Sunday, July 6, 2014

A Mini Van and a Bicycle





Two interesting bits in the New York Times concerning China this morning.  One has to do with the general migration from the microblog Weibo, to the private communities of Wechat.  Where as microblogs like Weibo had afforded Chinese an unruly, national forum in which to communicate the service appears to be waning in popularity.  Weibo was originally cited as a heretofore-impossible Chinese ‘all-thing’ of sorts.  After the high-speed train crash of 2011, citizens reportage contradicted official reports with eyewitness accounts and photos, forcing a national discussion.

Wechat, as I can attest reporting from my own family is now more popular than Weibo.  The article cites Wechat enjoys 335 million active users but I would have assumed the number was much higher.  Wechat is still used by activists but there are limitations.  Generally accounts are private circles of people, that don’t allow for viral metastasizing.  Public accounts do exist but are only allowed one post a day, the postings are erased after a few days, eliminating the historical record and access to public accounts can’t be made from cell phones, eliminating the possibility of real time photos being uploaded.  One can only imagine that Tencent’s product design anticipated and exploited clear government preferences. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/05/world/asia/an-online-shift-in-china-muffles-an-open-forum.html?ref=asia



Meanwhile, there were two interesting pieces about China’s relations with Vietnam.  It’s been a while since I’ve read any specific history on the fierce conflagration of 1979.  In my mind, China tried to teach the battle-hardened Vietnamese a lesson for their invasion of Cambodia and were, in turn, taught a lesson, by their “younger brothers.”  This article interviews some of the Vietnamese who remember the carnage of that invasion when China destroyed a village (most assuredly not “in order to save it.”) with what they referred to as a “parting kiss.”  Both sides claimed victory.  I’ve heard the facing-saving and oddly familiar claim that it was, simply, 不分胜负[1] though it’s hard to see how the Chinese invasion which resulted in as many PLA deaths in one month as the U.S. suffered in the entire ten years of our own invasion was anything to be proud of.  Vietnam repelled the French invaders, the American invaders and the Chinese invaders, just as they had successfully done to the Chinese during the Tang Dynasty. 

I also hadn’t realized that whereas Vietnam memorializes annually the resistance to the French and the Americans from last century, this is not the case for their struggle with China.  After the normalization between the two communist parties, Vietnam no longer officially drew attention to the Chinese invasion.  With the current activity in the Paracel Islands, this Party-to-Party make-over, is currently driving a rift between the Vietnamese Communist Party and the people in Vietnam.  People’s sense of history and resistance goes back far beyond any party or ideology.   Will Vietnam prefer to stand their ground with China and risk another attempted “lesson” from the north, or seek assistance from their former American enemy?

Stuck now in traffic on Jingmi Road.  Surprise.  Every Beijing resident with a car is out driving around on Sunday.  We’ve got Jack McDuff on the mix here in the air conditioning.  This is the next instalment of our segue through the world of soulful jazz organists.  We’ve made it through three songs of this album “The Honeydripper” from 1961, up to the title track and we’ll probably make it through the next three, before we get through the light up ahead.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Honeydripper_(album)

OK.  The verdict in: it wasn’t just the Beijing Sunday driving volume.  A mini van had earlier struck a bicycle.  Couldn’t say if the person was hurt or not. I hope they’re all right.  But in typical Beijing traffic etiquette, the scene has been left untouched so that the police can make their assessment as to what happened, at some point in the future, at their convenience, probably around the time we’re heading home and traffic halts to sap speed until such time, as a result. 


This morning, coming back from Starbucks with my younger daughter, a car decided to cross four lanes of traffic from a side street, at the timorous pace of fifteen miles an hour straight into the lane I was driving.  We had to stop abruptly, but not wildly, and I had to master my impulse not to force the car to a halt and berate the person who put us at risk.  With a few seconds of breathing it was clear they were utterly confused about what it meant to drive and weren’t sure at all, what they were doing.  My little one had screamed when we stopped quickly and was scared.  Have to stay calm, and cogent, driving in this town. 



[1] bùfēnshèngfù:  unable to determine victory or defeat (idiom); evenly matched / to come out even / to tie / to draw

No comments:

Post a Comment