TVTropes Now available in the app store!
Open

Follow TV Tropes

Following

Official China Discussion Thread

Go To

Ominae Since: Jul, 2010
#5301: May 18th 2024 at 10:18:44 PM

https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2024/05/7e5d6779b719-okinawa-governor-decries-us-ambassador-visit-to-isles-near-taiwan.html

Gov. Tamaki (Okinawa) is objecting to Ambassador Emanuel visiting Yonaguni since he’s worried that Beijing will be pissed off.

eagleoftheninth Shop all day, greed is free from a dreamed portrait, imperfect Since: May, 2013 Relationship Status: With my statistically significant other
Shop all day, greed is free
#5302: May 23rd 2024 at 10:51:17 PM

PV Magazine: China switches on first large-scale sodium-ion battery. The 10 MWh facility is located in Nanning, Guangxi, and is the first part of a planned 100 MWh-capacity project.

One day, we will read his name in the news and cheer.
Alycus Since: Apr, 2018
#5303: May 23rd 2024 at 11:40:30 PM

Not news, but my dad is currently on a tour in Xinjiang, mainly visiting cities and towns along the historical Silk Road such as Kashgar. The sights, scenery and history from the photos are indeed pretty nice, but it definitely felt a bit odd seeing so many non-Chinese place names on large Chinese signage. As to what attitudes are like towards the local non-Han people, I'm not sure how to ask about that.

Edited by Alycus on May 23rd 2024 at 11:41:08 AM

Ominae Since: Jul, 2010
#5304: May 24th 2024 at 1:02:42 AM

A Chinese "volunteer" in eastern Ukraine vlogs about how "shitty" the battlefield conditions are when he fought against the Ukrainian Army.

Guy showed his military ID as proof that he's ex-PLA.

Ominae Since: Jul, 2010
#5305: May 27th 2024 at 6:11:47 AM

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/25/shadian-last-major-islamic-style-mosque-in-china-loses-its-domes

The Grand Mosque of Shadian in Yunnan Province has been given a "permanent makeover", replacing the Arabic-style domes with Chinese structures.

This is based on a plan that calls for mosques in China for "Islamic architecture … that is full of Chinese characteristics" and resist "foreign architectural styles".

Xopher001 Since: Jul, 2012
#5306: May 27th 2024 at 8:05:31 AM

Colonization? What colonization? This is just <insert central Asian or non han culture > with Chinese characteristics!

AngelusNox Warder of the damned from The guard of the gates of oblivion Since: Dec, 2014 Relationship Status: Married to the job
Warder of the damned
#5307: May 27th 2024 at 9:21:59 AM

Colonization with Chinese characteristics!

Edited by AngelusNox on May 27th 2024 at 2:40:10 PM

Inter arma enim silent leges
Smeagol17 (4 Score & 7 Years Ago)
#5308: May 27th 2024 at 9:35:02 AM

Same old, same old. But usually the religion inside the buildings is changed before architecture.

DrunkenNordmann from Exile Since: May, 2015
#5309: May 27th 2024 at 9:56:23 AM

Pretty sure the CCP is also doing that. They want to "sinicise" any religions present within their borders because they can't abide by anything that isn't completely subordinate to their regime.

It's also why they do stuff like banning "unapproved" reincarnations.

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on May 27th 2024 at 6:58:31 PM

We learn from history that we do not learn from history
raziel365 Anka Aquila from South of the Far West (Veteran) Relationship Status: I've been dreaming of True Love's Kiss
Anka Aquila
#5310: May 27th 2024 at 10:00:47 AM

Next you know the party is going to tell muslims to pray looking at Beijing instead of Mecca.

I wish I could say this in mere jest.

Instead of focusing on relatives that divide us, we should find the absolutes that tie us.
xyzt Since: Apr, 2017 Relationship Status: Yes, I'm alone, but I'm alone and free
#5311: May 27th 2024 at 10:08:29 AM

[up][up]Aren't there already hanified muslims in the Hui muslims who among the various muslim groups are treated better than others? That the Uighurs and Hui Muslims also hate each other (from what I heard) and have had multiple riots between each other is also telling.

Edited by xyzt on May 27th 2024 at 10:39:06 PM

DrunkenNordmann from Exile Since: May, 2015
#5312: May 27th 2024 at 10:21:47 AM

[up]

Hui muslims have literally been protesting against the regime's attempts to demolish mosques

The Hui are better off compared to non-Chinese Muslims (meaning they're not actively being subjected to a genocide), but that doesn't mean the regime is treating them well.

Because ultimately, everything has to be subordinate to the regime and therefore organised religion in particular has to be either stamped out or taken over entirely.

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on May 27th 2024 at 7:22:43 PM

We learn from history that we do not learn from history
M84 Oh, bother. from Our little blue planet Since: Jun, 2010 Relationship Status: Chocolate!
Oh, bother.
#5313: May 27th 2024 at 7:01:29 PM

Yes, “better” does not mean “good”. Especially when you are talking about the CCP’s treatment of people.

Disgusted, but not surprised
SgtRicko Since: Jul, 2009
#5315: Jun 4th 2024 at 12:14:11 PM

As China’s Internet Disappears, ‘We Lose Parts of Our Collective Memory’

The number of Chinese websites is shrinking and posts are being removed and censored, stoking fears about what happens when history is erased.

By Li Yuan June 4, 2024, 12:00 a.m. ET

Chinese people know their country’s internet is different. There is no Google, You Tube, Facebook or Twitter. They use euphemisms online to communicate the things they are not supposed to mention. When their posts and accounts are censored, they accept it with resignation.

They live in a parallel online universe. They know it and even joke about it.

Now they are discovering that, beneath a facade bustling with short videos, livestreaming and e-commerce, their internet — and collective online memory — is disappearing in chunks.

A post on We Chat on May 22 that was widely shared reported that nearly all information posted on Chinese news portals, blogs, forums, social media sites between 1995 and 2005 was no longer available.

“The Chinese internet is collapsing at an accelerating pace,” the headline said. Predictably, the post itself was soon censored.

“We used to believe that the internet had a memory,” He Jiayan, a blogger who writes about successful businesspeople, wrote in the post. “But we didn’t realize that this memory is like that of a goldfish.”

It’s impossible to determine exactly how much and what content has disappeared. But I did a test. I used China’s top search engine, Baidu, to look up some of the examples cited in Mr. He’s post, focusing on about the same time frame between the mid-1990s and mid-2000s.

I started with Alibaba’s Jack Ma and Tencent’s Pony Ma, two of China’s most successful internet entrepreneurs, both of whom Mr. He had searched for. I also searched for Liu Chuanzhi, known as the godfather of Chinese entrepreneurs: He made headlines when his company, Lenovo, acquired IBM’s personal computer business in 2005.

I looked, too, for results for China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, who during the period was the governor of two big provinces. Search results of senior Chinese leaders are always closely controlled. I wanted to see what people could find if they were curious about what Mr. Xi was like before he became a national leader.

I got no results when I searched for Ma Yun, which is Jack Ma’s name in Chinese. I found three entries for Ma Huateng, which is Pony Ma’s name. A search for Liu Chuanzhi turned up seven entries.

There were zero results for Mr. Xi.

Then I searched for one of the most consequential tragedies in China in the past few decades: the Great Sichuan earthquake on May 12, 2008, which killed over 69,000 people. It happened during a brief period when Chinese journalists had more freedom than the Communist Party would usually allow, and they produced a lot of high-quality journalism.

When I narrowed the time frame to May 12, 2008, to May 12, 2009, Baidu came up with nine pages of search results, most of which consisted of articles on the websites of the central government or the state broadcaster Central Central Television. One caveat: If you know the names of the journalists and their organizations, you can find more.

Each results page had about 10 headlines. My search found what had to have been a small fraction of the coverage at that time, much of which was published on the sites of newspapers and magazines that sent journalists to the epicenter of the earthquake. I didn’t find any of the outstanding news coverage or outpouring of online grief that I remembered.

In addition to disappearing content, there’s a broader problem: China’s internet is shrinking. There were 3.9 million websites in China in 2023, down more than a third from 5.3 million in 2017, according to the country’s internet regulator.

China has one billion internet users, or nearly one-fifth of the world’s online population. Yet the number of websites using Chinese language make up only 1.3 percent of the global total, down from 4.3 percent in 2013 — a 70 percent plunge over a decade, according to Web Technology Surveys, which tracks online use of top content languages.

The number of Chinese language websites is now only slightly higher than those in Indonesian and Vietnamese, and smaller than those in Polish and Persian. It’s half the number of Italian language sites and just over a quarter of those in Japanese.

One reason for the decline is that it is technically difficult and costly for websites to archive older content, and not just in China. But in China, the other reason is political.

Internet publishers, especially news portals and social media platforms, have faced heightened pressure to censor as the country has made an authoritarian and nationalistic turn under Mr. Xi’s leadership. Keeping China’s cyberspace politically and culturally pure is a top order of the Communist Party. Internet companies have more incentive to over-censor and let older content disappear by not archiving.

Many people have had their online existences erased.

Two weeks ago, Nanfu Wang found that an entry about her on a Wikipedia-like site was gone. Ms. Wang, a documentary filmmaker, searched her name on the film review site Douban and came up with nothing. Same with We Chat.

“Some of the films I directed had been deleted and banned on the Chinese internet,” she said. “But this time, I feel that I, as a part of history, have been erased.” She doesn’t know what triggered it.

Zhang Ping, better known by his pen name, Chang Ping, was one of China’s most famous journalists in the 2000s. His articles were everywhere. Then in 2011, his writing provoked the wrath of the censors.

“My presence in public discourse has been stifled much more severely than I anticipated, and that represents a significant loss of my personal life,” he told me. “My life has been negated.”

When my Weibo account was deleted in March 2021, I was saddened and angered. It had more than three million followers and thousands of posts recording my life and thoughts over a decade. Many of the posts were about current affairs, history or politics, but some were personal musings. I felt a part of my life had been carved away.

Many people intentionally hide their online posts because they could be used against them by the party or its proxies. In a trend called “grave digging,” nationalistic “little pinks” pour over past online writings of intellectuals, entertainers and influencers.

For Chinese, our online memories, even frivolous ones, can become baggage we need to unload.

“Even though we tend to think of the internet as somewhat superficial,” said Ian Johnson, a longtime China correspondent and author, “without many of these sites and things, we lose parts of our collective memory.”

In “Sparks,” a book by Mr. Johnson about brave historians in China who work underground, he cited the Internet Archive for Chinese online sources in the endnotes because, he said, he knew they would all eventually disappear.

“History matters in every country, but it really matters to the C.C.P.,” he said, referring to the Chinese Communist Party. “It’s history that justifies the party’s continued rule.”

Mr. Johnson founded the China Unofficial Archives website, which seeks to preserve blogs, movies and documents outside the Chinese internet.

There are other projects to save Chinese memories and history from falling into a void. Greatfire.org has several websites that provide access to censored content. China Digital Times, a nonprofit that fights censorship, archives work that has been or is in danger of being blocked. Mr. Zhang, the journalist, is its executive editor.

Mr. He, author of the We Chat post that went viral, is deeply pessimistic that China’s erasure of history can be reversed.

“If you can still see some early information on the Chinese internet now,” he wrote, “it is just the last ray of the setting sun.”

What shocked me the most was how anything before 2005 no longer exists, and even trying to find more recent sites from 2010 is challenging. I know some folks may counter-point how the same issue is beginning to affect older websites in the western world, but that's more due to neglect or the original creators passing away, not the government deliberately erasing or obscuring data.

Nehz (Y2: Electric Boogaloo)
#5316: Jun 4th 2024 at 12:28:17 PM

As a Chinese who missed the German internet the last time he spent time in China this feels pretty horrifying.

AngelusNox Warder of the damned from The guard of the gates of oblivion Since: Dec, 2014 Relationship Status: Married to the job
Warder of the damned
#5317: Jun 4th 2024 at 12:39:48 PM

The CCP trying to control it's people by controlling information is really scary.

Not just the current narrative, but erasing the past and only allowing what is interesting to the Party by making impossible to find what happened before Xi took power, is horrifying.

Inter arma enim silent leges
LoneCourier0 The Wandering Geek from A Diverse Land (Unitroper) Relationship Status: How YOU doin'?
The Wandering Geek
#5318: Jun 4th 2024 at 12:52:42 PM

"Those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future."

"Cynicism is not realistic and tough. It's unrealistic and kind of cowardly because it means you don't have to try."
Kaiseror Since: Jul, 2016
#5319: Jun 4th 2024 at 1:01:40 PM

[up][up] Isn't that why stories with time travel are banned in China?

Nehz (Y2: Electric Boogaloo)
#5320: Jun 4th 2024 at 2:30:38 PM

I wasn't aware that there was a ban like that in China though I can't say that I'm an expert regarding China's bans.

MorningStar1337 The Encounter that ended the Dogma from 🤔 Since: Nov, 2012
The Encounter that ended the Dogma
#5321: Jun 4th 2024 at 3:13:48 PM

they also banned skeletons.

Banned in China obviously has several more examples.

Kayeka (4 Score & 7 Years Ago)
#5322: Jun 4th 2024 at 3:18:01 PM

[up]How do Chinese people move if skeletons are banned?

jawal Since: Sep, 2018
#5323: Jun 4th 2024 at 3:18:32 PM

[up][up][up]

It is not a law, but a directive made by the  China’s Bureau of Broadcasting, in 2011-2012  restricting the number of TV series that deal with a modern person getting Isekayed into Ancient China, becoming involved in historical wars, and maybe acquiring a harem in the process.

The Bureau seemed to think that those stories: 1) Don't treat Ancient national history with the seriousness it deserves; and 2) encourage young people to live in fantasy when they will dream of changing an imaginary past instead of engaging with the present.

I think the directive have gotten somewhat more relaxed in the following years, but anyway, the Bureau can still reject a TV series for this or for a number of other reasons.

Here is an old article (2011) about this.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2011/04/10/chinese-censors-halt-production-of-time-travel-dramas/?sh=4cae51755e11

Edited by jawal on Jun 4th 2024 at 11:19:16 AM

Every Hero has his own way of eating yogurt
Ominae Since: Jul, 2010
#5324: Jun 4th 2024 at 7:15:07 PM

Arrests were made in HK. A 68-year old is charged for NSL violations for using slogans to incite hatred against Beijing.

AngelusNox Warder of the damned from The guard of the gates of oblivion Since: Dec, 2014 Relationship Status: Married to the job
Warder of the damned
#5325: Jun 4th 2024 at 7:34:29 PM

And with the Tiananmen Massacre anniversary, pretty much most social medias are ripe with CCP propaganda accounts spamming how "it didn't happen" or "it happened and they deserved it".

Inter arma enim silent leges

Total posts: 5,510
Top