Some more observations

Dear readers, sorry for the sporadic updates lately. I am fully in the swing of being a teacher at Beijing Union University and have schedule of classes chock-a-block. I've started to build a site to keep all my lecture notes. If you're super curious, you can check them out here.

Thought I would share with you some interesting observations of China that I've had lately.

1.) At the hairdressers, you can choose between paying a lower fee, and a higher fee. The higher fee gets you the master hairdresser. The lower fee gets you the intern. So it's kind of like gambling. Well I gambled, and it turned out ok. The intern did a great job for RMB38, which is about SGD 8.

2.) Over 50,000 people died in the Szechuan earthquake, while 20,000 remain missing. Given that it's been a year since the disaster, it would be safe to assume that 70,000 people died in all. The mood in the air has been somber recently, Tuesday marking the one year anniversary of the disaster which fell on May 12th 2008. Apparently RMB 1 trillion has been committed to rebuilding affected communities. That's a lot of money no doubt, but it flows into infrastructure projects. Foreign NGOs are helping to fill in the gaps putting money into the most affected so that they can buy food and clothing. My heart goes out to the families of the deceased.

3.) On TV everyday, you can view soap operas of Japanese-Chinese war. They run for hours at a time. Anti-Japanese sentiment runs deep here and I was surprised by how entrenched it is. I have seen both the movie. I think one can make the case that Japan hasn't atoned for all its past WW2 aggressions as completely or as sincerely as Germany, but I can't escape the feeling that this deepset anti-Japanese stance may be over-warranted. I read this great article from a film critic who reviewed the film "Nanking Nanking" in a local Chinese. The ironic thing is that he's Japanese. Check it out his review here.

4.) Not sure if the government is trying to save money, but in general, the streets here are very dark.

5.) Besides Baidu, which is the Google of China, the Facebook of China is kaixin001.com, and the Youtube of China is youku.com. Youtube is banned here.

6.) There is province in China called "Inner Mongolia", and it's not part of the Mongolia, which is a completely independent country. So "Inner Mongolia" lies SOUTH of Mongolia. Weird.

Apparently, the Soviets had a strong influence in the creation of the modern Mongolian state.

According to Wikipedia:

"The Soviet threat of seizing parts of Inner Mongolia induced China to recognize Outer Mongolia's independence, provided that a referendum was held. The referendum took place on October 20, 1945, with (according to official numbers) 100% of the electorate voting for independence. After the establishment of the People's Republic of China, both countries confirmed their mutual recognition on October 6, 1949."