Mongolian Folk Songs - Gradually Dying Away?

Yaru can sing popular songs in Chinese to great effect but her real preference is for traditional Mongolian folk songs that she sings to guests in a big restaurant in downtown Hohhot.

"I'm proud to sing Mongolian songs," says Yaru. "And it's much better singing them in the original than in a version translated into Mandarin Chinese."

The 27-year-old, an ethnic Mongolian who grew up on the grasslands in northeastern Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, has been working for three years at the Caoyuancheng restaurant where servers dress in traditional Mongolian costume and customers eat in compartments shaped like Mongolian yurts.

As rapid economic development transforms the vast, resource-rich autonomous region, hundreds of thousands of people over the past decade have done what Yaru did and move to towns or cities from pasturing and farming areas in pursuit of a better life.

But they are also increasingly aware of the efforts needed to ensure the survival of their language and culture in a modern world where the lifestyle is vastly different from centuries-old nomadism.

China has about 5.8 million ethnic Mongolians, 4.2 million of whom live in Inner Mongolia which has a total population of 24 million. The rest mainly live in northeastern Heilongjiang, Jilin and Liaoning, and northwestern Gansu and Xinjiang provinces or region.

In traditional yurts -- now very rare -- and in Mongolian family houses, portraits of Genghis Khan -- the man who united Mongolian tribes eight centuries ago and ruled an empire that stretched from Southeast Asia to Central Europe -- are commonplace.

Ethnic Mongolians in the region regard him as a hero.

Every year, thousands of Mongolians from all over China and from Mongolia attend grand sacrificial rituals at the Genghis Khan Mausoleum, located in Erdos City, some 200 kilometers southwest of Hohhot, the regional capital.

The mausoleum, rebuilt in 1956, contains sacrificial tablets. It has become a gathering place for Mongolians to offer sacrifice to the spirit of Genghis Khan.

"I have not attended such rituals yet, but I will some day,"

said Yaru, for whom Genghis Khan is a brave, wise man.

The sacrificial rituals, with a history dating back 780 years, are now presided over by the descendants of the Mongolian tribe of Dalhut, who were once Genghis Khan's garrison army.

Nowadays, more Mongolians in the region prefer to give their children Mongolian names, rather than use three-character names standard among Han Chinese. Some Mongolians have even started to reconstruct their family trees.

"Offering sacrifice to ancestors, giving children Mongolian names and building family trees, all these phenomena indicate that ethnic Mongolians are keen to protect and pass on their cultural legacy to the generations to come," said Bao Siqin, director of the Literature Studies Institute of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Regional Academy of Social Sciences.

According to Bao, also an ethnic Mongolian, his current surname Bao is a simplified form of his original Mongolian surname Borzhijin while Siqin means "clever" in Mongolian.

More Mongolians have begun to send their children to schools with classes taught in Mongolian to ensure they do not forget their language.

"The number of classes taught in Mongolian in our school has risen to 12 from seven in 2001," said Dalai Duren, headmaster of Xing'anlu Ethnic Primary School in Hohhot. "The school has seen anannual increase of nearly 100 students studying Mongolian."

The school has now 1,200 students, and 98 percent of them are ethnic Mongolians. Each of them enjoys a monthly living subsidy of 30 yuan (3.8 U.S. dollars) from local governments. China encourages schools in autonomous regions to have classes taught both in the language of the ethnic minority groups and in Mandarin Chinese.

Preferential policies in schooling for students of ethnic minorities are also an attraction, according to Dalai Duren. The school has seen more mixed-blood children -- one parent a Han and one a Mongolian -- enroll and study in Mongolian.

Namula, the school's doorman, said his eight-year-old grandson studies in Second Grade classes taught in Mongolian. "I want him to master both Mongolian and Chinese," he said.

Source:Xinhua

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Chinese Turn To Japanese For Online Porn

Justin Mitchell

Much ado has been made over China's constant efforts to protect its citizens from the nefarious influence of free flowing Internet information. Falun Gong, Wikipedia, Reporters Without Borders, BBC News, any reference to June 4, 1989, Taiwan independence or a free Tibet are no-nos, of course. Selected blog sites, such as the popular Blogspot, also are often blocked but then unblocked and blocked again in an unpredictable cycle that defies logic.

Lured by all those eyeballs, western companies have enabled the crackdown in their desire to get a share of the rapidly expanding China market. Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and Cisco Systems were widely criticized in 2005 for their complicity in what the conservative American pundit David Kopel called, "China's stranglehold on information." Although, complicit or not, the overwhelming mass of Chinese Internet users continue to favor the country's leading search engine, Baidu - not Yahoo or Google - for their online needs.

But to be honest, it's not the real low-down on Tiananmen Square, updates on imprisoned intellectuals or the aspirations of the people of Tibet that lead to yearning for a breach in the Great Firewall.

It's porn. Pure and simple. The quest for online porn satisfies the same itch in Beijing as it does in Boston, Manchester or Melbourne. In China, though, finding it online it isn't as simple as typing in "Jenna Jameson," "Bang Bus" or "Japanese Race Queens." Official scrutiny of naughty net sites is arguably more focused than that of content championed by western democracy advocates, though access to pirated Korean, Taiwanese, Japanese, vintage American and European porn on DVD is usually as easy as a running to the corner shop for a couple bottles of Tsing Tao and some sesame chips.

Quietly, however, in mid-March Baidu, the monster NASDAQ-listed portal, did a favor for China's smut seekers when it launched a US$15 million Japanese version called Baidu.jp. With its server based in Japan, it allows users from China to access pages otherwise banned by Beijing - images included. "It's just a test version at an early stage, so we don't want to make a fuss about it in the press," Baidu spokesman Xu Jiye, told Shanghai Daily.

I know what you're looking forOn its corporate Website, Baidu explains the company's mission in lofty terms. "Baidu was inspired by a poem written more than 800 years ago during the Song Dynasty. The poem compares the search for a retreating beauty amid chaotic glamour with the search for one's dream while confronted by life's many obstacles," the company says. "Hundreds and thousands of times, for her I searched in chaos, suddenly, I turned by chance, to where the lights were waning, and there she stood."

For those who have found the Japanese site, and the numbers appear to be growing, Baidu has revealed what they want to see. Baidu.jp placed 908th in terms of overall traffic in Japan last week, according to the ranking site Alexa.com. But nearly 60 percent of those searching were from China. Despite friction over still-festering World War II issues such as the Nanjing Massacre, sex slaves, the Yasukuni War Shrine and unexploded chemical weapons, Chinese Internet users have put aside any antipathy. They like what they're seeing: Japanese adult video stars in their mostly R-rated glory

Here's what a few bloggers had to say shortly after Baidu.jp's modest debut:

Someone calling himself Lu Xinxin trumpeted the announcement at www.lvxinxin.com: "Baidu Japan is good stuff! (Girls, don't click, neither should anyone under 18!)"

"Baidu Japan is finally online! Liu Xinxin said it's good stuff. It is, it is! All the search results pop up easily!"

"Is this legal in Japan?" wrote "Kereal" in seeming astonishment.

"I'm sweating!" confessed "Aether."

"You can put in a few words and come up with this astonishing stuff," wrote an anonymous poster. "You can tell how good it is by noticing how the female comrades here react to it. It is really very good, but nothing stunning for other countries, especially Japan which has a large, specialized pornography industry. Still this is huge for China!"

"I hope now Baidu.jp can develop a video search engine," wrote "Ivxnxn."

There were words of caution, too. "You're a bunch of idiots!" scolded "Gdgfd." "After you talk about it here it will probably be banned by the GFW (Great Fire Wall)."

You can also find banned politics on Baidu JapanRest easy, Gdgfd. Official oversight is capricious. For example, how does one explain China's official state news agency Xinhua, and its frequent postings of partially clad females - Chinese and foreign models and actresses alike - on its website under the guise of "art" or "culture," sometimes on the same page as a dictum/news release from the Party about the dangers of online titillation? Xinhua's predilection for saucy pics led one of China's leading foreign bloggers, Jeremy Goldkorn at Danwei.org, to dub it "Skinhua." The nickname has stuck.

It's not all T&A, though, At Baidu.jp. Type in "6./4/89," "Tianamen 89" or variations of them in Chinese characters and the results roll in, albeit in Japanese and many appear to be academic or government documents related to the massacre. Included among the results, though, are graphic, bloody photographs not easily found even on western websites as well as a skillfully edited YouTube tribute that uses documentary footage, still photos and a banned-in-China song urging the world not to forget.

As for Baidu.jp's future in Japan, porn and politically sensitive topics aside, it faces substantial challenges. Yahoo Japan is the country's top pick, with about 86 percent of Japan's Internet users, according to JapanNet. The current version of Baidu.jp has no advertising and offers nothing more than a search engine minus its popular Baidu blogging service and news.

In vaguely addressing the issue, Baidu's chairman and CEO said in a press release that 'We believe that our proven strength in non-English language search, the high internet penetration in Japan, as well as similarities between the Chinese and Japanese languages make this market an ideal next step for Baidu.''

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The Post-1980 Generation - Chinese Most Materialistic

People born in the 1980s, who are currently at the age between 17 and 26, are viewed as the “post-1980” generation in society. In China, there are 200 million people classified as a member of this group. The post-1980 generation are said to be the main consumption group in society in future, the People's Daily reported.

Under the influences of market economy, globalization, and the Internet, the post-1980 generation display a very different consumption mode from their parents.

Born as the only child in the family, most children in this generation despise tradition and cherish individuality. They like things which are unique and reflect people’s personality. They do things as they like.

Their life is surrounded by ads, posters, video programs and Internet culture, which promote a totally different consumption culture from the past. Under this influence, the younger generation pursue pleasure in life. They like expensive stuff and vie with each other in everything they buy, from food to clothes.

Compared with their parents, who live a frugal life, most people born in the 1980s spend lavishly. They spend all the money they earn, or sometimes overspend. They seldom save money in preparation for their future life.

Needless to say, most young people of this generation have a credit card, which is often overdrawn. Although they don’t make much money, they buy houses or cars with loans from banks. As some banks nowadays issue debit cards on campus, many college students become cardholders, too.

The consumption habits of the post-1980 generation reflect the consumption preferences of people at their age. They are not to be blamed for this. People of this generation is apt to learn new things and skilful at playing with modern equipment. Their fondness for electronic products helps push the development of modern technology. These are all their advantages. On the other hand, as many of the young people have lived a comfortable life since they were born, most don’t save money and spend whenever they want, which is no good for society, said Xia Jianzhong, a professor at the Renmin University of China School of Sociology.

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