1907 and 2007: The late Qing press vs. the current Chinese Internet

I'm currently doing some research for an essay in my final class (Survey of Publishing: From Text to Hypertext) and stumbled upon a passage worth sharing here. The essay is about the rise of the Chinese press in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and the influence of Western newspaper models. The passage is from page four of Joan Judge's Print and Politics: ‘Shibao’ and the Culture of Reform in Late Qing China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), and discusses the connections between the Chinese press and revolutionary politics toward the end of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911):

While print journalism served a political function in many nations, this role was particularly consequential in late Qing China, which had neither a system of political parties nor a representative national assembly. Independent of the dynasty and accessible to the reading public, the political press provided one of the few forums where reformists could advance their political agenda. Opening a field of mediation between the different spheres of late Qing China made it possible for reform publicists to challenge imperial authority and express popular grievances, encourage debate over government policies, and educate their compatriots about the urgent need to reform the structure of dynastic power.

Does anyone else see the parallels between what was happening at the end of the Qing dynasty, and what's happening now with the Internet in the People's Republic of China? We're not seeing much online debate in China about the CCP or the current political structure, but late Qing newspapers in the 1870s didn't have this kind of debate, either .... Judge is referring to newspaper activity several decades later, in the first decade of the 20th century -- right before the fall of the Qing.

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Strange database queries at the Harvard Business School, and a new model for downloading online music

My Computerworld blog was recently updated with some new functionality and a new name -- The Digital Media Machine. The focus is mostly new media technologies, ranging from the Internet to virtual reality, but I also touch on some subjects that might be interesting to my Harvard Extended audience. For instance, yesterday I blogged about a strange incident at the Harvard Business School's Baker Library:

The Crimson, the student-run newspaper at Harvard, has a report of an unusual incident in a campus library. Administrators at the Harvard Business School library were forced to block a user's IP address from accessing Factiva, an online database of news articles and other text documents, after determining that the user had downloaded millions of articles in the span of a few months.

It turns out that the user in question was (probably) building a very large census of news articles and other text documents for a computer content analysis, using a script that scraped the articles from the password-protected Factiva database. I can totally sympathize: As some of you may remember, I also carried out a very extensive content analysis of news articles from China's Xinhua News Agency for my thesis, and was frustrated by the manual processes involved in getting samples and query results from LexisNexis Academic.

There's another new post on my Computerworld blog that might interest anyone who pays for online music: A proposal to revamp the per-song and per-album pricing model from a flat fee (e.g., iTune's 99 cents/song scheme) to a scaled pricing model that actually evaluates whether or not you value the song.

"Economic Nationalism" and patient safety in China

What used to be called "protectionism" is now known as "economic nationalism," at least when China is involved, according to a source quoted in today's New York Times:

“There is clearly a growing economic nationalism in China that is leading to discrimination against foreign investors in pillar sectors of the economy,” said Myron Brilliant, vice president for Asia at the United States Chamber of Commerce. “It’s not only a threat to foreign investors but it also undermines China’s transition to a market-based economy.”

The issue at hand are Chinese regulations that dictate safety inspections for imported medical devices, but not devices that are made in China. What's interesting to me is that the debate is being framed in terms of fairness in international trade, as opposed to a patient safety issue.

Sinocidal lampoons parachute journalists in China

I got a chuckle from this: Sinocidal's satirical advice for foreign journalists attempting to write an article about China:

You've just arrived in your 5-Star room at the Shanghai Hilton and unpacked your fancy new Apple laptop. As you pull the top off the mini bottle of Hennessey XO, you finally turn to your instructions from the editor back home. 2000 words by Monday about the important issues facing China today. Easy.

But two days have passed and you are still staring at a blank screen. You're experiencing a stretch of writer's block as long as the Great Wall of China and the deadline is hanging over your head like the proverbial Sword of Damocles. It seems that more research than flicking through a copy of Wild Swans in the airport is needed after all.

The list of tips that follows is a hoot, ranging from getting sources ("ask a taxi driver!") to choosing headlines (using Sinocidal's 'China-headline-o'matic').

And there's more than a hint of truth to the account. It's known as "parachute journalism," and it occurs every time a local crisis or event makes waves in an out-of-the-way place, and reporters with insufficient knowledge of the local situation are flown in and attempt to interpret the news for the folks back home. You've seen articles or TV segments like this before that pertain to Chinese culture. You will see dozens more next year when thousands of foreign journalists who've never been to China and can't speak Chinese descend upon Beijing for the 2008 Olympics and attempt to "explain" China to the rest of the world.

(Thanks to Myrick at AsiaPundit for the link.)

Hedge fund uses Harvard Extension School distance education class as backup training

Spotted in my Google blog search RSS feed: David Kane of Kane Capital Management -- a company that operates a hedge fund -- requires summer interns from Williams College to have a solid grounding in statistics. If they are unable to take the appropriate course at Williams, he has them take Government E-2001 ("a course [that] gives you the tools to build statistical models and useful in real social science research") through the Extension School's distance education offerings. He pays, too.

This is one example of how distance education at Harvard has potential applications beyond enabling Extension School students to take coursework online. Some of these high-quality classes can be used for workforce education in certain fields. Conceivably, these classes could also be used as substitute for-credit at other colleges or universities that don't offer such courses, offer them infrequently, or need to serve students who are not on campus because of a disability, military service, overseas study, etc.

The class that Kane refers to looks quite interesting. While Government E-2001 is "recommended" for government concentrators, it is not required, and I have the feeling that a lot of Extension School students aiming for a government ALM shy away from taking it, considering they already have one difficult requirement to get out of the way (the graduate proseminar) and the fact it involves a subject that so many social sciences concentrators dread -- math. In my experience, very few people who are ALM Government or History concentrators like math or attempt to use quantitative methodologies in their theses. Others may not realize until it is too late that they want to use statistical analysis, instead of more traditional qualitative approaches.


In hindsight, I wish I'd taken this class (or one like it) before I started my thesis, which used a quantitative methodology to study Chinese foreign policy during the Deng Xiaoping era. While I had studied computer content analysis schemes during my graduate proseminar in 2003, I didn't have any training in statistics when I started my research in 2005 -- I basically had to do a lot of extra reading on my own, and get advice from my thesis director and a few others in order to develop my models and analyze the data.

Undoing simplified characters: Traditional Chinese on the rise in China?

My wife draws my attention to the Sunday, Nov. 4 edition of the Chinese newspaper she reads -- the 世界日報 (World Journal). The top article on the front page describes the proceedings at the 8th International Chinese Character Seminar in Beijing, and the discussions surrounding a 15-year-old international effort to standardize Chinese characters in China, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea.

What's the big deal? Well, the proposal supposedly has received a major boost -- a department of China's Ministry of Education apparently agrees in principle with the proposal to standardize on mostly traditional characters (fantizi, or 簡體字).

If it's true, and the government follows through, this is major news. For the past 51 years, China has standardized its writing and printing systems using 2,751 simplified characters (jiantizi, 简体字) that are easier to remember and write than their traditional counterparts used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea and elsewhere in East Asia. Most of the simplified characters were invented by high-level scholarly committees in 1956 and 1964 as part of an effort to spread literacy among China's largely rural and uneducated population. The inset photo (from a Chinese language primer hosted by Gonzaga University in Washington) shows the stroke order for a collection of simplified characters. The simplified version of "gate" is the first character in the second row.

The simplification movement has always been a bone of contention for purists of written Chinese, who treasure the traditional characters for their beauty and connection to ancient Chinese literature and history. Even in China, the simplified characters have been weakened by the spread of Taiwanese and Hong Kong media in the 1980s and 1990s, along with the rise of what I call "historical nationalism". Some younger Chinese we know say that they prefer the traditional characters. I suspect that this sentiment could be one reason why the proposal is now apparently being taken more seriously by the government in Beijing.

According to the article, the proposal calls for traditional forms to be adopted among member countries, except for certain simplified forms which were used in antiquity. For instance, the traditional character 門 ("gate") was simplified to 门 by some calligraphers in dynastic times, and this was adopted as the official simplified character form in China in the 1950s and 1960s (with Mao's blessing -- as Richard Curt Kraus has noted in his 1991 book "Brushes With Power," Mao was a great fan of some classical literature and calligraphy, and directed the simplification committees to use these alternate historical forms when possible). Because of this historical usage, the character 门 would supposedly remain in the proposed international standardization scheme.

However, many of the thousands of other simplified forms used in China for the past four or five decades would allegedly be discarded, as they have no historical precedent.

This is far from being a done deal. This is second-hand news, and I suspect many of the facts were not checked with the relevant authorities in China. Additionally, the article notes that more discussions still need to take place at the ninth meeting of the International Chinese Character Seminar next year to iron out key details of the proposal, and get more buy-in from Vietnam and overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asia.

Lastly, I am skeptical that the government in China is seriously considering such a move in the near future. The implications for China's educational system -- not to mention the local publishing industry, software developers, and government bureaus -- would be too much. A billion people have been brought up learning the simplified forms, and almost all books, magazines, newspapers, computer programs, street signs, manuals, and recent records created in China use simplified characters. The complexity and expense associated with such an effort would be unparalleled, and at the end of the day, it would be a lot easier to just live with the simplified characters.