Re:In the US we have an inflated estimate of US
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Please read up on the history of India, China, etc. and the myriad of failed systems that have existed in the countries (India, China, etc) you've cited over the past 5,000 years.
Your analysis of history belongs in the early 20th century! Seriously, read a newer history book! China was developmentally ahead of the western world in many areas (statism, literature, economy) for centuries before the west figured out how to build guns and decent boats and subsequently conquer the world. The Chinese actually had the first two before us, but lacked the ambition to do the latter. Had the emperor not ordered him to stop, Zheng He could have gone to Europe and made us crap our pants with his huge fleet.
You talk of failed systems, but do you believe that the current dominant political and economic systems are not doomed to failure as well? As history indeed shows, all systems of governance have failed and been replaced by more efficient ones, so what makes you say the current western system is the best that humanity will ever discover? Our descendants 500 years from now will look upon the present western notion of superiority as just as ridiculous as that of the ancient Chinese and Roman rulers.
You've got it turned on the head. Old Chinese has a lot more phonemes than any modern dialect of Chinese, so it's wrong to say that characters evolved because of a lack of phonemes. Rather, the argument goes that modern Chinese lacks the phonemic variety to be written in a phonetic script. The website you link to, however, disagress with this conclusion.
Huh? What you just said makes no sense at all. When you have dense population centres it makes more sense to have air transportation between these big cities than in places with big suburbs. When you have big suburbs, it seems to me it would make a lot of sense to have rail transport which can make several stops and which facilitates easy transfer to other ground-based transportation.
???
Interesting. Yeah, that would indeed have been an excellent choice. I don't think I ever saw that at the used phone market - if I did it must have cost way more than 150 eur, because 150 eur (approx 1400 rmb) barely got you a Blue Angel when I was looking. I'm not that unhappy with what I've ended up with though, which is a Toshiba G900, which I got used for 2700 RMB (at the time about 260 eur). Dictionary software itself cost 120 USD anyway.
I should have been clearer; I was talking about students of the Chinese language.
AFAIK all hardware electronic dictionaries on the market are intended for Chinese who are studying English. With a device like this you could possibly run Wenlin (PC/Mac/Wine software). With a PDA you can run Pleco (WM/Palm software).
As for Wi-Fi in China, I don't know where you live (oh, Henan, right), but when I lived in Beijing last year I found Wi-Fi everywhere. All Starbucks stores have it, most smaller coffee shops have it, Subway has it... Wi-Fi was plenty available in my own personal experience. Much better than Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan or Japan, where though it may be available for the most part you apparently have to pay or at least register. YMMV of course.
Well, I like the form factor actually. It reminds me of my Casio dictionary. I also have a Windows Mobile phone with a flip-out QWERTY keyboard, and I use it for a Chinese dictionary (Pleco), but being able to perch it at an angle like a computer would be much better. I guess something like a HTC Athena is what I want, but that's too expensive for me. If you could get Wenlin running on this, it would be great for Chinese students... The keys look like a cheap Besta though.
Not true. The Red Cross has used it since 1863, and J&J since 1887. The Red Cross were just beat in the US (and the US only) to getting it registered as a trade mark. I wonder where J&J got the idea for using a red cross as a marker for medical supplies if not from the organization red cross.
I like your post but would like to point out a fallacy.
The reason I bring this up is that lack of protest is not necessarily a sign of contentment with government. And without access to specific kinds of foreign media, there is no way for the Chinese public to become aware that government is, in fact, a mutable thing. I cannot imagine a people who would me more aware of the mutability of government than the Chinese. Just think of the innumerable dynasties which have ruled it over the millenia; just last century there have arguably been three dynasties following each other: the Qing, the Nationalist republic, and the People's republic. Although I am uncertain how well it relates to modern Chinese thought, see the Wikipedia article on Mandate of Heaven. Compare the American republic, which has been an interrupted state since the Revolution, looking away from the civil war which threatened to break it.
For God's sake! This trite is *not* insightful. To make such patently absurd arguments about the problems of the 2 party American political system and then compare them to a system like the Chinese is irresponsible and without merit. No one doubts that there are issues in American politics, but it's a hell of a lot better than any communist system.
It is ridiculous to claim that China is Communist; today's China is Communist only in the name of its ruling party. China is a capitalist country; you mustn't confuse Communist with Authoritarian, which China indeed is. And I did not say that the Chinese political system is better or as good at working for the public good as the American system, I said that there are different levels of democracy, with the Swiss style of direct democracy at one end, and absolute dictatorships at the other end. China is closer to the latter end than America is, but it is far better than old European monarchies.
Your arguments about emissions or environmental pollution are drivel too. The Chinese don't give a lick about people or the environment, they care about propaganda and misleading sorry saps like you into believing that their elitist leaders give a shit.
What do you have to back this up with? Nothing. You are pulling arguments out of thin air. It is true that it's fairly recent that it's become a big issue in China, and results are still a ways away, but what has the Bush administration done for the government? Article in Chinese
I'll throw out a couple of examples besides the Chinese government's assault on freedom of thought and academic discourse. How about the numerous kids' toys that were sold here in the US, made in China, that have had various toxins and drugs in them? How about the Pet food tainted with rat poison because of their protein doping process? My cat nearly died as a result of that.
When 80% of your country's toys are made in China, and there turns out to be something wrong with a toy, chances are it's made in China. In fact, only 72% of toy recalls seem to be of products from China, so Chinese-produced toys must be safer than those from other countries! The same thing goes for pet food and everything else; pretty much everything you own is made there, so when there's a problem with something you own it's going to be something made in China.
That government didn't give a rat's ass about hurting anyone because it might cut into their profits!
I haven't talked to one Chinese immigrant that ever wants to go back there. I don't care if you're out there or not, you didn't grow up there, obviously. Do you honestly believe their technology is so superior to the US that the US can't hope to meet their emissions standards? Or the US is so evil and greedy that they just don't want to? I've got news for you. Any democracy is going to do a hell of a lot more for the environment then your communist friends because they are richer and have more resources to do so. Democracies, or Representative Republics like the US, while not perfect, are always going to be more collectively in line with the greater good. If you don't believe that, then I suggest you stay
Then why do US soldiers generally support the Republican party, which appears to me to prefer war as a solution to various problems more than their Democratic counterparts do? This is an honest question, from a non-US observer. I've seen a similar situation in my home country, though our army is very small.
No, no no. If all you want is for the CCP government to go down, then certainly that is what would work the fastest. However, the chaotic situation that would arise would be an economic disaster taking away the wealth gained by normal Chinese. It is a popular misconception in the West that the CCP is incompetent and corrupt and only exists for the sake of party members, but the fact is that even in a one-party state there is politics, and there is discussion and debate, and the system works. It's authoritarian, sure, and it's a mistake not to allow freer public discussion (even with such, I believe the government would still have great support of the people), but the system is not tyrannic, and while far from as democratic as Western democracies we must remember that there are differences between Western democracies, notably with a trainwreck of a two-party plutocratic system in the USA. The Chinese government has done a lot more good for the environment than the US government has, for example, with limits on car emissions that would be impossible for the US to meet, and energy efficiency markings for electronics. Would Americans not be offended if Swiss people claimed that the American political system needed to collapse? Anyway, you're very uninformed about the current state of the world economy if you believe that the West could cause the Chinese economy to collapse without taking an enourmous hit itself.
Reading posts like this, and seeing hundreds of Chinese protest outside Tous Les Jours, a bakery chain here in Beijing, because they thought it was French (hint: it's Korean!) just makes me wonder how diplomacy between different countries ever works. It's all a bunch of chauvinistic cheerleading for whatever country you happened to be born in, with stretching of and invention of facts and a complete disregard of the views of the other part. Chinese people know they don't have a proper democracy. They don't mind this fact as much as Westerners want them to. Now I'll go back to try to convince Chinese people of the benefits of Western democracy and that the Western media is not a single-faceted entity/hate machine directed at discrediting China, but in fact allows for having several different opinions...
Back on the subject of the Great Firewall, I'm posting from behind it, and I don't know any internet user here who does NOT know how to activate a proxy of some sort for the sites that aren't available.
Since we're on the subject - could you direct new PSP owners such as myself to good sites discussing homebrew on the PSP? I tried Googling for a while, but didn't find very good sites on the subject. Got myself one of the new slim PSPs in Beijing last month, and they fixed me up with custom firmware and everything, but still not finding many good homebrew apps to use...
But in China you pay to receive too (China Telecom Beijing)... well actually you don't have to; 10 kuai a month lets me receive up to something like 300 or 500 minutes a month...
Unicode sucks. Check out this. Compare the character in the stroke order diagram with the character as rendered by your browser. Are they the same? Well, then you're not looking at a Japanese character (here's how it's supposed to look in Japanese). If they are not the same, then behold how the idiots at the unicode consortium make an awful mess of simplified Chinese characters, traditional Chinese characters, and Japanese characters. This is the traditional variant, by the way. Does anyone have a good explanation for why the have to do this with extremely common characters such as this?
I need a computing environment that supports simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese and Japanese seamlessly. The traditional Chinese IME sucks too.
We need something better than this. Of course, it was a complete nightmare on XP where you couldn't even run software made for different locales without using AppLocale.
His post was responding to a post that proposed that smokers might be a lesser burdern on society than non-smokers, and he came with evidence that refuted this claim. Say all you want about stupid things humans do that shorten their own lives, but that doesn't make it a burden on society. Comparing driving and smoking in this manner is the stupidest thing I have heard this year, though. Driving serves a purpose. People need to get to their jobs. Items need to be transported. Smoking is just something done for momentary satisfaction. Your post is just ridiculous and illogical.
In any case, you're taking this one argument and misrepresenting the agenda of everyone who's critical of smoking. I don't give a shit about whether you want to kill yourself slowly with tobacco, but just do it without causing me grief. Because indeed, other people smoking is a direct source of grief in my every-day life. Where I come from, smoking is banned in restaurants and bars. Now, however, I'm spending a semester in China, and every time I go out to drink here I'm exposed to other people smoking. It makes my throat hurt all night. It makes my eyes run. The next day my clothes stink of tobacco, and if I've just thrown them on the floor as I'm wont to do after returning from a night of drinking, the entire room stinks of tobacco when I wake up. I'm eating at a restaurant, and the guy at the table beside me starts smoking, causing me to lose my appetite. I've stopped going to karaoke with classmates because the karaoke room just turns into a gas chamber. I feel like a jew at Auschwitz. What am I going to do? I can't exactly ask all my friends to not smoke inside. All this stuff is very easily avoidable. Is it so hard to just go outside if you want to smoke that badly?
You "refuse to believe" that smoking is a burden on society. Fine. You seem to "believe" a lot of things that seem very convenient for your agenda, which I assume is to be allowed to smoke whenever and wherever you want. Basically you want people like me to suffer - and yes, I do suffer - because you're addicted to a drug. I believe you are being irrational.
I guess I'll have to bow down to your experience, having been here for 12 times as long as I have. I still haven't had the experience of hearing anyone say very nasty things about the government, though, but that might be because my Chinese is still pretty bad. Or it might be a Beijing thing, I don't know. Most of what I've heard taxi drivers complain about boils down to having to work too long, migrant workers pushing wages down (though only Beijing residents can drive cabs fortunately yada yada), their bosses taking too much of their wages, gas being too expensive... I've never had them say anything bad about the government or CCP, even when I've asked them directly. I think I need to try to get drunk with some old Chinese people and see if they open up a bit then.
No, the problem isn't in information getting in. The thing that they try to control is interaction between Chinese people. Discussion of democracy, the Tiananmen massacre, and everything else the CCP doesn't want people to talk about. Most Chinese can't read English, even university students, so there's a very small audience for Chinese if they want to discuss on English-language websites. There are of course Chinese who know about Tiananmen and support democracy, for example, but if they can't propogate these views and this information then there will be many who don't know what democracy is all about, and who haven't even heard about the Tiananmen massacre. They have been pretty good about this. Come to think about it, I haven't actually asked any Chinese about Tiananmen. I'll make sure to do that and see what they say.
Written exam in oral Chinese (how fucked up isn't that?) tomorrow, so I'm going to call it a night. Will be commenting in the next China article, I guess...
Actually, when we learned the word for "independent" (), and the teacher asked me to make an example sentence, I said "Taiwan independence", and then she just looked at me with a look that said "oh, this naughty little kid" and then said something which I can't quite remember. Actually, though, I and my classmates always tease the teachers talking about Tibet and Taiwan and stuff and while they don't really take us quite seriously they aren't horrified or anything. Also, last Friday I was out drinking and met this Chinese-American (born Hong Kong, raised California) and his PRC girlfriend (who could understand most of what we were talking about in English but couldn't say much), and when we got into the topic of Taiwan independence she was just rolling her eyes. From what I understand of the PRC argument, it doesn't matter whether people on Taiwan want to be independent - they're Chinese, so China, the PRC that is, has to decide over them. I was pretty drunk though, so can't remember exactly what we were talking about. Still though, I'm walking around talking about this stuff and not getting any kind of reprisal, but imagine if I were a regular, Chinese, student at Peking University. If I were to go around promoting radical views like Tibet and Taiwan independence, it would probably affect how the professors treated me, and how my classmates treated me. Even though there might not be any official action against me, being publicly against the government is a sure way to get ostracized. Being in China is pretty bad if you're Chinese, I think.
Of course it is - everyone outside of China already knows how conditions are, they just need to keep the majority of Chinese from finding out. Of course, people here of course know that they themselves and everyone else are being censored. A classmate of mine here at the Peking University Chinese language course has a girlfriend who is working as an English teacher - it'll be interesting to ask if the contract she has signed has anything like that in it.
Well, we laowai (foreigners) here in China are granted more leeway, and the worst thing that can happen is that you're deported. Torbjørn Færøvik, a Norwegian author who wrote a fairly successful travelogue about a trip he took through China with a lot of commentary on Chinese politics and history comes to mind. I heard him speak at a small lecture in Oslo last year, and he mentioned that the last time he tried to go to China they wouldn't let him in because of what he'd written about the country. Of course they aren't going to do anything to me, a white, foreign student, for talking to someone about Tibetan independence, but if Tibetan monks make a peaceful protest saying the same, they get shot down with AK-47s. Really, an English teacher's experience in Beijing is not exemplary of how the average Chinese person has it. The CCP would never dare doing anything to a laowai.
But really, most Chinese are pretty much politically apathetic. The common worker has no time to even think about politics, having to work 14 hours a day just to feed their family. The bloggers are a minority, and the democracy movement here is just too small and unorganized to do anything. But people are in fact scared of saying anything bad about the CCP - every time I try to bring politics up with a taxi driver or whoever they just stop speaking to me. This lack of freedom of speech contributes to make people more complacent, as they don't even know about the Tiananmen protests or the truth of China's role in Tibet.
Well, iTunes DRM-free tracks play on other things than iPods as well... Just the other day I copied an iTunes Plus-song to a Sony Ericsson mobile phone, and it played it without any problems. Really old players that don't support AAC won't support it, of course, but those are rare these days.
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Please read up on the history of India, China, etc. and the myriad of failed systems that have existed in the countries (India, China, etc) you've cited over the past 5,000 years.
Your analysis of history belongs in the early 20th century! Seriously, read a newer history book! China was developmentally ahead of the western world in many areas (statism, literature, economy) for centuries before the west figured out how to build guns and decent boats and subsequently conquer the world. The Chinese actually had the first two before us, but lacked the ambition to do the latter. Had the emperor not ordered him to stop, Zheng He could have gone to Europe and made us crap our pants with his huge fleet.
You talk of failed systems, but do you believe that the current dominant political and economic systems are not doomed to failure as well? As history indeed shows, all systems of governance have failed and been replaced by more efficient ones, so what makes you say the current western system is the best that humanity will ever discover? Our descendants 500 years from now will look upon the present western notion of superiority as just as ridiculous as that of the ancient Chinese and Roman rulers.
You've got it turned on the head. Old Chinese has a lot more phonemes than any modern dialect of Chinese, so it's wrong to say that characters evolved because of a lack of phonemes. Rather, the argument goes that modern Chinese lacks the phonemic variety to be written in a phonetic script. The website you link to, however, disagress with this conclusion.
Huh? What you just said makes no sense at all. When you have dense population centres it makes more sense to have air transportation between these big cities than in places with big suburbs. When you have big suburbs, it seems to me it would make a lot of sense to have rail transport which can make several stops and which facilitates easy transfer to other ground-based transportation. ???
Interesting. Yeah, that would indeed have been an excellent choice. I don't think I ever saw that at the used phone market - if I did it must have cost way more than 150 eur, because 150 eur (approx 1400 rmb) barely got you a Blue Angel when I was looking. I'm not that unhappy with what I've ended up with though, which is a Toshiba G900, which I got used for 2700 RMB (at the time about 260 eur). Dictionary software itself cost 120 USD anyway.
AFAIK all hardware electronic dictionaries on the market are intended for Chinese who are studying English. With a device like this you could possibly run Wenlin (PC/Mac/Wine software). With a PDA you can run Pleco (WM/Palm software).
As for Wi-Fi in China, I don't know where you live (oh, Henan, right), but when I lived in Beijing last year I found Wi-Fi everywhere. All Starbucks stores have it, most smaller coffee shops have it, Subway has it... Wi-Fi was plenty available in my own personal experience. Much better than Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan or Japan, where though it may be available for the most part you apparently have to pay or at least register. YMMV of course.
Well, I like the form factor actually. It reminds me of my Casio dictionary. I also have a Windows Mobile phone with a flip-out QWERTY keyboard, and I use it for a Chinese dictionary (Pleco), but being able to perch it at an angle like a computer would be much better. I guess something like a HTC Athena is what I want, but that's too expensive for me. If you could get Wenlin running on this, it would be great for Chinese students... The keys look like a cheap Besta though.
Windows Mobile IS a disaster.
Not true. The Red Cross has used it since 1863, and J&J since 1887. The Red Cross were just beat in the US (and the US only) to getting it registered as a trade mark. I wonder where J&J got the idea for using a red cross as a marker for medical supplies if not from the organization red cross.
I prefer the jumping dock icons over focus stealing. /Been forced to use an XP machine for a month. Please kill me. Whose idea was the system tray?
For God's sake! This trite is *not* insightful. To make such patently absurd arguments about the problems of the 2 party American political system and then compare them to a system like the Chinese is irresponsible and without merit. No one doubts that there are issues in American politics, but it's a hell of a lot better than any communist system.
It is ridiculous to claim that China is Communist; today's China is Communist only in the name of its ruling party. China is a capitalist country; you mustn't confuse Communist with Authoritarian, which China indeed is. And I did not say that the Chinese political system is better or as good at working for the public good as the American system, I said that there are different levels of democracy, with the Swiss style of direct democracy at one end, and absolute dictatorships at the other end. China is closer to the latter end than America is, but it is far better than old European monarchies.
Your arguments about emissions or environmental pollution are drivel too. The Chinese don't give a lick about people or the environment, they care about propaganda and misleading sorry saps like you into believing that their elitist leaders give a shit.
What do you have to back this up with? Nothing. You are pulling arguments out of thin air. It is true that it's fairly recent that it's become a big issue in China, and results are still a ways away, but what has the Bush administration done for the government? Article in Chinese
I'll throw out a couple of examples besides the Chinese government's assault on freedom of thought and academic discourse. How about the numerous kids' toys that were sold here in the US, made in China, that have had various toxins and drugs in them? How about the Pet food tainted with rat poison because of their protein doping process? My cat nearly died as a result of that.
When 80% of your country's toys are made in China, and there turns out to be something wrong with a toy, chances are it's made in China. In fact, only 72% of toy recalls seem to be of products from China, so Chinese-produced toys must be safer than those from other countries! The same thing goes for pet food and everything else; pretty much everything you own is made there, so when there's a problem with something you own it's going to be something made in China.
That government didn't give a rat's ass about hurting anyone because it might cut into their profits!
Like Bush refusing to sign the Kyoto protocol because it would hurt profits?
How about the fact that Chinese don't own cars as much because they can't afford them?
Where does this come from? This is a ridiculous statement. More and more Chinese are buying cars, and it's a big problem. 1000 to 1200 cars are added to the streets in Beijing every day, but at least each car pollutes less than an American car does.
I haven't talked to one Chinese immigrant that ever wants to go back there. I don't care if you're out there or not, you didn't grow up there, obviously. Do you honestly believe their technology is so superior to the US that the US can't hope to meet their emissions standards? Or the US is so evil and greedy that they just don't want to? I've got news for you. Any democracy is going to do a hell of a lot more for the environment then your communist friends because they are richer and have more resources to do so. Democracies, or Representative Republics like the US, while not perfect, are always going to be more collectively in line with the greater good. If you don't believe that, then I suggest you stay
Then why do US soldiers generally support the Republican party, which appears to me to prefer war as a solution to various problems more than their Democratic counterparts do? This is an honest question, from a non-US observer. I've seen a similar situation in my home country, though our army is very small.
Reading posts like this, and seeing hundreds of Chinese protest outside Tous Les Jours, a bakery chain here in Beijing, because they thought it was French (hint: it's Korean!) just makes me wonder how diplomacy between different countries ever works. It's all a bunch of chauvinistic cheerleading for whatever country you happened to be born in, with stretching of and invention of facts and a complete disregard of the views of the other part. Chinese people know they don't have a proper democracy. They don't mind this fact as much as Westerners want them to. Now I'll go back to try to convince Chinese people of the benefits of Western democracy and that the Western media is not a single-faceted entity/hate machine directed at discrediting China, but in fact allows for having several different opinions...
Back on the subject of the Great Firewall, I'm posting from behind it, and I don't know any internet user here who does NOT know how to activate a proxy of some sort for the sites that aren't available.
Since we're on the subject - could you direct new PSP owners such as myself to good sites discussing homebrew on the PSP? I tried Googling for a while, but didn't find very good sites on the subject. Got myself one of the new slim PSPs in Beijing last month, and they fixed me up with custom firmware and everything, but still not finding many good homebrew apps to use...
But in China you pay to receive too (China Telecom Beijing)... well actually you don't have to; 10 kuai a month lets me receive up to something like 300 or 500 minutes a month...
I need a computing environment that supports simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese and Japanese seamlessly. The traditional Chinese IME sucks too.
We need something better than this. Of course, it was a complete nightmare on XP where you couldn't even run software made for different locales without using AppLocale.
Off-topic but... Wha, why does say "more" instead of "sonota no ..."? Does it also give explanations of kanji usage nuances in English?
Damn. I couldn't figure out how I'd lost 200 photos when copying from my camera to a directory on my Mac a while back. Now I know.
In any case, you're taking this one argument and misrepresenting the agenda of everyone who's critical of smoking. I don't give a shit about whether you want to kill yourself slowly with tobacco, but just do it without causing me grief. Because indeed, other people smoking is a direct source of grief in my every-day life. Where I come from, smoking is banned in restaurants and bars. Now, however, I'm spending a semester in China, and every time I go out to drink here I'm exposed to other people smoking. It makes my throat hurt all night. It makes my eyes run. The next day my clothes stink of tobacco, and if I've just thrown them on the floor as I'm wont to do after returning from a night of drinking, the entire room stinks of tobacco when I wake up. I'm eating at a restaurant, and the guy at the table beside me starts smoking, causing me to lose my appetite. I've stopped going to karaoke with classmates because the karaoke room just turns into a gas chamber. I feel like a jew at Auschwitz. What am I going to do? I can't exactly ask all my friends to not smoke inside. All this stuff is very easily avoidable. Is it so hard to just go outside if you want to smoke that badly?
You "refuse to believe" that smoking is a burden on society. Fine. You seem to "believe" a lot of things that seem very convenient for your agenda, which I assume is to be allowed to smoke whenever and wherever you want. Basically you want people like me to suffer - and yes, I do suffer - because you're addicted to a drug. I believe you are being irrational.
I guess I'll have to bow down to your experience, having been here for 12 times as long as I have. I still haven't had the experience of hearing anyone say very nasty things about the government, though, but that might be because my Chinese is still pretty bad. Or it might be a Beijing thing, I don't know. Most of what I've heard taxi drivers complain about boils down to having to work too long, migrant workers pushing wages down (though only Beijing residents can drive cabs fortunately yada yada), their bosses taking too much of their wages, gas being too expensive... I've never had them say anything bad about the government or CCP, even when I've asked them directly. I think I need to try to get drunk with some old Chinese people and see if they open up a bit then.
Written exam in oral Chinese (how fucked up isn't that?) tomorrow, so I'm going to call it a night. Will be commenting in the next China article, I guess...
Actually, when we learned the word for "independent" (), and the teacher asked me to make an example sentence, I said "Taiwan independence", and then she just looked at me with a look that said "oh, this naughty little kid" and then said something which I can't quite remember. Actually, though, I and my classmates always tease the teachers talking about Tibet and Taiwan and stuff and while they don't really take us quite seriously they aren't horrified or anything. Also, last Friday I was out drinking and met this Chinese-American (born Hong Kong, raised California) and his PRC girlfriend (who could understand most of what we were talking about in English but couldn't say much), and when we got into the topic of Taiwan independence she was just rolling her eyes. From what I understand of the PRC argument, it doesn't matter whether people on Taiwan want to be independent - they're Chinese, so China, the PRC that is, has to decide over them. I was pretty drunk though, so can't remember exactly what we were talking about. Still though, I'm walking around talking about this stuff and not getting any kind of reprisal, but imagine if I were a regular, Chinese, student at Peking University. If I were to go around promoting radical views like Tibet and Taiwan independence, it would probably affect how the professors treated me, and how my classmates treated me. Even though there might not be any official action against me, being publicly against the government is a sure way to get ostracized. Being in China is pretty bad if you're Chinese, I think.
Of course it is - everyone outside of China already knows how conditions are, they just need to keep the majority of Chinese from finding out. Of course, people here of course know that they themselves and everyone else are being censored. A classmate of mine here at the Peking University Chinese language course has a girlfriend who is working as an English teacher - it'll be interesting to ask if the contract she has signed has anything like that in it.
But really, most Chinese are pretty much politically apathetic. The common worker has no time to even think about politics, having to work 14 hours a day just to feed their family. The bloggers are a minority, and the democracy movement here is just too small and unorganized to do anything. But people are in fact scared of saying anything bad about the CCP - every time I try to bring politics up with a taxi driver or whoever they just stop speaking to me. This lack of freedom of speech contributes to make people more complacent, as they don't even know about the Tiananmen protests or the truth of China's role in Tibet.
But hey, it's damn fun being here as a student!
Well, iTunes DRM-free tracks play on other things than iPods as well... Just the other day I copied an iTunes Plus-song to a Sony Ericsson mobile phone, and it played it without any problems. Really old players that don't support AAC won't support it, of course, but those are rare these days.