Chinese character stroke order

Learning Chinese characters is perhaps the most difficult aspect of studying Mandarin. It's not just a matter of memorizing what a character looks like, the constituent parts (known as radicals), or the etymology. There is also a fairly precise "stroke order" that governs writing. It can be very frustrating for Western students.

I was reminded of this as my young daughter attempts to learn some traditional Chinese characters, which are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and some overseas Chinese communities (China uses simplified characters, see my essay here for a quick history). Her inclination is to write the characters any way she pleases -- much like I did when I started studying Mandarin many years ago -- but my wife and I had to correct her. The general stroke order is top to bottom, left to right, but there are some exceptions. We weren't helped by a cheap Taiwanese children's character booklet which had the incorrect stroke order for several basic characters -- for instance, the instructions for xiao (小, small) had her starting with the left dian instead of the central stroke. I am hardly an expert on characters, but it still seemed strange to me. When my wife saw it, she was puzzled, too. "That's not the way we learned it," she frowned.

She was right. I found a great online resource, the YellowBridge Online Character Dictionary, which has a very useful lookup function and animated character tool which shows the proper stroke order. It backed up my wife in almost every case. Still, as she tried it out, she was reminded that there are some alternate writing methods for certain characters, such as guo (國, country), below, which places the top right dian second to last in the stroke order, instead of near the beginning, which is how many people in Taiwan write it in order to save time.

The Chinese media responds to Tibet with tough talk

A few weeks ago I made a few predictions about the challenges the Chinese government would face over the Tibetan unrest in the runup to the Olympics:

... most Chinese do not sympathize with the Tibetan independence movement. According to the New York Times, Chinese-language news outlets are not reporting the riots in Lhasa. But when the news starts to leak out into unregulated, free-wheeling discussion forums and blogs in China, watch out. I believe many Chinese will demand that authorities crack down even harder in Tibet ...

The Chinese blog chatter started almost immediately. You can see a translated sample here, keeping in mind that this is the relatively tame stuff. And according to today's New York Times, now the Chinese media has weighed in, and not surprisingly, the government is playing up the nationalism angle and trying to look tough to its Chinese readers:

For two weeks, as Chinese security forces have tried to extinguish continuing Tibetan protests, Chinese officials and state news media have tried to demonstrate the party’s resolve to people like Ms. Meng. They have blasted the foreign news media as biased against China, castigated the Dalai Lama as a terrorist “jackal” and called for a “people’s war” to fight separatism in Tibet.

If the tough tactics have startled the outside world, the Communist Party for now seems more concerned with rallying domestic opinion — both by responding to the deep strains of nationalism in Chinese society and by stoking it. Playing to national pride, and national insecurities, the party has used censorship and propaganda to position itself as defender of the motherland, and at the same time to block any examination of Tibetan grievances or its own performance in the crisis.

What I also found interesting in the NYT report was the reference to overseas Chinese getting involved, by joining the anti-Tibet, anti-foreign media online crusade.

Former Berkman fellow and CNN journalist Rebecca MacKinnon has lots of commentary and links on her blog. See Tibet... is discussion possible? and Anti-CNN and the Tibet information war.

The wildcard for Tibetan dissent: The Internet

Tibet's capital, Lhasa, is under a curfew after Tibetans fought Chinese security forces today. The New York Times has the report. I've been reading about monks making protest marches throughout Tibet, but this is the first report of violence that I've seen.

The timing is notable. China is trying very hard to pull off a controversy-free Olympics, and preemptively cracking down on a range of potential problems -- such as foreign performers showing support for Tibetans -- seems to have been one of the PSB strategies. This, and the fact that Tibetans know China will be closely watched in the runup to the Olympics by the outside world, are two key factors contributing to the unrest, in my opinion.

The wildcard is the impact of the Internet on events in China. Internet-driven dissent is a problem for Chinese authorities in urban regions, but most Tibetans don't have Internet access, and most Chinese do not sympathize with the Tibetan independence movement. According to the New York Times, Chinese-language news outlets are not reporting the riots in Lhasa. But when the news starts to leak out into unregulated, free-wheeling discussion forums and blogs in China, watch out. I believe many Chinese will demand that authorities crack down even harder in Tibet, which will put the PSB and the government in a tight spot. China wants to put on a friendly face for the Olympics in Beijing, and a bloodbath in Tibet -- spread by pictures and video uploaded to the Internet -- would result in international condemnation and protests at the Olympics.

Fifteen years ago, China could easily hide news of protests and riots. In the age of widespread Internet connectivity and cheap digital cameras, it's just not possible.

(The picture below is from the Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy, India, and shows armed troops massing at Drepung, Tibet, last year after the Dalai Lama received the Congressional Gold Medal. Drepung is the location of one of the monasteries where monks have been protesting.)

Generation G in Taiwan: Age gaps in Internet usage and blogging

On The Digital Media Machine blog, I recently discussed Generation G -- the under-40s who belong to the video game generation. I wrote:

Most people in this demographic grew up with games, and many of them still play now. They are familiar with gaming conventions relating to movement, exploration, cooperation, competition, and communication. Additionally, interaction with video games from an early age has created a foundation of familiarity and interest in computing technologies.

While I noted that more than 80 million people in the United States belong to this demographic, I did not get into the international dimension. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there were nearly 4.5 billion people under the age of 40 as of mid-2007. Obviously, many of those in developing countries may never have seen a video game console or touched a computer, but in other countries parts of Europe and Asia, video games, computers, and the Internet are a way of life for people in this age group.

The ESWN blog found a report that supports the Generation G hypothesis in Taiwan. The United Daily News (lian he bao, 聯合報) reported the results of a telephone survey of 15,007 people from all over Taiwan that polled them on their 'Net habits, and broke down the results by age. The inset graphic is from the United Daily News website, and shows the data. Not surprisingly, almost 100% of the youngest bracket (aged 12 to 20) were Internet users. Most of the 21-30 and 31-40 groups were also online. But there was a steep dropoff from the 30-somethings to the 40-somethings, and just over one in five of the over-50s were online:

Age 12-20: 99.8%
Age 21-30: 94.4%
Age 31-40: 84.2%
Age 41-50: 58.6%
Age 51+: 21.9%

The survey also asked about blogging, and I was quite surprised to see how active Taiwan's teenagers were in this respect: Nearly half of the 12-20 year olds said they blog, and about 30% of 20-somethings do the same. 30-somethings in Taiwan are far less likely to blog, with just 12.5% saying that they maintain one. This matches with my own experience -- most of my Taiwanese friends are in their 30s and 40s, and I only know one who has a blog.

The pitfalls of automated Chinese-English translation

I've talked about issues related to simplified and traditional Chinese before, but the Ritter's Life blog brings up an issue I hadn't considered: Bad words cropping up in the English translations of otherwise mundane simplified Chinese phrases:

In "Gan: whodunnit, and how, and why?" (5/31/2006), I explained one of the sources of this phenomenon: several Chinese characters pronounced GAN1 or GAN4 -- and meaning such widely disparate things as "dry," "calendrical sign," "to do," and much else beside -- all got collapsed into one simplified character: 干. This has led to enormous confusion, especially when people who know next to no English rely on machine translation software to convert Chinese into English. The chaos caused by this combination of circumstances is vastly exacerbated by the fact that this little, three-stroke symbol also has a vulgar meaning when pronounced in the fourth tone ...

The "vulgar word" begins with an F and ends with a K, and has led to some bizarre signage in restaurants and department stores all over China, says Ritter. The Chinese in one example shown on his blog is a listing for fried cabbage with dried shrimps, but the English translation is quite twisted. There are many other examples (with photos) on the blog, and Ritter and his readers have actually identified the Chinese software programs that are likely responsible for the messed-up translations.

You may laugh when you see the signs, but this simple three-stroke character (see inset photo) has probably sunk more than a few international business deals when used incorrectly in translated correspondence or email.

(Thanks to ESWN for the reference)

Chinese media, international news, and foreign policy

Today's New York Times has a great article on Chinese media coverage of international news issues and events. The article notes that while domestic Chinese journalism is in the midst of a "golden age," foreign news is generally sourced from a handful of state-run news organizations that have foreign correspondents, including Xinhua/NCNA (新華社). As a result, says the article, Chinese audiences get a heavy dose of propaganda when they read about international events:

News media critics say one result of this lack of vigorous independent reporting is that what most Chinese news readers know of the world closely conforms with government policy and propaganda.

“By and large, China’s international reporting is a mirror of China’s diplomacy,” said Yu Guoming, a journalism professor at People’s University in Beijing. “As government mouthpieces, their international reports are linked with the government’s diplomacy. It’s not free, so what we’re really talking about is China’s diplomacy, not its media.”

This is a major problem for China and Chinese audiences, but it can't last, considering the problems Chinese authorities have controlling the Internet and networked communications.

On the other hand, as long-time readers of Harvard Extended know, this media/diplomacy connection in China's state-run press that allows observers to better understand the policies and actions of the Chinese government. Political and military experts have long used Xinhua and other official news sources to fathom internal power struggles (see my description of Beijingology), and I used a computer content analysis of Xinhua content from 1977 to 1993 to gauge Chinese policies toward Vietnam during the Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) era.

In any case, the NYT article is a good introduction to the topic of international news censorship in China. To learn more about domestic news in China and the challenges Chinese reporters face, I recommend reading some of the reports filed by Edward Cody of the Washington Post over the past few years.

Related Posts:

Censorship in China meets reality of networked communications

Another reason China should fear the 'Net: A million people with camera phones

Watershed event: Amateur riot video circulates in China

Freezing Point tests China's official stance on history and press freedom

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.

Related Posts:

Censorship in China meets reality of networked communications

Another reason China should fear the 'Net: A million people with camera phones

Watershed event: Amateur riot video circulates in China

Freezing Point tests China's official stance on history and press freedom

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.

Pulling the plug on the Chinese Internet

Yesterday on Computerworld, I blogged about China's latest preemptive Internet damage-control mechanism: Pulling the plug on entire data centers. Here's what I had to say about the episode, and its causes:

Despite regularly updating and strengthening the rules that govern the press and Internet communications, free-wheeling discussion on a wide range of topics continues to flourish.

Until now. Authorities in China have done something which I previously considered very unlikely: They are actually pulling the plug on the Internet. Or at least parts of it -- the troublesome parts. Data centers are literally being taken offline, because "inappropriate content" has been found on some servers hosted in them. Of course, such actions affect other Websites whose servers are hosted in these facilities, and irritate Chinese users.

Inappropriate content is nothing new to the Chinese Internet. This begs the question: Why are Chinese authorities taking such drastic steps to remove this content from the Internet? The reason is the upcoming Communist Party Congress in Beijing, which, according to China's official news agency, is slated to "mobilize the entire Party and the people of all ethnic groups to emancipate their minds, stick to the reform and opening up, advance scientific development, promote social harmony and strive together for a new victory over the building of a well-off society in an all-round way and the new development of building socialism with Chinese characteristics." Some highlights of the event include electing a new "Central Commission for Discipline Inspection," listening to endless speeches, joining banquets, and doing whatever else senior Party members like to do when they get together. While undoubtedly extremely boring, it's not that much different than what usually happens at these gatherings, which take place every five years.

Except for one thing: The Internet in China is not just an irritant anymore. It's a force to be reckoned with. There are more than 100 million additional Chinese Internet users in 2007 than there were during the last Party congress in 2002, and this population is far more comfortable using blogs, forums, and other tools (ranging from poems delivered by mobile phones to online games) to protest various domestic and international issues.

Beijing is not taking any chances. The government has the authority and the will to pull the plug on the Internet, even if it means angering their own people and upsetting 'Net businesses across China.

This type of heavy-handed approach can't be used whenever China gets nervous about discussion and criticism of the Party and state -- it will only frustrate more people, and make the government look even worse. Nevertheless, we may see similar actions next year. That's because the Chinese propaganda apparatus has another major event to worry about -- the 2008 Beijing Olympics -- and they don't want negative public buzz marring the competition. China is trying to clean up the city in time for the arrival of hordes of foreigners and the international media, but they will have a much tougher time cleaning up the Internet.

Back from State of Play V: Conference recap

For the past two weeks, I've been meaning to write about the State of Play V conference in Singapore. I gave a brief report about the opening night's entertainment (a documentary about Second Life) but I also wanted to talk about what happened over the following two days of the conference. It was the first time I attended State of Play, and it really was an eye-opening experience for me.

I only become aware of the extensive academic interest in virtual worlds relatively recently, through my Terra Nova experience, and reading Edward Castronova's Synthetic Worlds, R.L. Taylor's Play Between Worlds, and Nick Yee's MMORPG research. Many virtual world researchers were on hand to discuss their work in Singapore. My panel included Henrik Bennetsen, a Stanford researcher who has spent the better part of six months inside Second Life; Aleks Krotoski, a Guardian columnist and University of Surrey PhD candidate who is studying social networks and online social influence; and anthropologist Thomas Malaby, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who is in the midst of writing an ethnography of Linden Lab and its relationship to Second Life. I also met Ted Tschang, a Singapore Management University professor who has conducted some very interesting research into video game development.

The panel went well. It was entitled "Understanding Virtual World Inhabitants", and was described as follows:

As the virtual world landscape matures, industry and academic researchers are developing systematic methods of measuring user behaviors and understanding resident attitudes. This panel explores the value of quantitative and qualitative approaches to such investigations.

SoP V co-organizer Dan Hunter led the panel, which was in presentation format with a Q&A at the end. The others gave recaps of their respective research methodologies. I talked about the qualitative and quantitative approaches used by journalists, speaking from my perspective as a Computerworld editor and graduate student conducting media-related research at the Harvard Extension School. My main points: There is some stellar coverage relating to virtual worlds in the popular press and industry publications (I pointed to Wired and the New Yorker's Will Wright interview), but for the most part, journalists are quite limited in terms of the amount of time they can spend conducting research, restrictions relating to length and editorial focus, and problems finding and using quantitative research. Sensationalism, generalization, and poor use of statistical data are problems in many countries. I was able to give several examples from the American, Chinese, and Taiwanese media.

I concluded that the news media will play a major role in shaping the attitudes and understanding of the 90+ percent of the world's population that currently has no concept of social or gaming virtual worlds. I also revealed the results of some database searches I conducted, which support this conclusion: According to LexisNexis Academic, the number of references to "virtual world" or "virtual worlds" in "major US and world publications" (consisting of English-language newspapers and magazines from all parts of the world) has trended as follows, over the last three years:

July 2005: 45 results
July 2006: 81 results
July 2007: 199 results

I also searched Factiva for 虚拟世界 (xu1ni3shi4jie4), the simplified Chinese for "virtual world") in all languages, all companies, and all regions (which indexed results from publications in China, plus a few in Hong Kong and Singapore), and came up with the following numbers:

All of 2004: 271 results
All of 2005: 553 results
All of 2006: 624 results
2007 to June 30: 472 results

Assuming that the higher numbers reflect increased coverage, as opposed to the databases including more news sources, the data indicates that more people are indeed being exposed to virtual world-related concepts through the mass media. It will be interesting to see how their perspectives of virtual worlds and acceptable behavior in these worlds is shaped by what they see in the news in the years to come.

Besides the academics, State of Play V had large legal and industry contingents. The legal focus should come as no surprise, considering the history of the conference and its organizers, which include the Harvard Law School's Berkman Center, Yale Law School, and New York Law School. The industry representation was dominated by people and companies working with social virtual worlds -- Second Life, There.com, HiPihi -- as well as several marketing and consulting firms. I've already talked about There.com on Computerworld, and hope to discuss HiPiHi on a later post here or on my Computerworld blog.

There are also supposed to be "video timecapsules" posted to the SoP V website at some future date. Henrik and I taped an interesting, half-hour discussion about Second Life, emerging software and hardware technologies, and issues relating to media coverage of virtual worlds. I'll post a link when it goes online.

Many thanks to Dan Hunter, Aaron Delwiche, and the staff of Harvard's Berkman Center for making my trip to Singapore possible!

The Homer Simpson/Xinhua incident: The take-down is explained!

I have an interesting follow-up to last week's entry, Homer Simpson's brain, or why Xinhua continues to have a credibility problem. One of Xinhua's English "polishers" (Xinhua's title for copy editors) has revealed on his blog how Xinhuanet was notified of the mistake: He phoned them up and asked them about the inclusion of Homer Simpson's X-Ray in a serious health article. The conversation that followed is quite amusing.

The blogger behind Beijing Newspeak also discusses the prevailing institutional attitude at Xinhua. It's a place where departmental rivalries matter more than editorial quality or Xinhua's overseas image, apparently:

The entire organisational structure of Xinhua is flawed to the core. Each department within Xinhua exists independently, each scoring performance points for the release of reams of often meaningless words, or losing points for an individual’s mistake eg writing China and Taiwan in a headline. The departments compete with each other to secure as high a place as possible in the end-of-year league table which ensures there is absolutely zero cooperation between them. It is each for himself which means that if Xinhuanet uses a picture of Homer Simpson’s brain to illustrate a MS story, and in doing so tarnishes the reputation of the whole news agency, no one cares. As long as it doesn’t affect our department. Which is why it took a phone call from a foreign polisher, whose pay and reputation is not affected by the points system, to cause the removal of the picture. Many of the Xinhua “leaders” do not read English or simply regard the non-Chinese services as trivial.

I encourage anyone who is interested in the inner workings of China's state-run news agency to read the many other posts in Beijing Newspeak. The author has a lot of interesting observations about the New China News Agency and Chinese journalism. It's one of the few accounts I've seen from a foreign editor working at Xinhua, outside of the recollections published in Robin Porter's 1992 book, which date from the late 1970s and 1980s. Some starting points: Transformers: Xinhua reporters in disguise ("I have come across a number of occasions on which Xinhua reporters in the provincial bureaus around the country have treated breaking news with contempt") and Practising what they preach? China’s journalists’ association on bun conundrum ("It is common practice to surf local news websites, copy some titillating nugget and upload it to the central department. I have seen some of my colleagues rightly reject stories by regional journalists that are based on one comment from an Internet forum.")

Homer Simpson's brain, or why Xinhua continues to have a credibility problem

The New China News Agency (Xinhua, 新華社) has a credibility problem. It's not just because NCNA is a state-run news agency that publishes propaganda alongside news. It's also because basic editorial processes are so broken that a "file photo" of Homers Simpson's brain can show up alongside a serious article about multiple sclerosis, and remain there for days (it was not removed until August 3, four days after it was initially posted).

Now, you may chuckle at what appears to be a one-off mistake, but it reflects major editorial problems at China's official news agency. This is not just a harmless error (or prank) by a single employee -- it's very likely that at least two other people were involved, and the editorial processes that are supposed to catch such mistakes either failed to work or are not even in place at Xinhua.

I work for a major technology news publisher. Multiple people contribute to and review each article that appears online, before and after the initial publication process. It can't be much different at Xinhua. Aside from writing and copy editing the article, someone -- probably a writer, or the editor "Han Lin" -- had to choose the photo to be included with it. Someone else may have helped prepare the photo for the Xinhua website (resizing it, placing it on the appropriate server, etc.). A third person -- in a normal newsroom, that would be a more senior editor, or someone directly responsible for the website updates -- probably vetted it before it went live, or immediately after it went live. Other employees almost certainly browsed it after publication.

And it never occurred to any of them that the X-ray seemed unusual. I mean, c'mon! Even if you've never seen the Simpsons, wouldn't an X-ray of an oddly shaped skull with a serious overbite and walnut-sized brain warrant a little extra discussion or examination?

But wait, there's more. Since the publication of the article on July 30 (three days ago), people have noticed. Other media outlets have noticed, including Computerworld. It's hard to believe no one at Xinhua has realized the gaffe. Maybe no one checks the Xinhua email inbox?

This is not the first time something like this has happened. China's state-run media has lifted articles off the 'Net before, and has sometimes reprinted hoaxes as news -- as evidenced by the fiasco caused by a 2002 Onion article about the U.S. Congress threatening to relocate the Capitol. The Internet has made it much easier for careless or lazy journalists to copy and paste, and Xinhua's weak QA processes make it easier for plagiarized content, hoaxes, and false or exaggerated information to make it past the gatekeepers.

But even before the World Wide Web appeared, the English-language service had a credibility problem. While viewed as an authoritative source of information about Chinese policies (which is one of the reasons I used it as the basis for my thesis research), Western audiences did not trust its news output, partially owing to its stated propaganda mission, and partially because of quality issues, ranging from poorly written articles to long delays in printing coverage of important events. Since the 1980s, Xinhua/NCNA has invested a great deal of money and effort into making itself a "world news agency" (see Robin Porter's 1992 book, Reporting the News from China, and Won Ho Chang's 1989 history, Mass Media in China: The History and the Future). But as long as the propaganda mission persists, and editorial quality is neglected, there is little chance the English-language service will achieve widespread international respectability.

A Crisis for China's propaganda apparatus?

I swear, I could maintain a separate blog devoted to Edward Cody and his coverage of developments in China. The Washington Post journalist frequently reports on media-related issues in China, giving me lots of fodder for further analysis and commentary. His latest dispatch is no exception. He examines how, in an age of rapid change and increased openness in Chinese media, old-guard propagandists are faring. It turns out not so well, at least in some regards. Cody's article states that propaganda chief Li Changchun (李長春) was recently slapped down by President Hu Jintao after suggesting that an anti-CCP article be suppressed. The article also suggests that the credibility of the government propaganda apparatus is very low.

Nonetheless, the central government maintains a great deal of control over the type and tone of coverage appearing in mainstream news outlets, particularly in the runup to the 2008 Olympics and the 17th Party Congress this fall:

After a meeting of top Beijing propaganda officials, for instance, the capital's newspaper editors and television news directors last week were handed a list of newly off-limits subjects, Beijing journalists reported. The list included food safety as well as riots, fires, deadly auto accidents and bloody murder cases, they said.

The rest of the article is an interesting read. It discusses the rise of sensationalism in Chinese mass media and the spread of anti-Hu Jintao dissent on the Internet.

Mandarin Chinese gaming vocabulary in Taiwan and China

I am a proficient Mandarin speaker. I lived in Taiwan for six years, studied for more than two years at the Taipei Language Institute, and traveled extensively throughout mainland China. I have family members from Taiwan and China, and we try to speak Mandarin with our kids as much as possible (a difficult proposition, considering both are more and more inclined to speak English -- I'll try to blog about this sometime in the next few months).

Anyway, even though I am proficient in Mandarin, I have not achieved fluency. I often have to learn specialized vocabulary lists prior to conducting interviews or preparing for visits to Asia. In advance of my trip to Singapore to participate in the State of Play V conference, I wanted to get a handle on the Mandarin terminology used to describe virtual worlds and popular gaming platforms. These are words that do not appear in my Oxford putonghua dictionary, so I asked a friend and former colleague of mine to help translate some of the Mandarin used to describe the videogame industry and related software concepts.

It was interesting to see her list. I recognized many of the characters right away, and many terms made perfect sense -- these phrases are often direct translations of the modern English expressions, such as massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG, 大型多人線上角色扮演遊戲, da4xing2duo1ren2xian4shang4jiao3se4ban4yan3you2xi4).

Others were readable, but were clearly not character-for-word equivalents. According to my wife, some of these terms may have been derived from classic Chinese literature, or older translations from foreign sources -- for instance, the term for "dungeon" is 地下城 (di4xia4cheng2), lit. "underground castle," or 魔洞 (mo2dong4), lit. "monster's cave." It's also interesting to see how -- in certain cases -- the terminology has split in Taiwan and China.

The list:

3d (3d image): (3D 影像）or 三度空間影像
video game engine: 電玩遊戲引擎
Software platform: 軟體平台 (Taiwan); 軟體平台 (China)
Hardware platform: 硬體平台 (Taiwan); 軟件平台 (China)
Tolkien: 托爾金 (Taiwan and China)
Lord of the Rings: 魔戒
Gaming experience: 遊戲體驗 or 遊戲經驗 (in different contexts)
Players: 玩遊戲者 （could also be 玩家）
Gamers: 玩家
Fans:（電玩）迷
Massively multiplayer online game (MMOG, MMO game): 大型多人線上遊戲
Massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG): 大型多人線上角色扮演遊戲
Subscription model: 訂購模式
Micro-transactions: 微交易
Virtual goods: 虛擬物品
Dungeons: 地下城 or 魔洞
player-vs-player: 玩家對玩家
Online account: 線上帳戶
Username: 使用者名稱
Online community: 線上社群
Beta: 測試版
Concurrent users: 同時上線使用者
Game industry: 電玩業
Internet cafe: 網咖 (Taiwan), 網吧 (China)
Prepaid cards: 預付卡 (Taiwan), 預付費卡 (China)
Prepaid playing time: 預付遊戲時間

Attending State of Play V in Singapore/HiPiHi

About two months ago, I was invited to participate in a panel at the State of Play V conference in Singapore, and I have just confirmed my participation after sorting out the travel-related details. This is the third public speaking engagement I've had in the past year that touches upon virtual worlds and 3D media. The title of the State of Play panel: Understanding Virtual World Inhabitants. From the program:

As the virtual world landscape matures, industry and academic researchers are developing systematic methods of measuring user behaviors and understanding resident attitudes. This panel explores the value of quantitative and qualitative approaches to such investigations.

This is a chance to discuss the role of the media in shaping public opinion about virtual worlds and their inhabitants, as well as the expectations of new residents. There is also a lot to say about quantitative research and data relating to virtual worlds and behaviors in virtual worlds. These are topics which I have discussed several times in the past year on this blog and elsewhere.

The rest of the program looks interesting, too -- the list of panelists and speakers includes a few people from the Chinese gaming industry, which has grown very rapidly in the past five years. I've heard that there will be a screening of a documentary about Chinese "Gold Farming" at the conference.

As part of my preparations for the conference, I've been reading up on the state of gaming and virtual worlds in China. There's been lots of news about the incredible popularity of World of Warcraft in China, and the virtual demonstration that I remarked upon last year, but there are some new products that are worth mentioning, too, most notably the emerging VW platform, HiPiHi.

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to try out the beta version of HiPiHi -- like many software products designed for the Chinese market, it's PC only, and my Mac is too old to effectively use Boot Camp or Parallels.

Over the next few weeks I'll try to log some of the reading and other information that I am gathering as the conference approaches. The event takes place August 19-22, so I am going to combine it with a family trip to Taiwan, which will also give me a chance to do a little pre-conference research about the Taiwanese gaming scene. This is not a work-supported trip, but I was able to secure a small travel grant through my Harvard association, and the other out-of-pocket expenses are worth it -- this is an exciting field, and the conference seems like a fascinating opportunity.

Terra Nova recap

I've been meaning to put together a short list of the topics that I discussed on Terra Nova during my stint last month as guest author. I mentioned a few of them here -- most notably, the interview with Rebecca Nesson on her Harvard Law School/Extension School teaching experience in Second Life -- but there were a few other excerpts from posts and comments that I submitted to Terra Nova which I also want to record here, along with links back to the full versions.

In addition, I am including links to a few interesting responses that others made, but unfortunately cannot include every one -- a few threads received several dozen responses apiece!

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Comment: Virtual worlds, MMOs, Taiwan and China:

Issues that potentially limit virtual/electronic interaction are China's constantly evolving regulations and restrictions on Internet use in the country, and the ability of authorities to close down local websites, block individual sites or domains overseas, and even monitor traffic and messages for certain characters and phrases that the government doesn't like (e.g., names of dissidents, "Taiwan independence", etc.). These controls -- part of the so-called "Great Firewall of China" -- are only partially effective, but potentially limit the ability of local Internet users to see information that goes against the official line. Local media outlets that publish alternate interpretations of Dynastic or Republican history can be shut down, while Taiwanese and foreign sources can be blocked. ...

The other issue which limits exchange between Taiwan and China are the different character sets in use in the two countries. Standard spoken Mandarin in China (putonghua, or "common tongue") is very similar to Mandarin spoken in Taiwan (Guoyu, or "national language") but Chinese use simplified characters (jiantizi) which impacts typing, search, software installation, Web design, and game design.

What this all means for game and VW developers is that they cannot simply sell and support the same product in Taiwan and China. Localization is required, and in China, special sensitivities have to be taken into account.

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Post: Second Life's infrastructure issues prompt an open letter to Linden Lab

My follow-up comment: "I don't believe Linden has to worry about residents abandoning ship. Where would they go?"

• (Tripp's response)
• (thoreau 's response)

My second follow-up comment: Proprietary virtual worlds/"Is giving up SL for another virtual world an option?"

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Post: Evaluating virtual population projections:

... Can we expect the number of users/residents for individual virtual worlds to double every few months, or every year? Will hundreds of millions of people also have a virtual presence in just four-and-a-half years, as Gartner suggests? If not, when will a majority of "active Internet users" also be active virtual users?

In my opinion, growth in virtual platforms will continue, but at more restrained levels, owing to demographic usage patterns and technical limitations. For instance, in the United States, converting 78 million baby boomers to active MMO gamers or SL participants will be difficult. Most boomers are well below retirement age, and finding the time to join virtual worlds in between existing family and work responsibilities is difficult. Moreover, the boomers, and for that matter, people of all ages already have ample leisure time distractions, including television and traditional Internet use. And even if millions of boomers suddenly wanted to plunge into virtual worlds, perhaps attracted by some killer virtual app or community, would they be able to do so? ...

My follow-up comment: Gartner virtual world projections:

"I am very interested in seeing what types of SL competitors emerge, and how the features and functionality will differ. Ease-of-use will be critical to building support for new VWs, not just in terms of the client UI, but also for the 3D building tools. The company that develops a tool that makes avatar or 3D object creation as easy as Blogger makes creating a website will usher in a massive wave of adoption and interest. I am also interested in seeing how standards affect competition."

• (response from Mike Sellers)
• (my response to Mike and others)
• (Mike's second response)

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Post: 3D media in 3D worlds:

... I mention these examples to illustrate the shift in popular views of 3D animation. This technology was once remarkable. It is now so common that it is taken for granted. Hollywood movies, kids' programming on television, and even advertisements are the most conspicuous examples, but these may soon be joined by a crop of next-generation 3D media formats that are being developed by academic labs, hobbyists, and a few adventurous media companies.  Examples include Video Mods, NewsAtSeven, and Machinima. I recently wrote an essay about these and other emerging media technologies, "Meeting the Second Wave: How Technology, Demographics, and Usage Trends Will Drive the Next Generation of Media Evolution," but what I am interested in discussing with the Terra Nova community is how these formats, programs, and characters might be integrated with virtual world experiences.

We know that people make friends, form teams, and respond to pitches for products and services within virtual worlds, paralleling experiences in the real world. Is it reasonable to assume that other real-world communications habits -- such as listening to, watching, or interacting with mass media -- will be transferred to virtual spaces in the years to come? If so, what 3D formats will be able to gain traction, and how will the personalization options and creative freedoms available in virtual worlds lead to new formats and usage patterns? In Second Life, there have been some very creative marketing experiments using interactive 3D buildings and objects. But why don't we see Pororo, Buzz Lightyear, the cast of Red vs. Blue, and other 3D "stars" in Second Life or other virtual worlds?

• (response by Ren Reynolds)
• (my response to Ren)

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Post: Virtual reality and higher education: Another perspective:

... There are other virtual world/virtual reality technologies [besides Second Life] that can support instruction and classroom activities, and this week we will get a perspective from someone who is using these alternate technologies to teach. The interview is with Aaron Walsh, a programmer and instructor who has used modding software and other tools to create VR classrooms for courses at the Woods College of Advancing Studies at Boston College (the inset photo is from one of his experiments, and depicts "students gathering in the virtual Egyptian environment"). His VR classes are part of a larger effort that he is leading to develop a standards-based educational platform called Immersive Education. ...

My follow-up comment:

One interesting aspect of using WoW or Unreal Engine as the basis for classroom sessions, is that both platforms are optimized for fighting/killing/combat. That's not a bad thing -- it certainly serves as a hook for younger students, potentially flattens out the learning curve, and helps with customization-related tasks, thanks to the large developer/support base. Nonetheless, it seems to me that using these tools for instruction is a square peg/round hole type of situation. Of course, instructors can neuter the fighting nature of these platforms, while emphasizing the engines' communication, teamwork, and design capabilities.

Second Life, on the other hand, is a platform optimized for creativity. That can be a disruptive force, but it also appeals to many institutions. It allows customization of environments and objects, and lets students be themselves in a way that might not be possible with many gaming-based worlds.

At some point there may be virtual worlds or VR platforms that are optimized for education. My question for the group: What does "optimized for education" mean to you? What capabilities, characteristics, tools, cost considerations, etc., are most important to teaching students in a virtual world or space?

• (response from illovich on what "optimized for education" means)
• (Aaron Walsh's response to illovich and others)

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Overall, the Terra Nova blogging experience was a good one. I've blogged about 3D technology, MMOs, and virtual worlds on my I, Lamont blog for three years, and have sometimes talked about virtual worlds on Harvard Extended and my Computerworld blog, but my month on Terra Nova was a great opportunity to discuss and debate these issues with a formidable audience of academics, experts, and enthusiasts.

Many thanks to Aaron Delwiche, Dan Hunter, and Greg Lastowka for extending the invitation -- and I hope to keep on contributing to the newer threads in the future!

Beijingology, democracy, and "socialism with Chinese characteristics"

As part of my thesis presentation on Wednesday evening, I mentioned "Beijingology," a qualitative methodology used by China-watchers to identify and analyze shifts in official policy. It involves examining documents issued by the central government -- including state-run media reports -- to look for hints of change. Such hints may be the use of a certain word or the reappearance/disappearance of a certain official who is known for promoting a specific policy. Roger Garside, a British writer who lived in Beijing in the late 1970s, did not use the term Beijingology (or Pekingology) but he did note that local Beijing residents and foreign residents used such techniques to fathom CCP power struggles and government policy shifts:

"Small changes in emphasis, the reformulation of a set phrase, the appearance of a new slogan or the quiet dropping of an old one occurred only by design and reflected a political development whose meaning one must search for." -- [Roger Garside, Coming Alive: China after Mao (New York: McGraw Hill, 1981), 3.]

Edward Cody, the Washington Post's China-based correspondent, has employed Beijingology to describe a supposed internal political debate.

A little background is in order, for those Harvard Extended readers who may not be familiar with the political situation in China. In a nutshell, Communism is dead, and market forces rule China, yet its leaders -- the Chinese Communist Party and its members -- still cling to the notion of "socialism with Chinese characteristics."

Or do they? Cody cites two commentaries published in official media (The People's Daily) as signs that the facade is cracking, but loyalists can still be found to promote the status quo:

"The path of democratic socialism is not able to save China," said Xin Xiangyang of the government-sponsored Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. "Only the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics can make China flourish."

The commentaries, by contesting the idea that democracy would be good for China, suggested some within the party are pushing for political reforms to match the dramatic economic loosening that has taken place during the past 25 years.

Any sign of doctrinal differences has become particularly sensitive as leaders maneuver for advantage before the 17th Party Congress next fall, when President Hu Jintao hopes to cement his hold on power and anoint possible successors in the party hierarchy. In particular, analysts here said, he is expected to name his own loyalists to positions of power to replace the holdover proteges of former president Jiang Zemin.

In what was seen as a manifestation of the maneuvering, Shao Hua, the widow of Mao Zedong's late son Mao Anqing, published a front-page article in the May 18 People's Daily heaping praise on Jiang for what she described as warm-hearted concern for the legendary Chinese leader's descendants. Political observers in Beijing saw the article as noteworthy because, amid the effusive praise for Jiang, it never mentioned Hu.

Whether on doctrine or personnel, most differences of opinion within the party have remained private, forcing analysts to look for meaning in such indirect indications of what is happening behind closed doors. But a pair of essays in party-sanctioned intellectual publications early this year -- one by Xie Tao, a former Renmin University vice president, and another by Zhou Ruijun, a former People's Daily editor -- openly called for democratic reforms as the best way forward for China. Xie specifically referred to Northern Europe's democratic socialist systems as a source of inspiration.

I tried to find the English versions of the commentary on the People's Daily website, but was unsuccessful. However, I was able to find out more about one of the academics who wrote the commentaries in question, Xin Xiangyan. According to this article, Xin is a research fellow at CASS specializing in Marxism, and promotes a "socialist core value system," which "consist[s] of Marxism, Socialism with Chinese characteristics, patriotism, the spirit of reform and innovation and the socialist sense of honor and disgrace."


Related Posts:

Censorship in China meets reality of networked communications

Another reason China should fear the 'Net: A million people with camera phones

Watershed event: Amateur riot video circulates in China

Freezing Point tests China's official stance on history and press freedom

Five reasons why Chinese authorities won't be able to regulate the 'Net

Investigative journalists for hire in China

Edward Cody of the Washington Post has once again dug up a fascinating story about the new rules of journalism in China: Professional journalists who hire themselves out to interested parties to uncover and report -- via the Web -- on scandals or perceived injustices. From the article:

Xu [Xiang] and Li Xinde, another Web reporter for hire, said they take fees from those who can afford to pay but also investigate for free if victims cannot raise any money. Often they ask only for their expenses, such as plane fare and hotel costs, they said.

"It's not strange for the self-supported Web-site reporters to ask someone to cover transportation expenses," Li said, "and usually the reporters clearly state that on their Web sites or in e-mails."

Party censorship also extends to the Internet, which is policed by an elaborate computer system and an army of snoops who monitor what Chinese people read and say online. But that censorship comes after the fact; it can only monitor what has been posted. Web condottieri such as Xu and Li may get bounced off the Internet, but only after their articles reach the public and get passed around. If one site is blocked, they quickly start up another.

Xu, who has been sued for defamation by one group of officials, said he takes care in his articles to attack only the misdeeds of corrupt local officials and not the government in general. He has studied law, he said, to avoid getting into trouble with the police in the cat-and-mouse game he is forced to play.

What's also interesting about this trend is that it extends to rural areas, where a new class of Internet-savvy users are bypassing local media and local officials to air their grievances, potentially to a national audience. One example cited by Cody involves a property-related dispute in a small village in Sichuan. A young man from the village used the 'Net to research and contact about 30 journalists-for-hire. It's hard to imagine something like this happening five years ago, but the fact of the matter is a huge number of people across China -- including people living in rural areas -- are getting online and using the 'Net to communicate and gather information. This has huge implications for the government, which until recently had much stronger controls over information transfer.

My new media manifesto: "Meeting the Second Wave"

I've been working on an important essay over the past three months, in between work on my thesis. The essay does not directly address my thesis topic, but it does reference many of the issues I have talked about on my Harvard Extended and I, Lamont blogs: 3D avatars, user-created video, autotagging, and additional issues related to networked technology, mass media, and society.

Others have talked about the impact of the Internet on traditional media companies, but this essay is not looking at recent developments as much as it is examining the future of news and entertainment media, as demographic trends and sophisticated technologies impact media creation and consumption patterns over the next 15 years.

The essay is called "Meeting the Second Wave: How Technology, Demographics, and Usage Trends Will Drive the Next Generation of Media Evolution," and it's long -- you'll need at least 15 minutes to read and absorb all that I have to say. But if you work in the media industry, or are interested in how technology is impacting mass media, I think it's a worthwhile read. I'd be very interested in getting feedback; feel free to leave comments below or email me directly.

Update:

There's already been some interest in this essay; the first version was reprinted by Raja and now MediaGrid.org has kindly agreed to host a version with graphics. If you're interested in reading the text-only, printer-friendly version that I originally posted, it's on my Harvard website and will remain there until I graduate.

Second Update

Trey Perry has also been thinking about what the future holds for Internet development. He's written a blog post, The Internet in 2017, which discusses practical 'Net technologies ranging from GPS to personal storage.

Chinese blogs: An organized translation effort

One of my favorite sources for current media developments in China is Roland Soong, who runs the EastSouthWestNorth blog (東南西北) from Hong Kong. He has been directly responsible for alerting me to interesting or unusual incidents, such as the Freezing Point fiasco, and what I believe to be the first-ever spontaneous mass political demonstration in a virtual world. The reasons Roland has been such a good source: his "news junky" personality, his sensitivity to differences between Western and Chinese media practices, and his bilingual abilities.

Now Roland and a few other bloggers are participating in a much more organized effort to translate interesting or important conversations taking place in the Chinese-language Internet. Former Berkman fellow Rebecca MacKinnon explains:

Roland has become one of the most famous Chinese-English "bridge bloggers," bringing articles, blog posts, conversations, and debates from the Chinese-language Internet to the attention of the English-speaking world.  But there are many other people doing this on their own blogs. They include John, LfC, the good folks at Danwei, Interlocals, the China Media Project, the team at China Digital Times and many many more bilingual bloggers scattered around Greater China and across the globe.

The problem, as John points out, is that so far there has been little co-ordination about who is working on what, and people are often worried about duplication (i.e., whether Roland will beat them to the punch after they spend hours working on something).

The solution: Something Roland calls "Open Source Translation Blogging." Participants have set up a wiki, where you can sign up (if you can read Chinese and are willing to help identify and translate Chinese Web discussions) or find out about the translations projects that are being worked on. It's too early to tell if the translation project will be a success, but there really is a need for such an effort, and this one is really leveraging the power of the Internet -- and blogs -- in a constructive way.