Author Archive for Kathrine Hoersted

China Rises

Published
by
Kathrine Hoersted
on October 20, 2006
in Television and Video Clips
. 3 Comments

China Rises is a website that supports a television documentary series about the current life situation of different citizens in China. The website is hosted by New York Times as part of their ’specials’ and the television broadcast - to watch it, you will need the Discovery Times Channel - starts on the 23rd of October. They also offer a DVD with the complete series.

The series and website is devided up into four themes: Politics - Party Games (which is about the Communist Party’s role in the Olympics), Economy - Getting Rich, Environment - Food is Heaven, Society - City of Dreams.

What I like about the concept and the website is that it provides glimpses of different ordinary people’s everyday life in China. On the website you can read short introductions and see small documentary videos portraying persons and the possibilities and difficulties they face daily.

If you enter the Economy - Getting Rich section, you can for instance meet Liu Yong who is a young woman who works at a textile factory. As most of the other 4000 workers there, she is a migrant worker. Liu Yong is 20 years old and has worked at the factory since she was 17. She tells us that she has gotten use to the 12 hours of standing every day and that she manages to send half of her salary home to her parents in Anhui Province every month. Liu Yong earns what is equivalent to 60 cents an hour.

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Entering the section Society - City of Dreams you are offered to meet Ma Liang, a successful art director who has his own company producing advertisements for big international brands. He lives in downtown Shanghai in an expensive apartment and he expresses a strong belief in his own future, a lot of dreams will come true he says.

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Another cool feature I find at this website is that it has an Interactive Atlas - enter one of the four themes and the atlas option will appear in the menu. You can for instance click at China’s Economy and you will get a list of different options - one is to see a map of the density of Internet users in the different provinces respectively.

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If you move the cursor over Beijing, it will tell you that there are 4 million users of the Internet in Beijing.

Instant translation

Published
by
Kathrine Hoersted
on September 28, 2006
in Translation
. 4 Comments

Screenshot_060927190352

Talking about bridging language barriers, there is a really quick solution that I like to use for translating e.g. Chinese websites into English (of course I am still studying hard to learn the Chinese characters… but until then, I can cheat a little using this software :-)

This solution is the translation application called Foxlingo; it is a Firefox extension (so you need to have the Firefox browser to be able to use Foxlingo), and to install it simply go to addons.mozilla.org scroll down and click the Install Now link:
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After installing you will be asked to restart your Firefox browser. Once it has restarted, a window with three tabs will appear (if it doesn’t appear automatically, go to your Firefox toolbar, enter "tools" -> "extensions", highlight Foxlingo, and click "preferences/options" - then the window with the three tabs will open). In the first tab you check which languages you would like to be able to translate to, in the second you check which languages you would like to be able to translate from, and in the third you check the translation services you want available (I recommend you check them all). Then you click OK and you will be given the option of contributing with a donation.

You now have the Foxlingo toolbar in your browser. Right click in the grey area to the right of the row of flags, and you will be able to customize - move around the different flag-buttons that represent the languages. For instance I have the Chinese flag-button next to the search field in my upper toolbar, and when I am on a Chinese website I can simply click on the flag and choose to have the site translated (e.g., Chinese simplified to English (worldlingo). Within a few seconds the site appears in an English version, which is not at all a perfect translation, but most often it will give me a decent idea about the content of the website (and one thing is for sure, it serves me much better than my current Chinese character skill level  ;-)

Sometimes a site will appear in no language at all, but pure gibberish, then I click back to the original Chinese site and try another of the translation services. So far, I haven’t figured out what translation services work best for what kinds of Chinese websites (any ideas?), but usually one or the other will work fine.

Have fun in the Chinese cyberspace!

Overcoming Language Barriers

Published
by
Kathrine Hoersted
on September 24, 2006
in Translation
. 1 Comment

As many of us experience on a daily basis, the language barrier is an important part of the reason why the Internet appears divided up into different Internets - e.g. an English and a Chinese Internet.

A number of good translation software applications exist today. In the future translation software will definitely develop into levels that provide more accurate translations, easier to use applications, and to a large extend automatic functionality, but to what extent?

Well, in any case, one way to deal with the barrier between English and Chinese languages is to learn the other language :-)

Linese.com is a website that presents itself
as “a platform for people around the world to learn Chinese and experience
Chinese culture. It is also a place for Chinese to study English and further
explore other cultures”.
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It offers both written and oral Chinese
lessons, and a large, interesting selection of cultural insights on a variety of topics - and new articles are added daily. For example you
can see pictures of and read about snacks that are either traditional or hip to consume in Beijing.

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You can also learn about World Heritage Preservation sites around China, read a discussion about gender equality in the Expat’s View section, or learn about the historical meaning of ghosts in Chinese culture.
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Stay tuned for future posts on online
language learning and translation software.

popular Tibetan website

Published
by
Kathrine Hoersted
on July 29, 2006
in Music, Politics, Religion and Virtual China
. 1 Comment

Websites by or about ethnic minority groups in China can be hard to find; and because we do not normally mention our ethnic background when we write posts or chat, it can be even harder to tell if the people who use these sites actually belong to a minority group themselves.

Phayul.com is a website that is popular among expatriated Tibetans, but unfortunately it cannot be accessed from inside The Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR). Phayul is a Tibetan word that roughly translates into “Homeland” and the website mainly deals with issues that relate to the Tibetan societies around the world. The majority of the people who post on the site seem to be Tibetans.

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The site has a news section, a variety of message forums, chat functionality, book and movie reviews, and a music/radio broad casting service. The message forum topics range from “Humor” over “Buddhism” to “Express Yourself”, but the topic “Issues and Causes”, where users can “bring burning issues to the other’s notice” is the category that most people use – it has over 22 thousand posts, the oldest thread dating from 2002.

Manchus online

Published
by
Kathrine Hoersted
on July 14, 2006
in BBS
. 0 Comments

The Manchu people are one of the 56 officially recognized ethnic minority groups in China. They count around 10 million people and thus make up the 4th biggest ethnic group – the Han being the biggest, followed by the Zhung and the Hui.

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Qiren.cn is a Chinese language website made and used by Manchus. In a lot of the ongoing threads within the "message center", ethnicity and identity are discussed, and expressions like “Manchu nationality”, “ancestral home”, and “blood relationship” are commonly used. Manchu language is also a widely discussed topic, and an electronic dictionary is provided, even though it is apparently only a few people over 70 years who know the original Manchu language. Most Manchus speak Chinese.

Does this indicate that ethnic consciousness increases with the internet? Manchu expert Weidong Zhang, University of Iowa, arguments so with his dissertation on online Manchu communities. Ethnic consciousness is certainly one important outcome of the use of the internet, and on the other hand we also know that Manchus, Tibetans and other ethnic minorities use tools like QQ.com where people do not necessarily mention their ethnic background, because it is simply not relevant to the discussion engaged in.

Unfortunately Weidong Zhang’s dissertation is not available online but he kindly welcomes you to write him an email if you would like to read his work.

Other Manchu websites (in Chinese) are: Manchuren.com and Dbmanzu.net

Railway on the roof of the world

Published
by
Kathrine Hoersted
on July 5, 2006
in News, Photos and Travel
. 0 Comments

Railway

The last stretch of the Qinghai-Tibet railway between Golmud and Lhasa has now been completed. The first train left from Goldmud, Qinghai on Saturday the 1st of July after president Hu Jintao cut the ceremonial ribbon. The day of the opening was the same as the 85th anniversary of the Communist Party of China.

President Hu Jintao called the railway a "miracle" of railway
engineering when he officially opened the new line, the China Daily
reported on Monday. But the railway has drawn criticism from advocates
of Tibetan autonomy who say the trains will bring an influx of tourists
and long-term migrants who threaten Tibet’s cultural integrity. Link to Reuters

With 1,142 kilometers section of the railway between Golmud and Lhasa
running along Kunlun Mountain and Tanggula Mountain, 960 kilometers of
the railway will be above 4,000 meters, with the highest point at 5,072
meters, at least 200 meters higher than the Peruvian railway in the
Andes, which was formerly the world’s most elevated track. Link to News.xinhuanet.com

Check out the official Chinese website which provides a map with links in Chinese to each station, photos of the opening day ceremony in Golmud, and highlights on the armed police who are protecting the first bridge of the railway, which crosses the Himalyan origin of the Yangtze River.
Wujing_at_changjiang_bridge_1

Reuters describes experiences from the journey:

"This railway is really comfortable. You can see beautiful scenery,
white clouds, herds of yaks and lots of wild animals," gushed Tibetan
Mima Cering, attending the Police Academy in Beijing.As the train climbed, many passengers attached the tubes to their
nostrils and announcements warned passengers to avoid sudden movements
that could trigger sickness, even in the pressurized cabins. About a
third of those traveling in the cheaper cabins, mostly Tibetan
students, appeared to be feeling ill.


"Now we’ve reached the top, I feel sick and nauseous and have
headaches," said Wu Jia, 32, a Chinese tourist. Older passengers,
looking uncomfortable, were lying down, children were crying and some
were being sick in the bathrooms.
Link

For more first hand reports in English, go to cnews.canoe.ca or Chinatoday.com

Young Tibetans on the internet

Published
by
Kathrine Hoersted
on June 20, 2006
in BBS, Internet cafe, News, Translation, Travel and Virtual China
. 3 Comments

Lhamo Tsering is a young Tibetan woman who lives in a village with her family in the Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Dechen. In 2003 I did anthropological research for my master’s thesis and Lhamo and her family graciously offered me to live with them. I stayed with them for seven months.

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Most village houses have electricity for lighting, but for cooking the villagers normally use open fire. Nobody has internet access or a computer in their house.

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In the nearest town, Gyalthang town (Shangri La) [previously blogged], which is half an hour away on a bicycle, there are a few Internet cafés. Sometimes Lhamo would go with me to the Internet café and one day I had an email account set up for her.

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The main road in Gyalthang town.

Since then, she has been emailing with those of her friends who also have email accounts and Lhamo and I have also kept in contact using email. The other day she told me that apart from emailing she has started using QQ.com to chat with her friends in Lhasa and other towns. "You can have Tibetan installed on your computer" she explains, but most of the people she knows use either Chinese or English both for emails and chats.

a ticket to Shangri La

Published
by
Kathrine Hoersted
on June 19, 2006
in Commerce, Government, Politics, Religion, Travel and Virtual China
. 5 Comments

We’ve got a wonderful new contributor at Virtual China — Kathrine Hoersted, Danish social anthropologist. Kathrine is going to be exploring non-Han (something like 90% of mainland China identifies as belonging to the Han group) Chinese virtual places and spaces.  Think Tibetan, Mongolian, Uighur, Naxi, and more.  We’re trying to map out where non-Han online activity and expression shows up, and how much of it is created by non-Han Chinese themselves. Kathrine starts by trying to find Shangri La –Lyn 

It used to be an imagined place, but now it has been rediscovered as a physical location on earth, and is even promoted in the virtual world.

To the Tibetans "Shamba La" is a mythical imagined place where people are said to live peacefully for all eternity. "Shangri La" entered the Western imagination via James Hilton’s bestselling 1933 novel Lost Horizon.  In the fictional book he described a physical place in Tibet which he called Shangri La, where people of all religions and ethnicities coexist in happy harmony and live to be hundreds of years old.

In today’s cash-driven Chinese tourist market, competitive discussions have arisen between counties in Sichuan and Yunnan about where Shangri La was really situated. Many arguments and intents to prove the exact location have been based on descriptions from Hilton’s fictional novel. Recently, the local government in Zhongdian town was given official permission by the Chinese authorities to rename their town and County Shangri La. So the modern Shangri La now exists in The Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Dechen (Diqing in Chinese) located in the northern part of China’s Yunnan Province.

Zhongdian itself is the subject of many an English-language travel site and blog, 6,550 images via Google, over 1000 images at Flickr. Shangri La can be taken in on a number of Chinese-operated tours. Local Tibetans, however, continue to refer to this location as Gyalthang.

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