Archive for the 'BBS' Category

online, films not “underground”

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on January 24, 2007
in Art, BBS, Film, Gender and Virtual China
. 3 Comments

No filters for the word "underground 地下," apparently, in virtual China.  A Baidu search for "underground films" 地下电影, for instance, reveals Chinese language pages such as Underground Film Forum, a partial list of Chinese underground films from Xici Hutong (which includes Zhang Yimou’s "To Live", strangely), a review of selected underground Chinese films, and a Baidu Knows question: "what is underground film?" with the following quite direct answer:

Underground film refers to films that have not gone through state censorship, cannot be publicly screened inside China, and can only be shown at film schools or "underground" sites such as bars.  

One underground film, Green Hat《绿帽子》, written and directed by Liu Fendou, offers an example of how the Internet provides a platform for the dissemination of materials that are not officially sanctioned and could become widely known in no other way. Green Hat won multiple awards at foreign film festivals, but only a fraction of Chinese film-watchers would have been paying attention to that. Today, Green Hat is available for download online, has multiple online reviews on sites like Douban and blogs, and even has a Baidu Post forum where readers openly discuss "green hat" situations (when a woman is cheating on a man), and the film itself. Even without any official media reviews or marketing, films like Green Hat can flourish because of online piracy and online word-of-mouth buzz.   

Green_hat

the heroism of returning home for Spring Festival

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on January 17, 2007
in BBS
. 0 Comments

Chunyun

Spring Festival is a month away, but apparently the whole issue of getting home for the festival is a big one for QQ readers–and lots of students are traveling home soon.  QQ BBS editors put out a request about a week ago asking people to send in their Spring Festival travel (Chunyun) 春运 stories from now until 1/25–and since a lot of the actual travel won’t have taken place by then, what they really are talking about is stories of what it takes to arrange for transport home.  As Wikipedia notes:

The high traffic load usually begins 15 days before the Lunar New Year,
and lasts for around 40 days. This period is also called Spring Festival travel season, or Chunyun period. The number of passengers during the Chunyun period has exceeded the population of China, hitting the 2-billion mark in 2006.

The best posts will be placed on the QQ BBS news page.

A few responses from readers:

Spring Festival travel is a worry for poor people–what is there to share here? Have you been to the train stations and had a look?

I’m a student, and our school didn’t manage to get tickets for us.  I went and lined up myself for over 2 hours, and then all I could get was a standing-room ticket!   For a more than 20 hour trip!  Tomorrow I’ll be going home–I don’t dare think of it!

I wasn’t able to get a ticket, at any rate. 

I don’t know how to go home, I don’t have enough money?

Chinese urban life: city management online

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on December 8, 2006
in BBS, Education and Government
. 2 Comments

"The Ningbo City Managaers Welcome You!"
Ningbo_police_2

The ongoing experimentation in online governance and bureaucratic transparency continues. It would be interesting to do a comparison between municipal management department websites in China and elsewhere, to see what the categories of information are.  Ningbo’s site has news such as the prosecution of an illegal construction project, or the announcement of an investigation team to look at township beautification projects;  open tenders for construction projects around the city; announcements of successful bids; instructions for submitting bids; and customer service, such as the addresses and hours of official IC card purveyors (important to help citizens avoid buying fake cards).  It looks like a lot of what the city management does is allocate money to various construction projects, and like bureaucrats everywhere a lot of those contracts go to a small circle of familiar faces.  This is probably why there’s so much emphasis on transparency on the website.

But for a peek into pure officialese, we can’t forget the wonderful discussion forum, or BBS.  You have to love Virtual China for the ubiquitous BBS. It’s hard to tell who exactly is contributing to the Ningbo City Management website BBS, but there you find posts with commentary on anti-corruption regulations, or city events.  Here, one of the most-viewed posts: an angry citizen took photos of street peddlers setting up shop literally in the street, in the middle of the city, wondering where were the police? Comments focus on the Chinese project of raising the quality of the people, a favorite of the government AND everyday people:

This tells us two things: 1) that certain peddlers have absolutely no civilization consciousness 一点文明意识也没有, and 2) There’s a big difference between the presence or absence of city officials. Given Ningbo’s current situation, the city needs official management, and I support the city managers.

Talking about civilization consciousness to street peddlers is like playing the violin to an ox.  1, 2, even 3 officials there wouldn’t do any good.  There’s no way to rule them by law.

Raising the overall quality of the people is a comprehensive, complex, and systemic project of the entire society. It may be too early to request civilization from the petty merchants and peddlers. The proportion of people in the city who have a definite level of culture is way too small.

From the BBS: 50 photos, 50 years of peasant life

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on November 25, 2006
in BBS, Blogs, History and Photos
. 3 Comments

A tour of 50 photos that "testify to the real life of the peasants over the last 50 years" has been put together by a blogger and reposted on Tianya BBS.  It’s got many great pictures, though unfortunately there are no specific dates or origins on them.  For instance:

Members of a people’s commune put on Mao buttons together

Mao_pins

Families in a people’s commune eating in communal dining hall

Great_leap_forward

Pool tables in a field: "I used to play when I was little," writes the author.  "It was 50 cents a game."

Pool_tables

Furong: they love to hate her but they watch all the same

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on November 2, 2006
in BBS, Photos and Virtual China
. 1 Comment

Who else but Sister Furong 芙蓉姐姐?  On QQ BBS’s weekly top photo picks, over 200,000 have viewed Furong’s latest public appearance, at a hospital in Hangzhou over the weekend to celebrate the 7th annual "Men’s Health Day."  (Do you think she went to the China Blogger Conference? Um, no).  Personally, I think Furong takes a lot more interesting photos than, say, Paris Hilton.  Check out her moves:

Furong_hangzhou

Among the hundreds and hundreds of comments:

Why does the world have people like this?

on the BBS today: luxurious government buildings

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on September 24, 2006
in BBS
. 3 Comments

Taian_govt_bldg

"Have you ever seen such a fancy government building?  Seeing the broad, stylish square in front of the Tai’An Municipal Government [in Shandong province], who would still dare to say that we Chinese are poor?!"

An example of what’s driving the Chinese economy: massive real estate projects intended to project power, respect, and wealth.  Apparently also a topic of some interest to Chinese BBS readers, nearly 200,000 of whom have read this thread posted on the Netease BBS on September 18.  The poster’s screenname is "News Commentator," and his icon is a photo of Bill Clinton.  What I love about the big BBS is that they seem to bring together a diverse set of views.  Some of what’s below is hard to understand, frankly–especially the photo of what looks like self-immolation.

Selected comments from the first page alone:

Beautiful!  This shows that Tai’An city has stepped into the ranks of the world’s most advanced cities.

Who took this?!  They didn’t even get the whole thing! It’s much bigger than this!…

I heard it cost more than 600 million RMB, not counting the square in front and the cost of several new roads that had to be built…if you go to the city to have a look it’s no different than any county-level city, but then this building is really up to standard…it’d even be worth a look in Shanghai.

Comrades!  No need to get envious!  With the right conditions, building another Tian’anmen Square would be no big deal.  That’s progress.

When acclaiming the greatness of the Great Wall, let’s not forget that it was built by the bodies of laborers.

The leaders have no shame.

A gift for the mayor of Tai’An, his entire family, and his elder and younger maternal aunts:
Guy_on_fire

This is only one corner of the square.  Actually the square is even bigger than Tian’anmen!

All those kids who can’t afford to go to school, and all that money we’re asked to donate to the Hope Foundation, while our officials spend money hand over fist.  Very upsetting.

Don’t forget the national humiliation!

I’m very moved, as a Chinese, and proud to have such a wealthy and wise government.

The property management fee alone is more than 20 million RMB.

Shandong province? It’s the richest province in Chinese eyes, people there do have money.

 

alternative “rules of privacy” in Virtual China

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on September 20, 2006
in Art, BBS, Photos and Virtual China
. 1 Comment

ESWN translated a story that illustrates, for me, the speed at which digital content can go from private to full-on mainstream public in China.  It’s a significantly different understanding of the unspoken rules of Internet privacy, than in say, the U.S..  (Not that these rules aren’t constantly being rewritten: think of the recent Jason Fortuny "sexbaiting" story, in which he posted detailed responses from folks answering a sex want ad on Craigslist). But there are so many people doing stupid, rude things online in the U.S. that it takes a lot to get anyone to pay attention.  In China, however, representations of certain kinds of acts (and I’d like to think more about what kinds of acts these are) are unbelievably inflammatory. It must be terrifying to be caught up in.

Here’s the story this time: Some friends went to the Madame Toussaint Wax Museum in Shanghai and did some really stupid things with the wax statues, snapping pictures of themselves along the way (they said they just got carried away spoofing 恶搞). 

Waxfigures

(By the way, don’t you wonder how they got away with this?  There must have been hundreds of other people around!). Then they uploaded the photos to a computer so they could forward them to friends.  Someone posted them on a major BBS, and lots of people were upset, which led to criticisms, responses, apologies, and eventually mainstream news stories in (at least) the People’s Daily.

According to Roland Soong’s translation of a Shanghai Media Group interview with one of the friends:

I mean to say that I did not want to publicize this little thing.  I just want to share them within a small circle of friends.  But as soon as it got forwarded to a mainstream website, the effect becomes different.

The story also highlights the power of the major portals and their BBS’s. 

on BBS buzz and the Chery

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on August 28, 2006
in BBS and Commerce
. 2 Comments

If you’re interested in how Chinese BBS work and what it might mean for businesses, take a look at Sam Flemming’s detailed post, "In China, the Chery Army Sounds off Online, on a variety of online activities (BBS, websites, blogs) discussing the Chery automobile.

excerpt:

As a brand, can you imagine being able to listen in on 9,000 comments
from 23,450 of your biggest fans every day? If you are Chery, you can
do that at Mychery. You could also watch Chery related forums on Xcar.com.cn (I mentioned this in a previous post), as well as Auto Sohu, Auto PConline, Autohome, and Che168.  If you want to monitor other brands, they are all there as well, including fan sites for other models like Polo, Bora, Tiida and many others. All told, we estimate there are 3-5 million consumer messages a month on automobile related Chinese BBS sites.

Chery_owner_wedding_1

Chery QQ fans attending a fellow QQ owner’s wedding

Lecher Catcher Alliance

Published
by
Jason Li
on August 19, 2006
in BBS
. 0 Comments

20060819_daselang

抓色狼联盟 (The Lecher Catcher Alliance) is essentially a collection of BBS’s for people to report on and bitch about the perverts that they’ve randomly run into / regularly see. BBS sections include a perverts photo gallery (none yet!) and plans for action.

Via PostShow.

Moli Baobei/Crossgate 魔力宝贝 BBS

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on July 31, 2006
in Art, BBS, Games and Virtual China
. 0 Comments

Moli_baobei

Why is it that one of China’s "classic" games of the past 4 years is still virtually invisible on the English language web?  I Googled it, I Google Blog searched it, I tried to Technorati it but couldn’t get through on this particular Chinese server, I Google News’d it, I Terra Nova’d it, I Pacific Epoch’d it (and I Donews’d it for up-to-date news in Chinese)…precious little my friends, precious little.

I’ve been hearing about "Moli Baobei" for years, and last night while doing an interview in Shenzhen was introduced to the official Moli Baobei/Crossgate 魔力宝贝 BBS on Netease. It’s got almost 500,000 posts on it, 14,000 alone of which are from the player I interviewed. Moli Baobei 魔力宝贝, which literally translated means "charming baby," is known in English as Crossgate, and has been one of China’s most popular online games since it was launched in 2002. It’s run by the Japanese company Square Enix Co. (think Final Fantasy), and has anywhere from 14-16 million players in China from what I can find online. The player I interviewed used prepaid cards that allowed 72 hours of play and cost 32 RMB (about $4 US); there will also be a free play zone opening in August, according to Chinese news sources.

Moli Baobei/Crossgate 魔力宝贝 looks a lot like Runescape to me in terms of game play.  That is, it’s 2D figures who go on quests and interact in landscapes that look at about the same scale as Runescape. It’s not particularly violent, though there are plenty of things to fight and kill, and you can kill and loot other players under certain circumstances.  The overall design theme is Japanese Europeanesque fairytale characters and pretty fantasy landscapes, from Little Red Riding Hood-types to turreted castles.

Crossgate_2

The BBS offers forums for exchanging virtual assets and avatars, instructions on how to set up your own guild 家族, tons of user tips on gameplay and hardware, walkthroughs, and in the "original works" forum, thousands of screenshots of self-penned or scavenged Crossgate and other anime-ish images that go beyond the game graphics and must be referencing something else (Final Fantasy characters?).  Some are scanned in by hand, most are copied from other sites, many are by Taiwanese artists–the first time I’ve seen this kind of cross-straits exchange actually though I’m sure it happens often enough.

Crossgate_1

If you STILL haven’t had enough and want more Moli Baobei/Crossgate 魔力宝贝-related images and screenshots, see Baidu’s image search results here. 

Other recent China gaming news comes from Gamasutra’s coverage of last week’s activities leading up to the ChinaJoy China Digital Entertainment and Expo on July 29, 2006 in Shanghai. Articles include What Chinese Gamers Look for in MMOs, The State of the Chinese Game Business, and Inside China’s Game Outsourcing Business.