Beijing Sounds — 北京的声儿

Click here to skip the blah-blah and go straight to the blogroll

Syz is not known for his obsession with clean cars. He has tested to the breaking point the folk theory that a little dirt doesn’t affect how the car runs, by allowing the accumulation of enough winter road sludge to make a business in low-end salt lick sales look tempting.

Certainly he never thought to compare himself to the roommate back in LA, many years ago, whose cherry red Jeep gleamed even from within the unlit garage where I had given him the one available space because, hey, why go to all the work of opening the (manual) garage door when you could just drive past and park on the back lawn? And anyway my roommate didn’t seem to mind my Geo Metro, all three cylinders of it. He wasn’t above riding in it. He never complained.

Then came the day of the intervention. He had just come back from an especially punishing training run. I don’t remember how it started but maybe he was talking about how he still had to wash his car that evening. Maybe someone made a snide comment. Maybe he felt provoked. In any case, exhausted, unfiltered, he blurted out the whole unvarnished truth: “Dude, you know, I haven’t really wanted to say anything. I know you’re from Washington and people tell me this is a California thing. I don’t know, but it’s just a fact. The thing is, you just gotta wash your car. Every guy — even your first clunker in high school — you keep it clean. It’s just like changing your underwear. A guy who can’t keep his car clean, you know, well… Part of me knows it doesn’t matter, but it’s just like…”

He was embarrassed for me. It was like telling me my body odor had been bothering him for the last six months. I felt bad and washed the car — once.

Deep down I knew he was right. Not washing your car is a sign of deeper psychological uncleanliness. You can still see evidence of that deeper sickness today when you look at the old Beijing Sounds (BJS) blogroll. Having been through at least two traumatic technology moves, it’s not wearing its age well. Links are broken, text is squished and fragmented. And that’s on top of the typical problems one would find with a blogroll: that it would fail to keep up with your tastes and opinions of its own accord anyway.

So today’s the fall cleaning for this beat-up old car, the BJS Blogroll. Kinda makes you think of one of those branding exercises: “If the BJS Blogroll were a car, what kind of car would it be?”

* Focused in purpose

* With an air of whimsicality

* Big, to accommodate a marching band’s worth of different voices

* Comfortably at home in Beijing.

Maybe… maybe… yes, that’s it!

Detailing (a word I learned from aforementioned roommate) of this new vehicle starts by removing some of the detritus from the old blogroll, whose occupants are looking more like this.

One of the lines I liked from the retired blogroll was:

“…journalism largely consists in saying ‘Lord Jones Dead’ to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.” — letter from GK Chesterton

The idea was just that reading traditional journalism is like recreational drug use. Both are entertaining ways to kill time. What I didn’t know when I quoted it was what an abstainer I was to become. Fast forward to today. I’ve given away my last television. I live so close to work that I forget to turn the radio on before I arrive. Almost 100% of my distorted knowledge of current events comes through online reading (90% blogs) plus the occasional Economist.

Why blogs? While I’ll freely acknowledge there’s as much flotsam in the blogosphere as in any issue of the New York Times, there are also profound voices, obsessive collectors, meticulous documenters, tenacious pursuers of the truth — individuals whose collective and often voluntary work overwhelms the handful of truly original writers who happen to work at the big media establishments. The best of them also know that they don’t have to publish, don’t have to meet the demands of the news cycle, don’t have to compete in the “space age” where media empires vie to fill the vast and growing array of channels, websites, publications and so forth with something, anything that will grab eyeballs.

Like the Blogroll Bus, the new blogroll comes in three sections. It also can’t come anywhere close to seating all the blogs I read, even just the ones I read regularly. For lack of better criteria, I’ve selected only those blogs I’ve been reading long enough to know their personalities by heart.

Formidable Iconoclasts

The iconoclast seeks to reveal the error of conventional knowledge and shatter the myths we lead our lives by. Unfortunately myth-busting is a currency that has been greatly devalued in the last hundred years of hype-inflation. So to qualify as formidable and not just an iconoclast, a blog must be willing to seek the truth regardless of where it leads, even if that means contradicting earlier statements and acknowledging error. And the blog must make it easy for skeptical readers to investigate the iconoclastic claims themselves, into mind-numbing levels of detail if needed, in order to see what those claims are made of.

The Pinyin.info blog has — surprise, surprise — a gravitational pull towards that fine script which Beijing Sounds pays constitutional homage to. The blog is much broader than that, however, covering topics ranging from languages and dialects across China, to broader information about writing systems around the world, to cultural observations. And the blog is just the beginning. The “readings” page is a virtual library of works about China, much of it language-oriented, often in English and often with full texts available online. The “rules” page offers conventions for pinyin writing (e.g. re frain from writ ing mul ti syl lab ic words dis joint ed ly) with links to authoritative sources.

EastSouthWestNorth runs like a newsletter of the underground. It covers a variety of topics that often have not been suitably harmonized for the Net Nanny. Original stories as well as summaries and links.

Language Log is a group blog that is not China-focused but has loads of myth-busting information about languages in and around China. Victor Mair is the most frequent writer on Mandarin, but others often chime in.

Sharp Observers

Danwei is more an institution than the multi-writer blog you might think it is at first glance. You’d be missing out if you didn’t consider it a must-read in the “community builder” category below, because to the extent it is possible to keep abreast of what conversations are going on in Beijing as well as greater China, Danwei is the best single source for doing so. Yet it is worth categorizing as Sharp Observer because of the groundbreaking and original reporting that gets published there too.

Imagethief (NDFW) is a Beijing-based blogger whose work is, indeed, Not Dignified For Work. Try reading the smog recipe without blowing snotballs onto your desk. But it’s not just gut-achingly funny: Will at his best pulls together current events in a way that no one else can. Read about the Yilishen ant farms for a taste.

Bokane.org posts snarky but deep-inside (to the point of being esoteric) commentary. Not too many ex-pats in Beijing have done work on seal script, or been accused of trying to hide their (nonexistent) Chinese heritage. One nice touch is that he usually gives you three months between posts to digest the content.

Sinosplice’s John Pasden is hip on Mandarin linguistics, Mandarin as a foreign language (which goes into his work at Chinesepod), and life in Shanghai. Sinosplice offers not just the blog, but some very high quality Mandarin language resources (e.g. for tones, etc.) as well.

Jottings from the Granite Studio offers erudite but piquant observation from a Beijing-based Qing historian.

Black and white cat earns sharp observer status just for having gone through this one bowdlerized NYT article. Lots of other good stuff as well.

Community Builders

What’s going on in Beijing? What are Chinese netizens talking about? With the right selection of blogs, it’s possible to have a sense of the “flow of conversation” in a particular area or with a particular demographic. The ones below make that possible.

Danwei, see above.

Fool’s Mountain is a must-read, a self-consciously pro-China but not necessarily pro-government or anti-”Western” blog. It publishes some jetsam, but it sometimes gets right what almost everyone else gets wrong. To draw on a specific example (not because of its particular importance but just for the sake of illustration) take the tempest about the girl who recorded the song for, but did not perform during, the Olympics opening ceremony. Fool’s Mountain picked up the fact (as far as I can verify) that VOA completely made up juicy details about “unattractiveness” of the non-performing girl. For a period of time, FM’s chief drawback was an excessive flow of puerile posts from the great, wide Internet due to its open submissions policy. But since this editorial rejiggering, it has been doing a better job of separating beer from foam for its readers.

Laowai Chinese — substantial language discussion and a pretty active commenting community. Good linking and Mandarin-learning resources as well.

Cup of Cha — political/social commentary from Beijing

Echoes of Manchu looks at the remnants of Manchu and Manchuria, mostly from a linguistic perspective. It’s a sister blog of Beijing Sounds and while it might seem like a conflict of interest that I’m recommending it on my blogroll while being listed as a writer, I will argue that my contributions have been so pitifully minimal that they do not require recusing myself.

Adsotrans can tell you what’s going on with really cool Chinese character annotation technology. The only problem is that he posts so gosh-darned infrequently.

Notes of a Sinophibe — commentary from Xiamen

Bezdomny ex patria — stream-of-consciousness from Beijing: daily life as well as article translations

The China Beat — group blog with some seriously big names; often deep and insightful thinking and perspective on China

Inside-Out China — literature connected to China

The China Vortex — China business consulting, but substance! not at all just the usual crap

chinaSMACK (NSFW) — a unique epoxy of prurient interests and “pulse of the Chinese Internet” interpretations. It is really Not Safe For Work and possibly not even safe for home if you are of the type that prefers not to know what goes on in the semi-anonymity of the Chinese Internet. But once you get around all that, the blog is something of an original idea, well executed. Mixed in with the stuff that attracts teenage boys are pieces that summarize current events AND organize and translate the chat board commentary around those events. This piece on the Sanlu tainted baby formula story is a good example.

The Peking Duck — politics, often China-related

Absurdity, Allegory & China — commentary mostly from Tianjin

I Heart Beijing — where else could you get Beijing theater news? From the incomparable Elyse Ribbons

Barking at the Sun — personal blog from the nether reaches of Mandarin-land: Sichuan & Chengdu

China Law Blog might lead you to think it’s all about self-promotion if you don’t read it long enough or you catch it on the wrong day. If you stick with it, though, you’ll be well rewarded, as the writers do an admirable job of keeping up with what’s current in China and in the China-related blogosphere. I’m indebted for many-a-link to good writers.

Angry Chinese Blogger — sometimes a bit too angry for my taste, but overall still good commentary

Sexy Beijing — the blog is minimalist, but the YouTube episodes (some of which have been featured on Beijing Sounds) are mint

China’s Scientific & Academic Integrity Watch — just what it says; often heavy stuff

Ben’s Blog — personal blog of a sometime China resident

Hanzi Smatter — “dedicated to the misuse of Chinese characters in Western culture”. Need I say more? Hilarious.

WSJ China Journal — mainstream, but usually well-informed

China Law Prof Blog — quirky, mostly law, but occasionally delving into history, such as this important work on the history of ping-pong.