The kitchenware section of a large supermarket near me in Beijing, which has many bowls, cups, salt-and-pepper shakers, knives, food-storage containers, and rice cookers, doesn’t have a single measuring cup, measuring spoon, or timer.
Category: China
Do They Eat Dogs? (Continued)
In answer to the question “Don’t they eat dogs?” a blogger living in Taiwan stated flatly: “No. They don’t eat dogs.” Now, from a Beijing University student named Xiong Lilin, here is a definitive answer about Mainland China:
Yes, we do. But not every Chinese person eats dog and never for everyday meals. In some provinces, there are restaurants that serve dog meat in the winter. A few people will have one or two meals every year during the coldest days. Eating dog meat can make people warm and prevent colds. Although these kind of restaurants exist, they are disappearing. In fact, mutton has the same function as dog meat. In my home town, Chengdu, many people eat mutton on DONGZHI, the day winter begins according to the Chinese traditional calendar.
More In this New Yorker article, published today, Michael Savage, the radio host, contemplates eating dog. Xiong Lilin later wrote: “Yesterday, my roommate asked me what kind of dog we eat. She seems to think that we eat pet dogs. In fact, we do not eat pet dogs, the dogs we eat are raised specially for eating and belong to different kinds from the pet ones.”
Poorly Made in China
The subtitle of Paul Midler’s book is “An Insider’s Account of the Tactics Behind China’s Production Game.” Midler is an American who helps American and European companies get stuff made in China. The book is about how, in a dozen ways, Chinese manufacturers manage to make manufacturing deals more profitable to them at the expense of their customer — and, often, the ultimate consumer. Most of the book is about what happens to an unnamed American company that imports “telephone numbers” of beauty products. One problem is “quality fade.” The product slowly gets worse until the importer objects. For example, at one point the fragrance put in liquid soap was changed. Instead of different fragrances for products with different labels, almond was used in every case. So a product labeled Aloe Vera smelled of almond. (I discovered I couldn’t trust flaxseed oil made in China.)
A friend of mine became a vegetarian after working at Burger King. Midler had a similar conversion:
I found myself losing faith in all sorts of products manufactured in China. I was soon careful to purchase health and beauty products that were not made by local [i.e., Chinese] companies, but by large, multinational corporations — but then I realized the body wash I had been using, while it was made by a reputable global company, was actually manufactured in a plant located in South China. . . . I knew these production managers well. . . . They believed that what a customer didn’t know couldn’t hurt him.
I found myself using less body wash, eventually relying on only hot water for my showers. When no one seemed to notice the difference, I stopped using the wash altogether. And then I stopped using soap, as well. . . . Why take any chances?
The attitude of cheat your customer as much as possible isn’t a great long-term strategy, as Chinese manufacturers are learning — the situation used to be even worse. A friend of mine analyzes the situation like this: For a long time Chinese were taught Confucianism. When the Communists took over, that changed to The state is God. Now that system of morality is gone, but nothing’s replaced it. In Systems of Survival, Jane Jacobs wrote about two systems of morality, a “guardian syndrome” and a “commercial syndrome.” The commercial syndrome, appropriate for trading, placed great weight on honesty. (The guardian syndrome, in contrast, placed great weight on loyalty.) Behind Jacobs’s classification was the implication that these syndromes had evolved because they worked better than other possibilities.
Poorly Made in China was easy to read. It has those two essential elements: it’s a series of stories, long and short; and the author feels strongly about his topic.
Learning To Read Chinese
I have tried a dozen-odd ways of learning Chinese. Few of them have worked very well . . . except one: the book Learning Chinese Characters (2007) by Alison Matthews and Laurence Matthews. The subtitle is “a revolutionary new way to learn and remember the 800 most basic Chinese characters” and I agree, if revolutionary means “a lot better than other methods”. The method is simple:
- Break combination characters — almost all Chinese characters are combinations of a few hundred simpler characters — into components.
- The simplest components, not divisible into others, are associated with a picture that conveys the meaning. Someone pitching a baseball, for example, when outlined makes the character for nine.
- Devise a brief story, a little picture, to help you remember that the components together mean what they mean. For example, the characters for white and ladle put together in one character mean of. The story is something like: “Look at that white ladle. It’s the special ladle of Chef Thomas. The book is full of drawings to help visualize the stories.
I enjoy reading it. Partly for the feeling of accomplishment — I can tell I am actually learning the characters much faster than before — and partly because the combinations are intriguing.
The book I have says “Volume One” so I eagerly await later volumes to read more of what these two writers, who are not identified, have to say. I never saw it in Beijing; I came across it in a Barnes & Noble or Borders.
Ancient Non-Nutritional Wisdom: Morning Dance
From the latest episode of The Amazing Race:
[PHIL:] In this detour, teams have to choose between two ways that the people of Guilin [China] express themselves artistically. The choice: choreography or calligraphy. In choreography, teams must join in a popular exercise in Guilin: dancing. They’ll make their way to the central island, join a group of locals performing their morning dance routine, and learn the dance.
Emphasis added. The dancing, done in pairs, provides plenty of morning face-to-face contact, just what I think everyone needs for good mood regulation.
On the Tsinghua campus, I saw morning groups practicing aikido, which doesn’t provide as much face-to-face contact. The Guilin dancing is perfect. Also good is that it’s done outside. The sunlight will give the light-sensitive circadian oscillator a big push. Faces push a face-sensitive circadian oscillator.
There is one region of China whose residents are known for being laid back and happy. I wonder: Is it Guilin?
China and Electric Cars
According to the New York Times,
Chinese leaders have adopted a plan aimed at turning the country into one of the leading producers of hybrid and all-electric vehicles within three years, and making it the world leader in electric cars and buses after that.
Since I live in Beijing, I am glad to hear this. The story omits an important detail. Every day in Beijing, dozens of electric bikes zoom by me as I ride my non-electric bike. There are 30 or 40 models available, average price about $300. This means when battery makers make car batteries, they will build on a wealth of experience derived from making millions of bike batteries. This isn’t China with cheap labor, as Americans usually imagine the situation; this is China with more experienced labor. It isn’t obvious that American car makers can ever catch up.
The article continues:
Electric vehicles may do little to clear [China’s] smog-darkened sky . . . . China gets three-fourths of its electricity from coal, which produces more soot and more greenhouse gases than other fuels. A report by McKinsey & Company last autumn estimated that replacing a gasoline-powered car with a similar-size electric car in China would reduce greenhouse emissions by only 19 percent. It would reduce urban pollution, however, by shifting the source of smog from car exhaust pipes to power plants, which are often located outside cities.
Please. It is far easier to clean the output of a few hundred power plants than a few hundred million cars.
The United States Department of Energy has its own $25 billion program to develop electric-powered cars and improve battery technology, and will receive another $2 billion for battery development as part of the economic stimulus program enacted by Congress.
I think it’s too late. If the $25 billion were used for rebates to encourage electric car buying, as the Chinese government is doing, that might work, but there aren’t any decent American-made electric cars to be bought.
In related news, Tsinghua University (above all an engineering school) undergraduates who come to America for graduate school now account for more American-trained Ph.D.’s than any American school. In case you think that American engineers are better trained than Chinese ones.
Scam-Recognition Training
Plagiarism in Chinese Academia
I was glad to read this article in the Christian Science Monitor about an attempt to reduce plagiarism among Chinese professors.
The latest fraud to rock Chinese academia centers on He Haibo, an associate professor of pharmacology at the prestigious Zhejiang University. [Not very prestigious, since I haven’t heard of it.] He now admits to copying or making up material he submitted in eight papers to international journals and has been fired, along with the head of his research institute. The affair has drawn particular attention because a world-renowned expert in traditional Chinese medicine, Li Lianda, lent his name as coauthor to one of the fraudulent papers. His tenure will not be renewed when his contract expires soon, the president of Zhejiang University has said.
The Beijing Sport University, one of three sport universities in the world, is near my university. It has a Ph.D. program. To get a Ph.D. you must submit three books! As one of their graduate students told me, no way you can do that without plagiarism. He had noticed that a book by one of his professors was simply a copy of another book.
This paragraph, however, amused me:
Stearns [a Yale professor who taught at Beijing University] says that he and his colleagues at Yale “do not believe letters of recommendation from Chinese professors, for we know that many of them are written by the students themselves,” and merely signed by their teachers.
He thinks letters from Berkeley are different? My system for writing letters of recommendation was more nuanced, after I learned that students had great trouble writing these letters. I met with the student and we wrote it together. This had two great advantages: 1. It showed the student in the best possible (i.e., truthful) light. 2. It was easy. Trying to write a good letter by myself was tough.
Thanks to Sheila Buff.
Beijing Shopping (stuff easy to get in Beijing but not Berkeley)
Jane Jacobs said that one measure of a healthy economy is the choice it provides. A healthy economy provides abundantly at affordable prices; an unhealthy economy does not. Another sign of economic health, she said, is innovation: A healthy economy includes a constant stream of new products — nothing lasts forever. People in Norway are far richer than people in China right now, but what will Norwegians do when the oil runs out?
In contrast, my Beijing shopping revealed that Chinese entrepreneurs have been able to develop products that the rest of the world will want to buy.
1. Electric bikes. They’re everywhere in Beijing. They cost $200-$400 and a few cents per mile, far cheaper than gas. I would have brought one back to Berkeley but inability to fix it stopped me.
2. Keyboard covers for laptops. Transparent silicone plastic. Easy to clean. How did I live without one? These are a new product in Beijing, actually, but they are very cheap, about $1. I can find them for sale on the internet for about $15.
3. Cordless floor sweepers. They use a rotating brush to clean the floor instead of a air pump, as a vacuum cleaner does. That they are cordless makes them very easy to use. In Beijing they are obvious and attractive; I bought two and brought one back to Berkeley. In America I’d never seen them for sale but after I knew they existed I managed to find an unattractive one in Berkeley hidden deep in a hardware store. The price (about $50) was roughly the same in Beijing and Berkeley, except the Beijing models are much nicer.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that all three products are “environmental” broadly conceived. Beijing air is dirtier than Berkeley air; my keyboard cover and my floors get dirty a lot faster in Beijing than in Berkeley. I think they are a sign of hugely-important things to come — China inventing and selling the products we need for a cleaner world. It’s been called the next industrial revolution; a better name would be the second half of the industrial revolution in which we clean up the mess left by the first half. As Jane Jacobs often said, the problem is not too many people, the problem is the undone work.
How to Learn English
Pearl Alexander teaches English in Japan. She blogged:
The typically unintelligible and extra-syllable-laden speaking tests delivered to me by the students had a lone girl who stood out with nearly perfect pronunciation, however quite imperfect grammar.
I was completely astonished. Was she taking extra classes outside of school? If so, why wasn’t she delivering the typically rhetorical machine-gun speech like most of the juku students?
We got to the last question on her test: “What do you like to do in your free time?” She answered: “I often listen to music. I like Avril.”
At Tsinghua University, I had a similar experience. One of a dozen art students giving presentations had much better English than the rest. Did you live in America? I asked him. No, he just watched a lot of English TV and movies. Tsinghua students watch a lot of Friends, not to mention Prison Break and Heroes.
I found a Chinese movie to watch (Together With You) but in one player there is no sound and in another the English subtitles don’t appear! I listen to a lot of Chinese on my mp3 player but it is pretty boring. I should try to find some Chinese songs I like and get translations.