The return module of China's second manned spacecraft Shenzhou VI has come back to Earth, and the astronauts are safe. The module and astronauts landed in Central Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region at 4:33 A.M. Monday after a five-day flight.
CCTV had broadcast the whole process live. The two astronauts Fei Junlong and Nie Haishen received warm welcome as heroes. Reports about them are all over the media.
Your correspondent has been slacking for the last few weeks. A big reason is that recent news about media in China has been either brutal or dull.
The biggest events of the last two months, blogged to death but almost completely ignored by mainstream news sources, have been the nasty happenings at Taishi village. The one newspaper that has been devoting coverage to the village is The Guardian, who sent a reporter with an over-active imagination to observe the miserable events that have unfolded there. The reporter has since been sent to therapy. Simon World has a roundup of all relevant links to the Taishi story.
Aside from that, it's all Super Girls, bad journalism, second-rate versions of foreign magazines, lousy films, boring TV programs, new and unwelcome regulations, and the Nanny messing about with the Internet. Skinhua or Sinhua has of course been diligent with its output of girlie pics, as you can see from their Photo Gallery page, from which the most noteworthy album is Stars pose naked against breast cancer, which was also published on the People's Daily website.
Let's hope the media heats up as the temperature drops in Beijing.
Beijing Today, the English language weekly owned by Beijing Media Corp and associated with the Beijing Youth Daily, is looking for English copy editors.
Requirements:
1. Previous experience in English newspaper is a must;
2. Native English speaker.
Send resumes to jianrong@ynet.com
Coming on the heels of regulations banning traces of Hong Kong and Taiwanese influence in the speech of program hosts, this is a further attempt to promote language uniformity in television broadcasts. The rules are not new - Mandarin has always been the language of public communication - but the fact that SARFT feels the need to repeat them at this time says something about current official attitudes toward culture. The SARFT notice concerning a further reiteration of using standard Mandarin in TV series reads:
...addressing current problems that exist in language use in television series, the following stipulations are reiterated:
- Language in television series (excluding local traditional opera) should be mainly Mandarin. Under normal circumstances, dialects or non-standard Mandarin are not to be used.
- Major revolutionary and historically-themed television series, children's series, and series promoting educational content are to use Mandarin.
- Leaders portrayed in television series are to use Mandarin.
While the vast majority of TV series use Mandarin (whether what teen idols speak on their soaps is "standard" is open to debate) and hence will be unaffected by these rules, several shows in which main characters speak in regional dialect have been quite popular. Sure, viewers enjoy the distinctive flavor of various regional accents and vocabularies, and speakers of a dialect react favorably to programming in their dialect, but this entertaining variety stands counter to progress and is being cast aside in favor of some nebulous sense of future trends of the language, greater potential markets, and yes, a bit of nationalism as well.
Repercussions are already being felt. Producers of the long-delayed Zhao Wei vehicle Moment in Peking found themselves in a situation similar to what makers of ultra-violent Hong Kong mob films face when they submit their creations to the censors. Only for Moment, the question was whether non-standard Mandarin, not drugs and guns, would be corrupting the nation's youth. Fortunately for Vicky's fans, the producers are confident there will be no problems:
The success of a TV series does not lie in whether it uses dialect, but rather in whether its story can capture people's attention, or its characters are modeled successfully. Although this series, reflecting life in the early days of the Republic, is a large, Beijing-flavored grand opera, the language it uses is Mandarin that has a literary beauty. In addition, the show has three Taiwanese actors, but there will be no "HK-Taiwan accent problem." Since the sound wasn't simultaneously recorded, the voices of the three Taiwanese actors were dubbed over by mainland voice artists.
It may not be entirely bleak, though, if it leads to speeches by Party bigwigs getting the dubbing treatment as well.