Watching China

Kris, my co-worker at Bryght, and Robert are back in China as part of China Access 2008. Be sure to look at Kris' photos as well as Robert's, which they are posting to the China Access 2008 pool on Flickr. They helped organize BarCamp Shanghai (see also barcampshanghai.org for the attendees list and sessions). They (wisely) crossposted announcements at Bryght, Raincity Studios, and Daily Vancouver's 2010 Olympic coverage (Kris, among others, post stories and announcements related to their Torino 2006, Beijing 2008 and Vancouver 2010 adventures to that site). I'm looking forward to the photos and ideas that come from BarCamp Shanghai, which I won't be attending. Maybe I'll go to the second one, though, or possibly when Beijing technology buffs organize one for the capital.

A quick shoutout to Micah Sittig, who's weblog I had been reading for a while now, and who is listed as a BarCamp Shanghai organizer. He posted some great photos from China's first wiki conference, so I look forward to his documenting the event as well.

After subscribing to the combined RSS feed of the aggregator of weblogs about China and seeing the great writing there, I've once again renewed my interest in China. Over the next few months, I'd like to commit to improving Watching China, which may be no small task. Thankfully large tasks can often get broken down into smaller ones, so in the grand spirit of Urban Vancouver, I'll be more open about developing this site in the open. What's needed (and this is a very incomplete list):

• a less obvious colour scheme, maybe something with a hint of dark blue
• make the site more inviting as a community site, that is, making it easier for others to post to the site
• some more features, though I'd be happier just to point to other sites and make this site just for blogging and forums and point to other sites that have voting and social networking features, for example
• a tagline

That last one, a tagline which will appear in the site's title, seems to be the smallest and therefore easiest. Right now I'm thinking of "Outsider perspectives on the Middle Kingdom", since even though it may look like I'm the only on posting, I'd like the site to have multiple contributors—cross-posting and linking back to the original post would not only fine but be encouraged—write for the site, hence the plural "perspectives". That's not a very snappy tagline though, so I'm wondering, do you have any suggestions?

Lee and Sachi Lefever have been travelling the world and documenting it on their excellent site, The World Is Not Flat. (Disclosure, I had a hand in helping setting up the site, and it's hosted by my employer, Bryght, for which I do technical support.) As a guilty admission, I've only recently started following the site, mainly because early on I subscribed to their 'china' tag and only now are they writing extensively about their travels there. Check out their great articles about Hong Kong's modern efficiency, unidentifiable meat in Guangzhou and the gorgeous photos of Guilin (I always heard it was beautiful, and here's confirmation). The phrase winds through the grotesque peaks exactly like a blue silk ribbon is funny, partially because it reminds me of when I was in China, the Internet cafe I frequented asked me to help with the English on their sign. Let's just say some words on the sign did not exist at all in the language. They leave China in September, so it sounds like there's more to come about their adventures in the Middle Kingdom.

[Cross-posted from my personal weblog.]

I have recently developed a free Chinese learning site call ecChinese.com The site is developed in 21 languages who want to know some basic Chinese before taking serious paid course. It contains listening, oral, characters writing. Easy to learn.

I think I cannot post the link here, otherwise it will take it as spam. Please visit ecChinese (add dot com after ecChinese).

Enjoy!

Catherine.

Hi, I'm Toni, and I stopped by this site by accident.
In the near future I probably move to Beijing.
Maybe this site will become a window to those I leave behind :-)
That's for now.

China Web 2.0 Review has an article on Podlook, which purports to be the largest Chinese podcast directory. Clicking through, looking for something that would be related to learning Chinese, I came across the 学习和教育 directory (it had the characters for 'study' in it) and eventually landed on Hess Educational Organization, which has a Chinese Survival Guide podcast series (iTunes link). Not terribly interesting for me, since I think I know enough Mandarin to survive.

Looking through iTunes podcast directory, I came across My Experiences Learning Chinese (also available at Odeo), a series in English by Joe, who married a Chinese woman with whom he's having a child. Joe, the podcaster, has this as his series' description: "This podcast is a personal diary about my experiences learning Mandarin Chinese, which I am starting 72 hours from now and plan to continue until at least the Beijing Olympics." In one of the first podcasts, he says he learned some Chinese 5 years ago, and knows some phrases from his wife, but wanted some more formal and structured training. Not much Chinese in it, but it's a good insight into what challenges English speakers have and what tools they use when learning Mandarin.

George J. Gilboy, writing in the July/August 2004 edition of Foreign Affairs cautions the United States to stop considering China a 'strategic competitor' and instead consider that China's reliance on foreign technology and its lack of a strong culture of long-term investment serve as major hindrances

China [...] has joined the global economy on terms that reinforce its dependence on foreign technology and investment and restrict its ability to become an industrial and technological threat to advanced industrialized democracies. China's best hope for overcoming its technological and economic weaknesses lies in a renewed focus on domestic political reform. Thus, rather than lapse into shortsighted trade protectionism that could undermine current favorable trends, Washington should pursue a policy of "strategic engagement." Not simply engagement for its own sake, strategic engagement would explicitly acknowledge the advantages of U.S. technological, economic, and military leadership and seek to reinforce them, in exchange for increased prosperity and more security for China -- the more so now that China has a compelling economic interest in domestic political reform.The Myth Behind China's Miracle

Gilboy notes that while China enjoys a large trade surplus with the United States, it suffers trade deficits with all its major Asian neighbours. He also points out that importing Chinese goods have save both poor families and large American companies hundreds of millions of dollars, the families buying inexpensive household supplies, the companies buying inexpensive parts for consumer technology products large and small. He then notes that foreign direct investment by American companies in China has created both markets for the companies and opportunities for Chinese to import technology. Gilboy later cites three reasons why the United States needs not fear losing its dominant economic position:

First, China's high-tech and industrial exports are dominated by foreign, not Chinese, firms. Second, Chinese industrial firms are deeply dependent on designs, critical components, and manufacturing equipment they import from the United States and other advanced industrialized democracies. Third, Chinese firms are taking few effective steps to absorb the technology they import and diffuse it throughout the local economy, making it unlikely that they will rapidly emerge as global industrial competitors.The Myth Behind China's Miracle

The remainder of the article continues its focus on the economic aspect of China's "threat" to the United States. For a more military perspective (particularly with regard to alarm over China's supply of nuclear weapons), see Jeffrey Lewis' recent article in The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.

In May of this year, I asked if there were any podcasts for learning Chinese. Yesterday, in a comment to an unrelated post, someone mentioned ChinesePod.com, which has free podcasts but require you to pay a monthly subscription fee for transcripts and review exercises. That's reasonable: those like me who want something for the bus to learn (in my case, re-learn) Mandarin have something that can go straight to their digital music player of choice, while those tha want something to print out and Flash-based questions to help review the podcast.

It looks like their in a preview mode, since until October 10th, the 'premium' stuff is freely available to those who subscribe. It's a little bit pricey for subscriptions, though: $30 a month, $150 for 6 months and $240 for a year is still cheaper than taking a university class, but I think it still prices a lot of people out. I know it would be a pretty drastic price cut, but I'd happily pay $5-10 a month for something like this, maybe a little more if it included help over email. $30 would sound reasonable if there was some scheduled live instruction or question-and-answer (akin to 'office hours', since it would be one-on-one) via Skype. I'm thinking an hour or two a month of live, voice help learning Chinese would be more than adequate in the $30/month price range.

On their weblog, they show evidence of thinking ahead, with a business module for podcasting:

At ChinesePod, we have been pushing a concept of using podcasts as an ‘on-ramp’ to a personal learning center where learning can be reinforced. While it will take some time, ChinesePod podcasts will hopefully graft the best features of podcasts so far (e.g. flexibility, timeliness, informality, interactivity) onto the methodology of how to effectively teach secondary languages. The thinking is that the typical user will start their learning by consuming the podcast and then gravitate to the website where they can (a) view the podcast transcript and key words, (b) go through a few review exercises to gauge their comprehension and, my personal favorite feature, (c) save and flashcard review key vocabulary and phrases they would like to memorize. When I first started studying Chinese, I inevitably found myself walking around with a stack of paper flashcards that I had to manually write out. I would love to be able to take this system with me via my phone and consume via a Flash Lite or XHTML interface.ChinesePod Business Model for Podcasting

What they seem to be doing right (not an exhaustive list, focussing on the tech side of things):

• They're using a blogging CMS (Wordpress) to power both the main site, so that means RSS feeds for pretty much everything, plus tags.
• They list their Skype, phone and email address, Skype being the biggest deal of the three, but as above, I can see how they could do well charging for instruction via VoIP.
• They start with Beginner level, which isn't that great for me (since I can understand everything they say and is a bit repetitive), but that's where most learners of the language are.
• There's RSS for everything, and they even have a link to subscribe to the podcast in iTunes. The feeds have enclosures, which means—the way I have it setup currently—MP3s go straight to my iPod.
• The URLs are clean (the download links notsomuch, but that's okay), and the tags are useful.
• There is a weblog separate from the main site (which itself is technically a weblog).
• The "Most Popular" sidebar appears to use the same cool annotation tech found over at News in Chinese.
• They release the podcasts under liberal Creative Commons license. Of the Creative Commons licenses, Attribution is quickly becoming my favourite.

What they could improve upon:

• The about page doesn't have the prices listed. I had to find that out after signing up. It needs to be up front how much it costs each month.
• They use a WP template for their about page, when it really should be a page within the WordPress CMS database.
• The tags don't seem to have RSS feeds. Not really a big deal since I care more about the levels of instruction, which appear as if they will be the main categories, such as Beginner, Intermediate, etc.
• The annotation doesn't seem to work in Safari. Not a big deal, since I don't spend a lot of time in it anyway.
• There's some PHP breakage around a category feed.

Except for the lack of price listings before signup, those are relatively minor issues. Podcasting is a really great way to distribute language learning "tapes", so I look forward to what ChinesePod.com and sites like it have in store for those who someday wish to legitimately claim to be multilingual.

Related: see Blogchina's Podcasts, which seem to be mostly people having conversations. Conversations make for the best podcasts (as opposed to monologues, which are boring), but the level of Chinese was just out of my reach for me to be able to learn from them.

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Writers and thinkers on all sides of the copyright and intellectual property debate with regards to piracy have focussed (rightly) on China as a country with the least well-enforced regimes. That's not really such a bad thing, argues Ellen Sander in her article The Revenge of the SITH and the Rationale of The Pirates". Her focus is on China, but the best arguments deal with piracy at large. Briefly, she argues that money should not be the only consideration when releasing movies, books, music and other works of art that are easily copied digitally. Copyright, at least in my neither-a-lawyer-nor-an-economist analysis, is about control of "popular" cultre by the elites who claim to be the only ones allowed to produce it. If I read her correctly, Ellen seems to be saying that the more they let go, or, rather, if they make the legitimate purchase of CDs and DVDs and digitally-distributed music and movies a little more accessible (read: cheaper), then their legitimate spread—for which there appears to be a huge demand (she cites the low number of theatres per capita and the Chinese government regulation artificially limiting the amount of foreign movies shown)-will take off.

On the aspect of control through legisltation and litigation and other ways of measuring success than the monetary:

While the Western entertainment industry, politicians and economic spokespersons are very publicly complaining, launching lawsuits, threatening and predicting doom over the worldwide DVD piracy of movies, they are drastically overlooking something of great, perhaps even greater importance: the distribution of film through piracy reaches an audience in numbers that can not be approached by current marketing practices. The net result shouldn’t be measured only by perceived economic loss in the present, but should be dealt with in terms of cultural benefits and future marketing opportunities.The Revenge of the SITH and the Rationale of The Pirates

Before citing some evidence, she notes efforts by the Chinese government to clamp down on clearly illegal operations:

US politicians regularly admonish China (and other nations) for the rampant piracy that exists. However, it is not the Chinese government that is at fault. The government, tasked with respecting the intellectual property requirements of WTO membership while serving its own people, has actively sought solutions to a deeply entrenched situation from which hundreds of millions of Chinese (and gleeful foreigners as well) benefit.The Revenge of the SITH and the Rationale of The Pirates

As she mentions, Danwei does not allow comments on its articles, so she's added a spot on her weblog where she's taking comments.