Tidbits From the World

As you probably noticed, in my last few articles I translated some Chinese texts that I encountered in my daily life: a notice pasted on a door in my apartment building that urged someone to stop urinating in the hallway, an advertisement pasted on the street proposing to buy your sperm for one million and a half yuans, a prescription written by a traditional doctor, made on the fly after he had looked at me for five minutes in a restaurant,… Today, let me show you a translation of a poster located at the entrance of what locals call an “inside village”, a small, empoverished neighborhood, crossed by two or three streets, where migrant workers, prostitutes, poor pimps and second-class mafiosi live. The notice below explains the “immigration” rules in the city. I put “immigration” in quotation marks because it stands for the migration of citizens of one country into a different area of the same country, China; from the countryside to the city. Pay attention on how the notice starts: with gentle, soft words. First, they welcome you and wish you the best of luck. And then, as soon as the second paragraph begins, all the soft words are replaced by a more authoritarian tone “you will positively act in concordance with our work“. This device is very common in Chinese letters or notices. They start beating around the bush, using a soft tone with the aim of softening you, and soon thereafter they catch you off-guard telling you directly all that needs to be said, without detour. Have a good read, and enjoy your short excursion in 1984…

流动人口须知

流动人口朋友：
您好！热情欢迎您的到来。无论您是务工、经商或其他原因来到这里，都为杨家村的发展作出了贡献。我们将为
您提供安全、舒适的居住环境，优质的计划生育生殖健康服务，对您的子女就学提供帮助，并竭力解决您在生产、生活
中的各种困难，充分体现“亲情化管理 温馨式服务”，希望这里成为您的第二个家。
作为我们“杨家村新村民”，希望您能积极配合我们的工作。主动出示身份证、《流动人口婚育证明》等有关证
件，协助房主做好登记，并做到以下几点：
一、遵守《陕西省流动人口计划生育管理办法》、《西安市暂住人口管理条例》等当地各项法律、法规和村里的各
项规章制度。
二、凡在本村居住满30日以上的育龄流动人口，自期满之日起7日内持本人《流动人口婚育证明》、身份证到杨家村
办公室检查，有婚育行为的同时交验户籍地生育证。
三、未持有《流动人口婚育证明》者，请您香到须知后，及时回户籍地办理，以便纳入我村计划生育日常管理。
谢谢您的合作！

党支部
杨家村
村委会

Notice to the Migrant Population

Dear Migrants,

Hi! We warmly welcome you. No matter if you came to work in a factory, if you came on business or for any other reason, you will contribute to Yangjiacun’s development. ["Yangjiacun", name of the "inside village", T.N.] We will provide you with a safe environment and a comfortable place to live in, as well as superior health services in accordance with the One Child Policy, and we will provide your child with assistance in their studies. We will work diligently to resolve any problem that might arise, whether it be childbirth matters or simply everyday life problems. We will fully live up to our motto, which is “affectionate management and warm service”, and we hope that here will become your second home.

As “new Yangjiacun villagers”, we hope you will positively act in concordance with our work. You will actively produce your identification card, your migration, marriage and pregnancy certificate, as well as any other relevant document. In order to assist the owner of your hotel to correctly check you in, please follow the following three steps:

1. Respect the Shaanxi Province measures on migration, and the planning of births, the Xi’an municipal rules on temporary residence, as well as any other local law, and the village rules and laws.

2. Any migrant of childbearing age who plans on living here at least 30 days, must at least 7 days before the end of the 30-day period, go to the Yangjiacun police department building in order to produce their certificate of migration, marriage and childbearing, their identification card and, in the event of a pregnancy, you will need to immediately hand over your census register for examination, and write down the place of marriage or delivery.

3. If you do not have in your possession your certificate of migration, marriage and childbearing, please after reading this notice immediately go to the census register administration office, in order to integrate the daily management of birth planning.

Thank you for your collaboration!

Yangjiacun Branch of the Communist Party
Village Committee

打造平安雁塔
创建卫生城市
构建和谐社会
实行电子监控

长延保办事处
长延保处所

Create a Peaceful Yanta ["Yanta", the name of the district, N.T.]
Establish a Sanitary City
Build a Harmonious Society
Implement an Electronic Surveillance System

Changyan Protection Agency
Changyan Protection Area

枪爆无小事 民安中泰山

To fire a gun is no trivial matter; the security of the people is as important as Mount Tai.

***

The photo in the article “A Sea of People” was also taken at the entrance of Yangjiacun. The majority of the people in the photograph are police officers who went to check the documents of the migrants living in Yangjiacun. They checked the ID cards, the certificates of migration, marriage and childbearing, and all other relevant documents…

The Chinese Government is offering scholarships to any foreigner with a good knowledge of the Chinese culture, history and language (HSK 7 or better).

The government offers to give 42,900 yuans a year, plus money for tuition fees and accomodation (at the University’s dormitory). 10 to 12 students will be selected for each Normal University in all of China. If you convert the scholarship money into USD, it doesn’t really seem impressive ($6260), however if you compare this amount of money in yuans in relation to the cost of living or the average yearly wages in China (about 元 30,000 in Xi’an, 元42789 in Shanghai, and 元44715 in Beijing), then you get a pretty interesting sum of money.

But there is a catch. You have to “promise” (that’s the word they use in the contract [承诺]) the Chinese government that upon graduation, you will spend at least two years teaching in a Confucius Institute in your country of origin.

If you don’t know what a Confucius Institute is, well, it’s pretty much the Chinese equivalent to Goethe Institutes or Alliance Française, where the views of the Chinese government are represented. They are its human face, its soft power. Therefore, the Chinese Government offers any qualified foreigner the possibility of signing a Pact with the Devil. You take His money and the good life that comes with it, and then for two years you have to work for Him, at the service of His international propaganda!

Well, if you are interested, I think this would be a great way to improve your Chinese (among other things, you will get to learn the Classics in their original versions, that is in Classical Chinese). I’d like to sign up, but I’m not qualified yet. It is a Master’s degree program, so you need to have at least a Bachelor’s degree to qualify.

By the way, Confucius Institutes have recently taken some heat from the Chinese press. People have accused them as being too expensive and useless. They are using the Chinese taxpayer’s money to finance their activities in more than 88 countries and territories in the world. Since the first establishment of a Confucius Institute abroad, in South Korea in 2004, 282 new institutes have been created as of April 2010. That’s around one new institute every week! How much does all this cost? Are they really reaching their goal of “spreading Chinese culture abroad”? Where does money for the scholarships come from? If you think about it, the best scholarship a Chinese student can hope for is about 5000 yuans a year (there are of course some rare exceptions). So, behind this 42,900 yuan scholarship there must be some hidden political will. After all, the Chinese government is not unique: as any other government in the world, they are acting in their own interest, and for their own image rather than for their people.

***

I have talked to one student who is doing the Master’s degree program right now and he told me that the way the contract (pictured above) is written is purposely vague in order to attract foreign students. The tuition fees are actually not completely included in the scholarship (some of them are paid by the government, but the rest is paid by the university itself, which takes its funds from… guess where… your scholarship). The dorm fees are also not included… So in the end, the scholarship is not actually 42,900 yuans a year, but 17,000 yuans… Or 1,700 yuans a month, ten months a year (in January and February, you don’t get anything).

But it’s still a good offer if you already have some money saved up in your bank account as a backup. Otherwise, you’re in for a frugal life.

And one last point that I want to make. The motive behind this scholarship is not all political, but also cross-cultural. There have been some cases of Chinese teachers abroad who would go through serious nervous breakdown or depression while working abroad at a Confucius Institute. The aim here is to train “foreigners” (or “locals” in their home country), who will help the Chinese teachers to better communicate with their students abroad. This should release some of the pressure these teachers get while working abroad. After all, the Chinese are not different from the Westerners who come to China to teach English. How many English teachers have fallen in temporary (or not) depression? They would probably like to have someone by their side who can understand them and advise them.

Today I have no travel pictures to share, but instead here’s a very interesting observation that I made last week while studying Chinese:

This is a text that I had to study for my Chinese litterature class last week. It’s a short biography of Laoshe, an author from the beginning of the 20th Century. As I usually do when I read in Chinese, I looked up all the words, that I was not completely sure about the meaning, in a dictionary. And I stumbled upon that sentence:

1966年“文化大革命”开始后受到了残酷XX……

In 1966, after the start of the “Cultural Revolution”, he was the victim of cruel XX.

XX stands for the word that I didn’t know.

So, I looked up the word in my favorite online dictionary…

And this is what I got! The page was censored! So what could be that mysterious word that activates government censorship? – even in a dictionary… The unknown kindles the curiosity, so I used a proxy to bypass the censorship and I found out the meaning of the word…

And here it was… But why then was it censored? At first I thought it was just one of those keywords that the Great Firewall automatically blocks no matter which website uses them. So, I looked up the word again, this time in a French dictionary, and here’s what I got:

No censorship… the French dictionary worked without any problem. That was strange. So, if it wasn’t a matter of automatically censored keywords, then what was it?

After that, later in the same week, an other “illegal” word appeared in one of my texts: “色情”, litterally “color, feeling”. Again, the English dictionary would not show me any result without using a proxy, but the French dictionary worked without a hitch.

“Érotisme” (eroticism). Recently, the government started a campaign against pornography. Many pornographic sites were shut down or censored. I guess the word that is related to the concept of “pornography” has itself been put on the list of keywords to be censored by the Great Firewall!

That reminded of that dictionary that gave me the following definition for the word “Independence of Taiwan”: Proposition of a handful of people in Taiwan Province attempting to split Taiwan from China.

I try not to discuss too much about politics on this blog. I understand that some people get worked up really easily, especially on the Internet, over articles about China. But for those who don’t understand why I was surprised by this definition in my dictionary, it’s because the translation was very political and biased. Instead of only giving a translation for the word “台独”, a definition was added, thus giving a political bias to a document that is supposed to be neutral and apolitical, a dictionary.