PandaPassport.com – China Blog

Ok. So most of us are well aware of the Chinese Chat software, QQ. Chances are, if you know a Chinese person, you know a registered QQ user.

Founded by Pony Ma in Shenzhen, China, in November 1998, Tencent is now recognized as the leading provider of Internet, mobile & telecommunications value-added services in China. QQ, Tencent’s instant messaging service platform, officially launched in Feb 1999 and announced in its 2006 Q3 report that it has 221.4 million active users. What’s more, the total registered user accounts has climbed to 572.3 million! (Source readwriteweb.com)

So lets put that in perspective. If active QQ users formed their own nation, here’s what the world’s top 5 highest populated countries would look like:

1. China — 1,321,851,888*
2. India — 1,129,866,154
3. United States — 301,139,947
4. Indonesia — 234,693,997
5. Republic of QQ — 221,400,000
6. Pakistan — 169,270,617
7. Bangladesh — 150,448,339
8. Russia — 141,377,752
9. Nigeria — 135,031,164
10. Japan — 127,467,972

*Note: Ok, I know I didn’t take away the QQ users from China’s population, but I’m not encouraging a revolution here…

In any case, if you want in on a piece of all that action but you don’t speak Chinese, never fear, there is an English version:

Download Tencent QQ2005 English Standard Version

Keep in mind that you will need a QQ number, and those aren’t free. But like anything in China, ask your Chinese friends what they can do for you, and you’ll likely have one soon after.

Update: Thijs points out in the comments that there is now an English Sign-up page.

The english download above was first brought to my attention by Dezza of Mask of China. After I taught a year of university in China, I found that this was an excellent way to keep in touch with each and every one of my students, as about 99% of them were on QQ. Unfortunately I quit using the program after a while, since it was a little resource heavy. Update: I’m now using Adium on a Mac to run both QQ and MSN side-by-side. On a PC, you could try Pidgin IM Client.

If you’re a bit more ambitious, and want to give the Chinese version a go, you can get that here. Chinese Windows might be a requirement for this, though I don’t know how it displays in Vista yet.
Download Tencent QQ Chinese Version 2007 Beta1

This is a neat little trick using a feature of feedburner that some people may not be aware of yet.

Step 1:

If you haven’t yet burned your RSS feed using feedburner, I strongly recommend you do so. Feedburner has a ton of tools, and this feature is just the tip of the iceburg.

Step 2:

After doing that, go to the PUBLICIZE tab on your feed’s management menu.

Step 3:

You will see on the left sidebar, an option called HEADLINE ANIMATOR: Display Rotating Headlines. This will create a box containing your 5 most headlines, displayed in rotation. You can add this box to any html page. This is what mine looks like:

Step 4:

Under the ADD TO drop down box on that page, select EMAIL SIGNATURE. So far, this function can be used in Outlook Express, Yahoo mail, Mozilla Thunderbird, and they also have workarounds for Gmail and Apple mail.

If your email signature supports html, you can click on the Other (just gimme the code). I used the html option in yahoo mail, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it works in hotmail as well.

Step 5:

That’s it! Having your latest 5 rotating headlines tacked on the end of every outgoing email is sure to bring at least a boost to your traffic.

Update: You can use this little hack to use it in Gmail as well.

P.S. China’s Stolen-Media-of-the Day: The entire first season of Friends. The Offender: Yoqoo.com.

Ok. Well this topic has been talked to death. But here’s one aspect of pollution in China that you may not have considered: Language Pollution. And this is one that some in government think should be given high priority:

The reliance of mobile phones on foreign corporations’ Chinese character input technology creates at least three major problems. First, foreign corporation’s Chinese character input methods are destroying the traditional patterns for thinking about using Chinese characters and are Westernizing Chinese culture, [causing it to be] alienated and degenerate. Next, foreign corporations are not complying with our country’s compulsory standard of 27,484 characters, using instead only 6,763 characters, which wreaks chaos in the use of Chinese characters, distorts Chinese character text messages, and affects national information security. Also, China spends hundreds of millions of yuan every year on Chinese character input software. Where is the self respect of the [domestic] industry? The dignity and prestige of the culture of Chinese characters — where have they been put? –committee member Chen Duo, source Pinyin News

C’mon Chennie… You’re killin’ me here. My western culture isn’t gonna destroy yours is it? I mean, can’t you be more accomodating and develop a katakana for us like Japan did? As a foreigner in China, my initial reaction is obviously a defensive one. I’m in this country as an outsider, and any negative reaction to me or my culture is naturally gonna put me on edge a little, right?

But then I think about where I’m from. Newfoundland. A Canadian province known for having a dialect of English comparible to how an Irishman might sound if he had a mouthful of codfish and LSD. And I’ll be fucked if we’re not proud of it.

But here’s the kicker. I’ve all but lost my accent. I don’t sound a lot like my parents, and I sound even less like my grandparents. I still have some traces of it, but I have to say I’m sad to see it become so diluted. The fact that the world is getting smaller has made it harder for oddities like Newfie-english to stay pure. But of course, such cultural osmosis is happening everywhere.
(Note: If I said “osmosis” in my everyday speech back home, my friends would have given me a kick in the balls to set me straight.)

And now with China not as isolated as it once was, should they (the Chinese) be defensive about such cultural pollution? As I said, my initial thought is that people like Chen Duo should shut the hell up and focus on the dangerous forms of pollution in China. But then again, if Chinese culture was indeed my culture, would I still feel that way?

When I think about all the changes back in Newfoundland and how my culture has changed, I guess I can see his point. At least, just a little.

P.S. China’s Stolen-Media-of-the-Day: The 2007 NBA All-Star Game from Las Vegas. The Offender: Yoqoo

Ryan’s recent Lost Laowai post on staying positive in China has gotten me thinking. (Not an easy task, I must tell you…)

As I recently wrote elsewhere, I’m perfectly happy here for now, but I do bitch and complain sometimes. And I understand the impulse that causes others to do so as well, especially if they’re newcomers.

While nobody likes a person who whines all the time, in some situations I believe it’s perfectly fine.

• If I see corrupt practices, it irritates me, and I feel the need to discuss it.
• If I hear people talking crap about Japanese people, it irritates me – because it’s something that’s wrong and unnecessary.
• If I someone tries to cheat me, I ask them “?????????? and I glare at them with a look of disappointment.

While I’m happy here with my current situation, I don’t think we should turn a blind eye to such things. Of course, we can fall back on saying “Ah well, this is China,” and it happens. But I’m glad to say that the culture of “mei banfa/there’s nothing I can do” is not something I’ve adopted.

Let me put this in my super-big extra-pink bold font:

Discussing negative aspects of a situation (i.e. Discussing the negative aspects of living in China) should not be flippantly passed off as “whining or complaining.”

P.S. China’s stolen-media-of-the-day: Seinfeld.

Having a somewhat busier-than-I’m used-to schedule these days, I don’t seem to get out as much as I did in the past. However, I did head out for a few beers tonight. I ended up running into quite a few laowais/foreigners who, I’m sorry to say, I had lost touch with. Having mostly Chinese coworkers, I don’t really see many expats or western people in my daily life anymore.

But tonight it was definitely good to get back to that circle. I mean, it’s not that I don’t’ enjoy time spent with my Chinese friends, because I do. But there are just some occurances that simply don’t happen when you’re out with Chinese friends.

For example, you rarely hear someone yell out:

“Ok, lets all compare nipple sizes, and whoever has the smallest nipples buys the next round.”

That just doesn’t happen in my Chinese circle of friends. But it’s one of those sentences that never fails to bring a smile to the face of anyone who hears it.

For me, not having spent as much time with my western friends in the past year, I find it very refreshing when I finally get a chance to do so. I mean, it’s fun to sit around a table and contemplate the business plan of your male American friend who aspires to become a high-class male prostitute in the booming Asian market..

We China expats can all take solice in the fact that we all have one thing in common — that being we’ve all done some stupid-ass shit. Whether it’s been going to the fabric market to buy velvet upholstery for every main piece of furniture in your house, or naming your Chinese ESL class after entire cast of South Park… We’ve all been overwhelmed by the weirdness of China, and we’ve all thrown a significant chunk of laowai-crazy right back at ‘em.

To this day, I still take enormous enjoyment from getting into a cab and yelling in English “Follow that car, and step on it!”

Maybe it’s just me…

But anyway, the fact remains that not too many of my Chinese friends are quite as “retarded” as my laowai friends. Just a cultural difference I guess…

Have I adjusted to this more reserved Chinese culture and become less “retarded” than I was when I first came? Most likely I have…

But as a wise friend once told me, “Screw that shit.”

Why fight over who pays the bill, like the Chinese do? Lets split it 9 ways, because that’s our culture. Who cares if people stare? That’s our culture. No need to change just because we’re living in China.

Adjusting to a culture is fine. Assymilation? Well, that just silly. You’ll never catch me in one of those silly traditional jackets or waving my finger China-style during a heated argument, or when I try to emphasize a point.

That said, I’m usually quite reserved in my actions, and white skin aside, my behaviour is usually subtle enough for me to blend into most Chinese backgrounds. However, I really do envy those foreigners who just don’t give a be-jeesis about the inevitable crowds of gawking onlookers who gather around them.

As my friend Darren would often say faced with just such a situation:
“These are not the Droids you are looking for!”

Weekly China Links: 20 Sites I wish I had known about when I came to China

A friend of mine from Newfoundland has just recently hopped over the Great Wall and into the Middle Kingdom. Being the generous and thoughtful person that I (sometimes) am, I assembled a list of my favorite China related sites to pass on to him. I thought I’d throw it out here, in case some of you may not be aware of some of these sites as well.

Community sites:

1. The Haohao Report
2. Chinalyst
3. The China Blog List

And other China Blogs, in no particular order

4. The Adventures of the Humanaught
5. Jottings from the Granite Studio
6. Sinocidal
7. Fuck
8. Danwei TV
9. Filination
10. Kaiser Kuo
11. Image Thief
12. Lost Laowai
13. Mask of China – HK edition
14. Mutant Palm
15. The Peking Duck
16. Eyes East
17. Sinosplice Life
18. Virtual China
19. Weird Asian News
20. East South West North

Did I miss anyone?

I recently was made aware of an article from Federal Computer Week entitled Chinese Hackers will Attack Anything and Everything, via This Week in Tech. Whether the Chinese are hacking America’s Defense Department networks is not in question. That’s a fact:

Attacks coming from China, probably with government support, far outstrip other attackers in terms of volume, proficiency and sophistication, said a senior Netwarcom official, who spoke to reporters on background Feb 12.

The conflict has reached the level of a campaign-style, force-on-force engagement, he said.China has also been using spear phishing, sending deceptive mass e-mail messages to lure DOD users into clicking on a malicious URL, the official said. China is also using more traditional hacking methods, such as Trojan horse viruses and worms, but in innovative ways.

The big question is, is this really organanized and encouraged by the state? Or is it just a few punk university students trying to make a name for themselves?

Chinese hackers gained notoriety in the United States when a series of devastating intrusions, beginning in 2003, was traced to a team of researchers in Guangdong Province. The program, which DOD called Titan Rain, was first reported by Federal Computer Week in August 2005.

Following that incident, DOD renamed the program and then classified the new name. That particular set of hackers is still active, the Netwarcom official said. He would not confirm whether the Titan Rain group was linked to the NWC attack or any other recent high-profile intrusions.

I’m not going to speculate as to the answer. Is it possible that a sophisticated cyber-attack could be masterminded by these man-purse toting sleepy-heads? Who knows…

But given the patriotic spirit that seems to exist here in China, I wouldn’t be surprised if it were just punk kids out to score one for the motherland. I wasn’t in China when 911 happened, but I have English-teacher friends who were. They reported that some of their some of Chinese students reacted to the World Trade Center attacks with happiness and applause.

In my own experience when I was an English teacher, I’ve run into quite a few of these more militant students as well:

Me: Johnny, if you had one wish what would you wish for? Eternal Happiness? World Peace? A helicopter?

Johnny: No. If I only had one wish, I’d use it to drop a bomb on Tokyo.

Did I mention that I’ve also seen Osama Bin Laden T-shirt for sale here in China as well? Any opportunity to make a buck… Whatever the case, I sincerely hope that China’s rise is a peaceful one that doesn’t threaten any county, as the party line says it is. But maybe it’s not the government that the west needs to be worried about.

Maybe it’s just the regular dumbasses. China recently announced that there will be no new internet cafes opening in 2007. Maybe the powers-that-be doesn’t want anyone stealing their thunder?