Archive for the ‘News Log’ Category
Earthquake in China
As you may know, a powerful earthquake measured 7.8 on richter scale hit Sichuan, south-western province of China early yesterday. The earthquake was felt from Beijing to as far as Pakistan’s northland region and Bangkok, Thailand.
The latest death toll is at least 10,000 people are feared dead.
I have some close relatives and many friends in the Chengdu City, provincial capital of Sichuan Province and surrounding regions. The city is just located about 100 km away from the epicentre. I’m still unable to contact most of them at the moment due to heavy destruction of telecommunication equipment in the area.
The city government has confirmed that at least 300 people have died. From the ones I’m able to contact, I understand that most of 5 million+ Chengdu people in the city were too afraid to go home, they have spent last night on the street, with occasional heavy rains.
In towns close to the epicentre, which I have visited most of them before, thousands of people have died. In one county alone, up to 5,000 people are feared dead.
And the authority is still struggling to reach the epicentre, towns in Wenchuan County. I’ve been to the region before, I still remember clearly that during my visit I have to be on the car for a whole day to travel just 450km in this mountainous region .
There are at least 60,000 people live just right on the epicentre and we still know nothing about their situation because all the road are blocked and the heavy rain prevented helicopters to reach the region.
I pray for the god to show mercy on those people.
Isn't capitalism wonderful?
Flag of Tibetan Government in exile, or as most Chinese called, the “snow mountain and lion flag”, is banned in China since the exile of Dalai Lama in 1959.
The flag existed for nearly a century now.
However, as the BBC reports, people have been found out that the Tibetan flag they are holding to against the recent Chinese crackdown, as many other goods nowadays, is also Made in China.
The manufacturers said they have no idea on what flag it is apart from the fact that the flag is quite “colourful”.
I believe this statement. Chinese People who go to rallies, have strong views on politics are the absolutely minority of 1.3 billion people. Most of us, just like you, want to only have a peaceful place to live, and more money to spend.
That’s why censorship in China such as the Great Firewall could be so effective.However, it also has bad sides for the government, and the made in china Tibetan flag is one of them.
Apart from censorship issues, I think this is also a vivid demonstration showing that capitalists, regardless of their geographic locations, money is the only issue they really care about.
Pro-china rally in Aotea Square today
If you don't know what I'm talking about, here's the news.
I do not held a point of view on this kind of events. We are living in a free country so everyone has the right to get on the street and make his/her voice heard.
However, I do have an opinion on people who put themselves into this Tibet debate and protest thing. Whether they are pro-china or pro-Tibet; it is in my opinion that people from both sides are fundamentally the same - extremist, ignorant, and both sides believe they are representing the holy truth - the only difference is that they have different religious belief.
If you thought Chinese are non-religious people, you sure need to know a lot more about this country.
Anyway, I still just enjoy to use my camera to record everything down.
Photos below are thumbnails... If you click on them in this webpage, you will see a larger size photo in lightbox; if you are reading this from a rss reader, you will see a new window with larger size photo.
Carrefour in China
As you may heard in the news, Chinese national extremists are boycotting Carrefour in China as the response of protests of torch relay in Paris.
Now here's a chance to see how the boycott in happening in China.
I've always said, Chinese, especially those extremists are no threats to the World. Why? Those people only dare to throw bottles and rocks to shops in China and their chinese owners, oh, and chinese who shopped in Carrefour recently.
But wait, what kind of patriotists can throw bottles and rocks to against their fellow countrymen?
That's only because they know they won't be punished for being "patriotic" in that way. They dare to boycott Carrefour, but no one's willing to protest the Chinese government's deal with Airbus, which is another French company.
If my memory serves me right, in the past ten years, only one protest application was approved by the Public Security Bureau in China. I think that was in anti-japanese raid around 2004, in Beijing.
All other protests you saw from news reports, are "illegal", and those protestors know that there's no way that their protests can be approved.
There's more report on the situation in China in Bear's Blog Chinese.
insult to Chinese people?
CNN was recently hot on Chinese agenda, for allegedly "insulting the Chinese people".
I heard a lot of about this last week, however, as I was straggling with my assignments, I really did not have time to find out what Mr Jack Cafferty, the CNN commentator said about Chinese.
Then I found transcipt, which I verified its source to make sure it is exactly how it happened. The alleged insult took place in CNN's "The Situation Room", when host Wolf Blitzer asked a question about American's relationship with China to CNN political commentator, Jack Cafferty.
The controversial conversation, is as below:
BLITZER: One of the arguments that some of the pro-China elements is making, Jack, is that this is a very different China today than existed 10 years ago, certainly 20 or 30 years ago. This communist regime today is almost like a capitalist regime. They’re a huge economic superpower and that we have a lot at stake in maintaining this economic relationship with China.
CAFFERTY: Well, I don’t know if China is any different, but our relationship with China is certainly different. We’re in hawk to the Chinese up to our eyeballs because of the war in Iraq, for one thing. They’re holding hundreds of billions of dollars worth of our paper. We also are running hundred of billions of dollars worth of trade deficits with them, as we continue to import their junk with the lead paint on them and the poisoned pet food and export, you know, jobs to places where you can pay workers a dollar a month to turn out the stuff that we’re buying from Wal-Mart.
So I think our relationship with China has certainly changed. I think they’re basically the same bunch of goons and thugs they’ve been for the last 50 years.
The word "they" in the highlighted sentence was intrepreted as "Chinese people" in Chinese news reports. I doubt this, for simple reasons. Blitzer's question clearly defined the word "China" as the "communist regime", and Cafferty was talking about economical issues, although what he said was very extremist, I just cannot the reason why the last "they" word should be interpreted as anything else but Chinese government.
This "insult" angered many Chinese saying that they will boycott CNN. However, I don't really know how they are planning to boycott CNN, since they cannot watch CNN in their Cable TV anyway.
Although I don't feel offended about this, I believe Mr Cafferty should still apologise as his comments were really ambiguous, which he properly did, he apologised to those who "interpreted the comments in this way."
There is a trouble commonly seen across western media on how to properly refer a country called China, or Chinese government. In most cases, we refer American government as "Washington" or "the White House", British government as" the Downing Street", there is no ambiguity.
However, because of the complexicity of Chinese issues (Taiwan, Tibet ...), the word "China" can have different meanings in people with different political stands. Some of possible intrepretations on the word "China" I can think of:
- People's Republic of China's de facto controlled area, i.e. mainland China plus Hong Kong and Macau --- pro-independence people from Taiwan would interprete the word in this way.
- Republic of China, i.e. Taiwan --- likely interpretation by pro-unification people from Taiwan
- Mainland China only --- Some Hong Kong and Macau people would interprete the word in this way.
- Mainland China + Hong Kong + Macau + Taiwan --- offical interpretation of the word "China", by the PRC Government, Most people from PRC would interprete the word in this way too.
... and no need to mention, pro-independence tibetans interprete the word as the Han culture dominanted area of PRC, i.e. exclude Tibet.
The word "Chinese" can cause even more trouble. Oh, and the phrase "mainland China" I used includes Tibet, because it is a fact at this moment, and if you discuss Tibet seperately, you'll find that there are just unlimited number of possible interpretations.
If you are a journalist reading this, I strongly suggest you that next time when reporting on the issues relating to "China", don't forget to be more specific on what "China" you are really taking about, refer to their full names such as "PRC government" or "mainland Chinese people", otherwise when you wake up one day you may just find yourself under hails of criticisms and even death threats made by extremists from one or both side of the Taiwan Strait.
About ... free trade deal with China
Aunty Helen Clarke is in U.K.. Yesterday she appeared on Hardtalk, BBC's flagship interview programme. It's only 30 minutes long, but a lot of issues were discussed, from republican movement to carbon neutral, and also hot on the agenda, the free trade deal agreement. Read more
