"When America was leader of the world, we all studied English," Chae said. "Now that China is rising to the top, the interest is swaying toward the Chinese language."


This appeared yesterday on the front page of the Los Angeles Times. I haven't included a link as it is not published in the online edition.

The World; COLUMN ONE; Who Needs English?; As South Korea's economy grows closer to China's, more people are studying Chinese. For some, the choice is a rejection of the U.S.:[HOME EDITION]
Barbara Demick. Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles, Calif.: Mar 29, 2004. pg. A.1
Copyright (c) 2004 Los Angeles Times)

After years of slogging through her English lessons, stumbling over impossible pronunciations and baffling rules of syntax, Chae Chang Eun came up with a better idea.

The 33-year-old science teacher switched to Chinese.

It wasn't that the language was easier. But studying Chinese felt like a homecoming, a return to a culture and way of thinking closer to Chae's roots as a South Korean. Besides, with China on its way to surpassing the United States as South Korea's largest trading partner, she figured its language would be more advantageous in landing a job in the business world.

"When America was leader of the world, we all studied English," Chae said. "Now that China is rising to the top, the interest is swaying toward the Chinese language."

South Korea is known as one of the United States' staunchest allies and is host to 37,000 U.S. troops. But in what might be a sign of things to come, China is the object of infatuation at the moment.

The phenomenon isn't limited to South Korea. Chinese studies are booming throughout Asia. At the largest chain of private language schools in Japan, enrollment in Chinese in 2003 was double that in 2002 -- displacing French as the second most popular language after English.

For most students, the motives are strictly mercenary: They believe that command of Chinese will give them an edge in the job market, and they don't develop much of a corresponding interest in Chinese culture. Some study Chinese -- once scorned by a society intent on Westernizing -- as a conscious gesture of rejection of the United States.

"The interest in Chinese does reflect some antipathy to U.S. hegemony and arrogance," said Suh Jin Young, an international relations professor at Korea University in Seoul.

In the last two years, half a dozen private Chinese schools have opened in downtown Seoul, and posters for new ones are plastered throughout the subway system. In December, prestigious Seoul National University announced that Chinese had replaced English as the most popular major among liberal arts students. The country's largest electronics companies recently started offering free Chinese lessons for their employees in anticipation of expanded operations in China.

Since 2000, the number of South Koreans studying in China has more than doubled. There were 35,000 as of the end of last year, making South Koreans the largest nationality of foreign students in China. Meanwhile, the number taking the entry exam for Chinese universities has increased threefold, according to the Chinese Embassy in Seoul.

At the same time, student visa applications to the United States are down about 10% this year from the year before, a U.S. diplomat said. He attributes it to a combination of tighter security requirements and what he calls "the competing pole from China."

"People are sending their teenagers to China to learn Chinese. They are really crazy about China," said Nam Young Sook, an economist with the Korea Institute for International Economic Policy. "After all the hype about English, now everybody wants to learn Chinese."

In Thailand, so many students are taking Chinese that one university official calls it an epidemic of "China fever."

"They see that the future belongs to China," said Prapat Thepcatree, director of Thammasat University's Center for Policy Studies in Bangkok.

Prapat says it is not unlike the rage for learning Japanese in the 1980s, when Japan's economic might was at its zenith, but he believes that anti-American sentiment is also a factor. As a matter of simple practicality, more Chinese tourists are visiting Thailand while Westerners, fearful of terrorism, are staying home. The tilt toward China comes at a time when American policymakers are increasingly fretting about the U.S. image abroad.

"Net favorable sentiment toward China has since caught up with -- and on a number of occasions even surpassed -- that for the U.S.," warned a report on South Korea released this month by the Rand Corp., a Santa Monica-based think tank. "China's growing economic importance to South Korea and its increasingly important role in influencing North Korean behavior could portend more favorable attitudes toward China, possibly even at the expense of the United States."

Scott Snyder, a senior associate with the Asia Foundation think tank in Washington and until recently head of its Seoul office, said the U.S.-declared war against terrorism has alienated Asian allies not because they necessarily oppose it, but because they believe it is not relevant to their concerns.

"The Chinese are coming and essentially saying, 'Let's get rich together,' and that is a more compelling message for Asian partners," Snyder said.

At the moment, with the U.S. and China basking in relatively warm relations, South Koreans do not have to choose between the two. But they may in the future -- and it is not a given that they would side with the United States.

"We have to ask ourselves, at what point does South Korea's economic relationship with China impinge on the U.S. alliance? Can we imagine, for example, that South Korea would vote for a U.S.- introduced human rights resolution condemning China?" Snyder asked.

For South Koreans, the simple fact of the matter is that China is much closer and much bigger than the U.S.

China has been the dominant foreign power for most of Korea's recorded history, and many aspects of Korean language and culture -- from chopsticks to the Confucian family structure -- are derived from China. Although South Koreans have their own alphabet, they often use Chinese characters for names and in newspapers.

Historians say that the close relationship is natural and that the half-century estrangement during the Cold War was the anomaly. China intervened on behalf of the Communist North in the 1950-53 Korean War, and relations with the South were severed. Ties were reestablished in 1992, and since then, the relationship has blossomed.

Last year China surpassed the United States as South Korea's largest export market. Bilateral trade between China and South Korea was worth $63.2 billion last year and is expected to reach $100 billion within the next year or two, according to the Chinese Embassy in Seoul.

Yang Houlon, deputy chief of mission at the embassy, said that China is the biggest importer of South Korean products, the biggest destination for direct foreign investment and the biggest tourist destination, with about 2 million South Koreans visiting annually.

South Koreans, meanwhile, make up the largest population of foreigners in China, many of them students of the language.

"The Chinese economy is growing, so demand for Chinese speakers is increasing. These are simple market rules," Yang said. "Chinese and Koreans share a lot of values. It is easy for us to communicate."

Virtually all of South Korea's top corporations -- Hyundai Motors, LG, Samsung and SK Corp. among them -- have made significant investments in China in the last few years. Tsingtao, just a commuter flight across the Yellow Sea from Seoul, has become a "little Korea" of sorts, with about 4,000 South Korean companies having set up shop.

Companies that a few years back were attracted by the vast reservoir of cheap labor are now setting up research-and- development facilities to take advantage of Chinese technology and to better understand the Chinese consumer market.

"You can pay $100 or $200 per month for a well-educated scientist," economist Nam said.

"Whatever business you're in -- whether you run a small drugstore or build golf courses, you have got to think about doing business with China," said Kim Jo Han, a 57-year-old textile company manager who said he was studying Chinese because of his company's plant in Tsingtao.

Until recently, South Koreans studying Chinese were primarily scholars, not unlike Westerners who learn Greek or Latin. There was little interest in the modern Chinese language.

"People would ask me, 'Why are you teaching Chinese?' Even if I was sitting on a bus reading a book in Chinese, people would give me funny looks," said Song Jae Bok, a teacher at the Koryo Chinese Language Institute.

Eighty percent of the students at the school in downtown Seoul are women, mostly looking for jobs in trading companies. One reason for the boom in private Chinese institutes is that Chinese is not offered in most public schools. English is still the mandatory foreign language. Virtually all South Koreans taking Chinese lessons have also studied English, although many have had difficulty mastering it.

"Somehow students in the Chinese department are not interested in English. It seems they did not like to learn English and they see Chinese as an alternative," said Seo Kyong Ho, associate dean of humanities at Seoul National University and one of the few academics who is fluent in both Chinese and English.

Chinese popular culture has not made dramatic inroads into South Korea -- there are no signs that it will push aside the influence of Hollywood. But South Korean music, soap operas, film and fashion are increasingly popular in China.

Chae, the science teacher, started Chinese lessons four years ago after reading a book predicting the rise of China. It was something of an epiphany, and through the language she started exploring the Chinese roots of Korean culture that had been forgotten in recent years.

"Whereas the American influence is only 50 years old -- since the U.S. military occupation of 1953 -- Chinese culture goes back 5,000 years. We just didn't realize it," Chae said.

She also came to support China with the belief that it could be an important counterbalance to the United States should the Bush administration consider preemptive strikes against North Korea.

"There are a lot of us who feel that by befriending the Chinese we can prevent the outbreak of war on the peninsula," Chae said.

Not all of the students have as positive an attitude toward China. In fact, a few say they need to learn the Chinese language to protect their country from being swallowed by China's rapid economic growth.

"We don't really trust the Chinese," said Kim Min Joo, one of the few students at the Koryo Institute in their 50s. She complained that some of her young classmates are naive when it comes to China.

"A lot of them have rushed into studying Chinese because it's a fad," she said, "without knowing much about China, its history or its system of government."

*

Jinna Park of The Times' Seoul Bureau contributed to this report.

A photo appeared with the caption: SPEAKING SKILLS: A group of students learns beginning Chinese at a private language school in Seoul. With China on its way to surpassing the U.S. as South Korea's largest trading partner, South Koreans are studying the language to gain an edge in the job market.


Credit: Times Staff Writer

Question:

If you knew a woman who was pregnant, who had 8 kids already, three who were deaf, two who were blind, one mentally retarded, and she had syphilis, would you recommend that she have an abortion? If you said YES, you just killed Beethoven.

Found this on http://politicalhumor.about.com/library/jokes

And this one too:

George W. Bush Anagrams

He grew bogus
Bush ego grew
Where bugs go
Whose bugger?
"W": he bugs Gore
e.g. bug whores?
Ugh! Sewer bog!
Bugger, who's 'e?
Ogre hugs web

This picture, as well as black backgrounds, have been proliferating among blogs originating in China to protest some Chinese blog sites being blocked. China firewalls sites that it considers offensive, and these blogs, which were recently blocked for politically sensitive content, are in pretty good company: The BBC and CBS news websites have been blocked for a long time for Mao-knows-what. I expect this blog blocking, as noted in a squib below, will be temporary, but it's a shame and a canard that its happening now.

Shanghai Eye posted this poem

An ode to modern times
Blogs shall not weary them
Though they shall weary us
The emblem of truth
Is a black and white booth
Like a monitor that has a period every month
On the 31st of March
We will see all the fuss
Has led to a Taiwanese coup
While we were all out on our lunch
Oh to be a fish
A little fish
To swim a long time
Adieu
And slip into the lost and languid
Purple waters
Of the oft talked about
Huangpu river

Walter Greengage (poet) retired Professor of English at FASTAWAYS Englishy [sic] College, Guiyang

The LongBow Papers, my brilliant and prolific husband's blog, has a good background story on this phenomena here, with a lot of links that consolidate the issues as they were breaking. It, like all of the items and commentary he blogs, is a great read. There is ongoing commentary on this situation at Living In China, which aggregates China-relevant blogs and provides editorial comment as well as a vital community enviornment for us Laoweis and the fascinating Chinese netizens who participate. It's a great project, you'll be glad you checked it out.

I'm not putting a black background (the blogosphere's equivalent to a black armband) on Crackpot Chronicles at this time because I've started a redesign which will take a little time, as I'm teaching myself CSS as I go. I'm pretty handy with HTML, but I realize it's time to get with the program. This skin is an out-of-the box Blogger template with very few mods and I liked it until I saw someone else using it. I'd put so much time and care into co-designing, coding and maintaining The LongBow Papers that when Joseph finally managed to get me to start my own blog, I thought I'd better just get it up quickly before I let it slip by again. I'm glad I did, and the ol' Crackpot will have a new face one of these days, just you wait and see.

China Daily March 23

Husband bites off wife's nose after Divorce Request

Upset over his wife seeking a divorce, a savage man in Pingdingshan, Henan province, bit off the woman's nose in court in front of the judge, reports Dahe News. Late last year, Teng Jianhui was taken to court by his wife, who asked for a divorce. To vent his anger, Teng suddenly took out a knife and attempted to stab the woman without success.

His next movement was even more stunning--he caught the woman's nose with his mouth and bit it off and stamped up and down on it. [sic]

The woman was rushed to hospital [sic] immediately, but the man was only arrested on Monday.

This from an article in Beijing Review, March 25th, about New Zealand Professor Michael Donnelly, now teaching in Beijing Normal University in Beijing. This anecdote is from 1996, "when he was in Ya'an City, Sichuan province...a relatively small place, where, at that time, he was not just 'a' foreigner, but the 'only' foreigner.

Once he received a gift from the university where he was teaching at the time--a very old fashioned bicycle that he was determined to lose somehow after accepting it politely. Every time he went downtown he would leave it in some obvious place without a lock, hoping that someone would steel [sic] it. but nobody ever did. One morning he dumped it and walked home. In the afternoon, someone returned it, saying, "This is the foreigner's bike."

Virgin Atlantic clubhouse urinals are the shape of a woman's open mouth

Virgin Atlantic has opened a new clubhouse at JFK airport in New York that features a urinal in the shape of a woman's open mouth.

The clubhouse, which can be used by 150 upper-class passengers at any one time, has been opened at the airport's recently constructed Terminal 4.

The urinals were designed by Bathroom Mania - a cutting edge design company.

The Clubhouse cost more than £2m to build and is equipped with the very latest wireless technology. Booths offering i-Mac computers are positioned in the Business Area and are individually screened for ultimate privacy.

There is also a waterfall flowing into a 90ft-long pool, a bar, playstations and a 42" plasma television screen.

Pictures at Ananova

This from Ananova:

Ozzy gets his martian orders

Ozzy Osbourne has been named the nation's favourite ambassador to welcome aliens to planet Earth.

The bat-eating rocker pipped Tony Blair and TV presenters Ant and Dec as the face people want to represent them to alien life.

Read the rest, if you dare. Fair warning: there's a picture of Ozzy on the page.

The Republican National Committee announced today that
the Republican Party is changing its emblem from an elephant to a
condom. Governor Marc Racicot, RNC chairman, explained that the
condom more clearly reflects the party's stance today because a condom
accepts inflation, halts production, destroys the next generation,
protects a bunch of pricks, and gives you a sense of security while
you're getting screwed.

Sent to me by my friend Keith Shiraki in Los Angeles.

Quote of the day:

One wonders how long this dike holding back free flow of information in China will last..it's unfortunate that the government has a whole lot of thumbs.

This from a foreigner-in-China blog (one of many) reacting to several Chinese free blogging sites having been shut down recently. You can read the entire post at zero dispance, which has some links to follow for background. I expect this story to get a lot of bandwidth in days to come.

A deeper and wider-ranging commentary, Bad News Rising, with an entire nexus of background links is on The LongBow Papers.

Guangdong opens sex culture museum



Hot off the press:

BEIJING, March 13 (Xinhuanet) -- A museum of traditional Chinese sex culture opened to the public earlier this week in Danxiashan geopark in Shaoguan, Guangdong.

The museum, costing 15 million yuan (US$1.8 million), was built by a Dongguan school on an area of 2,400 square meters. It has six exhibition halls showing sex culture in 12 subjects, including sex and worship, sex and the arts and sex connotations in Chinese characters.

Officials said the museum was a combination of nature and culture, featuring documents and materials dealing with natural human desires, including the history and behavior of sex.

Danxiashan is famous for steep cliffs and rocks with bizarre shapes. Many of the rocks resemble human sex organs, but are much larger, and the Danxiashan tourism zone is often called the “garden of natural nudity.”

Image from El Pais

This little ditty has been circulating on the net. Sung to the tune of "The Beverly Hillbillies," it captures the sentiment and satirical angst of the "beat Bush" league energized by the Democratic campaign. Sing away.....

Come and listen to my story 'bout a boy named Bush.
His IQ was zero, and his head was up his tush.
He drank like a fish while he was drivin' all about.
But that didn't matter 'cuz his daddy bailed him out.

DUI, that is. Criminal record. Cover-up.

Well, the first thing you know, little Georgie goes to Yale.
He can't spell his name but they never let him fail.
He spends all his time hangin' out with student folk.
And that's when he learns how to snort a line of coke.

Blow, that is. White gold. Nose candy.

The next thing you know there's a war in Vietnam.
Kin folks say, "George, stay at home with Mom."
Let the common people get maimed and scarred.
We'll buy you a spot in the Texas Air Guard.

Cushy, that is. Country clubs. Nose candy.

Twenty years later George gets a little bored.
He trades in the booze, says that Jesus is his Lord.
He said, "Now the White House is the place I wanna be."
So he called his daddy's friends and they called the GOP.

Gun owners, that is. Falwell. Jesse Helms.

Come November 7, the election ran late.
Kin folks said "Jeb, give the boy your state!
"Don't let those colored folks get into the polls."
So they put up barricades so they couldn't punch their holes.

Chads, that is. Duval County. Miami-Dade.

Before the votes were counted, five Supremes stepped in.
Told all the voters "Hey, we want George to win."
"Stop counting votes!" was their solemn invocation.
And that's how George finally got his coronation.

Rigged, that is. Illegitimate. No moral authority.

Y'all go vote now. Ya hear?

Submitted in the spirit of regime change in America, that good old upstart Yankee gusto and crackpot fun.

Single Chinese Panda on Prowl for Mate
Wed Mar 3,11:20 PM ET

BEIJING - Wanted: single, full-figured black-and-white female for committed relationship. Must be willing to tolerate her man's heavy eating and deep sleeping. Call the Shanghai Wild Animal Park.

Guo Qing, the park's only fertile giant panda, is on the prowl for a mate.

Park officials announced Wednesday that 5-year-old Guo Qing, one of three giant pandas living at the zoo, is "looking for a lifelong partner," according to the official Xinhua News Agency. It said he is in his "reproductive prime."

The other two pandas, Chuan Chuan and Jia Si, are more than 20 years old and probably past any chance of reproducing, Xinhua said.

The 265-pound Guo Qing was born in China's famed Wolong Giant Panda Protection and Research Center in 1999. He moved to Shanghai when he was 2.

"He eats a lot, sleeps well and is so energetic that he often climbs to the top of a tree about 15 feet tall," said Sun Qiang, who has cared for Guo Qing since he moved to Shanghai. "We will take good care of the couple and try our best to make the female feel at home here."

The giant panda is one of the most endangered species in the world. Only about 1,000 are estimated to live in the wild, all in China. More than 140 live in captivity around the world.

A teenager jumped out of a second floor window during a science lesson at a Miami school after making a bet with his teacher. Police say the 17-year-old pupil at Miami Beach High bet $20 that he could make the leap, in the middle of a class on evolution, without injuring himself.

The Miami Herald reports the teenager won the wager after landing on a patch of dirt. His teacher Yrvan Tassy Jr has been moved to a non-teaching job while police and school officials carry out an investigation into the incident.

It's thought the pupil had been trying to prove a point about evolution when he decided to jump out of the window. A police report said he landed on his feet and returned to the classroom. School principal Jeanne Friedman told the Miami Herald: "We know for a fact that the student jumped out of the window. Now we're gathering information and substantiating the rest of the story. I'm just thankful the student wasn't hurt."

Miami-Dade schools police spokesman, Carlos Fernandez, added: "The teacher is being investigated by our detectives and there is also a personnel investigation. It doesn't look like this is something where there would be criminal charges. It looks like it will be administrative.''

Hmm...I wonder if any other teacher in China is thinking the same thing I am...

Until I clicked through. Danwei.Org, a frequently updated website about media and advertising in the People's Republic of China had an item on Usama Bin Laden Cologne advertised in the Pakistan's Daily Times. I thought oh great, more crackpot sense of humor. But when I clicked through, there the fark it was! You tell me if you think it's legit or not.

Try it, you'll like it. Will wonders never cease. I'd put it up here, but you should really pay Danwei a visit, there's lots of amusing and interesting stuff on there, like the best and worst Chinese front page of the day.

This article in the New York Times is an interesting and balanced analysis of China's economic growth vis a vis trade with the USA. Sorting out the big picture of China's economic ascension can be puzzling whether you are on either shore or bystanding on another continent. It's the horserace of the century and attracting substantial bets.

A cliche like "China is like Japan in the 80's" makes good lead copy, but fortunately the author, an award winning second generation journalist, drops the cliche-mongering right there and goes on to point out the more revealing differences between Japan in the 80's and China in the 21st century. And what I like even more about this article is that it does the inevitable wage quoting of how a factory worker earns $60 to $75 a month but goes on to explain that while this is a pittance by American standards it is a substantial take where these girls come from, a 30 hour bus ride away in rural China, where hundreds of million live on less than $1 a day.

March 2, 2004
Like Japan in the 1980's, China Poses Big Economic Challenge
By KEITH BRADSHER

GUANGZHOU, China
When Japan, at the zenith of its economic power, built a huge airport in Osaka in the late 1980's, the project set off a seven-year trade battle with the United States over the nearly complete exclusion of non-Japanese companies.

China, Japan's heir as Asia's rising star, is now completing its own immense airport here in Guangzhou, the sprawling commercial center of affluent southeastern China. But the Chinese are going about it differently.

American companies designed the terminal, its air-conditioning system and the flight information system. A German company engineered the vaulting roof, a Danish company produced the boarding gates and a Dutch company, the check-in counters. Chinese women in broad-brimmed straw hats wield shovels and brooms across from a modern air-traffic-control tower designed by a company from Singapore.

The welcome that China is offering to multinational companies and foreign investment has left many Western business executives, so critical of a closed Japan more than a decade ago, enthusiastically embracing China, its cheap work force and its huge markets.

But that same openness --combined with China's vast population of 1.3 billion and military muscle-- makes it an even greater long-term economic challenge to the United States than Japan seemed to be in the 1980's, according to a growing number of executives, economists and officials.

While China's economy is still one-third the size of Japan's, the potential size of its market has made it very hard for companies to say no when Beijing officials demand that they build factories, transfer the latest technology or adopt Chinese technical standards.

Japan has effectively run out of low-wage workers for its industries, and quickly brought much of its economy up to and in some cases beyond Western technological standards. China still has vast reserves of cheap labor in inland areas and many backward industries that can grow swiftly as they copy Western and Japanese methods.

"China could do what Japan did, as a very fast follower, but China could do it bigger and better and for a longer period of time," said Steven Weber, an Asia scholar at the University of California at Berkeley. "It's not necessarily as vulnerable as Japan was."

But while Japan's danger to other economies over the last decade has taken the numbing forms of economic stagnation and political lassitude, China poses the risk of fast, sharp shocks.

I heartily recommend you read the rest. To tempt you further, here's his intriguing conclusion.

For a parable about economies that seem as if they could prosper indefinitely, Chinese officials need look no farther than to Osaka and its huge airport. The artificial island on which it was built a few years ago is slowly sinking in the Pacific.

Of course, this trope begs the rejoinder, "Yes, but China is no island."

And it's priceless.

BEIJING, March 1 (Xinhuanet)
　
The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2003
By the Information Office of the State Council of the People's Republic of China
March 1, 2004

On February 25, 2004, the State Department of the United Statesreleased its Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2003 (called the "reports" thereafter). As in previous years, the UnitedStates once again acted as "the world human rights police" by distorting and censuring in the "reports" the human rights situations in more than 190 countries and regions across the world,including China. And just as usual, the United States once again "omitted" its own long-standing malpractice and problems of human rights in the "reports". Therefore, we have to, as before, help the United States keep its human rights record.

Read the full text of it on Xinhuanet

Thanks, China, for your help.

BEIJING, March 1 (Xinhuanet) --

The number of centenarians in China has climbed past 17,000, hitting a record high, according to the latest statistics from the China National Committee on Aging.

By the end of 2003, Beijing alone boasted 257 centenarians, with three of them over 110 years old, a rise of 57 over 2001.

Female centenarians account for approximately 80 percent of thetotal, including three aged over 110 years old, and 209 centenarians, or 84.6 percent of the total, are urbanites, according to statistics of the Beijing Municipal Committee on Aging.

Read more at Xinhuanet