The Chinese-English language barrier has allowed innovative companies to carve out niches in the language learning market. The arbitrage of English and Chinese, in particular, can be a lucrative practise.

One company that’s been doing this for awhile is Praxis, which runs Chinesepod out of Shanghai. Chinesepod is a podcast and website that teaches users Chinese. The podcast is free, but users pay a subscription fee for extra services. Fees start at US$9 a month for the basic package, which includes access to PDFs of dialogues, to US$200 for a year with all the bells and whistles, which includes daily practice phone calls from a Chinesepod staff member.

I’ve spoken to the Chinesepod team at their cool warehouse office near Xintiandi, and they say they’re profitable (but won’t disclose figures). They’re certainly enthusiastic about the possibilities of ‘language-casting’ (my shorthand for language learning podcasting… which is a mouthful) and have been chatting up partners and investors to expand their operations. (more…)

The Chinese journalism renaissance seems to have been a hot topic a few years back. A recent talk by Michael Anti at the University of Hong Kong, however, raises some salient new points about Chinese journalism and the internet.

He notes that traditional Chinese journalism usually follows the more subjective European mode. Chinese journalism’s best hope is to adopt American-style objective journalism, he argues, as rigorous fact-checking and a detached viewpoint will create stories that are easier to defend against censors and officials. A good example of this has been Hu Shuli’s Caijing magazine, which has an English-language website (found here).

This is where blogs play a part. Chinese journalists are increasingly splitting their stories between the online and offline worlds. Objective, factual reporting goes in print, while opinions are blogged online.

According to Anti, blogs have also widened the media space, allowing journalists greater freedom even in a more restrictive media environment under Hu Jintao.

But, a new Chinese journalism will not create a new China. “Journalists won’t be the founders of a New China,” he said.

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…surely never hurt anyone. The SOPA (Society of Publishers in Asia) 2007 Awards for Editorial Excellence were held on Wednesday night in Hong Kong, announcing winners in reporting and design categories from English- and Chinese-language newspapers and magazines (click here for a list of the night’s winners). China Economic Review won an award for “Excellence in Explanatory Reporting” for the article “Mother of invention?”, our cover story from November of last year. Here’s what the judges’ panel had to say:

China Economic Review: Excellent survey of China’s innovation potential, which is perhaps the most important angle on China’s economic future. A stellar example of regional economic analysis.

If you aren’t subscribed the the weekly emails of Access Asia, you should be. This week they are trashing the new version of the Rough Guide - the other Lonely Planet - on China, which praises the new “eco-village” being built on Chongming Island outside of Shanghai as representing “the most forward-thinking philosophy in the world.” Quite a statement, and one which the boys at Access Asia proceed to rip apart:

The boosters would have you believe that Dongtan is a vision of China’s green future, rather than just a small project on the outskirts of a big non-green city that is likely to stay that way. In short, Dongtan goes ahead, costing US$2 billion for the first phase alone, while building codes in Shanghai remain somewhere between lax and non-existent, doing nothing to encourage environmental protection or energy saving. While in winter heaters pump out heat that goes straight out the window, in summer the air cons do the same with cool air (meaning most of us freeze all winter and boil all summer, despite rising electricity bills) while efficient water use is not monitored…

There is a little historical tradition in China that Dongtan fits into quite nicely. Those of you who were students of recent Chinese history may recall the case study of the Shenfan collective farm, a Dongtan of its day. Indeed, William Hinton’s book Shenfan remains on the reading list for many Chinese Studies courses, despite being blatant propaganda for Mao’s disastrous agricultural policies. The hype surrounding Dongtan today feels a lot like Shenfan then (with the added extra of some Round Eye involvement and much cash), a model project that was largely smoke and mirrors, but that succeeded in one major aim – to get journalists (and Rough Guide writers) to wax lyrical and make everything seem OK. It wasn’t then, it isn’t now. We humbly submit that Dongtan is not a solution but rather a mask and a diversion – just as Shenfan drew the hacks while famine gripped the nation, so Dongtan draws the crowds while environmental rot continues untreated. Enjoy your day.

Well done, lads.

Danwei.org’s Joel Martinsen has a good roundup here of online chatter in the Chinese internet about the tragic massacre at Virginia Tech Monday, where over 30 died. Many comments, he says, are shocked and sympathetic, with some ugly venting here and there. He also includes an interesting excerpt from a CCTV reporter’s blog:

A journalist with a CCTV news program wrote on her blog that this possibility ultimately caused their report to be scrapped. She comments:

Instinct at the time was: not doing it would be unacceptable and a dereliction of duty. However, to do it might run into temporary restrictions, and it might even be killed before being born. Regardless, the first thing is to get going on it. This was the opinion of the editor in chief, and also that of us workers….Originally, the thought was to come up with a plan as quickly as possible and let the leaders pass a verdict on it, but something unexpected came up: the leaders quickly “became aware of the serious nature of the issue” and “stopped up a hole that could be problematic for propaganda.”

Meanwhile, Beijing Newspeak, a blog written by a foreign copy editor working at Xinhua, has a post here on the mood in his state newsroom as it was revealed that the gunman was a Korean permanent resident of the US, not a Chinese citizen, as had been reported earlier:

In the end, we will never know how they planned to approach it but suffice to say the senior editors were delighted when “South Korea” was read out at the press conference. Back-slapping and congratulations ensued - one editor said that it would have been a inconceivable loss of face if the gunman had been Chinese. Xinhua can now go forth and write about the incident all they want but there is no doubt that if the gunman had been Chinese the reporting would have been understated to say the least. Galling really. To think a potential loss of face dwarfed a sense of responsibility to report such a tragic world news event.

As you may have heard, Google came out with a new Chinese language input method editor, or IME - a device for typing Chinese characters using pinyin romanization. We discovered it here in the office about a week ago and all started trying it out. Personally, I found it annoying, as I only rarely type in Chinese, though Google’s IME assumes that I want to type in Chinese all the time. Even though I set my default language to English (I think), it would automatically switch me back to Chinese every time I toggled between programs (which for me is something like 2-3 times a minute, on average).

Well, I’m not the only one who is annoyed. Chinese search engine Sohu checked out the software and found it oddly familiar to their own IME - they promptly accused Google of stealing their material. Google then came out and apologized for doing just that, basically admitting that they had ripped off Sohu’s technology. “We are willing to face up to our mistake,” Google said.

It now appears that Sohu is going to put them to the test on that. They are preparing a lawsuit to be brought unless Google retracts its software, something Google has said it will not do. Let’s get it on!

The Editors suggest the following links:

• The Real Deal on China’s New Mega Fund - Standard Chartered’s Stephen Green on the new agency to manage China’s foreign exchange reserves
• FT.com / Asia-Pacific / China - Couple challenges Chinese property laws - Developers dig a 10-meter hole around the home of a couple who won’t move; wife uses a pulley system to get food and water into the house; kung fu master husband fights off eviction gangs. You couldn’t make it up
• Google China spamming bloggers? - Per Sam Flemming, Google misfires in attempts to engage in online social media in China by sending out messages rather than joining the conversation.
• China - Education - Schools - Re-education - Ann Hulbert - New York Times - In-depth look at changes in the Chinese educational system

A column by Nick Currie (aka Momus, whom I’d only known of previously as a somewhat obscure electronic musician) on Wired.com makes an interesting analogy between airline routes and how language and culture flow across the world: Both either go directly from point to point or radiate outward like spokes from major “hubs”. Like in the airline industry, the trend in cultural communication up until now has been away from point-to-point and toward hub-and-spoke:

One of the articles to emerge from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization conference was, “Cultural Diversity? A Pipe Dream.” In it, Rüdiger Wischenbart noted some shocking facts about the current realities behind book translation.

Worldwide, he said, between 50 percent and 60 percent of all translations of books originate from English originals. It’s sometimes higher: 70 percent of all books translated into Serbian, for instance, have English originals. In return, only 3 percent to 6 percent of all worldwide book translations are from foreign languages into English. English speakers, it seems, are talking a lot but listening very little. If this were the airline industry, we’d be talking about the kind of world where you can’t fly from Moscow to Berlin without changing in London.

The statistics go on to cover English dominance in movies (only in the US and India do people regularly go to see movies made in their own country) and, finally, the internet. But in this last category there at least seems to be some competition (emphasis added):

What about the internet? Well, English is unsurprisingly the dominant language, with 29.5 percent of all users communicating in it. Chinese is next, with about half the number of English users (159 million Chinese to 329 million English users). But Chinese is coming up fast, with more than twice the growth rate of English online. If it overtakes, does that make English a point-to-point language, or does Chinese just become the new hub, with all the spokes (at least the Asian ones) leading toward it?

A good question, but I wonder how much of that growth rate is coming from native speakers, either Chinese citizens or overseas Chinese (137 million of those 159 million users are inside China, where internet use is growing at an 8% clip), and how much is from second-language speakers from elsewhere in Asia or the world - my guess is that it is overwhelmingly from the former, and that Chinese on the internet is on the whole a fairly self-contained system. However, with more people learning Chinese around the world and the recent trend toward translating the Chinese internet into English, we’ll probably see a few more spokes emerge.

The Wall Street Journal interviewed Donald Tsang, Hong Kong’s Beijing-approved chief executive, in their weekend edition.

It’s a good read, though the Journal’s Mary Kissel can barely hide her contempt for Tsang, or maybe it’s the government in Beijing she doesn’t like. That’s fine. But at times it seems like she’s belittling him, for example when she continuously uses italics to highlight (mock?) Tsang’s phrasing. I can do without that. It reminds me of those back home in the US who look down their noses at China’s lack of democracy, while pointing to our own system of cronyism and corrupt government as some kind of model to imitate. I admit we’ve done a better job than China, but while some see it as a triumph of participatory government, I tend to think of it as a better system of control.

A couple of us attended a fascinating and eye-opening talk last night given by Arthur Kroeber of China Economic Quarterly and Paul French of Access Asia.

The seminar, titled “China’s Emerging Middle Class: Miracle or Myth?”, set about deconstructing the numbers published by the Chinese government, as well as the exuberant projections of investment banks, on the size of the “middle class” and the value of the national retail market.

Mr Kroeber made an excellent point when he said that he prefers not to use the term “middle class” when speaking of China, because, as he puts it, “There is no Chinese middle class. It doesn’t exist.” What he means is that the traditional Western idea of a middle-class family, one that might “take the SUV to the mall on Saturday and have dinner at TGI Friday’s,” is a completely unknown entity here. That very family dinner, he points out, would cost the same as the average Chinese family spends on food in an entire month (~US$100).

Instead, Mr Kroeber prefers to divide the citizenry into two categories: “surviving China” and “consuming China”. Out of 1.3 billion people, he contends, about 1.2 billion constitute Surviving China - those who make enough to get by and save for the future, but who, as far as foreign (and to a certain extent, domestic) retailers are concerned, basically don’t count, because they simply don’t have the disposable income to spend at Wal-Mart. The other hundred million or so are well-off enough to spend a bit of discretionary income on fashion items, movie tickets, etc. These are the ones businesses should be focused on selling to.

Overall, both men portrayed the way that the Chinese market is consistently overestimated. Mr French is the author, most recently, of a book on Carl Crow, the original “China hand”, whose own book, 400 Million Customers, exploded the myth of easy fortunes to be made in China back in 1937. Although Mr French did not bring up Carl Crow, those in the audience who know him were certainly making the connection.

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