Cuddly koala contingent arrives in Guangzhou home

GUANGZHOU: Six koalas arrived in the southern city of Guangzhou yesterday, the first time the sleepy Australian marsupial has set foot on the Chinese mainland.

The koalas, three female and three male, were donated by the Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary in Queensland, Australia, and will be raised at Xiangjiang Safari Park. They are between two and four years old.

The donation is a celebratory gift marking the 30th anniversary of the establishment of Sino-Australian diplomatic relations.

According to Dong Guixin, general manager of the park, the donation is part of a global koala protection plan agreed upon by Australia and China. The safari park has been chosen by the Australian Government after visits and evaluations by Australian experts.

He said that the koalas are in their prime so the safari park should produce its own cubs in the next couple of years. The park will become China's koala gene bank and propagation base.

According to Kelli-Ann Kerin, consul of the Australian Consulate-General Guangzhou, the koalas will easily acclimatize to the living environment in Guangzhou as the city shares a climate similar to Queensland.

The news of the arrival has aroused great interest among local people.

"Koalas are very cute, I just can't wait to see them!" Guo Guo, a Guangzhou resident, told China Daily. (China Daily)

So cute! Hope they survive Guangzhou, where may have a climate similar to Queensland but also more polluted environment!

Buffalo milk may help meet China's growing cheese demand

NANNING, April 22 (Xinhua) – China may tap its rich buffalo milk resources to meet the growing domestic demand for cheese, which has become so popular on the Chinese dinner table thanks to the prevalence of western food.

China has 22.76 million buffaloes that together produce 2.65 million tons of milk a year, says Zheng Hua, an expert attending the ongoing fifth Asian Buffalo Congress in Nanning, south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.

Buffalo milk contains more fat and protein than cow's milk and therefore provides ideal raw material for cheese production, says Zheng, a food engineering specialist.

"In Italy, almost all the buffalo milk is used to produce cheese, including the world-famous Mozzarella," he said.

If China fully taps its own buffalo milk resources, he said the country won't have to rely on imports to satisfy its domestic cheese demand and can even enter the world cheese market with its own brands.

Experts say it is costly to import cheese. According to Zheng, China is spending 10 percent of its milk industry revenue on cheese imports every year.

Buffalo, or swamp buffalo, is a strong but tame species living largely in tropical and subtropical regions. Ninety-seven percent of the world's buffalos live in Asia.

The Chinese started to raise buffaloes at least 7,000 years ago,and the country has the world's third largest number of buffaloes today. (Xinhua)

Yummmm...

Mosuo cultural events in Beijing...

To all those who are in Beijing, this might be interesting...

Thursday, April 20, 7:30 p.m. -- Lecture about the Mosuo, and our work with them, at The Bed (see attached invitation). Sponsored by the Hutong School Business Panel.

Saturday April 22, 10:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. -- An Art Festival at Ritan Park, sponsored and organized by the Eton International School (see attached invitation). All proceeds go to support the Lugu Lake Mosuo Cultural Development Association. This event will include singing/dancing performances by Mosuo dancers; presentations about the Mosuo culture, and our organization; a talk by Nong Miaomiao, a Chinese director who did a documentary about the Mosuo; and screenings of various movies and documentaries about the Mosuo. We will also be selling hand-made Mosuo handicrafts.

Monday, May 1, 10:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. -- Charity Organization displays at Chaoyang Park. Our organization will have a booth set up, and performances of Mosuo singing and dancing on the central stage.

Who are the Mosuo? The Mosuo are one of China's most unique minority groups. Their culture has many aspects of matriarchal cultures, with women being the head of the house, owning all property, etc. They are one of the few cultures outside of Tibet to practice Tibetan Buddhism. But perhaps what they are best known for is their practice of "walking marriages", or "zou hun". Traditionally, most Mosuo do not get married; rather, women can choose (and change) partners as they please. Children born as a result of such pairings will be raised in the woman's home.

The Mosuo live in the area around Lugu Lake, on the border of Yunnan and Sichuan provinces, high in the Himalayan mountains; they are one of the most remote minority groups in China.For more detailed information about the Mosuo, please check out our website at www.mosuoproject.org.

What is the Lugu Lake Mosuo Cultural Development Association? We are a non-profit organization, registered in January of 2006, that focuses on providing necessary support and resources for a variety of projects to help the Mosuo. Our organization is run by the Mosuo themselves, and focuses on addressing their most immediate and pressing needs. Current projects include:

* The Mosuo Language Project -- The Mosuo have their own language, but it is only an oral language, there is no written form. We are bringing in professional linguists to help develop and teach a written form of their language.
* Education -- We will provide training and support for local teachers (many of whom live in extremely remote mountain villages, with virtually no support or resources), and scholarships to encourage promising students.
* Culture -- We provide support and expertise to develop and expand the Mosuo Cultural Museum, a museum started by several Mosuo who want to ensure the study and preservation of their culture.
* Many, many more projects, including focuses on environment, economic development, children's and women's issues, etc. For more information about our projects, check out our website at www.mosuoproject.org

Chinese names - Farewell the red soldiers

LONG gone are the days when Chinese parents often chose such names as Hongbing (Red Soldier), Aihua (Love China) or even Kangmei (Anti America) for their children. They are still limited by the custom of using no more than two Chinese characters for given names. But growing numbers now prefer to choose highly obscure ones to avoid the common phenomenon, given a paucity of surnames, of bestowing a name already used by countless others. The police, however, have plans to stop this.

The problem is that commonly used software for inputting Chinese characters, including that used by police departments responsible for issuing identity cards (which every Chinese must carry), cannot handle very rare characters. In China, the usual way of writing a character on a computer is to enter its pronunciation using Roman letters, then choose from a list of possible options (most characters have many homonyms). A rare character might not show up on the list.

The tens of millions of Chinese with rare characters in their names have long suffered the consequences, experiencing problems with everything from buying airline tickets to opening bank accounts.

For the police all this has become a particular problem with the introduction in 2004 of new identity cards with embedded microchips. Rather than getting better software, a senior police official has announced that the answer is to ban problematic characters.

Reaction has not been entirely positive. One Chinese newspaper complained that the new regulation would “simply be for the convenience of the police” rather than for the good of the public. A government adviser was quoted in another as saying that the “right of citizens to use characters freely” should be respected. The “old hundred surnames”, as ordinary citizens are often described in Chinese, would agree. (Economist)

Funny that there was also rumor that the police should ban one character names (like mine) because it’s too easy to have the same name with too many people.

But seriously, before the new ID cards there are about 4600 obscure characters that the police computer could not recognize (fair enough, these 4600 don’t even exist in dictionaries). For the new cards they upgraded the system, now in Beijing Police Dept. there are only 231 characters that their computer cannot read. If they could solve the trouble with the 4600, why the flip is it a problem with the few hundred now? Ok, they can argue that people have been creative at making up new characters, that they can pick up something from the oracle bone script (don’t you like pictographic language?), and that there are already 60 million people using rare characters for names and there can be more, but then tell me what’s your standard for “problematic” characters. (“What? I can’t name my child this because your computer doesn't konw that Confucius used to like that word?!”) This is going to be a big joke in Chinese laws (not the biggest, we’ve got funnier).

Anyway, I’m not ranting because the new regulation is going to be difficult with my name. Mine is old school and tacky enough that not many people even use that word any more. Maybe in a hundred years it’ll become “problematic”. But now I’m happy. If you don’t like your name or your Chinese name, let’s look up some good stuff in a Qing Dynasty dictionary, shall we?

Dust in the Wind..

When Kansas sang that one some time back.. they could well have had Beijing in mind.

Government officials say that this is the worst dusty weather they've seen in 6 years. I feel so much more secure now with my asthma. If it wasn't the perpetual smog, and the pollen that spring normally brings, I've now got a million tons of Gobi Desert sand to worry about!

Here's to spending spring in the comfort of my home! :P

A slice of the pie...

Looks like I'll have to do some shopping soon!!

Officials asked to drink 2-million-yuan alcohol

Officials in a local government in Hubei Province were given a quota this year to consume at least 2 million yuan (US$250,000) of alcohol from a certain liquor company "as a support to its investment", a Hubei newspaper said today. Hanzhou City government has issued an official notice to its 105 departments to use Xiaohutuxian liquors during official receptions, citing a tipster.

The notice said that Guangzhou Pearl River Yunfeng Winery Co. Ltd., the producer of Xiaohutuxian liquors, was a major investor in the city and paid over 13 million yuan in taxes last year. But the company's local sales weren't doing well, the notice said.

Departments fulfilling their targets will be rewarded with 10 percent of the quota, while ones that don't will be criticized. (Shanghai Daily)

Well, ok, a quota of 2 million yuan sounds intimidating at the first place, but if you know the way Chinese do “official receptions” in business you’ll find it’s actually even reducing the volume they are drinking now, if they don’t drink other alcohol, that is… or they take the “at least” very seriously.

A bit of Math:

2 million a year for 105 departments that received the quota, that’s 2,000,000 (yuan) / 105 (Dept’s) = 19,048 yuan for every department over the course of a whole year;

Assume every department average 1 reception dinner every week (which is apparently underestimated I’d say), that’s 19,048 (yuan) / 52 (weeks) = 366 yuan consumption per week for every department.

Now a bottle of Xiaohutuxian, the liquor they are supposed to consume, sells within the range of 100 – 600 yuan in the market, according to the different types (alcohol percentage: 45 – 52%). Official receptions always go for expensive and higher percentage of alcohol, very understandably. So basically every department gets only 1 bottle or even less than 1 every week for official receptions which are normally in the form of a dinner of 10 people at a round table. And a piece of information for you, Hubei people can drink a little bit. The province's baijiu consumption ranks among the highest 5 in China.

That’s nothing, and sad…

April Snow

A few days ago, there were lovely 60 degree days in Beijing.

Right now, as I type, it is snowing in Beijing.

It's April.

Weird...