2/22/10 - Session 9 - Dube - China 1976 to Present and Conclusion
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March 10, 2010 at 2:14 pm #31248
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GuestLilia,
I have so appreciated having you in our class. You have brought a very interesting first hand experience to our discussions. Thank you for sharing your personal experiences.March 10, 2010 at 2:16 pm #31249GuestThat is an interesting observation. I hadn't noticed how similiar Obama's portrait is to Mao's posters!
March 10, 2010 at 3:14 pm #31250GuestOur campus Mandarin teacher is from Taiwan and has family living in Shanghai. She says that the economic differences are not as great as they were when she was growing up, but the many of the cultural differences are more significant. She said she doesn't want to see herself as a citizen of mainland China's government. She's willing to visit her family on the mainland, but she doesn't want to live there.
March 11, 2010 at 2:27 am #31251GuestThere's a great video up on CNN showing a rock band traveling through Asia. The band is currently in China and at the beginning of the video you see them playing in front of a giant Mao banner (I don't think it's the famous public portrait in the square). The times are a changing!
March 11, 2010 at 6:55 am #31252GuestOne of my student's mother has shared her thoughts with me about the difference between Taiwan and mainland China. She says that Taiwan is almost just like America. That is hard for me to imagine, because it seems so foreign to me. However, she is talking about freedoms, activities, and the ability to do the same things there as here, I believe. She says China is much more "conservative". (No doubt!)
When her husband takes business trips to China, his partners, who are European, are amazed at how much a dollar can buy. On the other hand, he complains about how often the factories are closed, and items cannot be shipped. Especially during New Years, because things are shut down for 2 weeks! And he says, "Why don't people work over there!" It was funny for me to hear that from a Taiwanese. Evidently, they have many such holidays where everything shuts down.
March 11, 2010 at 6:58 am #31253GuestBy the way, she states that she would not want to live in China. Her father was from mainland China and her mother was Taiwanese. She was surprised to hear that I knew about any hard feelings between the native Taiwanese and the Chinese. She says perhaps the older generation still has some of those ill feelings, but she doesn't and that her children would not even know the difference, or be aware of the hard feelings that some may still hold. She does speak Mandarin and Taiwanese, but says that many people in Taiwan only speak Mandarin.
March 11, 2010 at 1:13 pm #31254GuestDuring part of my curriculum unit, we were looking at a map of East Asia. The map did not have any names on it (countries or cities) and I was amaze that in every class there were multiple students who correctly pointed out that "the little island over there" was Taiwan. I was pretty impressed!
March 12, 2010 at 12:29 pm #31255GuestTaiwanese belongs to one of the seven big language groups of Chinese. It's basically the same as Fujian dialect. Fujian is a provice that has the shortest distance between the mainland and Taiwan. And culturally, Fujian and Taiwan are very similar. That's why most mainland brides married to Taiwan are from Fujian province.
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"There are many Chinese dialects in China. It is hard to guess how many dialects exist, but they can be roughly classified into one of the seven large groups, i.e., Putonghua (Mandarin), Gan, Kejia (Hakka), Min, Wu, Xiang and Yue (Cantonese). Each language group contains a large number of dialects. These are the Chinese languages spoken mostly by the Han people, which represents about 92 percent of the total population. We will not get into the non-Chinese languages spoken by the minorities here, such as Tibetan, Mongolian and Miao.
The dialects from the seven groups are quite different. For example, a Mandarin speaker in northern China usually understands little Cantonese, but a non-Mandarin speaker usually can speak some Mandarin with a strong accent. This is largely because Mandarin has been the official national language since 1913. Mandarin or Putonghua is mainly based on the Beijing dialect. Despite the large differences among Chinese dialects, there is one thing in common for them -- they all share the same writing system based on Chinese characters."http://chineseculture.about.com/cs/language/a/dialects.htm
[Edit by="lwang on Mar 12, 8:33:18 PM"][/Edit]
March 12, 2010 at 1:19 pm #31256GuestThank you, Beth, for your kind words.
I am blessed to have a family history that partially reflects China's contemporary and modern history, and personally experienced the positive historical changes in China, and now teach Chinese language and culture in "the beautiful land" ( In Chinese, the translation for the U.S. is "beautiful country".)
If you or any other colleagues have questions about China that I might be able to help to answer (even it's not teaching related), feel free to contact me.
[Edit by="lwang on Mar 12, 9:31:10 PM"][/Edit]March 12, 2010 at 1:41 pm #31257GuestMy grandfather worked for the KMT government, and was a delegation member to International Telecommunications Union before 1949. According to my uncle and his wife, my grandfather was assigned to be head of the telecommunication department in Taiwan before 1949, but he didn't accept the offer. When all his colleagues left for Taiwan with the KMT government in 1949, my grandfather chose to stay in Nanjing with his family.
One of my cousins left Nanjing for Taiwan in 1949, died in Palo Alto, CA a few years ago.
March 13, 2010 at 3:05 am #31258GuestI am not sure how I feel about this. I do think we need to respect the laws of other countries, as long as they are not harming their people. Is an unfiltered google more or less harmful than a filtered google?
Is that an issue for the people of China or for other countries to determine for them?
Will the citizens of China be harmed more by not having any access to google?I do know that the youth of our own country are exposed to much more on the internet that I am comfortable with, and I actually wouldn't mind some better filtering here!
That may not be a popular view point.
March 14, 2010 at 7:40 am #31259GuestI agree with you - I think American youth are exposed to too much on the internet and don't have the necessary social/emotional skills to understand the consequences. I look back on my generation and while we may not have had the access to information that young people have today, I also think that we were much better equipped to deal with it. It's almost as if kids today are more sheltered and more exposed at the same time, if that makes any sense.
March 14, 2010 at 9:11 am #31260GuestMao seemed masterful for many years at employing tactics to control the masses. From motivating the masses to become part of a movement for all of China, to engaging military control and employing in foreign relationships that benefit the betterment of Chinese interests.
Many teachers I fear have a complex similar to that of leaders that fear others being well versed, so that their opinions or teachings may be challenged. If you can defend a position or opinion therein lies the strength. If one has to rely on 'because I said so' to convey an argument, clearly the other party wins by default.March 14, 2010 at 9:25 am #31261GuestI believe the challenge in living in this era of overexposure from everything like media to UV rays. As a teacher, it is our job and our challenge to help students sort through information to come to their own surmise of how the world works. It is difficult because of how information is skewed and delivered by the winning party in a war or battle. Also, it is important to view things from multiple perspectives to try and clear away some of the ambiguities. However, it would similarly be a disadvantage for students to not use the readily accessible media.
Let the search for truth continue! -
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