What's in the News

Giant gold-painted statue of Mao Zedong 'demolished' in China



A gargantuan gold-painted statue of Communist China's founding father Mao Zedong has suddenly been demolished, apparently for lacking government approval, state media says, days after images of it went viral.

Images of the statue of a seated Mao towering 37 metres over empty fields in the central province of Henan made worldwide headlines this week.

But the 3 million yuan ($640,000) structure has been destroyed, the People's Net news portal cited local officials as saying, adding the reason was "unclear"...


My impression of any large scale construction project in China is they exist so funds can disappear. Big invoices get made bigger and the difference disappears. Official banquets go like this too. As such it always seems disingenuous when some grand project is offered as something good for me. But a gigantic steel and concrete Mao painted gold, that's probably for real.

On Being a China Lawyer and on Doing Business In China: An Interview


Not sure it's news but it is an interesting interview and seems timely. I'd almost send it to my students and see what they thought too.

Swedish activist Peter Dahlin paraded on China state TV for 'scripted confession'

The human rights activist had been arrested in January but friends dismiss the TV stunt as ‘ridiculous and absurd’

Supporters of Peter Dahlin, the Swedish human rights activist being held by Chinese police, have dismissed allegations he was a foreign agent attempting to undermine the Communist party as ridiculous and absurd.
Dahlin, a Beijing-based campaigner who was detained in early January, was paraded on Chinese television on Tuesday night to make what friends and colleagues describe as a “forced confession”. ...


Hurt any feelings lately?

Wanted in China: More Male Teachers, to Make Boys Men

FUZHOU, China — The history class began with a lesson on being manly.

Lin Wei, 27, one of a handful of male sixth-grade teachers at a primary school here, has made a habit of telling stories about warlords who threw witches into rivers and soldiers who outsmarted Japanese troops. “Men have special duties,” he said. “They have to be brave, protect women and take responsibility for wrongdoing.”

Worried that a shortage of male teachers has produced a generation of timid, self-centered and effeminate boys, Chinese educators are working to reinforce traditional gender roles and values in the classroom....


Looking forward to the propaganda drive. TEACHING! ACTION PACKED AND EXCITING! DANGER AT EVERY TURN! FULFIL YOUR DESTINY! BE A MAN!

Worried that a shortage of male teachers has produced a generation of timid, self-centered and effeminate boys, Chinese educators are working to reinforce traditional gender roles and values in the classroom....[/i]

So we can have a generation of aggressive, self-centered, and sexist boys? Would that really be an improvement???

What would be better would be a generation of bold children who understand that in any society, devotion to the common good should be placed above devotion to personal gain.

What even is traditional Chinese masculinity?

http://people.brandeis.edu/~monsoon/articles/zhou_masculinity.htm

The ideal image of a masculine man in China in 1840 bears almost no resemblance to its western contemporaries or its predecessor a thousand years ago. Westerners at that time perceived Chinese men as �sexless� or �feminine,� while the Chinese perceived western men as �barbarians equipped with advanced weapons.�

Lol. Equipped with advanced weapons. 

It's not only a problem in China! I am watching young children here who are being so pampered, that they would not last five minutes in a difficult situation, particularly if mummy wasn't there to help them! They would not have lasted five minutes in my childhood.

Wanted in China: More Male Teachers, to Make Boys Men

FUZHOU, China — The history class began with a lesson on being manly.

Lin Wei, 27, one of a handful of male sixth-grade teachers at a primary school here, has made a habit of telling stories about warlords who threw witches into rivers and soldiers who outsmarted Japanese troops. “Men have special duties,” he said. “They have to be brave, protect women and take responsibility for wrongdoing.”

Worried that a shortage of male teachers has produced a generation of timid, self-centered and effeminate boys, Chinese educators are working to reinforce traditional gender roles and values in the classroom....


Looking forward to the propaganda drive. TEACHING! ACTION PACKED AND EXCITING! DANGER AT EVERY TURN! FULFIL YOUR DESTINY! BE A MAN!

They should hire some of the jack-booted, mindless, militant, lesbian feminists that attended my alma mater in Canada.

Ooops!... sorry. I can't use the term alma mater - it's sexist.

Last year one of my students said that there had never been a significant female scientist. When I cited Roslalind Franklin and said that she had helped to discover dna, he pretty much freaked out. I think he was Crick and Watson's lawyer in a previous life. This was before a Chinese woman won the Nobel prize for Science, though I suspect that caused his head to explode.

i have a cracking job, but one potential problem is that the vast majority of students at the Uni are boys, and probably most classes are all-boy classes. luckily most of the teachers are also men, and prefer the all-boy classes, leaving me with the mixed, but mostly female, classes. Sometimes in the break I go to the loo and overhear the boys saying all the things that they can't say in class.

I'm not really a fan of Chinese masculinity. I am aware of the stupidity of making blanket statements, but i can't be having with Chinese men. I've been in China a while now and I've barely met a chinese male I'd want to socialise with. Of course Chinese guys are all different and it's daft to generalise, but the more they conform to the idea of chinese masculinity, the more I'm likely to dislike them.

To b fair, though I've had this prejudice about Chinese males for a while, the amount of male students means that I've inevitably met quite a few at the Uni that I quite like. I think I probably can't stand about 98% of chinese guys. It's just the sheer number of guys i come into contact with that has resulted in my meeting Chinese guys I like, who for the sake of simplicity I think of as mutants. Whenever i say that i like Chinese people, i'm secretly only talking about half of them.

Speaking just in a school environment, I find Chinese men in leadership positions creepy. It might well be the nature of the position attracting a certain type of man but they're watchful, disdainful, and for brief periods plausibly hospitable too, all at the same time. I have met literally two males I consider to be a real people. The one I've known the longest is resentful of all teaching institutions even though he continues to work in them, and cheerful otherwise. The other is easy going and intelligently objective. He avoids leadership positions (though he'll probably end up in one eventually).

As for males in class... well, these are mostly English majors so the boys are "pandas", and right now they're about half and half. Half strike one as effeminate in mannerism, with one or two being downright bitchy, and half seem classically "boy"-ish with the grunting and the basketball. They're all still male. They all still occupy positions of relative privilege. The nature of their lordship is tamped down considerably by sheer numbers of opposing girl values, and they adopt different strategies to get by. Some assimilate. Some have circled the wagons. I rather appreciate the fact that these days more boys can get out of the back row and work with teams in other parts of the room.

...

How [Duolingo] got 110 million users without spending a dollar on marketing

“How many of you have had to fill out a web form after being asked to read a distorted sequence of characters like this? … How many of you found it really, really annoying? … I invented that!”

Luis von Ahn, inventor of captchas and computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, always gets a laugh with those lines at the start of his talks, and so he did at the Surge conference in Bangalore last week.

But the captchas – which confirm users are humans and not robots – are only an ice-breaker for talking about his current passion. Luis is the co-founder and CEO of Duolingo, a free language learning app with 110 million users worldwide. It’s the most downloaded app in the education category on both Google Play Store and iTunes...


The whole story is interesting, but a stand out excerpt is this one:

Luis and his investors – among whom is the actor Ashton Kutcher – remain committed to keeping the app free for users and without ads. One of the ways it makes money is the option to take a test to certify proficiency in English or any of the other languages on the app. Users take the test online through live video to ensure they’re doing it themselves.

This year 12 premier universities in the US will run an experiment to compare Duolingo English tests with those of traditional tests like TOEFL and ESL for their applicants. The idea is to see whether to accept Duolingo test certificates as an alternative to those like TOEFL which are ten times more expensive and much less convenient.

The size of this market is huge. In China alone, points out Luis, there are 400 million people learning English who require some form of certification to prove their proficiency for a job or studies abroad. So testing and certification for English is a massive and inefficient industry that Duolingo hopes to disrupt.