Need2LearnChinese Blog

Chinese basketball All-star Yao Ming may become the mainland's first torchbearer, Xinhua revealed on its website Thursday.

The Olympic flame, which will be lit on March 24 in Olympia, Greece, is expected to arrive in Sanya, Southwest China's Hainan Province on May 3 after touring 21 countries and regions outside the mainland.

Yao is a shoe-in to be the first to run a 200m stretch with the torch. Fellow player Yi Jianlian will be Yao's backup torchbearer, Xinhuanet cited a Sanya local government official as saying.

"Yao, who represents China's sporting celebrities, has the honor of being the mainland's first relay runner," said official Liao Minsheng.

During the 2004 Olympic Torch Relay, Yao was the mainland's final torchbearer who ran in Kunming, Southwest China's Yunnan Province.

The NBA center, who led the Chinese team to the quarter-finals of the Athens Olympics, had a successful operation earlier this month after he was diagnosed with a stress fracture in his left foot. He will recuperate for up to four months before making the decision to participate in the Games.

Liao also told Xinhuanet that the Sanya leg, which is the torch's first stop on its mainland tour, will be a highlight and some of the relay runners are celebrities. TV hostess Yang Lan, movie stars Zhang Ziyi, Jackie Chan and Maggie Cheung will each carry the torch on Hainan Island.

"The detailed route for the Sanya stretch is already set," Liao added. "The relay, involving 208 torch runners, will start from Tianyahaijiao on May 4 and end at Fenghuang Island."

According to Liao, 10,000 people will perform a bamboo pole dance, a traditional dance by the Li ethnic group who live in Sanya, to welcome the Olympic torch.

Afterwards, the flame will continue its 97-day journey, covering the mainland's 31 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities, including the world's highest peak Mt. Qomolangma, or Mt. Everest known in the West.

The torch will finally arrive back in Beijing on August 6 and will be carried into the National Stadium or Bird's Nest for the opening ceremonies two days later.

Posted by jialilyus at 10:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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Too much spam on your mobile phone? You're not the only one being hit or getting angry. 30 NPC delegates are thinking of enacting a PRC Information Security Protection Law, which would provide a heavy deterrent to spammers.

No details have been released regarding the law under discussion. However, Chinese law now officially forbids people from sending pornographic or "otherwise disturbing or irritating" messages via SMS text message. There have been cases where sexual harassment in the form of text messages have landed the offender punishment.

The company isolated by consumer watchdogs as the offender — Focus Media Wireless — is a detestable institution indeed. With a database of 200 million mobile phone numbers, the company has the lowdown on every last bit of your personal information, including your car license number, according to mainland TV images. Even top-end execs such as Pan Shiyi (潘石屹), the man behind such architectural stunts such as Jianwai SOHO, has been tracked; Pan can easily get spammed if the Focus Media Wireless wants it.

The illegal selling of personal information is extremely unpopular amongst China's 500 million mobile phone users. There have, so far, been few attempts at reporting cases of text messaging spam. Around 8 spam text messages are received by the average user a month -- that's about one a day per user, in essence 500 million spam messages in all in just one single day.

The mainland authorities are finally eyeing their focus on the SMS market, which as early as 1999 was still an empty market. In 1999, about the only mobile phones capable of sending text messages were those brought in from outside China roaming on Chinese mobile networks. In just ten years, the Chinese SMS world has gone from mute to spam mode.

Posted by jialilyus at 10:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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DON'T Placing Chopsticks Unevenly

Chinese people regard it as inauspicious to place a pair of chopsticks unevenly on the table before, during or after a meal. They call it "son thong liang duan", or " three long and two short", which indicates death. According to traditional Chinese customs, dead bodies were placed in coffins in the past. In those days, coffins were made from two short boards at the front and back, and three long ones at the two sides and the bottom-hence the saying. Therefore, it is taboo to place one's chopsticks unevenly on the table.

DON'T Pointing at Others with Chopsticks

You should never perch your chopsticks between the thumb, middle, ring and little fingers, while sticking out your index finger, as it implies abuse. In most cases, Chinese people point at others with their index fingers to scold them. Therefore, such a movement is unacceptable. It is also considered bad manners to point at others,with your chopsticks, while chatting during a meal.

DON'T Sucking the Chopsticks Noisily

Usually, if one sucks his/her chopsticks in his/her mouth, while making noises, he/she is considered to have been raised improperly. This is similar to the belief that one should drink his/her soup quietly.

DON'T Striking Plates or Cups

Chinese people believe it is obscene to strike one's plates, cups or bowls with chopsticks, because, in the past, only beggars struck their bowls while begging.

DON'T Searching from Plate to Plate

Suppose that someone around you uses or on the table while transferring food from the serving dishes to your plate or bowl. If this happens, you should immediately apologize, as it is regarded as a serious breach of etiquette.

DON'T Reversing Heaven and Earth

When using chopsticks, you should be careful not to put them upside down; otherwise, others will look down upon you, as if you were a hungry beggar.

Posted by jialilyus at 10:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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The Olympic torch relay will stop for two hours at Tian'anmen Square in central Beijing on the eve of the Olympic Games, a Chinese official said on Thursday.

A ceremony would be held on the square when the torch arrived after circling the world and going through every province and region of China, said Jiang Gongmin, head of the Beijing Bureau of Culture.

He said that the torch would circle half the square, which is the world's largest, spanning 440,000 square meters, or larger than 50 football fields. Afterwards, a fire-lighting ceremony and art performance would be staged.

Tian'anmen Square will be the last leg of the relay before the torch enters the National Stadium. It will also be the starting spot of the marathon event of the Games.

The relay is to have 21,880 Chinese and foreign torch bearers along the 137,000-kilometer route, which will include the world's highest mountain, Mount Qomolangma.

Posted by jialilyus at 09:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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The Americans go wild for baseball, and the Brazilians wow everyone with their soccer skills... But when it comes to table tennis, China beats the other countries hands down. Anyone who watches sport on television knows that the Chinese team tends to do pretty well in the world championships, to say the very least. China has dominated both men’s and women’s table tennis since the 1960’s and account for at least half of the global top ten (Men’s and Women’s). 

What is wonderful about ping pong though, is that it is incredibly accessible. It seems every Chinese playground has a table. It’s by no means a sport reserved for the professionals with fancy and expensive equipment. In China, everyone learns how to play, and (from this foreigner’s perspective it appears) everyone plays well. Chinese friends invite you for a game of table tennis, insisting that their skills are nothing special… then you red facedly discover that they are just being modest, and spend most of the game running after the ball each time as they win every rally.

A look into the history of the game suggests that it has British roots rather than Chinese ones.  There are records in the 1880s of an upper class Victorian adaptation of lawn tennis into an after dinner parlour game. A cigar box lid was used to hit a rounded champagne cork over books on the dining room table. By the early 1900s, a modified version is said to have been introduced to Japan, where it soon spread to Korea and China.  But even if the game was not of their invention, China certainly soon became its master.

1953 saw China entering the Table Tennis World Championship for the first time and by 1959 table tennis player Rong Guotan became the first Chinese world champion in any sport. This was the beginning of Chinese domination of the sport, which continues to the present day.

Ping pong even played an important role in Chinese diplomacy. In 1971, while the American ping pong team were playing in Japan, they were surprised to receive an invitation for an all expenses paid trip to China. When the group of nine players, four officials and two spouses crossed the bridge from Hong Kong to the mainland on 10 April 1971, they were the first Americans to enter the country since the formation of the People’s Republic of China. Premier Zhou Enlai received the team at a special banquet and told them “Your visit to China has opened the door for people-to-people exchanges between China and the USA.”

The Chinese have also developed a distinct style and technique when it comes to playing table tennis. The traditional way of holding the racquet in the West is called the handshake style. As the name suggests, the player grips the racket as if he is shaking someone's hand and uses one side of the racket for forehands and the other for backhands. However, a style that is very popular in China and the rest of Asia is called the penhold grip.  A traditional penholder uses only one side of the racket for both strokes and grips the racket as if holding a pen. In the 1990s, player Liu Guoliang pioneered a new kind of penhold style: he stuck rubber onto both sides of the racket and played topspin with backhand. Such was the scale of the success of his style that most of the rest of the Chinese team now emulate it.

Today table tennis remains wildly popular across China. A massive table tennis tournament in Tiananmen Square in June this year marked the first non political event to take place there since the formation of the PRC.   The “play to win” mentality is perhaps best summed up by Zhang Yiming, a multiple world and Olympic table tennis champion: “We are expecting to win. Coming second is failure for us and the team. As long as we don’t mess up ourselves, we’ll be okay because nobody can beat us” .

Posted by jialilyus at 09:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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