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Things are getting out of hand

Posted by jeff on 12 Jun 2010 | Tagged as: Other

I’m trying to check 汉典, one of mainland China’s largest online dictionaries, for the character “同” and I get this message:

(关键词:性爱) 您浏览的页面或提交的数据包含敏感关键词信息,该关键词已经被过滤

Translation: (key word: sexual love) The page you have accessed or data you have submitted includes a sensitive key word; this key word has been filtered out

So now I can’t even read a dictionary entry on probably the most non-sensitive site you could possibly imagine. Baidu has plenty of graphic images when I search under 性爱 though.

I thought I had gotten out from behind the GFW, but I guess I thought wrong.

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Sign the petition

Posted by jeff on 13 May 2008 | Tagged as: Other

While this is of course not as important as supporting the earthquake victims, it’s important for anyone who is a student of East Asian languages. UC Berkeley’s EALC has been hit with a 25% budget cut for next year, which means hundreds of students won’t get a chance to study those languages. (A friend told me about it, I don’t have any affiliation with the school.) Unfortunately colleges think it’s ok to cripple area studies programs when faced with budget difficulties. But as someone who just took Chinese for fun in college, and discovered that he liked it, I think we should afford others the same chance. So go sign the petition!

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A funny dig at the Shaolin temple

Posted by jeff on 14 Jan 2008 | Tagged as: Humor, Other

Here is a funny post (series of pictures) that compares the Dabei Temple 大悲寺, a Buddhist temple in Shanxi that supposedly is the only Buddhist temple in China without a collection box, with the Shaolin Temple 少林寺, the flashy martial-arts training money-making “temple” in Henan. It shows the head of the Dabei Temple in his raggedy gray gowns and the “CEO” of the Shaolin Temple in his new yellow gowns. There are four pages of pictures, the funniest being the ones asking why the Shaolin Temple needs guards, and showing them using the wireless internet in the temple.

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Beijing’s weather for the past month

Posted by jeff on 07 Jul 2007 | Tagged as: Other

smog, smog, smog, smog, smog, smog, smog, smog, smog, smog, smog, smog, smog, smog, smog, smog, smog, rain, rain, rain, sun, smog, smog, smog, smog, smog, smog

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Why don’t the Chinese do Civil War reenactments?

Posted by jeff on 26 May 2007 | Tagged as: Other

Americans love reenactments (in Chinese 重演活动), and spend lots of time and energy in making them as realistic as possible. Europeans also do this, I think, dressing up as Napolean and such. China had a civil war from ’45-’49, but they don’t seem to like to reenact it. I can think of a few reasons:

1. The war isn’t really over yet – i.e. Taiwan.

2. Not enough time has passed.

3. No one would want to be the Nationalists.

I did find a Taiwanese group that does WWII reenactments, and there are some pictures of their latest reenactment on flickr here. They seem to have mostly Nationalists fighting Japanese (and maybe even a few Germans?).

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