China

Modern China RSS feed -- recent issues

Total news: 20
Last news: November 30, 1999 00:00:00

A blog about strategy, business, trends and convergence

Total news: 10
Last news: June 25, 2007 16:49:00

The adoption of beancake, a new commercial fertilizer, marked a significant technological advance in Jiangnan agriculture in the late Ming. The popularity of beancake was a result of two developments: the severe fertilizer shortage in Jiangnan and the importation of Manchurian bean products during the Qing. However, recent studies by Kenneth Pomeranz and Li Bozhong exaggerate the volume of imports from Manchuria by ten to twenty-five times. They also ignore the limited time frame of the importation of beancake, for it was mainly concentrated in three or four decades during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In fact, though Manchuria had a great potential to produce sufficient beancake to relieve the chronic fertilizer shortage in Jiangnan, this potential remained largely unrealized before foreign countries became involved in the trade. The nineteenth-century agricultural stagnancy in Jiangnan did not result from the absence of the kind of "geographic luck" enjoyed by England, as Pomeranz claims. Instead, Jiangnan failed to take advantage of its privileged access to Manchuria to improve its agriculture.

An interesting insight into China and the Web.

" February 16 -- A top official from Chinas official agency in charge of press and publishing suggested in an interview with the overseas edition of Chinas official Peoples Daily that Chinas unique cultural character made it particularly suited to the development of a Web-based economy, and that he expected the countrys Web economy to surpass that of many Western countries. "

A good source on the players emerging in internet video in China published by Danwei and updated from time to time. -�[Read�more]

Some good granularity here on the state of the internet in China, the full report is attached as a pdf.

"On January 23, 2007, CNNIC published "the 19th Statistical Survey Report on Internet Development in China".

The report shows that by the end of 2006, the Internet users in China reached 137 million, account for 10.5% of Chinas population. The Internet penetration in Beijing exceeded 30% for the first time. The total amount of domain names in China increased remarkably. Over 1.8 million .CN domain names had been registered.

The registration increased 64.4% in just one year. 75.9% of Chinese Internet users or 104 million people use broadband connections that include xDSL, Cable Modem and leased line. The scale of mobile phone Internet users has also expanded with the total number reached 17 million.

Comparing to the same period last year, Chinas Internet users increased by 26 million. The growth rate (23.4%) rose again since the rate dropped in 2004 (18.2%) and 2005 (18.1%).

Under the native environment of rapid development of the Internet, China show greater demand and developed broader application on Internet addresses.

Total domain names in China now touched 4,109,020, which is 1.16 million more than 6 months ago, averaged at 200 thousand net growths per month.

The .CN domain name reach 1,803,393, which are 706,469 or 64.4% greater than the same period last year. The .CN today ranks fourth among all ccTLDs and brings Chinas Internet into the .CN era.

The report newly added the survey on network resources of domestic webpage number and byte quantities of website contents.

The results show that by the end of 2006, China has 4.47 billion webpages and 122,306 GB of webpage contents, the annual growth rates of these two are 86.3% and 81.7% respectively. Along with vast growth of these domestic Internet resources, the total websites and IPv4 addresses in China also grow rapidly and reached 843 thousand and 98 million respectively." -�[Read�more]

This essay argues for a modification of James L. Watson’s influential ideas on official cultural standardization via ritual in late imperial China. Focusing on Watson’s introduction to Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China, co-edited with Evelyn Rawski (1988), it refutes Watson’s hypothesis that officials deliberately confined themselves to effective reform of death rituals in the period before the corpse’s expulsion from the community: gazetteers show that officials tried—and failed—to modify numerous practices, both before and after expulsion. The essay proposes that some reported orthoprax standardization was illusory, resulting from defensive, subversive, or self-deceiving writings of local elites, and it also recognizes forms of unofficial standardization that did not follow Zhu Xi’s Family Rituals. In explaining resistance to official standardization, it emphasizes local agency: as key sites of culturally appropriate emotional expression and as important vehicles for upholding and redrawing local status, funerals tended to develop distinct regional patterns and ramifying variation within them.

This article maps the unique social, gender, and material configurations in the courtesan houses of fin de si�cle Shanghai by portraying Chinese sojourners life in this dream "home." The male sojourners lacked comfortable, homelike lodgings, and as a result adopted courtesan houses not only as places for romantic liaisons but also as sites in which they could entertain friends and join broader social networks under circumstances more comfortable than their temporary lodgings. The courtesan houses were marked by a different sense of family organization, which merely masked their commercial nature, and a different set of gender roles, in which the courtesan challenged normative understandings of male and female. Finally, the new types of relationships between clients and courtesans were increasingly structured around material objects. This new urban culture, I argue, embodied a new consciousness of time, space, and materiality that constitutes a modernity distinctly different from the positivist conception of the modern marked by linear progress.

Watson’s view that culture held late imperial China together appears to be problematic with regard to standardization and insightful with regard to social theory. Ethnographic evidence about the assimilation of non-Han minority peoples to Han identity shows that orthopraxy led to many nonstandard cultural practices and beliefs. Theoretical implications include reassessment of the canonical interpretive assumption that cultural ideas are the primary motivations for human actions. Additionally, the concept of a culturally unified China appears to be an ideology that benefits the Chinese state.

Popular photo-sharing site Flickr has announced plans to launch a version in the Chinese language.

The move from Yahoo-owned Flickr is part of its attempts to localise and increase the accessibility of its websites, especially in Asia.

A little dated but still worth knowing, I found this article about a chap - "Matt Cutts works for Google and has a blog about how to court their search engine; so, when Matt flaps his blog wings in America there is a tsunami on the far side of the Internet."

Which alleges that - According to China Internet Network Information Center, CNNIC, Google is losing market share from 33% last year to current 25.3%.

It goes on to support this at the following link @ Linux World .

-�[Read�more]

Revenues from broadcasting and new media rights for the 2010 and 2012 Olympics have already risen nearly 40 percent from the previous two-Games package, which includes the Beijing Olympics, and will be in excess of $3.0 billion.

The IOC estimates some 15 percent of that will come from new media including the internet and mobile phones.

This article presents research on popular cults and ancestral sacrifice from the Fuzhou region in order to reflect on James Watson’s theories of ortho-praxy and standardization. It argues that substantive standardization and adherence to orthopraxy should be distinguished analytically from claims to standardization and adherence to orthopraxy, that the historical sources sometimes indicate the latter rather than the former, and that the distinction between the two limits the theories’ capacity to fully account for social and cultural integration in late imperial China.

This article examines the changes in behavioral norms in modern China and argues that the promotion of good manners and civilities constituted an important part of China’s nation-building project. By focusing on the reform of movie theater etiquette in the first half of the twentieth century and situating it in the context of China’s struggle to combat colonialist and racist discourse about the country, the article sheds new light on the New Life Movement and other state-sponsored national campaigns that were aimed at disciplining the Chinese people to conduct themselves in ways compatible with Western norms.

Oil prices are heading north.

None of us have seen any real increase like the sort of prices we have ahead of us.

The International Energy Agency, which monitors oil markets on behalf of industrialized nations, is forecasting average global oil demand of 86.1 million barrels a day this year, up 2 percent from last year. That is twice as fast as the 0.9% growth recorded in 2006, compared with 2005.

Demand is expected to accelerate further in the fourth quarter to 88 million barrels a day, an unprecedented quarterly volume and up 2.6 million barrels a day from the year-earlier period. In the second quarter, global oil demand already has risen at a 1.7% rate, more than double the 0.8% a year ago, according to forecasts and data compiled by the IEA.

This essay assesses James L. Watson’s argument that ritual orthopraxy promoted by the state and local elites played a key role in the formation of cultural unity in late imperial China. After opening with a brief review of Watson’s previous scholarship on standardization and cultural unity, it focuses on two case studies about nonstate processes of standardization that accompanied but did not necessarily mimic those of the state. The first concerns the cult of one of the most popular plague-fighting deities in late imperial China, Marshal Wen (Wen Yuanshuai), whose cult was promoted by Taoists who strove to promote liturgical orthopraxy by insisting that Taoist deities should only receive vegetarian offerings and Taoist titles. The second concerns sacrifices to banners (jiqi) performed by officials, local militias, bandits, rebels, and members of secret societies. Of particular interest here are the ways in which people belonging to the latter three groups adopted the state’s practice of banner worship while also reformulating its nature and significance.

-�[Read�more]

This article examines James Watson’s influential work on orthopraxy and cultural unification in late imperial China through a study of the cult of the goddess of Taishan. In this case the state (a crucial promoter of standardization for Watson) was internally divided, local elites took a hard line against popular practices, and ritual became increasingly disunified across classes, regions, and genders. Eventually, popular lore about the goddess changed to reflect an awareness of elite rejection and to celebrate the goddess’s ability to pursue her own goals despite often hostile male authorities. What "cultural unity" one can find here is paradoxical and based not on rituals but beliefs: a shared sense that Taishan was sacred territory worth contesting, popular awareness that elites did not welcome their claims on it, and other signs that groups marked their disagreements with each other, rather than either ignoring differences of ideas or disguising them behind shared ritual.

After a few day of stuffing little red envelopes with lucky lai see money and myself�with dumplings and taking in the always outstanding HK Harbour fireworks it was a relief to catch something other than Year of the Pig fare and find Sage�Brennans�THIS WEEK IN CHINA.

His comment on the overwhelming prevalence of bulletin board�systems BBS still dominating Chinas internet culture has motivated me to look further into the use of BBSs to cut thru the noise created by blogging and gaming to better appreciate where exactly�consumer tastes & sensibilties lie.

After surfing a few that I found Im in agreement with him [ that reading BBSs in China, that�] ..."Its one way to cope with an exploding market ... -�[Read�more]

This special issue contains five reassessments of James L. Watson’s influential ideas on the role of ritual in cultural standardization: Kenneth Pomeranz (History, UC Irvine) examines the Bixia yuanjun cult; Michael Szonyi (East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard) analyzes the Five Emperors’ cult and ancestral sacrifices in Fuzhou; Paul Katz (Modern History, Academia Sinica) discusses the cult of Marshal Wen and blood sacrifices to banners; Melissa Brown (Anthropological Sciences, Stanford) takes up the case of frontier acculturation; and Donald Sutton (History, Carnegie Mellon) looks at death rituals. To round out the special issue, Professor Watson adds his own rejoinder. On the basis of these essays and other recent scholarship, the introduction in turn questions the effectiveness of state standardization, outlines the phenomenon of heteroprax standardization, argues that "pseudo-orthoprax" local elites subverted the state’s cultural policies, reconsiders the applicability of the paired terms "ritual" and "belief," and underlines the subjectivity of the notion of Chineseness.

Western historiography on the idea of freedom in modern China has tended to focus on its conception as service to the state and social ends, as illustrated by studies of Liang Qichao’s democratic thought; as a result, many other interpretations have been overlooked. This article locates Chinese notions of liberty in a broader context as a fusion of personal, national, social, civic, and moral freedoms. After revisiting Liang Qichao’s conception of freedom, it posits six others that are mutually interactive—freedom as liberation; as self-development, independent personality, and responsibility; as democracy and human rights; as a spiritual cultural necessity; as a private realm; and as autonomy and self-mastery. The article offers a more nuanced understanding of the issue of the primacy of collective interests over individual interests by developing the notion of dual responsibilities, or the dualism between the sanctity of personal liberty and the public morality of service to society and state.