Second NCNA Chart: Three-Variable Measurements of Vietnam/Kampuchea Issues, 1977-1993

A few months back I posted a chart that details how the New China News Agency (新華社) associated issues relating to Vietnam with issues relating to other countries and international institutions from 1977 to 1993.

Today I've exported another chart from my Excel spreadsheet. It graphs all items that mention both Vietnam and Kampuchea, plus one other country/institution variable, over the same period. Here's the key:

Dark Blue: Vietnam, Kampuchea, and the Soviet Union/Russia

Magenta: Vietnam, Kampuchea, and the United States

Yellow: Vietnam, Kampuchea, and the United Nations

Light Blue: Vietnam, Kampuchea, and ASEAN

And here's the chart:


You can download the PDF version here.

Vietnam/Kampuchea articles that mentioned the Soviet Union vs. those that mentioned the U.S. were on a par in 1977 but sharply diverged in 1978 -- the year that Vietnam invaded Kampuchea. That year, NCNA strongly associated issues relating to those two countries with issues relating to the Soviet Union. The United States was mentioned in just 16% of the articles, and the United Nations, in just 5% of the articles.

However, over the next few years, NCNA associated less and less the Soviet Union with the crisis involving Vietnam and Kampuchea, as mentions of the U.N. rose. U.S. mentions remained sparse. ASEAN mentions peaked at around 30% of all Vietnam/Kampuchea items in the mid-1980s, but dropped off sharply in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Interestingly, after 1989, the year in which Vietnam withdrew from Kampuchea, the U.N. was mentioned more often than any other of the other countries or institutions. The Soviet Union/Russia by that time was seldom mentioned -- reflecting its reduced role in the region.

Coup attempt in Taiwan?

Just spotted this in the Taipei Times:

The nation's top military leader yesterday threw his weight behind claims of a coup plot by pan-blue supporters after the bitterly disputed presidential election in 2004.

During a legislative hearing, Minister of National Defense Lee Jye (李傑) yesterday said that some military personnel had approached him and asked him to feign sickness and step aside so that they could organize a coup against President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁).

On Monday, a second hearing began at the Taiwan High Court in a suit filed by former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) chairman Lien Chan (連戰) and People First Party Chairman James Soong (宋楚瑜) against Chen Shui-bian. They claim that he defamed them by asserting that there had been an attempted coup d'etat following their defeat in the election.

At Monday's hearing, Chen's lawyer showed the judge classified documents that he claimed proved the coup attempt.

He claimed that the classified documents clearly record persons, happenings, times, locations and evidence of the coup attempt.

The Liberty Times, a Chinese-language newspaper and the sister paper of the Taipei Times, yesterday reported that the classified documents said an "incumbent military adviser to the Presidential Office" and a former chief of the general staff had talked to Lee Jye and asked him to step aside on March 24, 2004.

Lee Jye, who was Chief of General Staff at the time, yesterday confirmed these reports.

"Some unidentified military personnel came to me and asked me to `play sick' so they could carry out their plans to oust the president. But, when I refused immediately, they just walked away," Lee said. "These people said that they came to me on behalf of `certain group of people.'"

However, Lee said that neither former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) chairman Lien Chan (連戰) nor People First Party Chairman James Soong (宋楚瑜) had approached him or sent anyone to see him on their behalf. But he said he was quite sure that the military personnel who came to him were pan-blue supporters.

"However, I couldn't say whether these military personnel came to me on behalf of Lien and Soong," Lee added.

Reminds me of a supposed coup early warning system that an ex-U.S. military man told me about, and was in operation as late as the mid 1990s -- a helmeted, armed soldier standing guard at the foot of each bridge leading into Taipei, 24 hours per day. The idea was that these soldiers would raise the alarm if they saw any unscheduled military convoys crossing into the city. They withdrew the guards in 1995 or 1996 after one of them was killed for his rifle by gangsters.

Another memory from those days -- my Mandarin teacher at the Taipei Language Institute (中華語文研習所) telling me that if a DPP (民進黨) government declared independence for Taiwan, her son, who was then doing his military service, had pledged to her that he would shoot any commanding officer who supported it. Yes, she was a mainlander, and probably a New Party (新黨) supporter at the time -- she was very suspicious of the GMD (國民黨) under Lee Deng-hui (李登輝).

Where have all the podcasts gone?

Anyone can make an educational podcast. All you really need is a digital recording device or iPod microphone, costing less than $50, to create an audio file that can be played back on your computer, iPod, or other type of portable mp3 player. At lectures I've seen people making their own podcasts for personal use, and recently the Extension School has begun producing Computer Science-related podcasts for students and others interested in hearing the lectures. The reaction has been enthusiastic, according to the Crimson.

But having a few dozen computer science lectures in podcast form is just the tip of the iceberg. This could be so much bigger. It's not just because the audio files are so easy to make, and share, if placed on the Internet. It's the huge installed base of people who can use the files. Think about it. How many students have portable digital music players in their backpacks, or software to play them back on their computers? 90%? 95%?

Yet Harvard -- and most other universities -- are only making piecemeal attempts to exploit the technology. I've looked at Apple's and Yahoo's podcast directories for college-level lectures and other course content, and there's not much there -- a few departments at a few colleges are playing with podcasts on a small scale. The best history podcasting resource I have found thus far is from University of California Berkeley. It's History 5: European Civilization from the Renaissance to the Present, taught by Thomas Laqueur (RSS link here, course description here). There is a complete collection of lectures, starting from the beginning of this semester. He often refers to slides of artwork that he's showing his class, but it's still a great audio resource that I listen to in my car or when I am at home. You can sample other topics from the current list of the Berkeley course podcasts.

Apple seems to "get" the potential of this medium, and is aggressively pushing "iTunes U", a program that offers schools tools to organize and host educational podcasts. It appeals to universities which want to use podcasts as vehicles to help students and propagate knowledge to a wider audience. And of course, it appeals to Apple, because it lets them sell more iPods and other products.

A handful of high-profile universities have joined the program, but so far there's not much to see. Stanford's iTunes portal has 40 or 50 of lectures across many disciplines, but no complete courses. I was unable to find any audio files from Duke or Brown, both of which are participating in the program. It's possible that they are setting up their podcasts so only their own students can access the files, but if that's the case, I have to ask, why not open up this content to students elsewhere, or to the general public? It's not like giving away course credit, or taking extra staff time to administer the program to non-students. It can and should be seen as sharing knowledge -- much like MIT's OpenCourseware initiative, Harvard's public lectures, and even the concept of a public library.

To learn more about making podcasts, see my earlier post on educational podcasting. Another Extension School student has also posted about educational podcasting on his/her blog.

HLS student gets inside look at a jail cell

Spotted in the Boston Herald this morning, about a Harvard Law School student celebrating St. Patrick's Day by allegedly mooning Boston drivers:

An officer working a detail on Cambridge Street witnessed Huston yell at passing cars and jump into traffic as the group crossed the street, police say. Huston continued to wave and yell at cars, pulled down his pants and exposed himself to traffic, police said. He was arrested for open and gross lewdness and disorderly conduct, officials said.

It's a shame that St. Patrick's Day has turned from a qiuet religious holiday into an excuse for people to drink themselves into such a state -- hardly representative of Irish culture or the Irish-American experience.

Raising Mandarin-speaking kids in America

We have two kids, a toddler and a preschooler. Before our preschooler was born, we pledged that we would make an effort to ensure she grew up being able to speak both English and Mandarin, to prepare her for a more internationally connected world, and to ensure that she can talk with her relatives in Taiwan.

For the first two and a half years of her life, she was exposed to Mandarin most of the time. At home, my wife spoke to her in Mandarin in 99% of their conversations, and myself, about 90% of the time. We read Chinese children's books to her, explained concepts to her in Mandarin, and showed her Mandarin VCDs and DVDs. She didn't attend daycare, and only had occasional contact with English-only speakers -- neighbors, my relatives, and a few kids living nearby.

The immersion strategy seemed to work. When she was 19 months and 25 days old, my wife and I sat down and recorded all of the words she was able to speak in both languages. Here's the Chinese list (translated into English):

duck, cow, horse, dog, cat, crow, bird, squirrel, mouse, pig, elephant, fish, turtle, ant, bear, monkey, rabbit, sheep (plus sounds they make)

telephone, key, toy, car, boat, book, door, baloon, shoes, socks, clothes, pants, belt, glasses, watch, hat, light, fridge, swing, candle, crayon, baby, diaper, bao bao (抱抱), kiss, bike

grapes, candy, vitamin, ice cream, noodles, rice, meat, egg, dofu, melon, banana, blueberries, cherry, strawberry, eat, bread, water, mushroom, soup, cookie, knife, fork, spoon, button, barette, air plane, music, bag, phone, fan, tea, beer, tomato, beans.

ear, nose, mouth, neck, knee, hands, tummy, belly button, hair, teeth, chin, feet, poop, pee

hot, cold, stinky

moon, sun, tree, cloud, rock, rain, stars, leaf, thunder, flower

eat, look, want/don't want, hurts, take a walk, swim, wash, cry, laugh, sleep, paint, open, close

mom, dad, grandpa, grandma, aunt (maternal & paternal), uncle (maternal)

thank you

Don't ask why she knew how to say beer (啤酒). Here's her English vocabulary list at the same point in time:

bird, bee, butterfly, boat, key, elephant, powder, teddy bear, juice, rui rui (raisins), ice cream, ye-you (yogurt), juice, bi-doom (baloon), soup, swing, slide, flower, pocket, telephone, uppie, big hug

delicious, beautiful, pretty, hot, cold, yuck-yuck, yum,

thank you, pleesh (please)

... plus the proper names of a few neighbors, as well as my parents' cats, and TV characters including Arthur, Barney, Elmo, and all four Teletubbies. Neither the Mandarin nor English lists include words that she understood, but could not say.

The Mandarin dominance began to shift very shortly after she started English-language preschool. Besides beefing up her English vocabulary, it also resulted in her asking me not to read stories to her in Chinese anymore and a newfound interest in English-language TV. By the time she turned four I'd say her Mandarin vocabulary was not as good as her English vocabulary, but her Mandarin grammar was definitely better than her English grammar, which often skipped articles and correct verb usage compared to her classmates. Sometimes Mandarin syntax will creep into her English conversation -- for instance, she'll say "open the light" instead of "turn on the light", which she gets from Mandarin (開燈).

We've tried to keep her Mandarin skills up to par as best we can. We subscribed to a satellite TV package which includes "Yoyo TV", a very good children's channel from Taiwan. We enrolled her in the local Chinese Community Center school, which meets every weekend, but she complains that "there aren't any toys there" like the English-language preschool. She still speaks Mandarin about 50% of the time with my wife, but never with me -- if I ask her a question in Chinese she'll answer in English.

Today, we took heart in the fact that she spoke entirely in Mandarin with a little friend who came over whose parents are from China, but I have a feeling that these types of exchanges will fade as both get older and enter the language and social atmospheres of the local public school system. We've thought about Chinese summer camp, or summers with the in-laws in Taiwan when she gets older, but judging by the experiences of my adult friends who grew up as ABCs or CBCs (American- and Canadian-born Chinese) it's very difficult to remain a proficient Mandarin speaker unless you spend lots of time in Taiwan or China.

As for our son, he is just learning how to talk, but we'll undoubtedly have an even tougher time with teaching him Mandarin. Why? The person he interacts with most during the day (aside from my wife) is his older sister, who speaks with him exclusively in English. This is a factor our daughter didn't have as an influence when she was his age. But we'll try pushing Mandarin with our son -- in the long run, even if he doesn't learn how to speak Mandarin properly, planting a nugget of the language in his brain will serve him well when he sees his relatives, explores his roots, develops an interest in doing work associated with Taiwan or China, or meets someone from either country.

Problems with the digitized, networked archives

I am a big fan of digital archives and other data accesible via the Internet. I am using them now as the foundation of my research, and I believe they will make a huge impact on historical studies in the years to come.

However, an article by John Letzing of the Wall Street Journal last month ("Changing History", p. R10, February 13, 2006) brings up a problem with this trend: Digitized records on computer networks are marginalizing records that are not on computer networks. A Northwestern University professor says that faculty aren't going to the library very much anymore, and are missing out on "accidental discoveries" that often prompt new theories and research.

The same source also brings up two problems with Google. He quite rightly points out that Google indexes by popularity, not by quality. Websites with the most links get pushed to the top of the search results, regardless of who wrote it or their famiarity with the subject in question. So if Martha Stewart's blog mentions ancient Chinese civilization in connection with a menu she dreams up, it will show up in the results way ahead of writings by history scholars. Additionally, the source in the article suggests that peer reviewed articles are losing their anonymity, because it's easy to insert a phrase into Google from an article under review and find out who the author is, at least if the text has been previously uploaded to the 'Net -- which it often is, in the case of classroom lecture notes, syllabi, and abstracts from conference papers.

I have a few personal observations to add. I really believe today's students are more apt to take the lazy way out -- several times, I've seen bibliographies of student papers that contain nothing but Internet sources. I believe that journals that are networked get more scholarly attention and citations, while those that aren't are increasingly relegated to obscurity. We may see a similar trend with books, when the trickle of electronic books and the Google Book Search project begin to make headway. And handwritten sources? Unless someone is able to design scanning software and hardware that can accurately and efficiently scan letters, scrolls, and notes, and make them searchable, these important primary sources are likely to be marginalized as well -- and the only ones that will get attention are those "imortant", or rare documents that have been scanned and hosted on the 'Net by their owners, most of them well-financed libraries and universities.

In the case of my own thesis, I have to admit that my own research would have been more effective if I had been able to include New China News Agency data from 1976, the year that Mao died and the Gang of Four (briefly, and incompletely) had political control of the country. But because NCNA news wasn't archived by LexisNexis until January 1977, I couldn't include the earlier material -- it would have been too time-consuming, and prone to error if I had to search and tabulate the thousands of 1976 NCNA articles by hand.

On the other hand, the fact that the post-1977 NCNA archives are digitized makes possible whole new areas of enquiry into modern Chinese history that simply weren't realistic endeavors in the pre-networked age. I am using this data for a quantitative study, but even people conducting qualitative research can far more quickly and effectively find relevant NCNA articles in the LexisNexis and Factiva databases. The same is true for other areas of history. Right now scholars can examine American newspaper reports from the 1700s and 1800s -- imagine how useful that is for people studying the American Revolution, slavery, and the settlement of the American West!

The Great Wall as an advertising prop

Staples, the office superstore chain, has an advertisement running on local TV channels that uses Chinese history as a theme.

The ad is about 30 seconds long. It is set in a rocky, hilly wasteland. Soldiers in ancient Chinese garb are standing in formation, facing a horde of screaming barbarian horsemen galloping toward them. The Chinese general presses a button marked "easy" and the Great Wall bursts from ground, protecting his army from the advancing horde. However, he is somehow left on the wrong side of the wall, and says "Dang!" as the barbarians ride up to the wall.

Will this ad help Staples sell binders and paper clips? I doubt it -- people who are unfamiliar with the history of the Great Wall won't even know what the advertisement is talking about.

Educational podcasting: Why isn't Harvard doing more?

I've written about educational podcasting before, in the following two posts:


Stanford's Podcast Lectures

How podcasts can help in the classroom

But I am going to talk about it again. Tonight I listened to some of the material available through UC Berkeley's podcasting program, and have to wonder: Why isn't the Harvard Extension School, not to mention the rest of Harvard University, doing more with podcasting?

To be sure, the Extension School already has some podcasts available from a few computer science classes. But this is a fraction of the academic content that should be on the 'Net in podcast form, including classes, lectures, seminars, debates, and musical performances.

For other classes, it's not hard to create an audio file of a lecture. You can do it with a $15 microphone plugin for an Apple iPod, or buy a $30, self-contained digital audio recorder which can transfer the file to a computer. Students do this already, I see it all the time at the Extension School.

Once the file is created, it's easy to upload to the 'Net, if you have a Web server -- and Harvard has several thousand Web servers. Conceivably, an instructor or TA could take a digital audio recorder into class, press "record" at the beginning of the lecture, press stop at the end, and then hand it off to a technician the next day to turn the file into an mp3 and upload it onto a Web server. Students in the class could access them to review lectures at a later date. Students not in the class could check them out, to see if they want to register for the class, or learn more about the subject. Members of the public who would otherwise have no access to Harvard instructors could learn from the lectures -- MIT already puts all class materials on the public Internet with the Open Courseware Initiative, an extremely generous gesture which has benefitted people all over the world. Why can't Harvard take the initiative for once, with podcasting?