Please browse my site – www.tonyinchina.com – and then make a comment. It would be so nice to know someone is looking at it.
Tags: Tony
Please browse my site – www.tonyinchina.com – and then make a comment. It would be so nice to know someone is looking at it.
Tags: Tony
February 5, 2009 at 5:18 am |
What would I like from this blog? Well on the simplest level I’d like all my friends (especially my Chinese friends) to use it to keep in touch and tell the casual surfer what interesting people you all are.
I’d like you to talk about either your experience of China or your perception of how the West sees China.
You don’t HAVE to be critical of my site, or China, or the West – but please feel free if you feel you have something that needs saying. Please bear in mind that all the standard arguments for and against the Dalai Lama or Taiwanese Nationalism have already been aired.
What about favourite spots in China, your hometown?
What do you think my site needs to make it more interesting?
Please give me something to work on.
Tony
March 7, 2009 at 10:14 am |
Greetings gentle surfer!
What I’d really like from any 中国人 who should stumble upon my humble site, is information about Chinese face culture for a proposed article on it.
If you could help I’d be most grateful
Tony
March 12, 2009 at 10:43 pm |
HI, Tony
I am enjoying your blog now, how fantastic so many great photos and writings.
I think your travels in China are very interesting,and thanks for you like our country so much.
I will enjoy it for a long time. I’m sure it must be useful in my english study. And I’ve seen your wife, she is beautiful.
I’m hoping your next trip more nice.
Best regards,
March 31, 2009 at 6:14 am |
Just a thought – suddenly we are discussing the true worth of Harvard MBAs – given that Bush and most of the people who caused the current World Economic Downturn had one. My university imports planeloads of Chinese students every year to study Economics, Accountancy, Marketing and so on. These are highly intelligent, curious and highly energetic young people… except that they feel obligated to take subjects which bore them shitless to please their wealthy parents (who remember what poverty is like).
Meanwhile, enrolments in science and the humanities are so low that action is needed to keep these subjects alive.
To make the study experience of our overseas students a little happier and more interesting could we not insist that everyone enrolling in a Commerce Degree must take at least one Science and/or Humanities subject per year?
April 23, 2009 at 10:27 am |
Tony, I find the link for comment finally. Sorry for late comment.
It seems that you have much memories in china, isn’t it? I thought Beijing is your destination. keep updating your blog. I will keep eyes on it. Pls hope your next trip in china will be more cheerful……
June 14, 2009 at 3:03 am |
I have just finished watching The Reader. People told me it was a great movie – I thought it was just okay… but it started me wondering ‘why do we get so many movies about the German massacre of Jews during the Second World War?’
It was 60 years ago but every year there are a handful of new movies about what the Nazis did to the Jews. Sure it was awful, sure we must never forget lest it happens again – but how about a Hollywood-produced movie describing something of Japan’s incredibly brutal invasion of China in the 30′s? Or are we coy about that because Australia sold scrap iron (“pig iron”) to Japan which they then used to attempt genocide in China (and of course Japan is now a crucial US ally in the pacific).
I have a Palestinian friend and while I have problems with what little I know of the Islamic religion, I can’t help but wonder why we never see “shock. horror!” television or movies about what the Jews are doing to the Palestinians?
Lastly I puzzle about western media’s total preoccupation with that former Tibetan slave-owner, the Dalai Lama. Why don’t we talk about his brother’s involvement in the 1959 uprising that killed thousands of Tibetans. Why was our media in 2008 clogged with footage of anti-Chinese demonstrations but it largely ignored the counter-demonstrations by overseas Chinese?
Why, when the Dalai Lama’s thugs attacked and murdered Han business owners in Lhasa last year, the supposedly unbiased Australian Broadcasting Corporation screened a touching little documentary about some old footage of his childhood in Tibet. You see he can’t go back to the ancestral home because the nasty Chinese Government won’t let him.
Gosh I wonder why?
June 24, 2009 at 1:42 am |
Just How Objective IS the ABC?
In the week after my last post (14th June) I feel that the anti-Chinese bias of ABC Radio National became most blatantly obvious. First they commemorated the 20th anniversary of the Tian’anmen Square Massacre by replaying a1996 documentary from the point of view of the demonstrators. Tian’anmen was a diaster for modern China, a terrible mistake (on the scale of the anarchy of Cultural Revolution and the environmental vandalism of the Three Gorges Dam project because ever after it would become a stick with which to beat the Chinese Government). The Chinese Government clearly recognises this from its refusal to discuss or allow any discussion of 1989.
This documentary concentrated on the massacre of the innocents and completely ignored the social divisions feeding the unrest. It did not seriously discuss the Democracy movement, the role of the universities in the political turmoil, the dissident Fang Lizhi who was invited to meet George Bush the First, and the general lack of a genuine safety valve for the rapidly increasing pressures for change.
Most regrettable of all was its failure to discuss the weeks of unrest that preceded the panic decision to send in the tanks, or the real spark that lit the conflagration: the death of reformer Hu Yaobang on 8 April 1989.
The situation was actually quite similar to the current one in Iran as I write this.
Immediately after this program Radio National broadcast a documentary on the Pol Pot regime. Now remember – being Radio National, such programs are repeated ad nauseum at all times of the day… no doubt making the point that all communist governments are mass murderers. Of course our lovely political masters – the USA – would never do such a thing.
April 26, 2010 at 10:13 am |
2009 – Annus horribilis
I began the year with the loss of my much-loved 18-year-old cat Tina who suffered a back injury and had to be put down. She was the only other occupant of my remote little house and her absence left a huge gap in my daily life.
Then my long-distance wife Meixin asked for a divorce. This was inevitable and expected – (given our failure to get an Australian visa so that we could live together in Australia) …but it made me sad. Although we weren’t in love I liked her and enjoyed my brief time with her. I wanted to help her escape the long hours, poor pay and general drudgery that faced most young Chinese women without wealthy parents or tertiary education.
So another part of my life that I thought was all organized suddenly disappeared. Next was my job at the university – which I must confess had bored me for some time (I wasn’t being allowed to do anything that required any initiative or skill – or that I was even good at) but I loved the daily contact with the students and I continue to miss that. For whatever reason the university library had for some years seen fit to employ me as a clerk on a professional salary, having inherited me from the old ITR Helpdesk. Clearly, from their point of view, I was redundant.
There were other warnings that things were changing. One day the University Chaplain, a young rightwing Catholic (Opus Dei?), was before me as I was in the process of connecting his laptop to the university wireless network. He was screaming abuse at me: why was I still there? Why didn’t I retire? I had for some time been complaining about the way ALL the various religious cults (from Catholics to Mormons) were preying on overseas students in a desperate search for converts and in a persistent manner that struck me as close to harassment.
Chinese students are particularly vulnerable because of the low-key nature of Buddhist belief and practice that does not prepare them in any way for Evangelical Christianity. Far from their families they feel isolated and lonely …and open to any apparent friendliness. They have no defense against these crazed fanatics who exploit Asian hospitality customs by plying them with food, money, religious texts and similar favors – then demanding their victims join their church.
From my conversations with overseas students there is a growing resentment against these door-to-door religion salesmen. The university would be wise to protect their golden goose by taking steps to control aggressive missionaries. Just imagine the publicity: don’t go to the University of Tasmania – you’ll never get the bloody Christians and Mormons off you’re back! These people, they soon learn, will not take “no” for an answer
You think I exaggerate? I was a witness to one particularly nasty incident when a Chinese student asked me to help her pack up her room in a share house and transport her gear to the shipping agent. While I was there two bible thumpers arrived and she quickly moved me out of sight inside her room (where I could hear everything). They had heard she was leaving Tasmania and interrogated her with a good cop/bad cop routine for about 20 minutes – even though she clearly had no intention of telling them anything.
A lot of the joy and colour of the university’s Chinese community was lost when Professor Mobo Gao moved to Adelaide University in 2008 to be replaced by Dr. Mark Harrison – a serious, hardworking but much less flamboyant character.
Professor Gao was a wonderful character with his books, his unique lecturing style, his pretty blonde wife and his beautiful Eurasian children. Being born and brought up in a small Chinese village where there was no electricity he tended to call a spade a spade. He once demanded that I do something about the Falun Gong members distributing their anti-Chinese propaganda in the university’s central library.
However he was just as upset when the library catalogued some new Chinese references and displayed them on the New Books shelf upside down!
Dr. Harrison is a very serious man, almost religious in aspect. We fell out when I was banned from interviewing a Chinese department staff member for my web site. Subsequently I have observed him to be doing good things for the teaching of Chinese – both at university and in schools.
The final blow to my little world came when a young, female, Chinese university student was murdered in Hobart. Zhang Yu (Tina) was beaten and strangled to death for the crime of being in the wrong place at the wrong time; neither a crime of passion nor of race – just violence for its own sake.
Australia is not an especially racist society but it IS incredibly violent. Now school kids have to be searched for knives and if teenagers don’t die in car accidents it could just as easily be at a rowdy party. Major sporting events look more like riots. Indian students have experienced this to the extent that prospective students still in India are thinking twice about Australia for their studies.
It IS relatively safe to walk the streets of Chinese cities at night because everyone is afraid of the police. Is that what we must come to?
October 9, 2010 at 3:50 am |
Remember this is the award that gave Kissinger the Peace Prize for seeking to end the Vietnam War by bombing Cambodia into the arms of Pol Pot.
We in Australia have detention centres full of people whose only crime was to flee oppressive regimes. Let those without sin…. etc. etc.