Micah Sittig - Archive for June 2004

Archive

June 2, 2004

London Review of Books, Stand-Off in Taiwan by UCLA professor Perry Anderson:

At the same time, this right [to self-determination] has always encountered a limit. Where a nation-state was already constituted, rather than still to be created, self-determination has been systematically rejected. In such cases, the right typically reverses into a taboo. For ideologically speaking, what is then at stake is not 'self-determination', but 'secession'. This is the Lincolnian moment. Its historical record is virtually as uniform as its Wilsonian or Leninist opposites. The American Civil War with its 600,000 dead - the largest military-industrial massacre of the 19^th century - was fought to suppress the separation, approved by unimpeachable democratic majorities, of the Confederacy from the Union. Since the Second World War, the same bloody campaigns against break-outs from the nation-state have been fought again and again, with comparable results. Such has been, in Nigeria, the fate of Biafra; in Russia, of Chechnya; in Turkey, of Kurdistan; in India, of Nagaland; in Sri Lanka, of Tamil Eelam; in Spain, of the Basque country. No standard nation-state has so far ever allowed the detachment from its territory of a breakaway community.

He covers near exceptions in the next paragraph. It's also interesting that this comes from a British journal; would an American publication be as friendly to an article that frankly admits the questionable legitimacy of the American Revolution and makes reference to the killing-fields of Lincolnism?

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June 5, 2004

Random China webloggers Day:

Hank's school is lucky to have him teaching English Lit. His latest piece is an ode to shaving his hairy back. It's beautiful.

And don't miss the comments.

Helen Yu writes up her experience at the Tiananmen memorial in Hong Kong. Very touching song lyrics (which I've backed up on another server).

WoBuZhidao does it again: this is too cute.

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June 7, 2004

News review today:

Home Depot Preparing to Expand to China:

Home Depot has been talking for months about the possibility of expanding beyond North America. Currently, it has 1,740 stores in the United States, Canada and Mexico.

Notice that Home Depot has no presence in Europe. I wonder how the home improvement market will evolve in China. In my experience the kind of home improvement for which Home Depot sells equipment is a distinctly American phenomenon.

Beijing Worried about Zhao Ziyang’s Nobel Peace Prize Nomination:

[Spokesman for the Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights & Democracy Frank Lu] said, “Since 1999, Zhao has been nominated every year and this year his winning the prize is quite possible. So far, no one related to China has ever won the Nobel Peace Prize. According to past statistics and experiences, the prize is often given to a historical figure in a historical juncture. This year is the fifteenth anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre and is the best opportunity. Zhao represents the reformist forces in China and has been sympathetic to democrats. I think he has a great chance of winning this year.”

By the look of the ICHRD's English website, this article could be more of a propaganda piece than a reflection of Zhao's true chances at a Nobel. Still, this would make me very excited. I wish I knew more about Zhao Ziyang's background.

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June 8, 2004

In his latest post, Stephen Frost pulls a fast one on his readers:

Whoops. He doesn't look Chinese!

No, he's not Chinese. He's actually an Australian working at an electroplating facility in Australia. And the three shots above were all taken in Australia. Did you think they were photos of Chinese factories?

The Chinese electroplating facility is nowhere near as bad.

This story illustrates both the idea that foreign investment and the desire to modernize will improve working conditions in developing countries independent of government oversight, and the silliness of propping up dying industries in countries with changing economic structures.

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June 11, 2004

The Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition at the University of Indiana keeps a list of papers for which they have hard-copies on hand. Search through and find the papers by UMich PhD David Moser, and you'll see why I really want to look these up:

If This Paper Were in Chinese, Would Chinese People Understand the Title? An exploration of Whorfian claims about the Chinese language.
The Translation of Godel, Escher, Bach into Chinese.
Fang Lizhi "Physics and Beauty" (translator)
Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard
Chinese-English Ambigrams
Slips of the Tongue and Pen in Chinese

Actually, Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard is available online, as a PDF document.

This shirt is even better than my 老外来了／老外走了 shirt. (via Shenzhen People)

The consistently funny $ Sinobling $ warns us of fifty things not to do in China. The great thing about this list is that there is something for everybody; the one that had me literally LOL-ing was number 64, the jab at John for his run-in with Dashan. Other highlights:

20. Plan ahead
26. Suggest to Standing Committee that their next five year plan should be to “not suck so much”
27. Ask for a doggy bag
37. Join a gym called the “Boxer Rebellion”
49. Bet on the notoriously corrupt game of Ping Pong
51. Ask why the Yellow River is Yellow

(via Simon.)

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June 21, 2004

As with most articles by Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, the rest is soft-headed philosophical musing. But his current editorial, Love Our Technology, Love Us, has a great story about Chinese students and their strategies for getting American visas that made me laugh, at the least.

If anti-Americanism is on the rise around the world, no one told the kids in the student visa line at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. The quest among Chinese students for visas to study in America, say U.S. Embassy officials, has become so intense that it has spawned Internet chat rooms, where Chinese students swap stories about which arguments work best with which U.S. consular officials and even give them names like "Amazon Goddess," "Too Tall Baldy" and "Handsome Guy."

Just how closely Chinese students strategize over the Internet on how to get visas to America—at a time when fewer are being given for security reasons—was revealed to the embassy recently when on one day one consular officer had scores of students come through with the same line, which some chat room had suggested would work: "I want to go to America to become a famous professor." After hearing this all day, he was surprised to get one student who came before him and pronounced, "My mom has an artificial limb and I want to build a better artificial leg for my mom and that is why I want to study in the U.S." The consular officer was so relieved to hear a new line that he told the young man: "You know, this is the best story I've heard this morning. I really salute you. I'm going to give you a visa."

You guessed it. The next day every other student who showed up at the embassy said he or she wanted to go to America to learn how to build "a better artificial limb for my mother." Said one U.S. official: "We have to be so careful what we say, because it gets into the chat rooms right away."

Laowiseass/lalaoshi got up close and personal with the Shanghai Foreign Affairs Office on his trip to cover the Shanghai Scaling Up Poverty Reduction conference that took place in late May. He takes a somewhat jaded view of these conferences. So do I.

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