First up, a modern rendition of the Zhangye Danxia (a classic landscape found only in China) by Rebecca Mok.
(Via Rebecca Mok Illustrates.)
Then, a classic Chinese landscape style rendering by Zao Lu…
(Via Co.Design.)
…except that Zao’s “paintings” are actually photoshopped pictures of trash heaps in China.
Over at the Atlantic, Nick Frisch discusses the outrage that ensued when Mo Yan, “Communist Party member, People’s Liberation Army veteran, Vice-Chairman of the state-run China Writers’ Association” won the Nobel Prize for Literature last October.
The paper quoted Gao Xingjian, the 2000 literature laureate whose dissident stature and French citizenship made him ineligible for recognition as a “Chinese” winner back home: writers need “‘total independence’ to create [...] ‘eternal’” literature. “What is the relation between officials and literature?” Gao asks. “Nothing… They have nothing to do with literature, especially with literature [...] Where can officials and literature be connected? Nowhere. … And if they are, then it’s merely official literature, and that’s a really laughable thing. So literature shouldn’t be organized by officials.”
Just don’t tell that to Tang dynasty wordsmiths Li Bai and Du Fu, or the historian Sima Qian, painter-poet-calligraphers Su Dongpo and Ouyang Xiu, 11th-century public-interest crusader Bao Zheng, or prominent 2nd-century BC anti-corruption activist Qu Yuan. And definitely don’t tell noted itinerant philosopher Confucius.
Shake it function (摇一摇)
Excerpted from Bytes of China:
A few weeks ago, a conversation about the popularity of WeChat emerged on a tech mailing lists. Someone posted several reasons why they thought WeChat was more usable than Skype. They listed several technical reasons, such as ease of use, great mobile interface, and more efficient battery conservation. The person also proposed that WeChat depersonalized communication.
I wrote a response agreeing with the person but also adding that there are more than just technical reasons. My reply is below:
…
But there are several other reasons that are more deeply intertwined with the social norms of Chinese society – I won’t go into the social norms but I’ll just briefly list several reasons why Chinese youth love WeChat:
The first three points are the interesting reasons for why WeChat is so popular — they all revolve around meeting strangers.
One of the most important things to understand about Chinese apps is that the successful ones make serendipitous communication with strangers really easy.
In a society with very restrictive social norms around permissive interaction and self-expression, Chinese youth don’t have a lot of opportunity to meet new people outside of formal contexts or to express themselves.
So the quasi-anonymity of the internet provides a space for youth to explore emotions with strangers – emotions that they don’t feel that they can share offline with people they know like friends and family. There’s a bunch of social structural reasons for this that I won’t get into here. But the important thing I realized was the extent to which youth spend time online interacting with what we would call strangers – and really strangers is not an appropriate word because some of these relationships become very meaningful.
I don’t see user practices around WeChat as an example of communication becoming less personal.
…
The analogy I use is a bar – and that some apps are a lot of like third spaces, spaces outside of home (first space) and work (second space). The informality of a bar widens what is considered permissive behavior. When you walk into a bar, you can be anyone – you have no institutional or personal ties attached to you. We go to bars to meet strangers but also to be a stranger. We all need informal third spaces where we can chill in the company of unknown others. And in the same way, we also need similar spaces online.
Some software environments are very formal (prescriptive behavior, primarily personal ties), but some software environments are more informal – and it is in these informal online spaces that people gravitate towards when they want to explore a self outside of prescriptive ties. In Chinese society where there are VERY limited options for self expression, online third spaces like WeChat are a place where self-exploration feels safe for Chinese youth.
…
[1] One Stand Tips is a popular message being passed around on Weixin. It’s written under the guise of a male giving other males tips on how to find one night stands with women on Weixin using the Drifting Bottle in the Sea (漂流瓶) feature.
微信约炮须知：Tips for finding a One Night Stand on Weixin.
1. 摇一摇功能看似是最靠谱的功能，传说中的郎有情、妾有意，其实却和Q的巧遇卡一样，是个骗子横行的功能，因此须格外谨慎判断。
The “Shake it” function is the most useful function. It’s a mutual feeling. In fact, the “shake it” function is similar to the Qiao Yu card (巧遇卡, coincidence card) on QQ which that liars use, so you should judge carefully.
2. 附近人功能需要勤劳致富，广种薄收，一般来说第一步是看个人签名，第二步是看人的长相。最好上手又最不花钱的，是长相一般或年龄30以上的好奇妇女。
The function of “Nearby” needs hardworking to make ONS comes to true. In general, the first step is to look at the personal status and the second step is to look at the appearance. The ones who have ordinary appearance or who are curious women 30 years up are easy to hook ups.
3. 漂流瓶看似最不靠谱，其实是成功率最高的，一旦捡到女同志迷惘、纠结、郁闷的瓶子，要立即以轻松的玩笑话予以安慰，一旦真成功，还真就有坐火车来陪你战斗一下，然后在坐火车回去的极品。
The floating bottle (漂流瓶, Piao Liu Ping, which is one of the fuctions of Weixin) may appear to be unreliabe but in fact gives you the highest hook up success rate. Once you pick a bottle from women who feel lost or blue, you should comfort her with jokes. As long as you succeeed, there are some who will take a train to see you.
4. 无论何种方式锁定目标，都不要轻易以“你好”这样的词汇让别人加你，最好的办法是直接说“加我！”，这样被加的概率远远高于你好。
No matter how you set your goal, never write “hello” to ask people to add you. The best way is to write “add me” directly. This gives you a higher chance to be added than a “hello.”
5. 微信开始聊天后，不要问那么清楚情况，因为我们的目的不是了解他的人生，而是了解他的人体，所以他多大你要靠照片判断，什么性格你要看签名和相册，频繁更新签名的，神志不清，很容易上手，频繁拍照的一半都需要大量花钱还不一定搞到，因此不予考虑；连性别都不会改的，多半是刚玩，一旦聊上对你产生依赖的心里，你就发达了！
When you begin to chat with a girl on Weixin, do not ask too much about her. This is because our goal is to know about her body instead of her life. So you need to tell how old she is through pictures, and get o know her personality through her personal status and photos in her folder. The ones who often change personal statuses are usually easy to hook up with. The ones who often take pictures can be expensive to court and you may fail. So we do not consider them. The ones who do not change their gender are usually rookies. Once you hook up with her. make her feel like she relies on you. You earned it!
6. 聊天的基本原则是寻找话题，然后让她说，你听，而不要你说让她听，他说啥对于我们来说一点不重要，因为我们的原则就是了解他的人体，而不了解他的人生；不管他的观点对错与否，你都要保证八分赞同，两分否定，这样他会觉得和你有共同语言，而且还会感觉你很有个性。
The basic chatting principle is to find topics that will get her to talk, then you listen. It’s never the other way around. It is not important what she says. This is because our principle is to know her body instead of her life. No matter if her view is right or wrong, you should agree 80% and disagree 20%. This way she will feel that you two have a common topic of interest and that you are special.
7. 要在不经意间炫耀一下自己的一技之长，没有一技之长不要紧，你要守着电脑用搜索引擎，反正就是忽悠，让他觉得你很厉害。
Show off your talents. It doens’t matter if you don’t have any. Have a computer with you and use the search engine, just brag. Try to make her feels that you are the greatest.
8. 见面之前一定要先聊十天八天，见面一定要喝点小酒，见面时候要有意无意地与他进行一些类似情侣的接触，不一定非要碰触，但一定要给他一个浪漫的感觉。
You need to chat with her for 8-10 days before you two meet. Drink some wine and interact the way lovers do. You do not have to touch her but you need to make it romantic.
9. 酒店一定要团购，团购的酒店价格基本和旅馆差不多，很便宜；千万别把女人带回自己家，除非你是癫痫病发作。
You need to reserve hotel through group buying. The prices will be similar to a motel which is also cheap. Never bring a woman home, unless you are crazy.
10. 完事之后电话立即换号，不要有过多纠缠，因为第二次开始，你就得花钱了……
Change your cellphone instantly after you finish. Do not have any more contact. Because seeing her a second time will cost you money.
最后一条原则，是老衲的经验：结婚了的比恋爱中的好上，恋爱中的（长期）比单身妇女好上；不要寻觅绝色美女，因为那玩意根本不属于你。
The last principle is based on my experience: the ones who are married are easier to succeed with than the ones who are not. The one who are in love (in long term relationship) are easier to hook up than singles. Do not look for beauties. Those ones do not belong to you.
祝广大网易网友约炮顺利，夜夜新郎！
I hope that my internet pals will success in hooking up and becoming a groom every night.
…
From the Atlantic, In Hong Kong, a Sanctuary for Banned Books:
Later that year we began to get mainland visitors from cities like Beijing and Tianjin who were traveling on their own. Our sign said “People’s Commune” in Chinese, and our logo was Mao Zedong’s face, so maybe that caught their eye. Sometimes, customers would ask me questions like, “Hey boss, do you have any copies of Zhou Enlai’s Later Years?’ At the time I didn’t get it, I still wasn’t so familiar with books published in simplified characters. I would tell them that I’d look into it and found a couple of Hong Kong publishers with that book or maybe The Private Life of Chairman Mao. I wasn’t really into politics – we were primarily selling books about art and culture…
We began selling more and more banned books in late 2004. People were interested in the power transition from [President] Jiang Zemin to Hu Jintao [which was drawn out over two years]. Customers would come back and ask, “What else do you have?” They were really interested in what was going on during the leadership change and were unable to read anything about it on the mainland. We started off with a tiny shelf of political books, eventually it grew to take up a counter, and as sales continued to improve more of the store was taken up by banned books.
Not mentioned in the article: The bookstore-cafe also sells milk powder, a highly sought after good after China’s tainted milk powder scanda in 2008.
Those of us who’ve been in Hong Kong are constantly barraged by articles and people describing the magic of the now-dismantled Kowloon Walled City. Amidst the romanticization of this 6.5 acre block that was ungoverned or policed for decades (it lay in limbo between communist China and colonial British rule), people rarely offer any photographs of its inside. Until now, I had seen more of it’s outside and bird’s eye view than its innards.
Discovering 99% Invisible’s excellent podcast on it changed this. On their article about the podcast, they feature Greg Girard’s wonderful photographs:
More from where that came from here.
The article continues by featuring video footage of the Walled City. Here’s Jean-Claude Van Damme in an action movie there before it was torn down:
And they even managed to find a 40-minute German documentary (subtitled) about the City:
If you can get past the judgmental German overtones, they take us on through quite a thorough tour.
Aside from interviewing photographer Greg Girard, 99% Invisible also talks to architect Aaron Tan, who wrote a thesis on the Kowloon Walled City. Listen to the episode now.
Update: Check out an infographic of the city that the South China Morning Post commissioned. (Via Transpondster & Final Boss Form.)
Above: TouchPal (触宝)’s promo video for their smartphone swipe-typing technology. Note the (probably unauthorized) Lady Gaga soundtrack.
Francis Pisani over at Winch5 has a feature on TouchPal Cootek, a China born-and-bred smartphone swipe-typing technology. Pisani claims that their keyboard works much better than the Swype that’s offered on Samsung phones. Amongst Cootek’s many features are predictive text (all hail T9!), contextual and location-aware dictionaries, and of course, better Chinese input support. And it’s the last one we’ll dig into here. (For the other features, I recommend watching the embedded video above.) Images taken from their Chinese website, captions by me:
Will autocorrect/account for your pinyin input typos
Will let you type one long string of pinyin without breaking after a few syllables
Has a mode where you can type the pinyin AND THEN swipe the first stroke of the character (has anyone used this? the mode switching seems strange to me…)
Better support for mixed Chinese & English text input
Via Winch5.
Photo credit: BBC World Service
Editor’s note: Below are excerpts from Tricia’s article on Makeshift, Pleasure Hacking:
Lao Bing is doing what most males at the Internet cafe are doing, have done, or will be doing later on that night—searching for porn. Users across the world are drawn to this corner of the infobahn; some estimate that porn accounts for a full third of Internet bandwidth.
…
It may be in the quest for porn that many male college students learn the fundamental lessons about what makes the Internet work: sharing and openness make collaboration possible. These qualities are rare in an education system that rewards individual achievements over teamwork.
While political censorship and digital surveillance continue to cause suffering, most people in China don’t use the Internet to fight back directly; they use what brings them pleasure.
Update: It seems that magCulture is no longer selling this from its online store, and the originally linked-to review has gone missing.
Presenting Cover, a new magazine coming out of China by Mazzybox. (Anyone have more information about him/her? magCulture says that Mazzybox works at a studio called Deadline.)
The magazine’s second edition, pictured below, covers Occupy Wall Street, critical graphic design and the death of newspapers. From magCulture’s review, the content sounds a little thin.
But is it pretty.
More information from magCulture here (including how to order).
Photos by Windell H. Oksay, from an Evil Mad Scientist post in 2009. From the hours I spent there last year, it hasn’t changed since then. Note the heavy advertising expenditure from Samsung, who were out there back in 2009 already.
The electronics markets around Huaqiangbei Road (华强北路) in Shenzhen are huge; hardware components, tape reels, LEDs, cell phones and laptops manage to fill up not one but many tower malls. Unlike many other hotspots in China though, Huaqiangbei has reached a sort of mythical status amongst makers worldwide. Hardware hackers, engineers and enthusiasts’ eyes light up when they talk about Huaqiangbei (sometimes referred to simply as SEG, the name of one of the more prominent malls). As far as I can tell, it started when maker hero Bunnie Huang visited in 2007 and wrote about his experience in a blog post titled, Akihabara, Eat Your Heart Out:
Ten years ago, Akihabara was the place to be for the latest electronics and knick knacks and components. I’m convinced the new place to be is the SEG Electronics Market in Shenzhen…
Chips that I couldn’t dream of buying in the US, reels of rare ceramic capacitors that I only dream about at night. My senses tingle, my head spins. I can’t supress a smirk of anticipation as I walk around the next corner, to see shops stacked floor to ceiling with probably a hundred million resistors and capacitors.
Oh my god! Sony CCD and CMOS camera elements, I couldn’t buy those in the US if I pulled teeth out of the sales reps…
Since then, Bunnie has become a sort of unofficial ambassador of Huaqiangbei/Shenzhen to Western makers. For example, he’s responsible for this geek tour of Huaqiangbei in 2009 (where the above photos come from) and he just wrapped up leading an MIT Media Lab month in Shenzhen.
From my experience buying at Huaqiangbei, what’s surprising is that it is not outsider friendly at all. Even as a Mandarin speaker, I was grunted at, turned down for buying too little at once, and generally bewildered by the lack of wayfinding.
There is some basic organization though, as Windell from Evil Mad Scientist points out:
“Low-level” components like the aforementioned transistors and capacitors are found on the lower floors, while “high-level” devices like computers, storage media, speakers, and all of their friends are found on the upper stories.
To cope with the chaos, people develop strategies for getting what they need out of Huaqiangbei. For example, Silvia Lindtner documents her experiences shadowing Yair, a maker from Tel Aviv:
In a notebook that he carries with him he clips the vendors’ business cards and draws next to it an image of the component, the name, part number and price per piece or per purchase. Upon his next visit, he already knows where to look for a specific part rather than repeating the search all over. A simple and useful way of tackling the maze and over time develop a network of trusted vendors who also offer a good deal.
But Lindtner notes that if Yair really has trouble finding something, he goes to a trusted “Madame Cai,” who will get on the phone for her customers to get them what they need… for a markup:
Customers come to her with a list of parts containing at least the part number, but often also the amount you need and a photo or drawing of the component.
At her stall, Madame Cai sits behind a glass display that shows off samples of parts she might help you with, often in different sizes so customers can easily point and explain their need. When customers stop by, Madame Cai goes through their part list for a quick assessment of what is in her reach to acquire. Then she begins making a series of phone calls to vendors within her network to confirm what she can get that day or what has to wait a day or a week. Most of the time, parts are ready 20 minutes after a visit.
One thing that fascinates and frustrates me about Huaqiangbei is that there’s no such thing as a short SEG/Huaqiangbei trip. I have spent entire afternoons there willingly, wandering around until the stores shut down. But I’ve also lost afternoons there trying to find the right part or vendor, or simply because I had to jostle my way from the subway up to the fifth floor. So in some ways, it doesn’t live up to the hype about being the hardware fairyland of the world.
For more about Huaqiangbei:
(Special thanks to Star Simpson for giving me my first tour of Huaqiangbei.)
China is now the largest car market. But many Western companies are discovering that simply transferring cars designed for Western users do not always appeal to Asian users. Point in case GM’s Cadillac, a car built for American consumers fails to connect to Chinese consumers.
Zach Hyman, an ethnographer based in China, has been researching the creative practices of vehicular design among resource-constrained users. His observations on low-tech vehicles are incredibly relevant for the current global shifts in automative production. In Zach’s latest fieldwork update on Ethnography Matters, he shares with us some of his observations.
He notices that people combine naturally found objects, like bamboos, with trucks to navigate the hilly city and narrow alleyways of Chongqing.
One way Chongqing stands out from most other major Chinese cities is geographically – the city’s notorious hills lead to the near non-existence of cyclists and, as a friend here says, “forces one to navigate in three dimensions”. The bang bang jun (棒棒军lit. “stick soldiers”) make their living using a length of bamboo with an attached rope to carry everything from groceries to refrigerators up and down the city’s steep streets for families and businesses alike. In conjunction with 3-wheeled vehicles, prized for their ability to enter narrow alleys where conventional delivery trucks wouldn’t fit, stick soldiers form a formidable duo for local logistics. Oftentimes, one can spy a stick soldier’s trademark bamboo shoulder-pole resting upon the pile of whatever goods fill the rear bed of a 3-wheeled vehicle.
While Zach’s observations may seem very disconnected from car design, but it’s important to keep in mind that a deep understanding of people’s current vehicle practices can reveal new insights for developing future vehicles. And maybe those vehicles can challenge the current domination of resource-intensive cars. One entrepreneur, Joel Jackson, created Mobius One in Kenya with local welders to overcome transport challenges. The result? A $6,000 low-tech car made for Africa. Like Joel, Zach’s research contributes to a growing group of designers and entrepreneurs who will create a new class of vehicles.
Read more observations from Zach on Ethnography Matters.
88 Bar is a group blog about technology, media and design in the Greater China region. All of our posts are curated from the various perspectives of our authors. More...
