The Point

Friday, August 10, 2007

Worth mentioning

I'd like to offer a long-overdue unexplaination for my extended absence: I have spent the semester studying away and over in China. In case that wasn't clear from the picture on the last post of the great big PLA tank being greeted by throngs of Hong Kongers at the 1997 handover to the People's Republic. When we left off, I wasn't sure it'd be a good idea to keep up a blog writing about the things I'd like to while a guest of PRC government. If there does indeed come a time to get thrown in jail for my writing some day, I'd at least like to achieve some basic fluency in the local language of my toothlessly grinning, merciless captors. My Mandarin, sadly, lacks any real grace or wit at the moment.

Which is probably all for the best, because Blogger just happens to be blocked a good deal of the time on the Mainland anyway. Along with the BBC, anything remotely originating in Taiwan, a great fistful of human rights websites, and - on a number of university campuses - our beloved Wikipedia. You don't know what it is to search for information and have no excuse to while away (wile away?) the hours clicking through chronologies of Bill Murray's hairdressers, disco influences on 1980s Hindi music, and Swedish shipwrecks.

More to the point, it is frustrating to live in a country where meaningful debate about broad issues in society is dictated by what a handful of smiling, ideologically-bent old veterans in Beijing allow people to debate about. This is equal parts 11 o'clock news and ingrained dislike for boat rocking. Given the massive upheavals China has gone through over the past century it is perhaps understandable, this nationwide aversion to having (or taking) responsibility decision-making. But there are a few voices putting up an intelligent fight to get the information out to help people make those decisions, and I would really like to bring your attention to one of them.

China Dialogue, whose Chinese name, 中外对话, actually means something closer to "China-Rest of world Dialogue," is a really really brilliant website focussing on the relationships between China's environment, economy, society and politics, and has a really and truly unique way of bringing other countries into the picture too. The tone of the site is very accessible for general laypeople (such as myself), even on the heavy sciencey articles, but the best part, and the most critical, is that it features side-by-side translations of comments and articles in English and Chinese throughout the site, opening a real dialogue between what otherwise might as well be two separate worlds: China and "The rest of us."

I was initially attracted to the site because one of their regular contributors is Ma Jun, author of a book called China's Water Crisis, which I was unable to track down a copy of over there but which is available in English overseas. I stayed because the writers, based out of London and Beijing offices, are frank about China's challenges in a way that is almost never presented in other media. They are not the sort of writers letting out banners over sections of the Great Wall shouting Freedom 2008!.

But this is a website run by people who understand that putting up signs on mountains doesn't do much more good than assauging some Western egos. The sentiment of solidarity behind this kind of protest is great. China does not lack for oppressed minorities, and it's a brave thing to do. But seriously... besides expats reading English-language news through proxy servers, nobody on the Mainland is ever going to hear about that stuff in China. I may be vastly under-estimating the power of the Tibetan grapevine here. But I really think real change starts with information and empowerment, and China Dialogue's got that in spades. You can definitely expect it to come up as a source now and again in the future.

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posted by Christopher at 1:02 a.m.

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