Archive for the 'Religion' Category

opening up to Chinese tweets: Dave’s experiment

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on March 16, 2008
in Blogs, News, P2P, Politics, Religion, Translation and Virtual China
. 2 Comments

Dave’s experiment is brilliant. It probably takes this kind of situation to open up new practices across virtual spaces, which even though technically just a click away, tend to seem as far away as Mars.

In a nutshell, he’s got a tutorial for non-Chinese readers to sign up to a Chinese twitter-clone called fanfou, in order to start having a dialogue with Chinese folks who can speak English, regarding the current Tibetan protests. Imagine if conversations get started that will continue into the future.

I’ve signed up for fanfou and got myself a home page, but it’s not intuitive, even for someone who reads Chinese. Dave is now my only fanfou friend, and I used Twifan, which appears to search across multiple microblogging apps in Chinese, to search for tweets on Tibet and 西藏 (there are a lot more using the Chinese characters, but this will not help those who need to communicate in English). It’s not clear what could happen next. Maybe the problem is that it’s 4:30 in the morning on the mainland. We’ll see.

Dave is translating Tibet-related tweets here.

So microblogging and online videos are being brought squarely into the fray. Roland Soong writes about what’s happening on Youtube:

There is a propaganda war going on
YouTube because this is clearly one of the top video news sites. In a
propaganda, you win the share of voice and then you can win the share of
hearts and minds. Therefore, you want the videos that favor your
narrative to dominate. You also want unfavorable videos to be drowned
out. Therefore, you mobilize your people to post as often and as much as
possible….The
point here is that using YouTube to track Tibet developments is low-yield,
high-maintenance work.

BBS: a new forum for folklore

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on February 27, 2007
in BBS, Food and Drink, History, Religion and Virtual China
. 18 Comments

Folklorists, historians, and anthropologists of the future will have a huge new source of self-generated firsthand reports of folk customs around China, complete with photos and pretty soon, audio and video. Poking around Tianya trying to understand a bit more about some of the big forums, I came across this lively, descriptive Feb. 27 post titled [Chaoshan] Hometown Great Pig Contest. A rough translation of the post, followed by photos and selected comments:

Guanlong, Denghai [in Guangdong province] has the custom of an annual "Great Pig Contest." This contest is a folk ceremony for celebrating an abundant year, similar to praying for a bumper harvest and prosperity.  But the spectacle and grandeur of this ceremony is rarely seen in these parts, and in addition the Great Pig Contest promotes growth.

On the 18th day of the first month of the lunar calendar, the site of Denghai’s Great Pig Contest is quite a spectacle. All one can see is over 500 flayed-open fat pigs, each spread on a wooden frame about 1 meter in height. Looking in that direction, one sees a field of snow white. These porcine offerings have their heads held high and their mouths stuffed with tangerines.  They look as if they’re leaping forward, presenting a scene of vigor and high spirits. Attached to each wooden frame is a red label reading, " so-and-so fortune and respect" so that each family can identify its own offering.  People are milling about, each wanting to be submerged in the center of the crowd, and only bits and pieces can be seen of even the tallest. Shouts echo through the crowd as people try to locate one another.

Every year the largest pig is put forth in the front row with its weight displayed.  They’re generally about 1000 jin or more.  In addition to labeling it with the family name, the biggest ones were also wearing big red flowers!

These huge pigs have all been raised since last spring. There’s a very rigorous process for keeping them fat and healthy.  It’s said that every year the Great Pig Contest takes place on the 17th and 18th of the first lunar month, and that it’s organized on a rotating basis by different family lineages. And as it’s at the beginning of the year, this kind of contest can not only enliven the farmers’ enthusiasm for production and fill the new year with hope, it also increases the atmosphere of joyous celebration.

Pigs4

Pigs2

　　

Pigs_1

So lively! My spouse’s family does this too, we call it "Displaying Pigs and Sheep," sometime around the new year.  It’s a shame I’ve been unable to see it for many years!

May I ask, what do they do with all the pigs after the contest? If the weather’s a bit hot, wouldn’t the pig flesh start to stink?

Is it interesting?  It makes me feel I’ve entered a slaughterhouse. What a strange folk custom!

It’s really a problem, what to do with all that pork.

For those animal rights people, have you never eaten meat before? Who are you kidding?

I wonder how Muslims would feel if they saw this…

a bit of Christmas in Virtual China

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on December 24, 2006
in Blogs, Commerce, Design, Portals, Religion and Virtual China
. 3 Comments

We’ll be taking the next few days off to celebrate the holiday season.

In the meantime, here a few tidbits from Christmas in Virtual China:

Shenyang_santa_swimmers

rare and old books in Virtual China

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on September 1, 2006
in Art, Auctions, Commerce, Photos, Religion, Translation and Travel
. 2 Comments

Locomotive_qianmen_1

Title: The first locomotive that runs through the heart of Peking.  A train station opens in Chienmên on November 1, 1901. From "Photographic Journal," a collection of photographs taken in cities including Beijing and
Shanghai by Alfons von Mumm. Mumm left in Genova July 1900, and arrived
in Beijing in October of the same year.

One of the wonderful things about the digital world is that it makes faraway, obscure, and rare things accessible to a wider audience.  The Asian Studies WWW Monitor recently logged the Digital Silk Roads Project (DSR), National Institute of Informatics (NII), The Toyo Bunko, Tokyo, Japan, and within it the Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books.  Self-description of the latter:

"The purpose of the project is to make ‘invisible’ books visible from everyone. Today surprisingly many books are invisible from the general public because accessibility to precious books is restricted due to their fragility and safety. To let them come out of the dark rooms of libraries, we establish the digital archive of precious books and improve accessibility to them on the Portal site." The site contains page-by-page photos of 53 extraordinary books, such as

  • 12 volumes of books and collections by Marc Aurel Stein, British archaeologist and linguist who made numerous Central Asian expeditions in the early 1900s. Example: The Thousand Buddhas, "A large color printed book of showing Buddhist paintings from the Mogao
    Caves in Dunhuang. Stein collected these paintings during his second
    expedition to Central Asia (1906-08). Includes L.Binyon’s essay
    ‘Dunhuang paintings and their place amongst Buddhist art’, together
    with Stein’s descriptions of 48 Buddhist paintings";
  • From Kyakhta to the source of the Yellow River, a report by Russian zoologist and explorer Nikolai Mikhailovich Przhevalskii, who in the three years of 1870-1873 "crossed the Gobi Desert with only three subordinates, reached
    Beijing, and went southwest from there to explore the Ordos, Alashan,
    and upper reaches of the Yangtse River before entering Tibet and
    arriving at the banks of the Dri Chu (Jinsha Jiang)."
  • One volume of George Ernest Morrison’s, Views of China, photographs of daily life in China taken in late 1800s, early 1900s.  Morrison was an Australian journalist and Chinese Republican government advisor.   

If you’re looking to buy old or rare Chinese books, bloggers MaryAnn O’Donnell and Frog in a Well ("collaborative weblogs dedicated to East Asian history")  point to Kongfuzi, a Chinese language site that identifies, evaluates and ranks old book sellers across China, provides links to online resources and merchants, provides an online auction platform, and much more. 

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.

Screenshot_005

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.

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.

Shangri_la_3

 

Internet Buddhism: a site for Chinese cultural dominance?

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on April 14, 2006
in Politics, Religion and Virtual China
. 2 Comments

Worldbuddhistforum_1

Greg Walton has a rich, thoughtful post on Buddhism in the Internet age, in which he directs us to the World Buddhist Forum being held April 13-16 in Hangzhou, China.  The WBF site contains links to speeches and articles by Buddhist scholars and luminaries, one of which is an article titled, "A Brief Discussion on the Dissemination of Buddhism in the Internet Age."  Author An Husheng has a very clear-eyed view of what is at stake in Virtual China, noting that the Internet:

will certainly become the new century’s major cultural competition
occasion. Whoever grasps the dominance of the network will be able to
more effectively influence society and guide the public and can thus
gain strategic advantage in the field of culture. Internet as the most
effective new way to popularize and spread Buddhism, has realized our
aspirations of showing the Buddha’s land at the end of a hair and
turning the wheel of the dharma in an atom… [emphasis added]

Elsewhere, a Chinese officials refers to the Forum as a venue for China’s "religious renaissance."

virtual memorial halls

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on April 13, 2006
in Religion
. 0 Comments

Candle

Incense

The Qingming Festival just passed by a week or two ago–the day when Chinese families all over the world go to pay their respects at the graves of their ancestors.  Graves or memorial halls are swept and freshened with flowers, fruit is presented, paper goods are burned. 

Much was written in both the Chinese and English-language media about the burgeoning popularity of online memorials. 

One of the most popular websites, Netor, starts by asking users to decorate their memorial hall with a variety of wallpapers (there are about a dozen choices, including flying seagull over an ocean, soft-focus candles laid on a white table cloth, and swanky living
room).  Once they’ve chosen the virtual environment for the memorial hall, they can enact a number of virtual ceremonies: present flowers, order a song, light a candle, burn incense (1, 3, 9, or a whole bunch of sticks), or present liquor (beer, maotai, red or white wine, rice wine, tea, cocktails).  Recent ceremonies are recorded in the hall by name and date–things like "3/26 lit incense," "4/2 lit candle".  A month of ceremonies costs 15 yuan [<US S2.00]. You can order by short text message over your cellphone.

Interestingly, there are also virtual mass halls such as one that memorializes the 191 victims of a Sichuan industrial accident.  These, as well as the memorial halls for celebrities, get visited by tens or even hundreds of thousands of people. 

CyberAsia conversations

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on March 29, 2006
in Games, Politics, Religion, Video Clips and Virtual China
. 2 Comments

There is a series of conversations being organized in the Netherlands on Chinese online politics and culture, which appear to be things you can stream live and participate in via IRC, or at the least, download and view after the fact.   One took place last night (ahem…should have read those emails earlier!), but the others are happening tomorrow and later in the month.  Here goes:

V2 and IIAS (both based in the Netherlands) are organising a debate on Chinese Media Culture. The event itself takes place in Rotterdam, but it will be streamed online, and it will be possible to ask questions and take part in the discussion through IRC.

Tangent_Leap: An evening on emergent media culture in the People’s Republic of China

featuring
Isaac Mao, activist blogger and software architect, Shanghai
Zhang Ga, media artist and curator, Beijing/New York
Karsten Giese, political scientist and sinologist, Hamburg
Guobin Jang, social scientist, New York online

moderator: Stephen Kovats, media researcher, V2_Institute
respondent: Martijn de Waal, journalist and media theorist, Amsterdam

Thursday March 30m 19.00 - 21.00 (CET)
V2_Institute for the Unstable Media
Streamed live: 02.00 - 04.00 (Beijing, Hong Kong), 19.00-21.00 (Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris) 13.00 - 15.00 (New York), 10.00 - 12.00 (San Francisco)
www.v2.nl/live

In addition there are 3 seminars organized by Peter Pels (Anthropology, Leiden University), bringing together Asian activists, academics, and industry folks to discuss some ripe topics:

  • Asian Cyberpolitics, with Isaac Mao and Merlyna Lim. How successful is the Chinese regime in silencing digital voices? Why was Isaac’s website <www.isaacmao.com> blocked so quickly? How does the Internet produce new forms of politics? Does the Indonesian cyberspace still facilitate critique on the political system the way it did before the downfall of the Soeharto-regime in 1998?  Wed. March 29 8-10 pm Amsterdam.

  • Asian Cyberfundamentalism, April 18
  • Asian Cybergames, May 10.

Looks like you have to make a reservation (email: reserveren@waag.org) to view the seminars live, but also that they should be available to download at the Waag Society/Connect Media site after the fact.

(via Chineseinternetresearch)

online superstition

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on March 23, 2006
in Religion
. 1 Comment

China’s official news agency reports that online "high-tech fortune-telling" sites are poisoning Chinese teenagers, taking them away from their studies.  Will try to find some of these in coming weeks! 

link
(via Gerry Groot at Chineseinternetresearch)