One of my new favorite ‘blogs in ChinaSMACK, a curated collection of trending topics on the internet in mainland China. The authors pick a couple big news items, ongoing memes, or interesting stories each day and post a round up of the comments made on the larger Chinese forums (e.g., the equivalent of digg or the like).
The cool thing is that the authors don’t provide much commentary on their own, but do a great job translating all the comments into very readable English (complete with slang explanations and roll-overs showing the original Chinese). Of course, you must bear in mind the fact that the authors necessarily pick and choose, and there is no way to tell how representative the comments are. Still, I get the impression that they do a good job of conveying the general feeling on the Chinese ‘net.
It’s also quite important to bear in mind that fact that only around a third of the population on China uses the internet, meaning that even if these curated comments were truly representative of Chinese online thought, they’d still leave out almost a billion folks.
Still, I find it fascinating. Take, for example, this recent post, “Male Cross-Dresser At A McDonald’s In Shanghai“. This was a post on the largest internet discussion board in China: mop.com. It’s just a series of photos of the back of someone in drag at a McDonalds. Not a terribly remarkable photo, except that their dress is really quite short, and they have closely cropped hair with no wig. The other remarkable thing about the photos are the sheer number of them, and the number of other folks also taking pictures. Hard to imagine anyone taking photos like that in Chicago.
The poster says, “I really didn’t have the courage to take a photo from the front!!”, and the general tone is pretty frightened. It’s not especially hostile, however. There are some comments like “Brother, I’m old now, society progresses too fast for me.” that could have been made by Tea Partiers in the States. A couple a more bigoted, aggressive comments are also presented, but there are others like: “A large tree has all kinds of birds.”
I also really liked this comment, by 飙车BOY:
To tell the truth, I like and even approve of these bizarre and fantastic things appearing. Yes, it can be to become famous, to get people’s attention, any mess for any reason is all fine, I just hope that as long as it is not against nature or reason, people can freely express themselves, onlookers can naturally accept them, and then a kind of creative, vibrant, cheerful, self-confident new atmosphere can develop [in society].
(Note that he mentions “becoming famous”–I’ve noticed this a lot in other ChinaSMACK comments. Chinese netizens seem to be much more judgmental about self-promotion than Americans are. I have no idea what is meant by “as long as it is not against nature or reason”.).
I dont know about you guys, but I am hard.
I went to the Chinese page to see what the guy has originally wrote. It’s just too literal a translation; what the guy said was more along the lines of “as long as he isn’t hurting anyone…”.
Oh, well that’s nice to hear. Now I have no idea what is meant by HOt’s comment above, but I suspect that I’m ok with that.