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With on-line / pre-paid/ high environmental cost airline tickets tucked away in my gmail database somewhere, this year’s experience of Chinese New Year may well be somewhat different to last year’s. Although, bus stations/ train stations and a trip to the in-laws can only actually be forestalled and not avoided completely; Beijing for New Year- deep Southern Shaanxi a week later.
Here are a few extracts from last year’s Notes, just to remind me what Chinese New Year is all about and to get me in the spirit of it all. Plus this article about the ‘real-name train ticket system’ that is being piloted this year.
Chinese New Year at Xi’an’s Southern Bus Station I.
Chinese New Year is fast approaching and people in their masses are heading home. Yesterday I wandered down to the bus station to buy a ticket for my girlfriend who is also returning home for Spring Festival, a few days before I join her. No problem I had thought, a bit of a wait then I would arrive back at the flat a knight in shining armour, clutching a much sought after ticket when she returned from work. However… read on
Chinese New Year at Xi’an’s Southern Bus Station II.
Tomorrow is another day but I was up again and heading off to the bus station just as I had done two days earlier. This time as I arrived at the station I was relieved to see the line pleasingly manageable, probably about where I had entered it the first time just this time I was to do so legitimately and with over an hour before the station doors were to be opened. read on
New Year In China
New Year in China isn’t just what you celebrate but where you celebrate and what it tells us about what we already know but maybe don’t always quite see, that China is a country of migrants. Though, it is not as it is in many western countries a migration of national peoples. Here it is a migration from the country to the city, from small town to large, most often within the same province, although ofcourse the general mass movement in recent decades East and South has been huge. read on
Chinese New Year Comes (And Is Still Going)
Chinese New Year (Guo Nian) seemed to have come and gone but on returning to Xi’an it is obvious it is still in the process of going, pleasantly. Back in the village, my girlfriend is actually from a small village outside town, New Year was spent trying desperately not to eat a feast of fine proportions at every home in the neighbourhood. However, when the neighbourhood consists of fields and homesteads drifting off into the far distance and when everyone seems to be a second father, an uncle, a sister, an elder brother or an aunty this can prove quite difficult. read on
Chinese New Year- If It Is Going To Go, It Might As Well Go Like That
Well, if the curtain has to be brought down on these celebrations then you might as well go down fighting for them. That is how it seems the Chinese greet the Lantern Festival, which falls on the 15th day of the Lunar New Year and marks the end of these weeks of travel, celebration and the good old-fashioned eating of too much food. Although, when they went, they went down with a smile on their faces. read on
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China News Links- w/e 7th February 2010
State-Owned Enterprises in China: How Big are They?- from blogs.worldbank.org: ‘It seems that although Chinese SOEs play a major role in the Chinese economy, they continue to remain mysterious to most outsiders. ‘
Wow, China IS Serious About Clean Energy!- from CleanTechnica.com: ‘China’s upcoming Big Clean Energy plans are Huge and are likely to dwarf what are currently the largest wind power and solar power projects in the world.’
How Much Internet Freedom do Chinese Citizens have?- from The China Media Project: ‘I try to explain how China does not lend itself to simple labels like “free” or “unfree.” As we broach this now exceptionally sticky question of Internet freedom in China, I encourage readers to step back and take the same vantage point.’
Six Takes on Martin Jacques’ ‘When China Rules The World‘- from The China Beat: ‘My goal… is to direct the attention of interested readers to six recent essays by other people that engaged with the thesis of ‘When China Rules the World’.’
Can We Learn From China?- from The Huffington Post: ‘By one estimate, China has been at the top of the global economy for 18 out of the last 20 centuries. That’s an impressive track record, whatever you might think of imperialism, communism, and all the other systems that have prevailed in that vast country over the centuries.’
Lunar Eclipse: US Retreat Leaves China Leading Way in Race to Return to Moon- from The Guardian: ‘The Chinese space agency could land its first astronauts on the moon within a decade…India found water on the surface with its first lunar mission last year… Japan, too, has sent a satellite to the moon… the beginning of a new age of lunar exploration.’
The 3-2 Tone Swap Error- from Sinosplice: ‘This post identifies a type of tonal production error which many students of Mandarin Chinese make, not only in the beginner and elementary stages, but often well into the intermediate stage… I’m dubbing the error the “3-2 Tone Swap”.’
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For me and my petty concerns, Google went too far when they started incorporating alternative logo styles and random selections of daily information on their .com search engine, presuming that we the masses, in our beautiful diversity, would all be interested in whatever soupcon of news or random image they felt entitled to share with us. However, this didn’t stop me continuing to use their services; my Gmail account, the Google Chrome Browser, my first blog post on Blogger and all the googling I have continued to do. For others, it was the dilution of Google’s border-less approach to information accessibility when they started dealing with China that spelt the beginning of the end. Though those protestors may well now feel, in the short term at least, slightly appeased! Maybe inserting a little snippet of daily information and a different logo image into their search engine showed a little too much arrogance for my liking, censoring its site to adhere to Chinese government dictates, at the cost of defending the principle of freedom of speech/ information and a consequential respect for basic human rights was obviously too much for others.
A pastime which has helped me to engage a little more with matters on the Chinese news front, as I have failed to do that regularly with my own notes here. I passed through into 2010 as a Hao Hao Reporter! Now, although the title is more grandiose than the reality, which is simply volunteering to add media stories one finds interesting on the internet to the 
So, because of that, I will begin with a quote from President Obama atop the Great Wall in Beijing. 
This continued with a recognition of Chinese sovereignty over Tibet but which included a pleasant sentiment, that it would be nice if the Chinese government and the Dalai Lama enter into
On a lighter note, 
秦始皇
西安
Xiao Yan Ta