What's the Difference Between Children's Books in China and the U.S.?
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In other words, the (politically-influenced) Chinese publishing industry is producing didactic children's books, but Chinese consumers are not interested in those books at all.
China has explicit political movie censorship. The golden dragon logo at the beginning is the "passed by censor" label. The Chinese army even produces an occasional feature film. "Sky Fighters", is a ripoff of "Top Gun", but worse. The USAF, especially the Strategic Air Command, used to do stuff like that in the 1950s. See "Strategic Air Command"[1], with Jimmie Stuart (considered good) or "Bombers B-52" (not so good).
The USA, for one.
The MPAA does rate movies, and most theater chains choose not to run movies rated to contain extreme violence or sexuality, but anyone can privately film and distribute a political (for example) film that might embarrass the US government.
Many such movies also run in theaters- see Fahrenheit 9/11, Citizenfour, All the President’s Men, etc.
There was a French group, Oulipo, that imposed weird restrictions on themselves in order to reproduce this effect. See eg 'A Void', a novel without the letter 'e'.
Censorship in the US may be more subtle than elsewhere, but it is present. Banks and governments have their methods which have become disturbingly effective. Also consider SJWs who effectively drown out or ostracize anyone with a differing viewpoint - you are free to think whatever you want, as long as you agree with us!
http://imdb.com/title/tt4103404/ https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/world-news/corruption/cen...
"SJWs"? Really? Does HN really need to devolve into KiA, TRP or T_D?
Armstrong advised Reagan, Thatcher and numerous other administrations over the past few decades. He has been behind the curtain.
His computer system has been accurately forecasting long-term socio-economic trends and their apices since the eighties. This is what the banks wanted.
When Armstrong turned the banks down, they sought to forcibly acquire the software and utilized government to squeeze him. The story continued on with illegitimate confiscation of billions and civil rights transgressions as Armstrong was jailed for years over contempt of court because there were no legitimate charges that could be brought against him.
So yes, there's definitely a history that makes Armstrong a target. The deeper you dig, the more it makes sense why The Forecaster was effectively blocked in the US and others have no problem.
Their influence usually shows itself in how america/troops/wars are portrayed, such as negative language being replaced by neutral statements - but sometimes there are bigger changes.
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/hollywood-cia-washington...
In China and similar countries, good luck portraying the army in a negative light, whether you ask for their cooperation or not.
If you want your film to include footage on a warship, or with tanks, or etc you'll need the armed forces to cooperate, and they only cooperate on films that make them look good.
Better CGI and good set design is making this less of a problems.
This isn't really a problem of censorship, but it is propaganda.
Even though our government doesn't censor us, our society does censor a lot of unpopular opinions. For example, the neo-Nazis who were publicly shamed and then subsequently lost their jobs. And the Google employee who was fired after writing that email about sexual harassment. I've seen other cases, too, but can't think of them off hand. And I should point out that I'm not defending those views (I think they're shameful), I'm pointing out that they were publicly humiliated and punished for sharing them.
Practically speaking, is there much difference between government backed censorship and online mob justice censorship? Each one will ruin your life, just in a different way.
1. You can't sue a mob for justice
2. You can't convict or fire a mob.
3. You can move to somewhere where the mob isn't.
More neutrally:
4. Mobs are crowd-sourced. Government censors are appointed experts of some sort.
5. One rouses and incites a mob. One lobbies and corrupts a government.
6. Mobs aren't constrained by things like double jeopardy. The U.S. government is.
7. Mobs tend to be more situational than government rules. Mobs don't care about boring things, niche things, technical things, or sympathetic perpetrators.
Ditto for 2, and certainly 3 unless you have resources, luck, and manage to get away.
4. Experts. In what? Toeing the party line?
5. True, although mobs are easier kick off than new patterns in govt.
6. Neither is the PRC.
7. True.
Edit: typo correction of “can” to “can’t”
And didn’t the term “Human flesh hunt” start out as a chinese one?
That's the traditional explanation, but does it apply any more now that we have the internet?
With the internet, any screw up or faux pas can cause worldwide publicity for any business. They can theoretically stand up for their employee's free speech, but in reality it's so rare that it's almost not worth considering.
At the same time, it's more difficult for the government to silence people due to the Streisand effect.
The Streisand effect happens when you try to make people shut up about something but don't actually have the power to make them shut up. So of course they'll just talk about that unsuccessful attempt, after all there's no downside. House arrest/public humiliation/bullet through the head? Try talking about that in any way critical of the censors and you could be next. That won't actually inhibit "dangerous" ideas, of course, but it's pretty effective at making everyone stop talking about them.
In other words, it is still possible to find neo-Nazi social media in the US. (Yes, there's been some issues on this front with some of the more visible sites due to certain Internet corporate CEOs getting "caught up in the mob", but organizations like the EFF are allowed to push back with counter-opinion -- https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/08/fighting-neo-nazis-fut...). It is still possible to find the Google employee manifesto online, as well as social media both sympathetic to these opinions and completely disagreeing with them and anything in between.
In many cases of government censorship, unpopular causes and opinions simply disappear. They for all practical purposes don't exist. You are not allowed to talk about them at all, at least in public.
Almost all democracies. I'm sure someone can point to a little "censorship" (e.g., children can't watch porn), but that's not the same thing at all - just like a cough isn't the same as lung cancer. When Disney released a film that was complementary of the Dalai Lama, the Chinese government banned all Disney movies - that's censorship.
The claim that 'everybody does it' is an old ploy for dictatorships.
The US censorship model is sneaky; instead of official state censorship, we have “voluntary” “private” censorship by industry groups, but when government isn't satisfied with the results, it threatens official regulation (either directly of content or at least marketing of certain content, or punitive regulation of other aspects of the relevant industry’s business), drags industry execs in for public shaming, and engages in similar pressure tactics until the industry aligns censorship practices with government preferences. In this manner, it imposes censorship, satisfies the segment of the electorate seeking government action on unwelcome content, but mostly maintains a façade of refraining from government censorship.
https://qz.com/1123570/china-literature-ipo-tencents-e-books...
Not children-specific, but just to illustrate the amount of domestic production for domestic consumption.
Tu Quoque is boring.
(Not saying it's the same as China. It's just an interesting system to subtly get sympathetic portrayals.)
For (old) Top Gear I wonder if they have some sort of patriotic elements, because Clarkson is a friend of David Cameron. Maybe the government/military offered them access to make a boys' show, with the unmentioned quid-pro-quo of making the show a bit of propaganda for the UK government/military.
Also that movie taught me the proper pronunciation of "Thule" (it's too-lee).
'Jimmy' or, preferably, James Stewart. With a more than decent real-life airforce career alongside all the movie stuff. And when war came, used his Hollywood connections to get into, not out of, active duty.
The US Army just has a target audience with different cultural tastes, so it makes FPS video games, instead (as well as supporting favorable movies.)
Can you justify your claim "99% of children's books published in China are imported and translated from other countries, mostly the US"? The claim seems exceedingly silly. Not only is the 99% number impossible I am also pretty sure US is not the majority source of children's books in China. See http://www.shuku.net/novels/mulu/ert.html . The only US book on the list I recognize is "The Wizard of Oz".
The silliest thing ever is to treat obvious hyperbole as if it is a precise, literal assertion.
I actually very much dislike hyperbole for this very reason; it prevents substantive discussion and the reader gains little for it. Hyperbole really expresses only the author's emotional reaction, and it's even vague about that; it charges the discussion with emotion. If I were benevolent dictator of my own forum, hyperbole would be banned.
The one thing that my extremely French parents couldn’t stop making fun of at the time, and still can’t stop making fun of now 20 years later, is the American habit of praising children repeatedly, putting stickers on homework, giving participation ribbons for every event, etc.
It was actually an interesting dichotomy: I’d get my homework back from the teacher with it saying “Great job!” with a cute little star sticker, and then at home my mom would get mad at me because she thought I made dumb mistakes and would make me do it all over again.
Definitely a strong contrast between French and American values in schooling, at least in the 90s. I’m left handed, and in the 2nd grade I had a teacher who would tear apart any piece of paper I gave her that had any ink smudge on it (fountain pens are mandatory in French grade school - which also confused my parents when we moved to the US and I was expected to write everything in pencil) and make me do it all over again. I do have really neat handwriting now ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
15 years later, as a grad student in the US, teachers I TA’d for repeatedly told me I was too harsh in my grading and that I shouldn’t take off points for small mistakes, typos, etc. That’s another big difference between French and US schooling: in France, you’re graded out of 20; but at the high school/college level, if you have an average above 15/20, you’re most certainly in the top of your class. In fact, in some top tier universities the class average might be 8/20. In grad school in the US, I had a 90%+ average, and routinely got 100% on tests - something just completely foreign to me.
Basically: Gamification. This trend, especially in games, really really sucks; as a German I'm not really used to it either, although it has swapped over to us in the last years, possibly due to the rise of Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Reddit, all of which use one or another form of karma points.
I am surprised that you got resistance on this in an educational setting, of all places. When I notice typos and grammatical errors, it almost always lowers my opinion of the material. It signals sloppy writing or possibly unclear thinking. It calls into question the meticulousness of the work as a whole. I expect more from a news outlet or a review journal with a copy editor. Professional writers and publishers should produce expert writing.
I should note a few things, for the sake of context: I had some years of private schooling early on; my father would make me write book reports during summer vacation; he self-published a book later in life and was very proud that others repeatedly complimented it for being free of typos and grammatical errors. (None of my peers had this experience growing up, to my knowledge.)
University standards should impose higher standards than what is typically expected in regular life. This is how writing is taught and reinforced. I think the internet, as a whole, dumbs-down writing skills by exposing readers to terrible writing on such a regular basis that they no longer perceive the difference. I don't know a solution to that problem.
I had a professor who made me regrade an entire batch of homework because, in her words, my comments explaining the mistakes were unnecessary - the students just care about their grade. Eye roll.
There is this idea that nothing is perfect and as a result, there should be no such thing as a perfect score.
"Perfect" means that there is nothing to improve - which is hardly ever the case. Hardly anybody is perfect, so hardly anybody can get a perfect score.
For many years Denmark (where I come from) had an official grading scale from 0 to 11. And then 13, not the usual top grade, but reserved for rare occasions of unique, original, outstanding performance completely outside the norm.
Alas, some years ago this system was scrapped, officially because "abroad" (meaning to a large extent the US) didn't get it. When Danish candidates turned up with their perfect 11-scores, they were reportedly often handicapped by having not a single top grade.
Grandparents and Tiger Moms don't read to their kids? Grandparents lived with their grandchildren in China as a whole. My wife teaches English to Chinese children through the internet and the sessions cost them about $20 US dollars. There is always an adult close at hand and seems much more active in their children's lives.
Now for your daily dose of Chinese Propaganda 88% of parents read 23 minutes everyday. Also there is no link to said "study." http://www.china.org.cn/china/2011-04/21/content_22412555.ht...
One big take away. In the US we push all Kindergarten students to read (age 5 or 6). In this paper 77% read at age 8 grades 2 or grade 3 in the US.
I follow the money that is spent on education in China by the child's parents. We don't even come close in the US.
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2017-10/30/content_338809...
Just look at VIP Kids and the other English teaching startups where Chinese parents spend $20 for a 25 minute session twice a week. VIP Kids now has 30,000 US employees teaching these kids.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-23/china-s-v...
If they aren't the predominant style they still spend a ton of money on children's education.
Interesting ... at what age can children begin reading children's books? Adult books? How do schools teach children who can't read?
As for Adult books, I belive a primary school student at about grade 3 maybe "can read" with a little struggle. As they have learned enough basic word to understand the sentences, even if there are few "hard word" remain unknown.
German original: > http://sternchenland.com/downloads/unsortiertes/Der%20Struww...
English translation > https://archive.org/details/englishstruwwelp00hoffrich
(note that you should prefer to read this in German if you can, since lots of subtleties are lost in the English adaption).
Here is a movie adaption of this book (in German) - note that they added an epilogue at the end where all stories still come to a happy end:
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpcPz-GvHYI
In particular consider the third ("Die gar traurige Geschichte mit dem Feuerzeug"/"The dreadful story about Harriet and the matches"; 16:54 in the video) and the sixth ("Die Geschichte vom Daumenlutscher"/"The story of little thumb-a-suck"; 13:38 in the video) story to see why this might be somewhat different from what I consider as a typical US-American children's book from my non-US perspective. :-)
After the industrial revolution, with nuclear families moving to cities, and education suddenly becoming more important and children being moved out of the labor force, the idea of "childhood" as a uniquely innocent period was invented.
A lot of the sanitized fairy tales we read have very dark origins.
I still consider lots of fairy tales that I was told as a child as very dark (I don't mean the idyllic world "Disney" versions).
For example in the Grimm version of Cinderella the evil sisters cut cut away their heels and toes with a knife to fit in the shoe and at the end the pigeons peck the eyes of the evil sisters (see http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/buch/-6248/16).
Or in "The red shoes" by Hans Christian Andersen the little girl protagonist prompts the headman to chop her feet (wearing the red shoes) to get rid of the shoes.
Edit: or Snow White: At the end the evil stepmother has to dance in red-hot iron shoes at the daughjter's wedding until she dies (see http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/buch/-6248/16)
It would be interesting to learn why the German version retains the darkness. Maybe its because Germans get to/are encouraged to read it in the original.
Because this is the version that the Brothers Grimm wrote down. I am nevertheless aware that there exist other (sometimes even darker) versions of the fairy tales than the versions written down by the Brothers Grimm. In this sense the versions of the Brothers Grimm are not "the original", but some version of the fairy tales (this is the difference between "Volksmärchen" (folk tales) and Kunstmärchen (literary fairy stories) - only for the letter one there exist some concept of "the original").
So I would say that Grimm brothers versions of the fairy tales conserved the zeitgeist of the beginning of the 19th century and there exists to my knowledge no other popular collection of German original language folk fairy tales. But of course today there exist translations of collections of folk fairy tales from different language areas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddcRDGgKVys
It's a retelling of the story from the perspective of the cat, who is watching Harriet burning to death. Good healthy black humor :)
If you ever have a chance to see this band play live, they are really weird, obscene, entertaining folks.
Instead I let her dicide what she wants and hope that this will let her develop and refine her taste.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that i suspect top down government of children's books will backfire in diminished interest and cruder taste for culture.
Initially I tried to influence the books he would read, but after a while he refused to read them (he would read them in his own time). So now I just let him be and just track what interests him and periodically introduce him to new stuff.
If we’re going to play this game, which culture’s children’s books teach kids more about honesty, I wonder?
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/13/world/asia/china-science-...
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/03/how-so...
No, Chinese children scored higher because only a sample was taken from urban Shanghai and compared to the entire USA. Imagine comparing San Francisco to the whole of China, including its much poorer and less educated hinterlands.
There are false generalizations all around.
I will put my argument more widely, East-Asian countries tend to train their children at a very young age, and their pronunciation of numbers helped them to learn arithmetic(stated in the book <Outliers>).
China has a basically working K-12 program, and there were a series of documentaries shoot in UK, not long later, UK imported elementary math books from Shanghai. But China still need to improve it's higher-ed system. Preferably learn from Russia, France and Germany.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_St...
This is a real story in India - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashrath_Manjhi
There is also a good movie made on him - http://m.imdb.com/title/tt3449292/
The first thing that came to mind when I read this was Lysenko-ism.
That quote just seems to be garden-variety "growth mindset" vs. "fixed mindset" self-motivation.
Problem is, even if that's true, it's not a particularly useful truth to most individuals. A growth mindset is useful -- unless you're particularly unintelligent, it's probably true that your efforts to learn will have results that make you more capable, and effort can compound on effort. You should probably act as if you can become more capable than you are, even if there are degrees of inborn intelligence.
But the underlying point is clear: "This is really instilling the idea of effort — that children have to learn to consistently practice in order to achieve a certain level,"
My take on the underlying point of that story is quite different: conform or be exterminated.
You didn’t persevere to the end:
“And lest you've been worrying about the fate of that cat — Cheung has reassuring news. Once the kids improve their handwriting, ‘the cat feels very hungry,’ says Cheung. But then the kids take pity on him — and write a few sloppy letters for him to eat.”
You’re overprojecting. They’re inanimate letters. The children are learning penmanship. In the end, out of compassion for the cat that was previously plaguing them, they bend the rules to be nice. It’s certainly cuter than the German fairy tales I was raised on.
Cats don't actually starve when they don't get to eat those.
And why only say that now? What does the "compassion for the cat" have to do with it it either way?
What German fairy tales about non-conformist things being destroyed were you raised on? And did your learning of penmanship involve any of that?
And they don't even bend the (part of the) rules (under discussion here), non-conforming letters still get eaten.
Not fairy tales but media for children in general: Pinocchio and Thomas the Tank Engine.
What is your source? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_su... has US at 12.6 per 100000 and 8.5 for China, with the world average being 10.7. What stands out about China is the much higher ratio of female to male suicides.
It's very hard to compare suicide rates across different countries.
That's because they don't have common definitions of what a suicide is (is it something a coronor has ruled on? Or is it something that's counted by statisticians from death certificate coding?); and because their definitions change over time.
But I doubt this is because of books. After all, children of chinese descent consistently score higher on academic tests everywhere in the world, including the U.S.
The elephant in the room is that ethnic chinese children have got more of what it takes, conditio sine qua non, to score high on academic tests.