Chinalbeit

Everywhere you guy in China, you see these red banners with white or yellow characters strewn all over the place.  In neighborhoods, parks, over roads, on walls, in shopping centers…you get the point.  These signs are truly ubiquitous.   They serve many uses.  Some of them are simply advertisements, like the one below advertising a film festival:

Zhengzhou Cinema Club Movie Festival

Of course, the more interesting red signs tend to be the ones that government agencies use to either diseminate information, stir up nationalist sentiment, or warn citizens against engaging in certain types of behavior.  The name for these banners in Chinese is 宣传条幅 (xuānchuán tiáofú), or literally “propaganda banners”.  However, it is important to note that the Chinese word for propaganda would more correctly translate as “dissemination”  The Chinese translation does not necessarily carry the negative connotation of the English word “propaganda.”  Following are some translated propaganda banners.

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The Tank Man by Charlie Cole

Last post on this topic – I swear.  I’ve been getting a few questions about it though, so I’d like to address them.  What happened to the Tank Man?  Who took the picture?  The short answer is: nobody knows what happened to him or where he is now, whether he is even alive or not, and the man who took the picture is a guy named Charlie Cole.  Below is an account of his tale of the picture from The New York Times:

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Now that the day that shall not be named has come and passed, the time is upon us to reflect just what it means, both for Chinese at home and abroad, and for those foreign devils of us both living in China and those of us who have never been (Wing Wang’s Super Deluxe Chinese BBQ and Hamburgers doesn’t count as sovereign Chinese territory).  Of course, the original event occurred twenty years ago, though many people don’t know that the event was actually a culmination of a long process beginning with the death of Mao, continuing through the process of reform and opening, and finally resulting in a crushing defeat at the ends of the very same people who demanded China open up and modernize in the first place.   Chinageeks has an interesting translation up from a Chinese writer detailing some of the events leading up to the culmination at Tiananmen Square, and if you’re really interested, you can check out Chinese Lessons by John Pomfret, who witnessed firsthand both many of the events leading up to and including Tiananmen.  The point is that, at the time, mass student protests were quite common, and the riots at Tiananmen seemed an almost inevitable occurrence.  However, in the twenty years since then, there have not been any riots anywhere near the same scale.  Though there are tens of thousands of “disturbances” every year, they are normally quite small and focused protest.  Farmers demanding more pay or cleaner environments, workers protesting factory closings, migrant workers that haven’t been paid, etc.  Unlike 1989, these types of protests are not ideological at their base.  The people protesting are looking to obtain something concrete: thus it is not useful to compare these demonstrations to the events of 1989.

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