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Posts tagged China

I asked the question on Quora and I got a very interesting reply from Junde Yu, a mobile and internet startup consultant in China, who is also an editor for Chinese tech blog TechRice. He said: probably not. Conversely, I think Google Plus is a clone of Weibo. This is a very interesting way of looking at it. The threaded comments, videos, photos—they work pretty much like Sina Weibo, China’s hottest microblogging platform. Although I wouldn’t go as far as saying that Google has cloned it, it does share a number of similar elements, sans the 140 character limit.

‘Will Google be cloned in China?’, TNW Asia (via thenextweb)

(via stoweboyd)

aliceandlife:

I was reading this opinion on the nzherald today - Is it okay to be a slut? - and my eyes gradually wandered to the comments section. 

I read this comment:

Yes, wouldn`t it be heartening to see the same volume of people step out onto Queen Street to protest at the disgraceful Human Rights abuse perpetrated by China for decades against Tibetans whilst the Dalia Lama was in the country? 

Or protesting about the possible sale of Crafar farmland to China or the eventual sale of state assets to foreign businesses, mainly Chinese? 

No chance. 

Those days are long gone when students marched en masse against such important issues, the social situation today being that a great majority of Auckland students are from the very country that the protests would be aimed at.

If it wasn’t immediately obvious from the title, the article was about the recent Slutwalk marches that have been occurring around the globe as a protest against blaming victims as opposed to the rapists for attacks on women. I think the idea is that somehow because women dress quite revealingly, it’s their fault that they get sexually assaulted and raped on the street.

Anyway, that comment was the first to show and my immediate reaction for a good minute or two was a single thought - … the fuck?

Being the Chinese student that this guy/girl refers to, I was amused, surprised and slightly pissed off. So I stalked his other comments and found similar anti-Chinese sentiments.

Having grown up in an environment where racism has been a part of my childhood, comments like that usually don’t really bother me. What does bother me is when people take a small piece of China’s unsavoury history and uses it as evidence for the legitimacy of everything else. As if the Western world is the beacon of human rights and everyone else is a threat and something undesirable to have within society.

I have never harboured any negative feelings against European people (although I know many people do) but I do hope that many will recognise that they too have inflicted grave human rights abuses throughout history. For a lot of them, something about being ‘white’ gives them the sense of being on some moral or authoritative high ground. The lengths they would go for religions, colonisation and war purposes are actually incredibly revolting to learn about. Parikaha in the late 1800s is a small but accurate representation of New Zealand’s own history of repression and destruction of human rights (see below). 

I know a lot of people who are sick of being treated like second-rate citizens. I don’t think respect is much to ask for, but even the champions of human rights like the guy with the comment can’t help but let racism and prejudice get the best of him. 

I suppose it’s a little comforting to think of the impact on New Zealand’s economy if China pulled all of its resources and people of out New Zealand, as the writer seems to desire. Goodbye economy.

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It’s the idiots that have made me cease reading comments on a lot of news sites. I guess I shouldn’t, because there are occasional gems in there. But the comment areas also bring out the nutters. We should be thankful to the internet for exposing just how far we still need to go to get anywhere near ‘civilized’. Website and blog comments remind us that racism, stupidity and simple meanness are still with us in a big way.

China does have a lot to answer for, I agree. But Alice is also right in that no group is perfect, and so often the preachy self-righteous stuff (and my own lot is just as guilty of it—I’ve seen Chinese justify the deaths from Maoism, intellectual property theft, and even the M9 earthquake and tsunami) smacks of hypocrisy, a desire to impose some kind of digital historical revisionism, or, at the least, a remarkable lack of awareness. She has every right to be pissed off.