Category Archives: China

China moves against bloggers

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From an AP story by Elaine Kurtenbach: “China Orders All Web Sites to Register“:

Authorities have ordered all China-based Web sites and blogs to register or be closed down, in the latest effort by the communist government to police the world of cyberspace.

Commercial publishers and advertisers can face fines of up to 1 million yuan ($120,000) for failing to register, according to documents posted on the Web site of the Ministry of Information Industry.

Private, noncommercial bloggers or Web sites must register the complete identity of the person responsible for the site, it said. The ministry, which has set a June 30 deadline for compliance, said 74 percent of all sites had already registered….

The government has long required all major commercial Web sites to register and take responsibility for Internet content — at least 54 people have been jailed for posting essays or other content deemed subversive online.

But blogs, online diaries, muckraking Web sites and dissident publishing have been harder to police. According to cnblog.org, a Chinese Web log host company, the country has about 700,000 such sites….

The latest restrictions follow many others. Authorities have closed down thousands of Internet cafes — the main entry to the Web for many Chinese unable to afford a computer or Internet access.

They’ve also installed surveillance cameras and begun requiring visitors to Shanghai Internet cafes to register using their official identity cards — all in an effort to keep tabs on who’s seeing and saying what online.

tattoos of Chinese characters / kanji

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Tian of the wonderfully amusing Hanzi Smatter Web site was kind enough to respond to some comments of mine by blurbing my site. I’d like to return the favor.

On a related topic, here’s a section from the Pinyin.info FAQ, which should be going up in June:

I want to get a tattoo with kanji / Chinese characters. What do you recommend?

This is probably not what you want to hear: Don’t get the tattoo. Most tattoos with Chinese characters are seriously flawed.

The chances of you getting something that looks good — and not just to you but also to others, including the hundreds of millions of people who can actually read Chinese characters and know how they’re supposed to look — are quite low. Moreover, tattoos of Chinese characters are seldom written properly or represent a correct, idiomatic translation of the wearer’s desired meaning. On the other hand, the chances of you ending up looking more or less like a fool — at least to those who know Chinese characters — are uncomfortably high. These are important considerations, given that you would need to go through pain and expense to have someone permanently stain your skin with an image that very likely will be done wrong in some important way.

Maybe with some assistance I could get a tattoo done right. Would you help me?

Sorry. I like to help people, but this just isn’t something I’d want to get involved with, especially considering all the things that could go wrong.

I already have a tattoo with Chinese characters. Can you tell me if it’s correct or not?

You might want to try Hanzi Smatter, a site “dedicated to the misuse of Chinese characters (Hanzi or Kanji) in Western culture.”

Google, China, and censorship

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Although I strongly support the adoption of Hanyu Pinyin in Taiwan, many of the other outlooks of this Web site on language, Chinese characters, and romanization are unlikely to fit well with the official line in China. Will this site end up blocked by the Great Firewall? I doubt it. But I think censorship concerns everyone, so I’m adding this here:

Following Google’s announcement that it is to open an office in China, Reporters Without Borders has written to the company’s two founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, asking them for a clear response to the following question : “Will you agree to censor your search engine if asked to by Beijing ?”

rest of the article

Naxi pictographs

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The following is the text of a note I have sent to the U.S. Library of Congress concerning its discussion of its collection of Naxi materials. Much of this beautiful and fascinating collection is available for viewing on line.

The section of your Web site devoted to “Selections from the Naxi Manuscript Collection” makes frequent reference to Naxi as a “pictographic language.” This is a serious error, rooted in a common but mistaken conflation of language and script. No language is pictographic, as even common sense should be sufficient to reveal. (Surely no one believes that Naxi people are unable to speak to one another but must instead draw pictures in order to hold conversations.)

Moreover, the Naxi pictographic texts are not even writing, properly speaking. The following is from The Languages of China, by Robert Ramsey:

In the strictest sense it is wrong to call these pictographs writing, because they do not normally represent the units of a language. They serve, rather, only as mnemonic devices to remind a priest of the details of a story he already knows by heart. … Moreover, many words of the text — especially those representing abstract concepts — are left completely unrepresented by symbols and must be totally supplied from memory. Sometimes a symbol is inserted into a frame only to elucidate the meaning of another symbol and is itself left unread. … The Naxi have never used these pictographs to communicate with each other — they do not exchange letters, write books, or even keep simple accounts and records with them. Anyone can appreciate the graphic beauty of a Naxi text, but only someone well-versed in the mystical lore of Naxi religion can interpret its meaning and translate it into language. It is not enough simply to be able to speak Naxi.

The Naxi have a different but less interesting script that can be used for real writing.

I hope you will correct the text of your beautiful and informative site accordingly.

This tendency to conflate language and script is one of the main problems interfering with many people’s understanding of the nature of Chinese characters.

German paper on Chinese language reform

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Another paper I’ve come across in my Web surfing: Ideen zur Sprachreform in China ab den ersten phonetischen Transkribtionssystemen unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des Schriftstellers Lu Xun (“Thoughts on language reform in China, starting from the first phonetic transcription and with special consideration of the writer Lu Xun”).

I don’t read German, so I can’t vouch for the correctness of the paper. Actually, from what little I can read, it seems that the author has a few all-too-common notions about “dialects”, etc. But the paper might be worthwhile anyway.

script reform in the Qing era

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I recently came across W.K. Cheng’s “Enlightenment and Unity: Language Reformism in Late Qing China,” an interesting article from 2001 that covers much of the same ground as Victor Mair’s “Sound and Meaning in the History of Characters: Views of China’s Earliest Script Reformers,” but from a wider, social perspective.