Just a few quick links from over the weekend while YJ gets Sunday dinner on. Best part about pingfang living? Al fresco dining…May to October.
For those of you who don’t have a high-school aged Chinese student living with you (or missed the mothers chain smoking by the side of the road) this weekend is the gaokao, the annual battery of tests that determine whether a particular student will get into the college of their choice and face a future of fulfillment and promise or instead wind up a miserable failure, openly mocked by family and family friends as they descend into a never-ending shame spiral of disgrace and limited options. Seriously, great fun!
Two biggest worries for 2009? Cheating and the flu. That and the possibility of some 17-year old kid snapping like a twig and stating to gnaw off his own foot while waiting for his test booklet.
Speaking of youth under pressure…the kids of today should feel fortunate that the competition has been thinned a bit by three decades of the One Child Policy, which is all good if you’re taking a college entrance exam with a strict quota system in place but not so much if you’re an eager young bachelor in China’s rural areas. Human nature being what it is, and this being China, it should hardly come as a 10,000 volt shock that a number of scams have popped up to take advantage of these poor lovelorn souls. Whatever the benefits of slowing China’s population growth, and there are some to be sure, the side effects of such a massive experiment in social engineering are only now starting to show, and an increase in bride price, the trafficking of women, and prostitution are, I suspect, just the tip of the iceberg in terms of OCP hangover in the years to come.
Finally, be sure to check out Liang Jing’s essay on The China Beat, “The Historical Bafflement of the Chinese People.”
I accept that cultural radicalism takes some of the blame for the disasters of the last century, but fail to understand the actual proposals of cultural conservatism. Will cultural conservatism be able to succeed where cultural radicalism has failed? Such simplistic thinking is disturbing.
It’s a fascinating and provocative read.
Unfortunately, those liberal radicals can be very conservative on what they don’t like to see too, maybe even worse.
Look at what Chai Ling is doing now — she and her husband (a former partner Bain & Co company) is suing Long Bow Studio which produced ‘The Gates of Heavenly Peace” about June-4th incident.
“For nearly two years the Long Bow Group tried to negotiate a settlement with Chai Ling and Jenzabar’s lawyers. During this time, we were careful not to publicize the lawsuit. In April 2009, Jenzabar’s lawyers declared that they had no interest in settling the case; given our limited resources, Long Bow has decided to appeal to the public for help.
The following open letter asks for your support of the principles of free speech and academic freedom which we feel are being threatened by this lawsuit. Please know that signing this appeal letter carries no legal obligations, responsibilities, or commitments of any kind, nor does it mean that you necessarily agree with opinions expressed in either the Long Bow Group’s films or its websites.”
The hostility may spark by the document showing Chai’s public statement to Cunningham on May 28th, 1989
“On May 28, 1989, just days before the massacre, American journalist Philip Cunningham interviewed one of the student movement’s most prominent leaders, Chai Ling. In this interview, Chai indicated that “the hidden strategy of the leadership group she dominated was to provoke the Government to violence against the unarmed students. With statements [in the interview] like ‘What we are actually hoping for is bloodshed’ and ‘Only when the square is awash with blood will the people of China open their eyes,’ Ms. Chai denounced those students who sought to bring an end to the occupation of the square.” (op. cit.) The May 28, 1989 interview was undertaken at Chai Ling’s request. She then asked Cunningham to release it internationally as her political statement on the student movement. The Gate of Heavenly Peace makes extensive use of this interview (necessitated in part by Chai Ling’s repeated refusal to be interviewed for the film”
Shane,
Thanks for the ‘breaking news,’ you may also have heard that Barack Obama has been elected president and that Chevy Chase is no longer on Saturday Night Live.
This has been a well-discussed topic on the internet over the past year or so, and I recommend checking out one of the many many threads on the subject.
Ps. I apologize, but I had to remove the links from your comment. The CCP is in full-scale ninny mode this week, and links with a TAM flavor interrupt access to the site. I wonder what they’re so worried about…
Jeremiah:
My point was not to break an old news. In fact, little can be done to a private civil law suit, except money, lots of money.
My point is that some Chinese radical liberals cane real scumbag by hawking their ideological view to gain western sympathy on one hand, yet be a brutal on different POVs too.
Look at Chai Ling, she is a typical Red Guard of Cultural Revolution with a full of cloth of liberal radicals
So Chai Ling is both a “Red Guard” Maoist and a “radical liberal” who earns “Western sympathy.”
Thanks for clearing that up.
Joking aside, I don’t think many people take Chai Ling very seriously, or as seriously as you seem to, she rather quickly established herself up as the Paris Hilton of 1989.
Most of Liang Jing’s pieces that I read to me are atrociously bad. Maybe it has more to do with his employment (presumably employed by RFA?), than his seeming inability of thinking things through?
Chinese are more interested in their own history now than ever, is because,
1. Chinese are better educated now.
2. A lot of them don’t have much faith in finding the answers to China’s questions today outside of China. China’s own history is the right place to look.
JXie,
You know what they say about assumptions and presumptions…
But in any case, I think it’s great that Chinese are more interested in their own history now more than ever before, though the state of history education in China…well, that’s probably the subject of a whole other post.
Guilty, your honor. I just couldn’t help but notice his name almost always comes with RFA. Maybe he is a freelancer to RFA, or maybe RFA just loves to run his pieces…
Personally I don’t concern about the basic history education (like high school level history textbooks), but rather if academic diversity is allowed.
[...] Gaokao stuff can be found on Danwei, Granite Studio, and [...]
Great, someone showed me that the Boston Globe put out a column about Chai “Red Guard” Ling
“What you might not have heard about is how a leader of that crushed movement is trying to put the boot into a pillar of democracy right here in Boston.
Ling Chai, sometimes called commander in chief of the 1989 demonstrations, now lives in Massachusetts and heads a successful software company, Jenzabar Inc. In the years since she fled China, she has spoken passionately about the importance of free speech.
And yet Jenzabar is using the courts to bring two filmmakers to near-ruin because their website contains excerpts from, and links to, articles critical of Chai and her firm.”