Pronounced: dàyuèjìn
Means:
1. The Great Leap Forward (1958-61), China’s infamously disastrous economic and social campaign in which dozens of millions died.
2. Name for the Chinese version of the card game “President” (a.k.a. “Scum”), in which your seat, rank and privileges at the table change each round according to your relative success in each hand.
I’ve never understood why some bourgeois Chinese make an issue of eating dog. I mean, I get that pet owners might develop less of an appetite, but staging demonstrations? Rescue missions? What do they care? It seems so … unChinese. Well, turns out there’s an interesting historical and social angle to dog’s as pets that I’d missed before, and that’s why eating dog can be such a sensitive issue in China: “During the Cultural Revolution, having a pet was seen as a capitalist activity. Only the rich and arrogant had dogs and allowed them to bite poor people. So there’s this implication that if you treated pets well, you will treat those who are weaker badly.” See: Eating Dog In China. It’s Very Complex. Very. and Chinese dog eaters and dog lovers spar over animal rights.
Our own dog-eating experiences are here:
A Chinese woman in exile with a colourful past leads the fight to end sex-selective abortion in China and India: “She launched the group All Girls Allowed, which aims to end what she described as “gendercide,” the elimination of millions of girls in China and elsewhere through sex-selective abortion.” Read more here and here.
A related recent story is also here.
For more on this topic:
This one’s for all the budding entomologists and/or homeschoolers out there.
If you’re the kind of person who stops to smell the flowers in Tianjin (yes, there are flowers, sure, sometimes they’re plastic, but let’s not be picky), then chances are good you’ve seen some of these lately:
Our two-year-old daughter loves to dig in the dirt and play with bugs. Recently (second half of May) the trees and bushes all over our district have been infested with these things, but I don’t know what they are or if they bite. They can jump and fly short distances, and they start to move away when they sense the camera but they’re not so fast that my daughter can’t accidentally squish them when she tries to “touch” them. Our neighbourhood grandpas told me a word that translates as “ladybug” (花大姐), but Google image search didn’t turn up anything resembling these. I’m not the first lǎowài to wonder what they are.
So I asked BugGuide.net, WhatsThatBug.com and the Natural History Museum. Some of these folks are quite the bug sleuths. It looks like these things are some kind of immature (nymph) form of one of the following, which I image searched in Google and Baidu and which may or may not all be the same thing — I wouldn’t know. Mouseover the Chinese for pronunciation and definition:
It would make sense if these will one day grow up to be cicadas, because cicadas infest Tianjin in the summer so loudly that you have to yell when you’re reading Harry Potter out loud to your wife under a tree.
If anyone wants to provide a definitive answer, be my guest!
But the bug experts didn’t answer the most important question: do they bite? So I took matters into my own hands. The next time we were out I grabbed one and shook it around to see if it would bite me, and OOOWWW! HOLY COW! … just kidding. Nothing happened, so now I let our daughter play with them. :)
Of course, this is not our first notable photogenic insect encounter in China:
P.S. – Curse you to the Nth generation, Great FireWall of China! Trying to do Google image searches when your proxy has been torpedoed (temporarily, I hope!) is as frustrating as it’s intended to be.
Today is the Dragon Boat Festival 端午节。Tianjin’s Dragon Boat festivities don’t even come close to what we saw in Taipei (though I did once see a dragon boat team bailing out their sinking dragon boat while trying to practice on the canal 卫津河), so if you want to see some dragon boat race pictures I suggest you take a peak at this gallery:
All our Dragon Boat stuff was written from Taipei:
Pronounced: shèhuì guǎnlǐ
Means:
1. Social Management, as in “Research, strengthen and innovate the social management issue” 研究加强和创新社会管理问题。
2. “stability-plus”, as in “there are more than enough conservatives around who want to make the new slogan of ‘social management’ stand for ‘stability-plus.’”
Other related key buzz words are “harmonious society”（和谐社会），”harmoniousness” （和谐），”to be harmonized” （被和谐），and “maintain social stability”（维持/维护社会稳定）。
I’d say mistressing is an open secret in China that’s hiding in plain sight, except it’s not a secret, nor is it hiding. Anyway, it’s so bad that anti-mistressing content is being added to the curriculum in some Chinese public elementary and high schools: China: Can Education Curb a Mistress Epidemic?
This isn’t an entirely new thing in China. We have an American friend who, along with her Chinese husband, has been teaching Chinese girls how not to become mistresses for years through her Bright Future project, an “HIV/AIDS, Sexual Health and Values Training” initiative at Tianjin University. For more on Bright Future, which aims “to meet the physical, emotional and relational needs of university students in China,” see the links below:
We had one of those sudden summer rainstorms the other day, and a friend was crediting the Chinese government. It’s hard to know which rainstorms are artificially “encouraged” and which ones are natural, and regardless of whether last week’s was induced by the government, China is trying to use cloud seeding to combat it’s worst drought in over a century: Rainmakers of China struggling to cope with country’s severe drought
Behold the power of China’s weather gods:
“The core issue is not about ‘how much’ religious charities can contribute to China’s society, and it is certainly not about them substituting for state organizations… It is about the inventiveness and capacity to ‘feel’ social and personal needs not yet answered that characterize faith-based initiatives. It is about the quality of care and creativity that communities of believers are ready to contribute. It would be a shame for China to deprive itself any longer of a humane resource that till now remains untapped.” From Religions and Charities in China.
We both write, but Jessica only writes when I bribe her. See all of her posts here.
Pronounced: guāzǐ liǎn
Means: Melon-seed Face. One of the ideal Chinese face shapes.
Albert at Laowai Chinese introduces two ideal and two undesirable Chinese face shapes: The Four Faces of Chinese People (women, really)
- 2012/03/22
Eating Bitterness: an intro to the unprecedented Chinese migrant worker phenomenon
If you're unfamiliar with the urban migrant phenomenon in China -- as in, the people who make the stuff you buy and their lives -- then China’s Urban Immigrants: A Diet of Bitterness is a fine overview with lots of links for further reading.
"Chinese metropolises are now home to an estimated 200 million rural-to-urban migrants . . . who occupy a precarious place in the urban hierarchy: while urbanites appreciate their labor, they are less enthusiastic about the migrants’ presence in their cities."
For more on this topic you can browse our Migrant Workers category, or if you like documentaries, see these reviews of two good documentaries on migrant workers:
- 2012/05/10
Chairman Mao enshrined -- literally
When one of my young, very privileged Party-family students passionately told me, "Chairman Mao is like a god to us!" I understood he meant it as a simile. And the god metaphor is common when discussing Mao and his Cultural Revolution personality cult. But as it turns out, in some incredible irony, some other Chinese mean it literally. I heard about this before, but this is the first time I've found pictures -- Mao actually enshrined in a local temple: Mao Temple in China – Chairman Mao Becomes Local God.
For more about Mao and the Mao Era, you can browse these topics:
- 2012/05/08
A deeper look into the dynamics of living with Chinese propaganda
Two insightful posts from Seeing Red in China, which is probably my current favourite China blog, about living in an aggressively and explicitly propagandized environment, and how Chinese try to deal with it. The propaganda still works, but in ways different than us foreigners probably tend to assume. Without further ado:
I tell [my daughter] that she must not be afraid to take a clear moral stand. “If you see someone is being bullied,” I said, “speak up for that person.” “Be the keeper of the good.” [But] Chinese parents would have to think twice, three times, or even lose sleep, if they are to instill these values in their children, because these qualities won’t serve them very well in the Chinese society.
We've written lots on propaganda, mostly the Chinese kind, including translations of the propaganda we've encounter in China. You can find it all in our Propaganda category.
- 2012/05/06
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