Competition and Controversy

Every week here at ACC, we're required to deliver a "kou tou bao gao," or oral report, to our classmates on an assigned topic. Last week, the topic was the severity of Beijing's traffic problem and how we suggest solving it. Of course, there isn't really an easy solution. But because the teachers liked my report, and about five of my classmates', the best, our speeches were chosen to be videotaped and uploaded on some Chinese-learning website. People then vote for their favorites, and the winners get cash and other prizes.

I make a mistake right in the first sentence (I say 自从 (zicong), instead of 自来 (zilai)), and I didn't have my speech memorized since we had only learned about the contest the day before. In any case, here's the link to my video.

Don't worry about actually voting for me... registering to vote seems kind of complicated, and I won't (and don't deserve to) win anyway, given that some videos already have thousands of votes. I just thought I'd share the video though.

In other news, or non-news rather, the Liu Xiaobo's Nobel Peace Prize win this week has been given no press at all here in Beijing. Most people do not know anything about it, or even know who he is. My friend Gerald actually told me a text message that his coworker tried to send was blocked because it contained Liu Xiaobao's name. I had no idea that was possible. Censorship (or "harmonization," in Chinese, since it ensures China's stability) here is such an interesting thing. One of our homework assignments was to read a passage about American media. At one point, the article said something along the lines of "If an American news crew were to report about Tiananmen Square..." and my heart skipped a beat because for a second I actually thought the author was going to mention the June Fourth massacre. Instead, the sentence, criticizing the negativity of American media, continued, "the news crew would broadcast all of the Square's litter and ignore the Square's beautiful flowers and smiling faces." In my response to the article, I took a risk and wrote "American media might focus on the negative side of things, but the China media wouldn't broadcast the Square's litter at all, given that they've ignored worse things," but the teacher didn't say anything about it. I was kind of scared though... actually, I wrote that part of my answer in pinyin instead of characters, and censored myself with asterisks (Tian*nm*n Sq*are) because I was afraid the Internet police would find my e-mail. Oh, the things China does to your brain.

Going to Xi'an tomorrow! I'll be back on Sunday.

P.S. I forgot the English word for "broadcast" just now and had to look it up in Chinese first.