change for any particular website, but I can’t find any information on what goes into creating that "CIIS value," beyond the fact that they are "monitoring web traffic." Here’s the CIIS value for IT community site Donews.com, for the last two months:
The site also runs down the top 100 blog services, auto sites, tech sites, and more.
CIIS also calculates the Google page rank, Google search results, and Baidu search results, all on the same page so you can compare them. Get this: Donews.com has around 1.1 million results on Google, and more than 8.3 million search results on Baidu.
Finally, another useful feature is the piechart that tells you how the traffic is divided on the site’s sublevel domains, so that we can see that QQ is getting the most traffic on its Qzone, entertainment, and news domains. You could track the growth of new domains with the CIIS.
We’re taking a respite from the usual translated comic today because I’ve stumbled upon something much greater: a forum post entitled 找一找你心中的最帅的帅哥 (Find your ideal hot boy).
In the post are six pages full of airbrushed men, presumably all from Japanese manga/anime. They range from the dark silent type:
(Character = Sasuke from Naruto.)
To the more effeminate:
(Character = Sai from Hikaru No Go.)
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