Tommy says…

The New York Times getting it wrong? Preposterous notion, right? And so I thought also – until reading this story recently.

The story is by now so well known that it’s featured on Wikipedia. A Chinese woman called Ma Cheng has a given name which uses an unusual character, which is visually composed of three repetitions of the character for “horse”. This character was recorded in a 1710 AD character dictionary as a variant form of a character meaning “gallop”. This variant form has fallen out of use over the last 300 years, and today is only found in comprehensive character dictionaries, with the 1710 publication being the most recent source. For a rough analogy, imagine having a þ in your name.

As might be expected, having an obsolete character in her name has caused Ms Ma some difficulty over the years. For one thing, modern type sets and computer character sets rarely feature the character. In earlier years, authorities would write-in the character “”cheng”” by hand on documents such as ID cards. However, with the conversion towards full digitisation, it is becoming more and more difficult to solve the problem.

A quirky story so far, but not too far out of the ordinary. The NY Times report takes a turn torwards the dark alley of dystopia, however, when it turns towards what it claimed was an 8,000 list of permissible characters. The Chinese government, it said, citing a Chinese newspaper report, had been developing this list in recent years, not just for standardising naming use, but for ordinary usage as well.  A Chinese linguistics official was quoted, via the state mouthpiece Xinhua, as saying that 8,000 characters (compared to the 85,000 in existence, and the roughly 30,000 in ordinary or literary usage) was ‘enough to convey most concepts’. Disturbing whiffs of doublespeak, newspeak, and the Thought Police?

I certainly thought it sounded just a little too shockingly Orwellian. So I went digging a little. The NY Times referenced two other sources for the statements about the 8,000-character “permissible word list”: a Xinhua news piece which it linked to, and a report from “another Chinese newspaper”.

First up, the Xinhua report. Headline? “Official refutes report that China will limit number of characters for new names“. Quite the opposite to the “limiting language to 8,000 characters” claim, it seems.

So how did this all come about? The Xinhua article cites – and refutes – a report by the Guangzhou-based Yangcheng Evening News that claimed that baby names would be limited to an 8,000 character list. It also offers another clue: an 8,000-character list of simplified characters, which a government official says “in combination, could convey almost any concept in any field”. So is it true? Is the Communist government embarking on a campaign to control thought by limiting the tools of thought?

Read more…

I’m writing a research paper on the role of juries in sentencing, which has, perhaps, made me especially sensitive to the way tabloid journalism reflects public opinion. While many assume that tabloid journalism reflects the voice of “the masses” – the plebeian, if you like – in reality this seems to be simply untrue. This point surfaces here and there in the debate on juries, usually in the context of questioning whether there is in fact a crisis of confidence in our legal system, as would appear from the reportings of tabloid media, such as the (Sydney) Daily Telegraph, and increasingly the Sydney Morning Herald.

So the Olympic torch relay is being disrupted by – not angry Tibetans after an independent country, but smiling Western anarchists who have nothing better to do and jump on these bandwagons like an annual county fair. WTO one year, Olympic games the next. If it gives them the opportunity to smash a window or to or bash a handicapped girl in wheelchair or two, then they seemingly don’t care that they are supporting a feudal theocracy that has only minority support in the land they claim to represent.

Many tabloid journalists are probably drawn from the same stock as the anarchist protesters: angry, ignorant, and eager to claim a moral high ground. Not only are they ignorant of the facts, they are also ignorant of the true opinions of the community that forms their readership. So I looked on the Sydney Morning Herald website, and this survey showed more clearly than anything that disjoint. The question asks “Should [Kevin Rudd] use this impressive combination of [language and professional] skills to push Beijing for a fair deal for Tibet?” Patronising, ignorant, prejudiced — laden with so many false assumptions one might question whether the author would be able to find his or her own country - let alone Tibet – on a map of the world.

If one believed that the SMH represented the opinions of the community, one might expect the ensuing answers to go something like this: 50% saying “Yes, Kevin Rudd is not doing enough to criticise the Commie-Nazi pigdogs! Long live the theocratic government of the Dalai!”, and 40% saying “No, Kevin Rudd is such a wimp, and he’s like, half Chinese already – he’ll just roll over”, and finally one lonely comment posted by a Chinese netizen going something like “White people stupid. White people imperialist want to split China. Wait for China nuclear missile, fuckers.” Something like that.

The reality is quite different. About half the comments belong to the first and second categories discussed above. There is a random sprinkling of the third king, but about half of the comments speak with a rational and contrary voice: yes the Tibetans have a right to protest, but the bandwagon jumpers who are bashing torchbearers and trying to steal or extinguish the Olympic flame? Their actions are despicable. They are selfish. They try to attract the spotlight, whether for their own perverse personal satisfaction or to promote a political agenda – in either case, selfishly destroying an event that means so much to so many: athletes, torch bearers, governments, Olympic officials, a nation of 1.3 billion people. No-one should be allowed to mar an event that is sacrosanct as a symbol of world unity and peace for some political agenda- regardless of how right or wrong that agenda is. The marked contrast between this large proportion of the comments with the assumption-laden question clearly shows up how out of touch with their readership the SMH really is.

I started a group on Facebook called “Defend the Olympic flame”. Interestingly, the comments of several people who joined were “I thought I was the only one who thought like this”. If you read Australian newspapers and watched Australian news, you would think so – I certainly thought that I was out of step with the general community, who are all baying for the blood of torch bearers. But no – once again, tabloid journalism has been shown to be the voice of the mob, and not the voice of the plebeian.

Finally, on an unrelated point: lest it be misunderstood that I’m supporting the Chinese government on this one – I have absolutely no sympathy for the “loss of face” (as it has been called by Western media; why must they use an improper expression of Chinese origin only for China? “Loss of dignity” could serve just as well in this context) — by the Chinese government. Ordinary torch relays do not “belong” to the host country. The torch is carried from Olympia – perhaps through several intervening countries – and eventually wind up in the host country. “Relay” describes not only the relaying of the flame from runner to runner, but also from country to country. China, however, just needed to prove how great and mighty it is. So it ships the flame from Greece by plane to Beijing, where the torch relay is declared “open” by the President in an elaborate staged ceremony on Tiananmen Square, before it gets flown – by a Chinese jet and escorted by Chinese agents – to each “leg” of the relay where the torch gets a tour of the city before re-joining the Chinese jet. It’s a strange “relay” when the same player – the host country – controls the torch all the time.  This move by the Chinese government in one sense is inviting the protesters to disrupt it. Whereas disrupting the flame on an ordinary relay would be just that – disrupting the Olympics - disrupting the 2008 rally is in fact disrupting a Chinese torch relay, since the Chinese government both in words and in action has shown that it owns the torch relay. The (London) Daily Telegraph has on several occasions described the London and Paris legs as descending into “farce”. Well, from what I can see, the Chinese government managed to turn it into a farce even before the whole relay got started.