Humor Me (Shanghai Subway Edition)
The Shanghai subway accident has reignited concerns over China’s transportation infrastructure, in particular the involvement of a company called Casco, which supplied the signalling systems for a number of subway systems in China.
I wrote before about Internet memes following the Wenzhou train collision. It’s no surprise that this incident has spawned another wave of Internet jokes.
This duilian (traditional Chinese couplet) which involves a bit of Chinglish, has been retweeted over 27,000 times:
Top: “Subway, railway, highway, way way to die.”
Bottom: “Officer, announcer, investigater [sic], word word to lie.”
A commenter suggested that the top scroll for this couplet should be: “Welcome to China.”
Proof: Chinese Have Least Fei Hua
Finally, a scientific validation of what we already knew intuitively!
Brad Plumer over at Ezra Klein’s blog has a link to a Time article where researchers coded languages to see which ones were more information-dense—meaning they contained more meaning per syllable. English is fairly dense, with a score of .91.
Mandarin Chinese was the densest language studied, with a score of .94.
The Psychology of the London Riots
I’ve been reading a lot about the British riots, including a post by fellow contributor Monica Tan, and I feel like most of the discussion is missing the point.
The funny thing about crowd psychology that most people miss is the concept of diffusion of responsibility. Basically, it means that the more people there are, the less responsibility each of them feels for what is going on. It’s a simple but powerful theory that helps to explain behavior that might otherwise signify the end of morality—most notably the murder of Kitty Genovese. Thus, individually, each rioter feels little responsibility for the actions of their neighbors or for their own actions. After all, if you are just one of a dozen people taking things from a shop, and you weren’t the first to take it, then it’s not really your fault. Besides, if you don’t take it, someone else will.
Material Worlds
In reading Zoe Williams’ excellent Guardian piece on the psychology of looting, in which she analyzes the significance of London rioters doing away with consumer retail products, I was reminded of a vaguely analogous story in China, of a 17-year-old boy who sold his kidney to buy an iPad 2. Both stories seem to illustrate the extremities to which consumerism has driven us.
Humor Me
Niels Bohr once said, “Some subjects are so serious that one can only joke about them.” Certainly, humor is one way in which the Chinese public have chosen to deal with the Wenzhou train collision. I recently wrote an article for ChinaGeeks about the dual catchphrases uttered by ministry of railways spokesman Wang Yongping at a press conference after the Wenzhou train collision. His two phrases—”This is a miracle,” and, “Whether or not you believe it; either way, I believe it.”—have been co-opted by the Chinese public and raised to the apotheosis of humor: the Internet meme. But these Internet memes do more than poke fun at the governement—they prolong the public memory of the incident and undermine the government’s credibility.
The State of American and Chinese New Media
There is a battle raging in Hollywood, and it’s getting ugly. The explosive growth of the Netflix customer base, which now has more than 24 million subscribers (more than any individual cable channel), has seen the Los Gatos, CA based company morph, in last ten years, from an under-the-radar DVD rental service into the distributor of movies online.
Working from Home
When Ai Weiwei walked out of a Beijing prison last month after 81 days of imprisonment, there was one question on everyone’s mind: had the most consistently vocal dissident in China finally been silenced? On the night of his release, the artist could only manage a terse response when reached on the phone: ”I’m released, I’m home, I’m fine…. In legal terms, I’m—how do you say?—on bail. So I cannot give any interviews. But I’m fine.”
But two days ago, news outlets reported that Ai has accepted a guest professorship at the Berlin University of the Arts. Ai also broke media silence when he described some details of his semi-house arrest.
A Chinese in Paris
An estimated 116 million Chinese people watched Li Na’s historic win at the French Open. They knew that history was being made, but what exactly did it mean? Could it simply be the culmination of an athlete’s path to glory? A vindication of hard work and perseverance? Nope, not when you come from a country of 1.3 billion.
Tension on the High Seas
This past weekend Vietnamese students from Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City held demonstrations criticizing China for recent incursions on what they believe to be sovereign Vietnamese territory. The islands in the South China Sea (including the Spratly and Paracel Islands) have long been under territorial contention between Vietnam, China, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Taiwan. On May 26th Hanoi authorities accused a Chinese patrol of a cutting the cables on a Vietnamese ship conducting seismic research in the area.
Google and China
Previously on “Google and China.” When we left off, Google had accused the Chinese government of tampering with Gmail and causing connectivity issues. The Chinese government had responded by investigating the company for tax fraud. Though there’s been no follow-up report about the investgation, Gmail is still experiencing problems in the mainland.
This week’s episode: Hacking, again. Not the hacking of human rights advocates which precipitated Google pulling out of the mainland, that was last year.
This time, Google says the hackers targeted senior U.S. government officials, and Chinese activists and journalists.
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