I go back to this because I am surprised there hasn’t been much said about the internet chats that for the first time have been organized with legislators participating in the NPC-CPCC Annual Sessions. Where has all this gone?  Not even the Chinese language internet seems to be very interested, judging by the search 网络民主.  It is obvious that without a strong push of the propaganda machinery the “internet friends” don’tpay much attention to these initiatives.

And why didn’t the State Media push it this time? Perhaps they are bored of it already, or perhaps  not everyone was very hot for the idea of “online democracy”. For example,  NPC chairman Wu Bangguo, one of the strong men in the politburo standing committee, who made these encouraging statements yesterday.

In the end, it is not so much about democracy (that’s too big a word for the NPC), but more about trying to give it some sort of role in participatory politics that would allow the legislators to take into account at least some requests of the public. The problem is, this year again, the NPC has given an image of being just a big annoying “Carnival”,  where the guest’s only role was to clap at the words of Mr. Wu.

Did I say the only role? No wait, the deputies  also have the duty of making proposals, and some of them must be pretty talented, judging by their phrases “amazing like thunder”.

ULN takes you for a browse

But follow me for a minute as I browse the Chinese internets, see what interesting things we can find on this subject. A good place to start is izaobao, with their daily roundup of bloggy stories:

以前我很关心两会，因为那时候很傻很天真，认为这两场嘉年华真能改变些国家民族的命运。现在我还是很关心两会，因为总有些的雷人语录，给无趣的生活带来了很多有趣. 这些雷人语录（简称雷语，三表老师原创）自然轻易就占据了媒体网络的头条，因此也带来了另一个问题，大家把太多目光聚集在雷语上，可能就忽视了春风——那些真正有价值有专业水平的提案。我相信我们的代表委员绝不会全都是倪萍奶奶那样的智商水平，其中应该不乏精彩的提案，可是为虾米不公开给大家看呢？以现在的技术手段，应该不是什么难事吧。

I used to pay attention to the NPC-CPCC, because I was stupid and innocent, I used to think these 2 “carnivals” were really going to change the destiny of the Chinese people. Nowadays I still pay attention to them, because there are always “thundering statements”（雷人语录), which bring interest to an otherwise boring life  (… ) this also brings another problem: everyone is paying too much attention to the “thundering  statements” and possibly missing some of the “spring breeze” – that is, those proposals that might have some value and professionalism. I am sure in our NPC-CPCC not all have the IQ of NiPing, there must be some with excellent proposals. But why don’t they do it in public, with the technological means we have today?

And that’s what I ask myself, why not in public? Let’s try to follow some links and find out:

First, this cue of deputy NiPing, it  is not linked here but we will easily google it. There you are, it is a funny story: the typical embarrasing situation where an older lady that could be anybody’s mum tries to use buzz words of the online community, like shanzhai (山寨). The uncoolness she radiated could be sensed all the way from Guangzhou, were finally this blogger saved the World by proving that she had no idea of what she was talking about, even though nobody really knows what this rapidly morphing word means.

Forget NiPing. Let’s follow the links on the Izabao article. One of them goes to our familiar “3 watches” blogger, who attempts to coin or re-coin the term  雷人语录 (thundering statements) into the shorter and perhaps cooler  雷语 (er.. thundering statements). Wondering if the Chinese internet slang really needs any more innovations, we leave this blog  and continue our quest for some Thunder material, wishing “3 watches” luck with the promotion of his new word.

OK, don’t get impatient. We are almost there.  Let’s check on the link to  Sina, which brings us some pretty thundering stuff straight from a newspaper in Chongqing,  the “Chongqing South Journal”

据中新社电 全国“两会”期间，人大代表和政协委员踊跃建言，“炮声”隆隆。不过在“炮声”之外，也有不少代表、委员发表的一些“异类”观点，被网友用时下很流行的一个词“雷人”来形容。

According to China News, the NPC-CPCC is on, and the deputees are enthusiastically advising, with a rumble like a cannon. But apart from the “cannon” activity, there are also some atypical points of view, that the internet friends describe with the buzz word “thundering“

What are these thundering points of view? Something we need to look into more carefully. The article gives 3 interesting examples that we will skim-translate, so that you can get the gist of it:

Thunder N.1 : “For 5 Million, I’d  sure admit you 20 points down”

“谁要是给我五百万，我绝对降他二十分录取”

全国政协委员、北京第四中学校长刘长铭谈起择校问题时说，“择校是个正常现象。有些人的孩子分数差几分，希望用别的方式补偿，花点钱进入一个学校，这也是正常的”。刘长铭说，有些专家认为金钱不能打破分数面前人人平等，这是思想僵化的表现。“谁要是给我五百万，我绝对降他二十分录取。一百万留在自己学校，四百万可以捐给其他学。”

This  is about the problem of access to schools. Deputy and Schoolmaster Liu ChengMing says:  ”It is a normal phenomenon, some people’s children are only missing a few points to get into a school, they wish there was another way to compensate, and there you go: you spend a little bit of money and get in, that is the most normal thing in the World. Some experts say that the money shouldn’t break the equality given by the points, but this is a rigid attitude. If someone gives me 5Million, even with 20 points less for sure I would admit him, then keep 1Million for the school and give 4 to other schools!!

Thunder N.2: Lin JiaXiang is a great Cadre!

“林嘉祥是个好干部。”

去年底，深圳市海事局党组书记林嘉祥涉嫌猥亵女童一事闹得沸沸扬扬，事后，林嘉祥被撤销职务。但在本次“两会”，全国政协委员、交通运输部海事局常务副局长刘功臣却为林嘉祥叫屈。刘功臣说，林嘉祥“是一个很好的干部，谁不会有喝醉酒的时候呢”。他认为，林嘉祥遭遇了网络暴力，“网络是可以杀人的，他就是个倒霉蛋。”

This is about a party secretary in Shenzhen who was suspected of molesting girls and removed from office. NCP deputy and minister of transport etc.  Liu Gongchen said:  “Lin is a great cadre, come on, who hasn’t been drunk sometime”.  And adds: ” the internet can kill people, he is just an unlucky egg!!”

Thunder N.3:  Just give a woman a hen…

“如果给一个女人一只母鸡……”

全国政协委员张晓梅建议，应加大发挥女性的社会优势，倡导女性精神应对经济危机。她举例说:“如果给一个女人一只母鸡，她会节俭下自己的口粮， 饲养它生蛋孵鸡，并在鸡与蛋的循环中，帮持家用，供弟妹上学，继而产生无限生机和力量；如果同样一只母鸡给到一个男人手中，最有可能的结局是炖了被用来当 作下酒菜。”

This CPPCC member Zhang Xiaomei suggested the feminine spirit is the best to deal with the economic crisis. “If you give a woman a hen, she eats sparingly, feeds the chicken until it lays eggs..blahblah.. take the children to Beida with the proceedings and what not. But give the hen to a man, most probably he will eat it. An internet friend commented: then the best against the crisis is sex change surgery.

On to 1515

Whatever, that was a good read and we are beggining to get tired of so much translation, even if it is approximative. Let’s switch to the 1515.cn link, see what we can find there. Finally, we do find some kind of serious analysis here.  Or perhaps not, it is a column posted on Xinhua’s herald.

[...] 前两天和一位政协的领导聊天，他说，你们媒体每年都会问，为何有些政协委员又请假了，追得紧了，自然会对这些老是清假的委员们产生压力，他们以后 就不敢了。我倒是没有这样乐观，因为对一批政协委员来说，这个头衔不是他们自己想要得，而是作为一种荣誉和社会地位主动给与他们的，既然他们从来没有想要 过，那来自外界的压力，又怎样会改变这样的状况  [...] 不过对于那些雷人的议案，公众在批评和议论之余，还应该看到这样一点，毕竟因为提案并不是完全公开，大家能够知道的，只不过是数千份议案 中的很小很小的一部分，因此这些被媒体曝光，或者是代表委员们自己向媒体透露，或者是透过代表委员们自己开设的博客主动向公众阐述的，不能够反映代表委员 们的普遍水平。[ ... ]   好的议案被忽略有几个原因，第一是媒体缺乏信息来源，因为不是每个委员代表都愿意公开自己的提案，很多人愿意低调的实实在在的做 事情，第二则是因为媒和公众本身，媒体觉得不吸引眼球，而这种判断，是因为公众对于严肃的问题缺乏兴趣，这也就让那些雷人的议案传播效应越来越大.

After explaining the origin of the expression ‘Thundering” (雷人）from Japanese cartoons and a few other things, the author speaks about his chat with a CPCC  deputy, who says that media puts a lot of pressure on some members to attend the meetings and stop asking for holidays.

But the situation will not change because many didn’t really choose to be CPCC members, it is just a honour and social status given to them. They have no capability and no willingness to participate. Perhaps we should consider other ways to reward these guys instead of forcing them to seat  in the boring NPC-CPCC every year. There are already enough proposals in the CPCC so perhaps they should just resign.

Among the thousands of proposals that are issued in the NPC-CPCC, the ones that everyone can see are only a tiny part.  They surely don’t represent the general level of the deputies. The media does not publish many proposals of deputies either because many of them don’t want to make statements in public, or just because the proposals are too serious and would not attract the readers, which is precisely the reason why the ‘Thunders” do go public.

Some notes

So there you go, a few different points of view from the chinese blogosphere. Note, these Chinese blogs are not necessarily representative of the mainstream opinions in the Chinese internet, but rather of what is – in my opinion anyway- the intelligent fraction of the Chinese internet.

I hope you have enjoyed the ride. This is my first attempt at bridge blogging proper, if you find it useful let me know and I will try to do more. Otherwise I guess I will stick to commentary in English, where I am more time-effective.

IMPORTANT: the translations above are not meant to be verbatim. Browsing with ULN means that you see what I see and you skip what I skip. I have tried to convey the tone and the message of the originals, but feel free to correct me if you see some translation error.  Chinese readers, now is the time to take revenge for all my mocking of Chinglish signs.

Any thundering comments?

Tom Pellman is Double Handshake. He was an editor in a well known economics magazine in Shanghai, he is almost trilingual in Chinese and he is now in Peru to see that Latin America’s largest population of Chinese are enjoying their Pisco.

Have you noticed that, in China, most of the people you hear speaking Spanish are not European, but overwhelmingly Latin American? Did you ever wonder why so many Chinese are flocking to the Salsa Dancing schools, and why in Shanghai there is a latin night scene more active than the one in Barcelona, for example?

Well, in some places, language is not the only means of communication. And if you want to smell the Juan Valdes, you better keep and eye on these two continents, because things are moving fast under our very noses.

Double Handshakes.

This time I have received a couple of links from Spanish newspapers El Pais and El Mundo where there is evidence of at least two different Chinese industries that continue their cheerful expansion to the West in spite of the World Crisis: These are the industries of Shady Barber Shops and Mahjong Gambling Dens. Fourteen of them have been closed down in a recent police raid in Barcelona.

These are the two articles, one very recent, one from last year:

In recent months local residents of the districts of Eixample, Sants-Montjuïc, Gràcia, Horta-Guinardó and Sant Martí, had brought to the police their suspicions that many hairdressers opened recently by Chinese citizens were something more than to cut and dye hair.

Yes, how perspicacious. I never knew of these things  during the three years I lived in Barcelona. For linguistic reasons I had quite a few friends in the Chinese migrant community over there and I frequented the Chinese areas of the city. As far as I know these FDIs must be very recent.

Anyway, so much for the Chinese hairdressers’ expansion. Although gambling and prostitution are not among the Rights that this blogs stands for,  I can’t help feeling a bit sorry for those Chinese that see their  business seized by the police. Something must have gone wrong with their otherwise perfectly profitable business model. Perhaps they didn’t remember to “glocalize instead of globalize”. Perhaps the local police superintendent is not keen on Asian chicks, or maybe they chose the wrong hand to oil. Who knows.

The New Iceland?

Since we are at it, and on a completely different subject, check out below this scary chart of Spanish unemployment that newspaper El Correo published this week. Two little thoughts:

First, I am seriously afraid that Spain is going to turn into the next Iceland. The growth of these last years was so based on the real estate bubble that troubles could be smelled all the way from China. Am I going to turn into a poor immigrant in Shanghai working my ass off to send money back to homecountry? It would be an interesting role reversal, after all the Chinese I met doing exactly that in Barcelona. Oh well, it was  inevitable at some point, I guess, I just never imagined it could come so soon.

Second, as an engineer I note again how numbers and charts are powerful tools of manipulation. The chart below  goes so high on the Y axis that it almost needs logarithmic scales to fit in the paper. A mere problem of the units chosen, of course… or of the number of copies the newspaper wishes to sell.

Inversely, it would be very easy to make this graph look flatter with a more harmonious  objective in mind… CCTV, take note, you might consider hiring a specialist like me to re-engineer your charts and numbers for harmonious results. But then, what do they care, they simply would not publish the negative charts.

(yes, it is CCTVbashing week this week)

Lately I have received by email these pictures that are widely circulating on the Spanish speaking internet. They apparently originated in Colombia, so they are referred by some as Colombianadas.

Colombianadas are the Latin American equivalent of Chinglish: signs and other pieces of writing with a twist of unintended humour. What makes Colombianadas even more amazing is that they are written by people using their own mother tongue!

Chinese toilet keepers and sign translators: you better get moving fast,  watch more Marx brothers movies or revert to using older dictionaries. A whole new continent of talent is on the rise, and your monopoly of world sign humour is going to be seriously challenged.

Someone needs to open a website urgently to collect these gems:

Sexshop and Seafood / Ladies with O please do not use swimming pool / No urinating, fine: machete/ Cold ice available / We paint houses, home delivery service/ Carrefour Supermarket

But thanks to Spanish blog Chinochano I found yesterday the new archives of La Vanguardia, the newspaper that was my daily read during my 3 years in Barcelona. The difference with other archives is that the interface looks much better, it shows the scanned articles, AND it comes with a cool graph showing the incidence of the search word over the years since 1881. This is in itself a fantastic tool for bloggy research:

The search for “China” gives the following graph:

Number of entries in paper issues containing "China"

Here we can see the rise of China in the European press. It is interesting to see the sudden lack of interest in some periods, for example when Hitler was invading Poland, or when the dotcoms crisis set all the eyes looking to Silicon Valley around 2000. The sudden peaks also make for a good guessing game. Especially interesting to see is the sharp rise from 2000 to 2008, which matches the observations of many China analysts, like Mark Leonard.

2008 is still not over but I’m betting it will beat 2007 by a fair stretch.

Re La Vanguardia: It is a mainstream catalan newspaper that has in my opinion the best Foreign Affairs section in Spain. If you speak Spanish don’t miss “Diario de Pekin”, the blog of La Vanguardia correspondent Rafael Poch in China. His articles are entertaining and he has an original point of view on Chinese affairs. Unfortunately Rafael is leaving China now after 6 years so we’ll have to wait and see if he gets a worthy successor.

PS: Now I have really earned the title of BRIDGE blogger !