An exploration of virtual experiences and environments in and about China.
I came across a BBS on Sina tonight, images from an exhibition of photos of Chinese inmates in asylums, period unknown, location unknown. They looked uncannily like someone taking photos through a security camera…but then Jason figured out they were photos of photos hanging on a wall.
For non-Chinese readers, go to the bottom of the page and click on the image that looks like this, in order to scroll through the 4 pages of photos:
From 传说狼的联盟的BLOG
I recently received an email from a young Chinese friend who mentioned being inspired by amateur Welsh opera singer Paul Potts, who won a British idol singing contest last summer. I’d never heard of Potts, but a quick Baidu search turned up a wealth of Paul Potts videos on Baidu video and elsewhere. Apparently the story of the nerdly amateur with a heart captured the imaginations of the British and American press as well as the Chinese (it can’t have hurt that he sells mobile phones!). Here’s an excerpt from a blog post written by a Canadian Eastern European blogger:
with his hobbit-like pudgy figure, his crooked front teeth and his
misty-eyed sadness, he personifies everyman. His talent is not
propelled by surgically-altered, photoshop-ed good looks; his stories
of low self-esteem and being bullied in school ring true to all of us
who have been there. As a true underdog, he is one of us; he represents
the millions of average looking people who go about their mundane days,
secretly harbouring talents that they do not believe would ever take
them anywhere.
Everyone loves an underdog, but as with many things from abroad that show up in China, the Paul Potts story lingers on in Virtual China as a cultural reference for Chinese netizens to explore their feelings about their own country. In this case, some of what the story is about is the horror of China’s popular "idol" TV talent contests and some distrust of how "open" a television show can really be in China today. As my friend wrote, "many Chinese expressed their recognition for Paul Potts and meanwhile disappointment toward similar Chinese shows, declaring that Paul can never make it the same way in China." Some online comments:
这才是选秀的真谛，中国的选秀，拼的都是背景和后台。
Now this is the real essence of a talent show. China’s talent shows are all based on background and what goes on behind the scenes.
中国的选秀是国情决定的，出不了这样的人。
China’s talent shows are determined by our national conditions. Someone like this could never emerge from them.
…人家选修选出来的是paul potts,我们选出的是李雨春，多大的差距啊…要是英国人看我们选出的李愚蠢，只会觉得我们中国人的审美观和兴取向都有问题
…They elect Paul Potts, and we elect Li Yuchun, what a difference!…If British people saw our Li Yuchun the only thing they’d think is that we Chinese have problems with our aesthetic standards and orientation.
对！这才是平民选秀，因为这不是在中国。。。
Yes! THIS is what you call selection by the people. Because this is not taking place in China…
有谁认为国内的选秀节目能比上这个“胖子”？？？ 我认为国内所有选秀节目的冠军加起来也不如他
不仅仅是震撼人心 更重要的是他的那种精神 那种坚持不懈的精神…… 、Paul Potts 厉害！！！！
Who thinks that our Chinese contestants could compete against this "fatty"??? In my opinion, all the Chinese idol shows’ contestants all put together aren’t as good as him, not only in terms of sheer impact, but even more importantly it’s his spirit, that never give up spirit. Long live Paul Potts!!!
Danwei and billsdue have already blogged this stuff, but it’s just so brilliant that I have to repost! China’s most popular indigenous MMO, ZT Online (征途), which is run by a guy who got rich selling a vitamin tonic, is described in a Southern Weekly article that was taken down after its publication online, but translated into English by Joel Martinsen at Danwei. When you take the time to read the details of the game and the design of the system, it’s a bit frightening. It reminds me of the mentality behind some of the Chinese chuanxiao pyramid schemes that I studied in the 1990s. Crazy, crazy situations, where entire business organizations spring up to use the crudest psychological manipulation to extract money from their "members," who often are there because they crave or need social or financial status. In the case of ZT Online, it looks like there is a network of salespeople who pull people into the game, ramp up competition in face to face encounters in web cafes; and then the system itself uses all the tricks at its disposal to get players to spend more money. Tens of thousands of RMB, to become a really powerful player. It’s also similar to chuanxiao in that the collectives organized by the system turn and revolt against the system, in this case holding mass sit-ins inside the game. As playnoevil says, "Take everything you "think" is good MMO design and turn it on its head."
The game is run by Shi Yuzhu of Giant Interactive Group, who was recently named one of the ten most influential entrepreneurs of China by China Entrepreneur Magazine.
The whole article is well worth a read if you haven’t already, but here are some of the really good bits:
A newly-born ID is at level 1, while the most courageous heroes
among the kings can reach "reincarnate level 170": after bringing a
normal character to level 168, they gain a new incorruptible body and
can reach level 170. Simply put, this is the difference between a
mortal and a god. Heroes wield "Perfect Sacred Weapons", and they are
enveloped in the purple aura of nobility, while you stand empty-handed,
clad in only a pair of shorts to hide your nakedness.
Now you can purchase a point card to pour RMB into your game
account, allowing you to ascend levels more quickly and purchase
precious materials with which to craft equipment. You do not have to
spend money; if you don’t, if you only sit there within the game, then
the system*
will take not even a single penny from you. But you will quickly
discover that you are unable to kill even a mosquito in that wasteland,
and your movements are restricted to the place where you were born, a
small village called Qingyuan; the wide world outside is for heroes. Of
course, even more discouraging is the fact that you, a descendant of
royalty, will live forever under the threat of another player’s secKill.
…One day in 2007, at the web cafe that Lu Yang frequented, a salesman
appeared in front of her while she was running around. He was smartly
dressed, wore a smile on his face, and spoke in alluring terms of ZT
Online, a new kind of game. "There’s absolutely no need to thread
mazes. We just want you to be comfortable," Lu Yang remembered that he
guaranteed.
So Lu Yang and her friends went on to ZT Online. These friends were
her colleagues at the hospital and her husband’s business partners.
They were not short of money, but they had little free time. They
quickly discovered that ZT Online was indeed a wonderfully satisfying
game, as if it were designed expressly for people like them.
You do not need to waste your effort to find a NPC to give you a
mission; press the F key and a drop-down menu displays character names
set out like hyperlinks. Double-click a name and you will automatically
be taken to them. If you want to go to a particular location, there is
no need to thread a maze. Open up the map, find a place name, click on
it, and you will arrive in a moment’s time.
…"Personal enemy" is the social relationship most often found here;
animosity also exists between clans, factions, and kingdoms. Spreading
like a fission reaction, bitter animosity is something eternally
encouraged and glorified.
…The pressure came not just from the game. At Lu Yang’s web cafe, ZT
Online’s promotional four-panel comic was posted even in the bathroom.
When you washed your hands, you could see a cartoon character mocking
those "lazy people" whose next level ascension was far off. The
awe-inspiring hero in the posters tacked up at the entrance to every
web cafe stared at you, and diligent salesmen frequently appeared
beside gamers.
Compared with various promotional offensives in the media, these
salesmen are called Shi Yuzhu’s "ground troops." Many of them are from
Naobaijin’s old sales force and are active in China’s major second and
third tier cities. They possess a well-trained sensitivity and
skill-set in digging for profit.
…"The [game] system provokes wars
and we pour in our money. Whoever allocates more money is the winner."
She felt that there were no winners: "Everyone’s been played by the
system!"
…Gamers were furious. They stopped fighting monsters, refused quests,
and the kingdom’s rulers sat down in a rare peace and refused to
request wars. The Royal Plaza at the center of the game map was thickly
dotted with seated warriors, mages, archers, and summoners. These
characters, usually bent on slaughter, used absolute peace to protest
the insatiable greed of the system.
Also in the original Danwei post is this wonderful bit from a Southern Weekly sidebar article that characterizes Chinese gamers:
"Chinese gamers are an unwelcome species on European and American
servers," said a game manager who once worked on World of Warcraft.
Chinese players always have ways of quickly ascending levels that leave
European and American gamers in the dust, and on group missions they do
not like to respect the tacit rules of profit division. For those
"pedantic" European and American gamers, Chinese players are like
fearsome pagans. "European and American games do not encourage
unlimited superiority of power; they put more of an emphasis on balance
and cooperative support." The former WOW manager said, "Perhaps this is
because of the influence of traditional culture and the current
environment; truth be told, Chinese gamers are better suited to
jungle-style gaming."
I find it difficult sometimes to keep track of Chinese power politics. Now the Brookings Institution has provided us with a lovely, succinct 2-3 minute video analysis of the two new top leaders (Shanghai Party Secretary Xi Jinping and Liaoning Party Secretary Li Keqiang) who were recently promoted as possible successors to President Hu Jintao, at the 17th Party Congress in October. The speaker is Cheng Li, a Senior Fellow at the Institution’s John L. Thornton China Center. If you’re like me, you might enjoy it!
A slightly longer written version, same subject and author, can be found here.
gorgeous, isn’t it? Dr. Pan Meiyun is a professor and professional photographer who has been taking pictures of the Olympic construction sites over the past two years. SSPhoto, a website for Chinese scenic photos, has a page of her National Swim Center, aka Bubble Building, photos.
Over the last three years, three and a half million mobile users have
created over 14 million "red" SMS messages (“红段子”), which have been downloaded
and passed on over 100 million times, according to this Xinhua article about Guangdong’s "red SMS culture" (红色短信文化) (in Chinese), found via Zhejiang Online. "Healthy" red SMS have been solicited by China Mobile Guangdong for the last three years in an effort to counteract "yellow" SMS (of a sexual nature), "black" SMS (characterized in the article as "malicious satire), and "gray" SMS (doesn’t say what this means). A Xinhua reporter recently went to investigate some of the people who have been creating and circulating the red SMS, to hear their stories and understand what lies behind this "healthy" movement.
Here are some of the stories from the article, paraphrased:
Spreading warmth and kindness is what the red SMS do. "With someone worrying about you the journey is not a wandering, with someone thinking of you the days aren’t lonely, with someone caring about you the years are not lost. Don’t let fate brush by you, don’t let your dreams burst like bubbles. Hope you have more happiness than others!" This was the red SMS received by the GM of China Mobile Guangdong’s Dongguan office, sent by a colleague, one day when he was on his long commute home and feeling tired. He had just been promoted to GM of the Dongguan office and his wife was still living in their old home, over 1000 km away. His son was in a third place, and the GM could only make it home once a week. The travel was long and tiring, but when he received the red SMS above he laughed aloud and felt better knowing that a colleague cared enough about him to send it.
[Note: It's not only management who are using red SMS to feel more connected.] "’Red SMS’ help smooth my communication with my son and allow me to peacefully work in Dongguan," said a construction worker. "Now that I’ve left home I can’t take care of my son and I feel really guilty about it. Then one time I saw some educational red SMS on the company’s website. I downloaded them and changed them to suit my own way of talking, then sent them to my son. On the weekends I can even go to the China Mobile service center to make free calls and chat with my son. It makes me happy."
When the Jiangmen city branch office asked for red SMS in praise of Jiangmen, they received over 100,000 SMS from 80,000 Jiangmen people, spread across 167 different countries or regions of China. [Note: Jiangmen county is one of the main sources of diasporic Chinese in the last several decades, and civic pride got expressed in poetry and history via SMS.]
People are also expressing their everyday concerns via the red SMS. For instance, one high school student composed a red SMS about China’s environmental problems. "By the roadside white plastic flutters, in the restaurant used chopsticks pile up; outside the window, dirty paper amasses." In concert with a municipal environmental office, China Mobile Guangdong’s third annual red SMS contest enlisted citizens to create and disseminate environmentally themed SMS.
Establish a healthy mobile phone culture. China already has over 500 million mobile users. SMS are already part of our everyday communication methods. People are creating all kinds of SMS; some are healthy but there are also "yellow SMS," "black SMS," "gray SMS," and so on. Are there more good messages or bad ones? In addition to blocking bad messages by technical means, China Mobile also encourages users to create healthy content for messaging, in order to lead people toward positive expression, toward the pursuit of truth, kindness, and beauty. SMS are inherently neutral, but if gray SMS outweigh red SMS and become more prominent in people’s thoughts, the city itself will become grayer, according to a Jiangmen city official.
We had a visit in Palo Alto from Dr. Pan Haidong, CEO and founder of hoodong, China’s most popular wikipedia and wiki software. The hoodong wiki has over 1.5 million articles written by over 250,000 contributors, and the HDwiki software has been downloaded 200,000 times and currently supports over 1000 other websites in China. Pan Haidong was in town for a meeting with hoodong investors DFJ.
A common stereotype is that Chinese technology is not innovative but merely derivative. Americans talk about Chinese web companies and services in terms we can understand: "the Chinese Google," "the Chinese FaceBook," "the Chinese Youtube," and so on. And yet, with all of the web2.0 action in China, you know that there are things happening in virtual China that could be adopted and even monetized in the English-language environment. Says Pan Haidong, "At first we were the copycat. "C2C" is a "copy to china" model. Then we improved it and localized it and other Wiki developers outside of China learned from us and embedded these features into their systems."
Hoodong is an example of how we can miss what’s innovative about
Chinese online platforms, tools, and features, simply out of ignorance and the lack of
English-language information on such developments.
Notes from interview with Pan Haidong:
There was a lack of wiki software in China. Before HDwiki, there
were around 200 wiki sites in China, most of them using
MediaWiki–which is the basis for Wikihow and Wikipedia. But the
software is difficult to use in terms of user friendliness, features
and functions. It’s too hard for Chinese characters and doesn’t quite
fit Chinese internet user behavior. So that has made most of the
Chinese wiki websites stagnant and unable to draw in more users.
That’s why we developed our free, opensource software, the first of
its kind in the world. Hoodong wiki. We released the first version in
November of 2006 and by November of 2007 we have version 3 with added
functions, features, and more stability. There are about 1000 websites
using our software, consisting mostly of tech researchers, OS groups,
government, universities, and high school students.
Wikis are really popular in tech companies like Sina and Sohu
because it’s a very good tool or platform for the software industry,
for working on documentation. And it’s easy for tech guys to adapt to
this new software. Sina, Sohu, and Netease have a lot of internal
wikis.
Researchers at Peking University’s Institute of Computer Science and Technology, with the University of Mannheim’s Laboratory for Dependable Distributed Systems, just released a fascinating paper laying out the technical aspects of virtual asset theft and modeling the relationships among various actors in the Chinese virtual asset economy. The paper is quite technical, but contains a lot of meat for the nontechnical reader as well. Some points of interest:
I also found in my own visits to Internet cafes that people were buying and selling virtual assets in face to face transactions, which would be hard to track.
For more analysis, especially on the aspect of malware, see Ryan Paul’s great post on Ars Technica, here.
[Second Update: I guess I take comments more personally than I should! This was an act committed by a single person and does not represent all of China, nor all Chinese people's views on how to treat animals, any more than any act of violence committed anywhere represents an entire nation. It has gained attention and public outcry in China--that's why it was posted on a video sharing website.]
Today’s front page feature on Youku, a streaming video site, shows a Lanzhou Wenzhou University security guard beating a dog to death as watchers film from above. After the dog is dead they shout out to him: Why did you kill the dog? It was posted 18 hours ago, has been viewed 345,000 times, and has garnered over 4700 comments, which are growing quickly. [First update: there is a long discussion in the comments about why the people watching didn't try to stop the killing. It's quite clear that they were filming from a window several stories up and couldn't have reached the guard in time to stop him. They did, however, yell at him to stop while he was doing it.] Excerpted comments below.
The caption posted with the video reads: Please treasure every life. There are a lot of different opinions to be found, however, regarding the incident:
What a poser. Why didn’t you go back and get it and cook it up? Now that the weather’s getting cold you could have had dog meat!
Schools aren’t really supposed to have dogs anyway. If it was a rabid dog or a stray dog and it bit someone, who would take responsibility? If it showed up somewhere it wasn’t supposed to be, why not beat it?
If you can’t see the difference between dog meat and pork, it just shows your level of civilization. You’re acting like everyone eats dog, but I think there a lot of people who don’t eat dog. And even if they did eat dog before, after they see this video clip and hear the sound of the poor dog, they won’t even want to think about eating dog again. This is progress, get it?
Complain to the school leadership and they’ll definitely get rid of him. That kind of person could do practically anything. Aren’t you guys scared?
It wasn’t right to kill the dog. People who don’t do something about this kind of thing when they run into it are not good people. At least a lot of people would say that. So those who saw this happening at that school are all not good people. I find them despicable.
Dogs are protected by the law in other countries. Even though they’re not legally protected in China, they should be under moral protection!
How is this guard keeping the peace? It looks to me like he’s causing a disturbance. If a guard can get to this point, it’s probably better that he go back home and raise crops.
**By the way, for North American viewers who read Chinese and are ever looking for streaming video, Youku loads more quickly than other
streaming video sites. (via Ethan Jeffery-Liu)
OK. This is just…where things are going. Ten minutes of nasty American pop music, teenage hormones, voyeurism, and sheer curiosity, raging in broken English. From an Internet cafe in China to a bedroom in some (I’m guessing) Eastern European country. "You make me vidio/I kill you" and "I have this photo in my home. You give me." They make plans to talk on 56.com. Where does the music come from? How do they know each other?
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