The Craft Movement in China and Other Assorted Thoughts
Posted by Chuck Vose Fri, 20 Feb 2009 23:37:00 GMT
I’m hung over as hell today. It’s Saturday and I consumed about 30rmb worth of beer last night. $4 goes a long way when you’re drinking Tsingtao.
Anyways, last night one of the Chinese roommates commented that he liked my hand warmers. Like any good American I explained that my girlfriend is part of the craft movement. But explaining the craft movement was a little odd for me, compared to the citizens who are desperately trying to survive on their crafts and barely staying alive our craft movement feels extremely childish. We’re striving to reduce consumption while many Chinese are striving to increase their ability to consume, at least to the point where they’re fully fed.
Consumption has been the word of the week in all of my classes except language class. In ECON we’re talking about how much consumption has increased per capita and in Society and Culture we’re talking about the switch from everything being about increasing production in the 50s to the late 70s and how it switched shortly after the 70s. This paragraph isn’t nearly so eloquent as I would like but consumption and globalization have been on my mind a lot.
On a side note, since this blog is actually supposed to be about how Chinese people use the Internet, I found out some juicy details about how some native Chinese people perceive the Internet. There’s this assumption that everyone in the world knows about the Firewall but it turns out that in China many, many people do not know about the Firewall at all. Many do not know they are being censored and one Chinese roommate didn’t know that they Internet was driven almost entirely by porn (which is blocked by the firewall). On the other hand, another native Chinese (name never requested) not only knew about the Firewall but knew how to circumvent it.
It is also interesting to talk to foreigners about what they think of the Firewall and how it affects their usage of the net. I’ve noticed that almost none of my colleagues are really affected by the censoring so it actually makes sense that people don’t know about the firewall. It’s really just more annoying than anything, you never know which days cnn.com is going to work. I think if anything the Firewall is probably succeeding in making Chinese people go to Chinese news agencies because they are more reliably present on the Internet.
There’s a machine outside my window that sounds like my cat. I’ve been assured that he has not walked all the way here and is in fact still at home with E, but it makes me miss him anyways.
I’ll write more when I can gather my thoughts.
So does this mean you can’t access any porn in China? :)
I wonder about the firewall – there are plenty of Americans that don’t even know what a firewall is much less when there is one blocking their own use…. and is there any way the Chinese can get in trouble for bypassing it like your friend does?
No comment about the porn.
As for getting in trouble, my research suggests that in general citizens to do not often get in trouble, or when they do it’s not being made public. The people that actually get in trouble are the Internet cafes, schools, and businesses that allowed that person to use the Internet. I believe the responsibility is solely on the ISP to monitor the traffic of individuals and they are supposed to take measures to ensure this.
But yeah, I have no idea really. I doubt there are statistics about this sort of thing but if there were they would be written in Chinese so I wouldn’t have access to them at all.