Forward
Long after the confusion of tongues, English, not Chinese or any other language, starts to be the de facto international lingo. The reality is that almost the entire world is now published in English. And I am afraid that we have to live with this fact for long to come, whether we like it or not.
I am not saying English is evil. Quite the opposite, I believe English is not a bad choice for the sake of a unified tongue. But not all the minds of human being are alphabetic. There also exist things, many of them are great, that are not offered in English.
The following is a post regarding what prompted Michael Anti (赵京) into writing his English blog. Although AEB (Anti's English Blog) was already water under the bridge (Ref[1][2]), the same mindset brought the inception of this blog here.
============================
For me, to accomplish a certain matter is sometimes proven to be even harder than delivering a baby. Although I've already signed up at some BSPs to reserve spaces for my English blog, it took me a long while to get started on the real deal. Chinese is my mother tongue, and I expect the readers of my blog to be largely from mainland China. The news that caught my eyes is also linked to China in large part. To start an English blog seems irrelevant to what I am doing at work and would inevitably erode my time budget. What matters most to me is whether my fellow country man shares the same anticipation as I do on a unified news body(*), as well as the craving for freedom and democracy. To a man with deep aspiration, nothing is more exciting than being able to root for his homeland in his mother tongue.
But what happened recently made me realize how misconceived or detached China is in the eyes of the rest of the world. It is hard to imagine that the rest of the world got the firsthand account on Taishi villiage through a distorted news report from The Guardian (Ref[3]). i.e, in the eyes of the rest of the world, nothing comes into being until it is recorded in English.
However, it does make sense to me now in hindsight. If you ask me what I know about Iran and Iranians, I would have nothing to offer besides the image I got from those English news reports that paint their president as a hard line dictator. No one knows what Iranian intellectuals have in their mind. They speak Persian and I don't. Thus consciously these Iranians minds are opaque to me and the non-Iranian world. The only thing I can think of is what Iranian president has said, in addition to the words from those Iran-bashing western politicians. Sadly, a great country is turned into a black-and-white stereotype in this way. We would be left nonplused to any political move that might come out of Iran next.
The same can be said about China. One of such stereotyped views can be aptly found through what happened to Mr. Edmund Xu (许知远) recently. Mr. Xu, the chief reporter of "The Economic Observer" (经济观察报), jumped ship to "New Life" (新生活), along with some of his coworkers. And his job hopping was portrayed by an English news reporter as such that Mr. Xu was doing this because he was fed up with the lack of Freedom of Speech at "The Economic Observer". Obviously, the English reported was one-track minded into thinking Mr. Xu's move was another smoking gun like the protest happened at the editor's office of "China Youth Daily"(青年报). Thus Mr.Xu's recent move proves once again that the Freedom of Speech is deteriorating in China, blah, blah, blah. And more disheartening was that the dude came to this conclusion simply because his assistant managed to scrape some grumble words off Mr.Xu's blog and translated that single piece for him.
Such kind of "Lost in Translation" has laid ground for severe distortion of truth. For example, Professor Xiguang Li (李希光), an imperial guard for tight media control, was ridiculously extolled by western media as a stalwart fighter against media censorship. He thus got a variety of chances to speak to the world on behalf of Chinese news media. And some ostensible NGOs, which evidently are the works of con artists, were presented by western media as the grass root movement for social reform. There is also a conservative editor who has no interest in opinions against dictatorship, was applauded by renowned US expert on Chinese affair as the most influential figure on anti-dictatorship in China.
But Professor Li was right on one thing. He once conjured up a brazen coup to beat western media in its own game. He proposed to the Chinese government to put more focus on propaganda in English and yank the interruption of certain matters out of the hands of western media. Such no-fair-play strategy, which is kinda like Transfinite Warfare at information age (信息超限战), is a disgrace to Chinese as a whole (**).
As a personal blog, I have no intention to fight against the hegemony of western media. What I feel strongly about is to tell the world what those minds (Intellectuals) in China are vehemently discussing: Let the rest of the world know that we are not wasting our time doing nothing!
Going forward, I would start to translate those sticky points of views among Chinese Intellectuals and post them at http://mranti.blog.com (change to http://mranti.blogneo.com/ ). The original Chinese text may be around 1500 characters each. I have no bias against any group. I would try to choose carefully among: researchers funded by government, Marxist, Maoist, new conservative, democrats, constitutionalist, conservatives on culture, conservatives on politics, moderates, environmentalist, woman's rights group, scientologists (***). I would try to label them as the way they label themselves and make the description as accurate as possible. Also I would try to keep a balanced and unbiased view when I pick articles to translate/edit so that the whole spectrum of Chinese political minds can be presented without much distortion. After all, what they say utters Chinese intellectuals' voice in Hi-Fi.
My blog will be kept interactive. Any comments that you made here on my translation will be addressed as soon as possible. Solecisms will be corrected and different opinions will be taken into serious consideration. If anyone comes up with better translation, I will accept that without reservation. For the time being, I plan to keep the blog update for one piece every other day. I think with my gradual improvement on English, I might make the fresh rate to one piece per day. Despite my best effort, I am afraid there still will be many blunt mistakes left at the beginning. Please be patient and bear with me on that. And your friendly feedback on that will be also high appreciated. I believe I would be able to do much better and more professional on this in the not-so-distant future.
This English blog (Anti's English Blog, AEB) is entirely different from my Chinese blog in terms of topics. Thus my Chinese blog would not overlap with my English blog. If anyone happens to subscribe my Chinese blog's feed, please also add AEB into your subscription. Any promotion and external link on AEB would also have my deepest appreciation. I wish through AEB more western readers could have the chance to observe the most sophisticated cerebrums China has to offer.
On top of that, for those readers who wish to do something for our great nation, you can offer your talent, effort and resource at any time to pursue China's future, the kind of future that comes with freedom. Allergy to the incumbent party should not be an excuse for our inaction. Let's disregard its existence and move forward, along with our conscience. I believe this is the mentality that Chinese bloggers should have at Internet Age.
Footnotes:
(*) I don't quite understand Anti wants to convey here. The translation here is merely a literal rephrase of his original text in Chinese.
(**) Anti calls it unfair. But to be honest, I think Professor Li does have some merits here. And I failed to see how this strategy is unfair to western media.
(***) I didn't realize there are so many think tanks in China with convoluted names. I wish here my translation had faithfully labeled them.
References:
[1] Climbing the Great Wall, We Will Persist in 2006, Washington Post, 02/19/2006
[2] The Freedom of Chinese Internet Users is Not a Slave Girl of the Americans, Washington Post, 02/19/2006
[3] Taishi Village and The Guardian's big error: Western media discredited in China, RConversation, 10/16/2005
===========================
Photocopy of Michael Anti's original text:
I am not saying English is evil. Quite the opposite, I believe English is not a bad choice for the sake of a unified tongue. But not all the minds of human being are alphabetic. There also exist things, many of them are great, that are not offered in English.
The following is a post regarding what prompted Michael Anti (赵京) into writing his English blog. Although AEB (Anti's English Blog) was already water under the bridge (Ref[1][2]), the same mindset brought the inception of this blog here.
============================
(The following is from http://blog.hjenglish.com/echo_zkl/archive/2005/11/22/177229.html, photocopy of the original text is attached at the end of this post.)
For me, to accomplish a certain matter is sometimes proven to be even harder than delivering a baby. Although I've already signed up at some BSPs to reserve spaces for my English blog, it took me a long while to get started on the real deal. Chinese is my mother tongue, and I expect the readers of my blog to be largely from mainland China. The news that caught my eyes is also linked to China in large part. To start an English blog seems irrelevant to what I am doing at work and would inevitably erode my time budget. What matters most to me is whether my fellow country man shares the same anticipation as I do on a unified news body(*), as well as the craving for freedom and democracy. To a man with deep aspiration, nothing is more exciting than being able to root for his homeland in his mother tongue.
But what happened recently made me realize how misconceived or detached China is in the eyes of the rest of the world. It is hard to imagine that the rest of the world got the firsthand account on Taishi villiage through a distorted news report from The Guardian (Ref[3]). i.e, in the eyes of the rest of the world, nothing comes into being until it is recorded in English.
However, it does make sense to me now in hindsight. If you ask me what I know about Iran and Iranians, I would have nothing to offer besides the image I got from those English news reports that paint their president as a hard line dictator. No one knows what Iranian intellectuals have in their mind. They speak Persian and I don't. Thus consciously these Iranians minds are opaque to me and the non-Iranian world. The only thing I can think of is what Iranian president has said, in addition to the words from those Iran-bashing western politicians. Sadly, a great country is turned into a black-and-white stereotype in this way. We would be left nonplused to any political move that might come out of Iran next.
The same can be said about China. One of such stereotyped views can be aptly found through what happened to Mr. Edmund Xu (许知远) recently. Mr. Xu, the chief reporter of "The Economic Observer" (经济观察报), jumped ship to "New Life" (新生活), along with some of his coworkers. And his job hopping was portrayed by an English news reporter as such that Mr. Xu was doing this because he was fed up with the lack of Freedom of Speech at "The Economic Observer". Obviously, the English reported was one-track minded into thinking Mr. Xu's move was another smoking gun like the protest happened at the editor's office of "China Youth Daily"(青年报). Thus Mr.Xu's recent move proves once again that the Freedom of Speech is deteriorating in China, blah, blah, blah. And more disheartening was that the dude came to this conclusion simply because his assistant managed to scrape some grumble words off Mr.Xu's blog and translated that single piece for him.
Such kind of "Lost in Translation" has laid ground for severe distortion of truth. For example, Professor Xiguang Li (李希光), an imperial guard for tight media control, was ridiculously extolled by western media as a stalwart fighter against media censorship. He thus got a variety of chances to speak to the world on behalf of Chinese news media. And some ostensible NGOs, which evidently are the works of con artists, were presented by western media as the grass root movement for social reform. There is also a conservative editor who has no interest in opinions against dictatorship, was applauded by renowned US expert on Chinese affair as the most influential figure on anti-dictatorship in China.
But Professor Li was right on one thing. He once conjured up a brazen coup to beat western media in its own game. He proposed to the Chinese government to put more focus on propaganda in English and yank the interruption of certain matters out of the hands of western media. Such no-fair-play strategy, which is kinda like Transfinite Warfare at information age (信息超限战), is a disgrace to Chinese as a whole (**).
As a personal blog, I have no intention to fight against the hegemony of western media. What I feel strongly about is to tell the world what those minds (Intellectuals) in China are vehemently discussing: Let the rest of the world know that we are not wasting our time doing nothing!
Going forward, I would start to translate those sticky points of views among Chinese Intellectuals and post them at http://mranti.blog.com (change to http://mranti.blogneo.com/ ). The original Chinese text may be around 1500 characters each. I have no bias against any group. I would try to choose carefully among: researchers funded by government, Marxist, Maoist, new conservative, democrats, constitutionalist, conservatives on culture, conservatives on politics, moderates, environmentalist, woman's rights group, scientologists (***). I would try to label them as the way they label themselves and make the description as accurate as possible. Also I would try to keep a balanced and unbiased view when I pick articles to translate/edit so that the whole spectrum of Chinese political minds can be presented without much distortion. After all, what they say utters Chinese intellectuals' voice in Hi-Fi.
My blog will be kept interactive. Any comments that you made here on my translation will be addressed as soon as possible. Solecisms will be corrected and different opinions will be taken into serious consideration. If anyone comes up with better translation, I will accept that without reservation. For the time being, I plan to keep the blog update for one piece every other day. I think with my gradual improvement on English, I might make the fresh rate to one piece per day. Despite my best effort, I am afraid there still will be many blunt mistakes left at the beginning. Please be patient and bear with me on that. And your friendly feedback on that will be also high appreciated. I believe I would be able to do much better and more professional on this in the not-so-distant future.
This English blog (Anti's English Blog, AEB) is entirely different from my Chinese blog in terms of topics. Thus my Chinese blog would not overlap with my English blog. If anyone happens to subscribe my Chinese blog's feed, please also add AEB into your subscription. Any promotion and external link on AEB would also have my deepest appreciation. I wish through AEB more western readers could have the chance to observe the most sophisticated cerebrums China has to offer.
On top of that, for those readers who wish to do something for our great nation, you can offer your talent, effort and resource at any time to pursue China's future, the kind of future that comes with freedom. Allergy to the incumbent party should not be an excuse for our inaction. Let's disregard its existence and move forward, along with our conscience. I believe this is the mentality that Chinese bloggers should have at Internet Age.
Footnotes:
(*) I don't quite understand Anti wants to convey here. The translation here is merely a literal rephrase of his original text in Chinese.
(**) Anti calls it unfair. But to be honest, I think Professor Li does have some merits here. And I failed to see how this strategy is unfair to western media.
(***) I didn't realize there are so many think tanks in China with convoluted names. I wish here my translation had faithfully labeled them.
References:
[1] Climbing the Great Wall, We Will Persist in 2006, Washington Post, 02/19/2006
[2] The Freedom of Chinese Internet Users is Not a Slave Girl of the Americans, Washington Post, 02/19/2006
[3] Taishi Village and The Guardian's big error: Western media discredited in China, RConversation, 10/16/2005
===========================
Photocopy of Michael Anti's original text:
posted by Nimrod | 11:11 PM
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