The still-unidentified Tibetan man shouted slogans before self-immolating, they said.

“The protester appeared to be a monk,” Yeshe and Tsering said, quoting a source, “but his name and place of origin and other details are not known.”

“He was immediately taken away by soldiers and police,” they said, adding that two other monks were detained in the vicinity.

“Their identities are also unknown,” Yeshe and Tsering said.

The latest incident took place amid a worldwide vigil day called for by the Tibetan exile leader and, if true, would bring to at least 20 the number of Tibetans who have taken their lives to protest Chinese rule since March 2009, according to The New York Times. It also comes just days after three Tibetan livestock herders reportedly lit themselves ablaze in Sichuan’s Seda County.

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Post tags: self-immolation, Sichuan, Tibet protests
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Lin, a former Harvard star who went undrafted out of college, gives up 14 inches and roughly a hundred pounds to Yao, the former No. 1 draft pick and recently retired center of the NBA’s Houston Rockets. He’s also an American by birth, the California-raised son of Taiwanese immigrants.

But none of that appeared to matter to China’s basketball fans after the second-year player exploded for a career-high 25 points in leading the New York Knicks to a victory over the New Jersey Nets on Saturday then went on to top that effort with 28 points in a win over the Utah Jazz on Monday.

Video clips of Lin’s performances have circulated widely on China’s popular Twitter-like microblogging service Sina Weibo, where the 23-year-old’s Chinese name, Lin Shuhao, ranked among the top 10 most searched terms Monday.

Images of the 6-foot-3-inch guard outperforming NBA veterans, including All-Star point guard Deron Williams, have garnered him global acclaim, including on Twitter, where the hashtag #linsanity has been trending. But he seems to made a particularly big splash with Chinese viewers, some of whom had begun to lose interest in the NBA following Yao’s retirement in July last year.

ESPN spoke with Lin following his latest scoring outburst, a contribution which gave the New York Knicks a two-game “Lin-ning Streak”:

Because, as improbable as it sounds, Jeremy Lin’s fingerprints were all over both victories.

That’s the same Jeremy Lin who was cut by two teams in the preseason.

It’s the same Jeremy Lin who played a grand total of 16 minutes in his first two weeks with the Knicks.

And it’s the same Jeremy Lin who spent six days in the D-League two weeks ago.

“I definitely couldn’t have imagined this,” Lin said after scoring a career-high 28 points and handing out eight assists in his first NBA start, a 99-88 win over the Jazz.

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Post tags: basketball, Jeremy Lin, NBA, New York Knicks, online public opinion, sinaweibo, sports, yao ming
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If confirmed, the latest cases would bring the total self-immolations over the past year to 19, an unprecedented wave of self-inflicted violence among the tiny ethnic minority in China, according to scholars. They were also apparently the first by lay people, rather than current or former members of the clergy, suggesting that self-immolation may be gaining popularity as a form of dissent.

The incidents took place Friday in a remote village in Seda County, once a center of Buddhist teaching, but reports did not surface until the weekend because the government has cut Internet and telephone connections to the area, said Tsering Woeser, a Tibetan poet in Beijing.

She said that one of the three men had died and that the other two, believed to be about 30 and 60 years old, were severely injured.

The local party secretary for Seda County disputed the latest reports in a Global Times article published Monday:

“Everything is all right here, although we still have no Internet access,” said Wang, who said there had been rumors saying some Tibetans were going to set themselves on fire, but “it has not happened.”

Zhang Yang, from the publicity department of the Party committee of Sichuan Province, told the Global Times that he has not heard of any self-immolation incidents over this weekend.

Despite claims in official state media that recent unrest between Tibetans and local authorities in Sichuan is no cause for concern, Beijing has put officials on alert ahead of this month’s Tibetan New Year festival. From The Telegraph:

“Officials must put all their efforts into maintaining a stable, unified social situation in our region. They must have a clear head and fully recognise the extreme importance and urgency of the job of maintaining stability,” a Communist Party notice said in the state-run Tibet Daily newspaper.

“Government departments must unstintingly carry out all measures designed to maintain stability, ” the notice ordered.

The diktat did not detail what measures should be deployed to quell any further unrest.

But with the fifth anniversary of the large-scale March 2008 Tibet uprising also looming, the message to strike hard and stamp out any signs of mass revolt was clear.

Meanwhile, the elected leader of Tibet’s government in exile told the Financial Times on Monday that he is worried about a forceful crackdown by the Chinese government:

“The military build-up is increasing rapidly. We have seen pictures of hundreds of convoys filled with paramilitary forces with automatic machine guns moving towards various parts of Tibetan areas,” Lobsang Sangay, the prime minister of the Tibetan government in exile, told the Financial Times on Monday, referring to images sent by sources in the Tibetan region.

“We are really worried that with such a military security build-up and so many guns in the hands of Chinese police and military personnel, we fear the Chinese government is preparing for something very drastic and unforeseen and tragic.”

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Post tags: crackdown, self-immolation, Sichuan, Tibet protests
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Transplanting football to China has never been as easy as the transplanters hoped. Mao was a basketball buff, which is one reason why you’ll find a hoop in just about every village from Tibet to the Yellow Sea. In football, by contrast, the pads and balls and rhythms are idiosyncratic, and, for a while, the league put its hopes on trying to cultivate a Yao Ming for football, a Chinese national who might be able to cut it in the N.F.L., and bear on his (presumably ample) shoulders the hopes and merchandising money of the motherland. At one point, the league even helped train some big-boned Chinese soccer players to make the switch to field-goal kickers. But none of them reached the N.F.L. (I encountered one of the aspiring kickers a few years ago, after he’d played his first minutes of actual football, and he told me that he’d rapidly discovered that the “opponent will try to disturb you when you try to kick a goal.”)

The N.F.L. is no longer looking to groom its Yao Ming. Richard Young, the managing director of N.F.L. China, told me that he now compares his sport’s future to that of coffee. “Years ago, I took a Chinese friend to try a cup of coffee, and he choked down this black liquid and said, at the end of it, ‘Richard, Chinese people will never love coffee.’ And you know what? To this day, they still don’t have the big barista machines at home. But they’ll gladly go to Starbucks, and Starbucks is all over China. So coffee is not going to replace tea, and we’re not going to overtake soccer, but it doesn’t mean we can’t build a good business.”

The Wall Street Journal reported in November on the NFL’s latest attempt to bring American football to China through an interactive marketing event in Shanghai.

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Post tags: Beijing, football, foreign sports, NFL, sports, Super Bowl
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The three volumes under the magnifying glass are Ezra Vogel’s ‘Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China’, Henry Kissinger’s ‘On China’ and Jay Taylor’s ‘The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China’.

Books about China, popular and scholarly, continue to pour off the presses. In this ever expanding literature, there is a subdivision that could be entitled ‘Under Western Eyes’. The larger part of it consists of works that appear to be about China, or some figure or topic from China, but whose real frame of reference, determining the optic, is the United States. Typically written by functionaries of the state, co-opted or career, they have as their underlying question: ‘China – what’s in it for us?’ Rather than Sinology proper, they are Sino-Americana. Ezra Vogel’s biography of Deng Xiaoping is an instructive example ….

… Vogel devotes just 30 pages, out of nearly 900, to the first 65 years of Deng’s life. The foreshortening is historically grotesque, but perfectly logical from his standpoint. Of what relevance to policy-makers and pundits in Washington is Deng’s long career as a revolutionary, steeled in clandestinity, insurrection and civil war, and the founding and leading of the PRC under Mao? It is only when he is detached from this history, and can be safely treated as a victim of the Cultural Revolution whose triumphant comeback enabled a turn to the market – and the United States – that Vogel’s story gets underway.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom also points out Anderson’s January 2010 review of Martin Jacques’ ‘When China Rules the World’, Yasheng Huang’s ‘Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics’ and Ching Kwan Lee’s ‘Against the Law’, “without taking stock of [which], no sense of contemporary China is clear-eyed.” See also more on Vogel’s book and a lot more on Kissinger’s, via CDT.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: book reviews, Chiang Kai-shek, Deng Xiaoping, Henry Kissinger, history, United States, Yasheng Huang
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Han Han’s early replies were entertaining in their earnestness and snarky vulgarity. He provided a straightforward account of his blog-writing habits to explain how he could post in between race events, and then flipped Mai Tian’s reasoning around to cast aspersions on his sexual prowess. He offered a 20 million yuan purse and the copyrights to his entire oeuvre as a reward anyone giving conclusive proof of having ghostwritten for him. And, perhaps unwisely, he took a few potshots at Fang Zhouzi (方舟子), who up until that point had needled Han Han for a few minor writing mistakes but had otherwise shown no great interest in the argument.

Going up against Fang Zhouzi is a risky thing. A science writer better known for his work exposing academic fraud and intellectual dishonesty, Fang Zhouzi is a tenacious opponent who has an arsenal of online debating tactics at his fingertips. He brings up questions one by one, beginning with minor points that might seem trivial to explain or brush aside, and then when his target takes the bait, he charges in with more evidence showing a pattern of deceit. This technique, which he employed successfully in 2010 to reveal Tang Jun’s worthless diploma as well as in a more recent campaign to completely discredit Luo Yonghao (罗永浩), a popular internet personality who had insulted his wife, is how he went to work on Han Han ….

As in the best flame wars, Han Han PK Fang Zhouzi has been a comedy goldmine. Quick wit, outrageous accusations, dodgy amateur textual analysis, passionate debaters falling prey to the simplest of conversational gambits – if I was a conspiracy theorist I’d wonder whether Sina had engineered the whole thing to keep people refreshing their microblog feeds over the long holiday.

Read more about Han Han and Fang Zhouzi via CDT.

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Post tags: blogging, danwei, Fang Zhouzi, Han Han
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“Tibetan language is the key to our culture, and without it all our traditions will be locked away forever,” said Abo Degecairang, 25, a ruddy-cheeked monk who is among the inaugural class of young men enrolled at the school, the Anymachen Tibetan Culture Center, which opened in September here in southeastern Qinghai Province.

More striking than its improbably isolated setting is the fact that the Chinese government allowed Rinpoche Tserin Lhagyal, 48, the school’s spiritual guide and soft-spoken founder, to set up an autonomous institution dedicated to promoting Tibetan culture and language. Although Tibetan areas of China are flecked with Buddhist monasteries, their mandate is to teach religious devotion through ancient texts and long hours of prayer. Nonreligious schooling is typically controlled by the state, most often anchored in Mandarin, although poverty and geographic isolation deprive many children of any formal education.

It was those young people whom the Rinpoche — a title bestowed on high-ranking teachers in Tibetan Buddhism — has sought out, eager to give them a future that he hopes will help preserve their heritage. Today, 30 shepherd boys, orphans and novice monks are learning the fundamentals of Tibetan culture, as well as Mandarin and English. Some are garbed in burgundy monks’ robes, others in jeans and trucker hats. A few arrived unable to read or write in any language, but the Rinpoche has faith that these challenges can be overcome, just as he succeeded in establishing this center despite the daunting political and financial odds.

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Post tags: education, rural education, Tibetan culture, Tibetan language
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• forced demolition
• elderly not helped when they have fallen
• chengguan brutality
• ditch oil
• Yao Jiaxin
• China-Africa Hope Project
• demolition of schools for children of migrant workers
• boozing, womanizing cadres
• Wenzhou train crash
• collapsed bridge
• “It’s not rape if you wear a condom“
• Guo Meimei
• Sinopec spending on luxury liquor

Click “CC” for English subtitles. (Translated by Harriet Xu)

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Post tags: 2011, chengguan. high-speed rail crash, guo meimei
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Zhou Yunpeng, the blind folk rocker from the northeastern city of Shenyang, serves up tart satire in his songs. Performing at small venues in Beijing, Zhou sings about the darker side of the new China: coal mining accidents, the Karamay Fire, and the drifting lives of the unemployed have all reared their heads in his lyrical music. In his music and poetry, he sighs at what is lost in our modern lives.

Zhou’s editorial, “We Want to Sign in Dialect,” appeared in December 22, 2011 edition of Nanfang Daily. As is common, Zhou uses the term fangyan to refer both to dialects of Mandarin, such as is spoken in Guizhou Province, and non-Mandarin languages, such as Shanghainese. Original text here. (Translated by Harriet Xu)

As all cities are building their own Tian’anmen, and everyone must speak Mandarin, there is no longer a place for theater or a home for folk ballads. Chinese musicians have already made a conscious about-face. Their mouths are no longer full with foreign words, and their eyes are no longer fixed on the Beatles or Pink Floyd. At the end of the 90s, a man from northern Guangdong Province, Yang Yi, rode a 28 bike to northern Shaanxi Province, singing Shaanxi folk music in a Shaanxi accent, as home-grown as it gets. Jiangsu eccentric Zuoxiao Zuzhou simply invented an out-of-tune dialect with an absurd accent. It was like the sound of a seller’s voice in a small southern city alley, buzzing and crashing, an honorable refusal of Mandarin.

Our ancestors left us treasures embedded in these dialects: a unique family inheritance, a bag of tricks, inexhaustible. With the start of the new century, the band from open-skied Gansu Province Wild Children sang “Ballad of the Yellow River” and “If I Had Known Earlier” on the road as they entered Beijing. Following this, respectable underground rock and roll bands that used the Lanzhou dialect began to arise. These performers called out, changing their greetings to “Hǎo zhe ne? Qù nǎ ha? (好着呢? 去哪哈?)”

Does singing rock and roll require the din of northern dialects? The Shanghai band Top Floor Circus sings in authentic Shanghainese, using a sissy accent for big punk music. They declare, “I am Shanghainese, and if I die, I want to die in beautiful Shanghai.” In 2010, they made jabs at the Shanghai World Expo Their shows were banned and they paid 20,000 yuan in fines. Setting a precedent for heavy penalties for underground music in China.

The band Wu Tiao Ren, from Haifeng County in Guangdong, is all about the Haifeng dialect. Their album Memories of the County Town is incredibly beautiful, funny, and violent, as if to remind us, “I am a peaceful ‘southern barbarian,’ but you’d better not mess with me.”

A new folk star from Guizhou, Yao Thirteen, has translated Liu Yong’s “Bells Ringing in the Rain” into the Guizhou Zhijin County dialect. Simply put, it is in no way second to the classic translation. Entranced, you’ll feel like Liu Yong is an old Guizhou buddy who eats sour soup fish.

As I think of my voyage through a thousand miles of mists and waves
Where the evening clouds are somber and the distant skies vast
Lovers has suffered since ancient times the sorrows of parting.
How can I further bear my solitude in this clear autumn season?
Where shall I be when I wake from my drink tonight?
Willow banks, the breeze at dawn, and the waning moon. (trans. Liu Wu-chi)

Middle Chinese:

Niàn qù qù qiānlǐ yānbō, mù’ǎi chénchén chǔ tiān kuò.
Duōqíng zìgǔ shāng líbié
Gèng nǎkān lěngluò qīngqiū jié!
Jīnxiāo jiǔ xǐng héchù? Yāngliǔ àn, xiǎofēngcányuè.

念去去千里烟波，暮霭沉沉楚天阔。
多情自古伤离别，
更哪堪冷落清秋节！
今宵酒醒何处？杨柳岸，晓风残月。

Guizhou Dialect:

Wǒ yào shuō zǒu lei, zhī qiānlǐ lei yānwù bōlàng lei
A hēi bábá de tiān, hǎo dà o…
Lāmen jiǎng, shì zhī yàngzi lei, líbié shì zuì nánzài lei
Gèng qiú búyào jiǎng, xiànzài shì qiūtiān lei
Wǒ yī hā jiǔ xǐnglái, wǒ zài nǎ diǎn
Yángliǔ lei ànbiān, fēng chuī yíge xiǎo yuèliàng lei…

我要说走嘞，之千里嘞烟雾波浪嘞
啊黑拔拔的天，好大哦。。。
拉们讲，是之样子嘞，离别是最难在嘞
更球不要讲，现在是秋天嘞
我一哈酒醒来，我在哪点
杨柳嘞岸边，风吹一个小月亮嘞。。。

Dialects have a definite power and give us deep satisfaction. Mandarin is only suitable for explaining the “animal world” or for reading eulogies. If you were to come back home for the Spring Festival and use proper Mandarin to tactfully state, “Father, Mother, happy Spring Festival,” everyone would laugh at you and think you had just come from the Spring Festival Gala.

I’ve heard that some offices have issued orders restricting the Guangzhou media from using Cantonese on television channels. To me, this is a crime. We are already familiar with how to tear things down. Let us not raze languages to build a grand plaza. Our parents’ generation and our ancestors lived within their dialects. If I just open my mouth, you’ll immediately know where I’m from. True enough, the ground below my feet is no longer is mine. But within the realm of these dialects, my ancestors and I can rest in peace.

© fionasmith for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: dialect, music, Zhou Yunpeng
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It was knocked down by developers over the lunar New Year, despite the fact it is rare for labourers to work during the festival, raising suspicions that the company hoped to avoid publicity.

A Beijing official told state news agency Xinhua the firm wanted to prevent the residence being harmed during last week’s holiday, apparently referring to the fireworks which are let off.

Other Chinese media quoted an unidentified developer as saying that the demolition was “in preparation for maintaining the heritage site” because the buildings were in bad condition.

But heritage protection activist Zeng Yizhi – who alerted city officials to the demolition – said they should have repaired the buildings.

“Liang and Lin made such a great contribution to the protection of Chinese ancient buildings. If their home can be torn down, then developers can do the same thing to hundreds of other ancient houses in the country,” he told China Daily.

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Post tags: architecture, Beijing architecture, demolition, historic preservation, hutongs, liang sicheng
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