Chinese TV dramas take an unexpected turn: Quality trumps cost

Over the summer I took a class on modern Chinese and Japanese film, and wrote a number of capsule reviews and research papers, which I published on the Harvard Extended blog.

Since then, I haven't had much time to watch Asian films, but my wife borrowed from a friend a DVD box set containing a 23-episode Chinese TV miniseries, 中國式離婚/中国式离婚 ("Chinese-style Divorce" or "Divorce of a Chinese Pattern," according to the box).

Before playing the discs, both of us were skeptical. Chinese and Taiwanese TV dramas have a poor reputation for quality -- most of the soaps and historical dramas we see on satellite TV have terrible production values and scripts, characterized by overacting, violence, overuse of dramatic close-ups, and out-of-sync Mandarin dubs.

But my wife was hooked by the 中國式離婚 series, and, after watching portions of two episodes, I could see why: Not only was the script well done (according to my wife) but also the production values are superb. The actors are pros, hysterics and violence are kept to a minimum, the sets look real, and the film-production standards are top-notch -- I actually believe they are using film to shoot it, instead of video. If Google is any guide, lots of other Chinese-speaking people think so, too -- there are more than 700,000 Web pages that contain the simplified Chinese title/phrase.

This is not an isolated example. Long-form, high-quality television miniseries are apparently very popular in China, according to two expatriates who we've talked with, and who buy or rent the box sets for marathon viewing sessions at their homes in the Boston suburbs.

Harvard Extended gets tagged!

Argh! I've been blog-tagged in a post by Richi Jennings, the most excellent IT Blogwatch writer. According to the rules of this twisted game, I have to reveal five things about myself that relatively few people know, and then tag five other hapless souls.

Here are the five oddities:

• I once swam across the St. Lawrence River, from Morristown, New York, to Brockville Ontario


• My favorite travel destination: Malaysia


• One of my first jobs after college: Working for the record label of a the British pop duo known as The KLF


• I am reasonably talented at preparing authentic Chinese stir-fry dishes (well, at least according to my wife and daughter)


• I was an extra on a Taiwanese sitcom

Now it's time to tag my victims:

• Bob Hsiung


• Samuel Chow


• An anonymous HES student


• Michael Farnum


• Simon World

Update

Visitors from Michael Farnum's information security place looking for my Computerworld blog can find it here.

Those who are interested in why I have a Harvard-related blog can read about the mission of Harvard Extended. Or they can simply visit the front page of Harvard Extended, which contains all of my latest posts.

Since 2004 I have also maintained a blog about 3D technologies and media trends: I, Lamont.

My first blogging effort -- a programming-related blog that I started while taking classes at Boston College back in 2002 -- is unfortunately no longer extant. It was hand-coded (!) and hosted on a personal domain that I gave up, owing to costs.

Nesson on Second Life: "elaborately constructed but humanly forbidding"

You may remember my write-up of the Harvard Extension School/Harvard Law School experiment in Second Life. Now that several months have elapsed, there is some time to reflect on the potential of Second Life. Prof. Charles Nesson (the course instructor) has done just that in a blog post:

whenever i’ve left berkman island to go forth and look around i’ve found the environment elaborately constructed but humanly forbidding. yet i am excited at the prospect of holding court in this virtual immersive domain. second life is a crappy way to do some things, maybe a fine way to do others.

Amen. I have noted some major problems with the SL interface and various requirements (ranging from having a credit card to tech specs) and also described a poorly planned and executed meeting carried out by Sun Microsystems in SL.

But the situation will likely change in the next five years as Linden streamlines the interface, drops certain requirements, and gets some honest competition. The increasing size and virtual savvy of the video game generation will also make for more worthwhile interaction in virtual worlds. Finally, companies and organizations will learn -- after much trial and error -- how to best use this environment for meetings, training, and other types of activities.

Reed Hundt on China's political future

A new business magazine, The American, has published an excerpt from a book by Reed Hundt, entitled In China's Shadow: The Crisis of American Entrepreneurship.

The excerpt is long, and dwells for a long time on the nature of entrepreneurship in China and the United States. However, the author also neatly summarizes the current nature of the Chinese political situation:

Numbering somewhere between 5 and 500 people at the apex of the 65-million-member Communist Party, this group can barely rule their huge population, even when collaborating with the handful of super-rich Chinese who made their fortunes outside the People's Republic. Centers of governmental and economic power are emerging in the various regions in rivalry against Beijing, as has repeatedly occurred in Chinese history. New influences threaten not only the existing order but anyone's ability to exercise order. Perhaps 30 million Chinese can taste the West's standard of living, and 500 million might hope to enjoy that life in one generation. But a billion are still trapped in desperate poverty. Powerful forces rend the social fabric: international capital, the military strength of the West, an aging population and overwhelming population shifts, the Internet's disruptive spread of information, the devastating environmental impact of development, massive energy shortages, and the ever-present risk of political instability.

Later, Hundt makes this surprising statement about long-term political development in China:

The Chinese Communist Party apparently plans to craft a state corporatism that will manage the Chinese economic and political strategies for the next several generations. Entrepreneurs are to be part of political leadership. Political leaders, in their own names and through family members, will take a share of entrepreneurial wealth and portions of the state-owned firms as they slowly convert to private firms. Meanwhile, the government will provide Chinese entrepreneurs with the trade policies, educational resources, transportation, and other public goods that let them take on Western rivals in the commercial battles of the century. The entrepreneurs may see the government as an unwanted partner, or even an agent of corruption. But as long as the country's economy grows at nearly 10 percent a year, everyone will make enough money for the new business leaders and old government elite both to obtain their shares of the country's wealth creation.

I say "surprising" because one almost never sees long-term political predictions relating to China and the Chinese Communist Party, at least in the English-language press and academic literature. Why not? I believe it partly relates to the failure of almost all Western observers to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union and Communist states in Eastern Europe until people started taking to the streets in 1989. It also relates to the regular occurrence of political and social instability in China, which every two or three decades results in old plans, policies, and politicians being purged and replaced, often by radically new policies.

The excerpt, unfortunately, does not explain where Hundt was able to find out about Beijing's master political plan for the next few generations, or how he interpreted various sources and factors to arrive at this conclusion.

Nevertheless, this excerpt is intriguing, and warrants further exploration. The book is available now.

Cameraphones and the death of photojournalism?

I've written about the potential impact of cameraphones and videophones upon China's media and political life (see "Watershed event: Amateur riot video circulates in China", and "Another reason China should fear the 'Net: A million people with camera phones").

I've also given presentations where I discussed how it could lead to a new generation of news apps that sort and feed these images to consumers, maybe accompanied by news that's "read" by a speech synthesizer, or paired with a 3D avatar/anchor treatment.

But Dan Gillmor has considered another effect of this trend: The demise of photojournalists. Read his essay here, and the interesting comment thread that follows.

Thesis update: Chapter 4 (draft) completed

I wrapped up the draft of chapter 4 of my thesis last night, and sent it into my thesis director. The focus of chapter 4 was analysis of the data presented in chapter 3. Chapter 4 was also the last chapter of my thesis, and contained a conclusion and recommendations for further research.

Chapter 4 came in at 28 double-spaced pages, making the total draft length (not including front matter, bibliography, or appendices) exactly 100 double-spaced pages long. The entire draft took 45 days to complete, mostly working on evenings and weekends. That may seem fast, but keep in mind that I was working from an outline that my thesis director approved, and this time does not include the year-and-a-half of research, data gathering, proposal writing, etc., that started in the spring of 2005.

More importantly, I've not received any feedback from my thesis director about the draft. It's conceivable that he'll ask for significant revisions, which could take a month or more to get through. Then I have to run it by the Extension School research advisor, who will vet the format and style.

In other words, I'm not out of the woods yet. Stay tuned ...

(Read earlier thesis updates here)

Relics of the Qing Dynasty: Bound feet

The New York Times talks about living relics of a past age: Two elderly Chinese women whose feet were bound when they were children.

AT ages 84 and 83, Wang Zaiban and Wu Xiuzhen are old women, and their feet are historical artifacts. They are among the dwindling number of women in China from the era when bound feet were considered a prerequisite for landing a husband.

No available man, custom held, could resist the picture of vulnerability presented by a young girl tottering atop tiny, pointed feet. But Mrs. Wang and Mrs. Wu have tottered past vulnerability. They have outlived their husbands and also outlived civil war, mass starvation and the disastrous ideological experiments by Mao that almost killed China itself.

I saw an old woman with bound feet during one of my visits to Western China in the 1990s, and a friend in Taiwan, who was an ethnic Chinese immigrant from Burma, had a nonagenarian grandmother who also had bound feet. I believe that the practice was quite common in Qing times, but was slow to die out in the early Republican era. The New York Times article describes Wang's and Wu's recollection of the Communists forcibly ending the practice in areas that they occupied in what would have been the 1920s or 1930s.

NaNoWriMo vs. writing an ALM thesis

National Novel Writing Month (aka NaNoWriMo or NaNoMo) just finished. For those of you not in the "know," this is an online-based writing marathon which encourages participants to write a novel of 50,000 words every November. Approximately 80,000 people participated this year, reports the New York Times.

What I found interesting were the reports of difficulties encountered by the writers:

Every year more than 80 percent of those who sign up for the project do not finish, often because the experience is just too painful. First there is the toll on the rest of the novelist’s life, with friends, family, co-workers and living spaces sure to be neglected.

And then there is the sheer torture of trying to write fiction continuously for several hours every day. Week 2 is the worst, [NaNoWriMo participant Chris] Baty said, because that is when the book can feel like “a truck parked on your face.” Forced to make hard decisions about plot and characters, many people give up: “They love their book so much they stop writing it,” Mr. Baty said.

This sentiment struck a chord with me, and I suspect for many others who have started ALM theses at the Harvard Extension School. Of course, we have a lot longer than a month to research and write a thesis, but are subjected to similar study/life pressures and doubts about the direction of the projects. For me, "week 2" came about a year ago, early in the research phase, when the research was going slowly and writing had yet to begin.

But, as someone who is now in the proverbial final stretch, I can confirm that progress will come if you stay focused on your research question(s) and force yourself to read, conduct research, and write at least several times per week.