Archive for the year 2011
Riding That (Chinese) Train Posted by sasha on Jan 19, 2011
With the Spring Festival (春节 – chūn jié) fast approaching, hundreds of millions of folks in China will be buying train tickets to head home for the holidays. This is the biggest mass migration of people in the entire world, and it happens like clockwork every year. While I wouldn’t recommend attempting to travel by…
Simatai Great Wall in January（司马台长城） Posted by Stephen on Jan 18, 2011
As the transition from winter to spring occurs, and we experience a “change of seasons” or 物换星移 (wùhuànxīngyí), a real chance to shed off all those winter layers and have some fun outside emerges. Sure winter was frigid, summer’s going to be sweltering, but right now Chinese weather has found a happy medium. To understand…
History of the PRC – Part Thirteen Posted by sasha on Jan 12, 2011
When we last left off, the CCP and KMT had ceased fighting with each other, albeit temporarily, to fight together against Japan. For years now, a civil war had been raging within China’s borders and little attention had been paid to its neighbor to the East, thanks to a policy of “first internal pacification before…
Mr. Hu Goes to Washington, pt. 2: Deng Xiao Ping’s Legacy Posted by Stephen on Jan 7, 2011
Now that we’ve gone over Nixon’s visit to Beijing, lets fast forward through history to the late 1970s and focus upon Deng Xiao Ping’s or 邓小平 (dèng xiǎo píng) visit to the United States. In what has been dubbed “ping-pong diplomacy” (due to the back and forth nature of travel), the lessons learned are…
Great Wall at Mutianyu (慕田峪长城) Posted by sasha on Jan 7, 2011
About 100 km outside of Beijing lies the Mutianyu section of the Great Wall. Representing just one of the many sections of the 6,000+ km long wall, this area is easily accessible from China’s capital city, is not quite as full of tourists as other sites and is restored enough to make the climb up…
History of the PRC – Part Twelve Posted by sasha on Jan 3, 2011
At the end of Part Eleven, we found Mao Zedong and the Communist forces battered, bruised, yet still intact after the Long March. While enduring the hardships and struggles of their historical march across the country, Mao’s troops obeyed his Three Rules of Discipline: Obey orders in all your actions. Do not take a single…
Understanding Measure Words (量词) Posted by Stephen on Jan 1, 2011
When I taught English in China, one of the easiest lectures was on English articles, i.e. the, a and an. However, when discussing the use of “this” 这 and “that” 那， some problems would arise. Some students would say things like: “this the ball is red” or “that a school is where I study”. At…