A number of interesting articles have been circulating on WeChat recently. I've desperately wanted to translate some of these, but have refrained from doing so for a variety of reasons. Firstly, time is not on my side these days. There's a chance I might find the time during the Spring Festival period, but certainly not before. By that time a number of these popular "articles" will have faded from peoples' posts. Additionally, what time I do have is generally devoted to that all-consuming parasite of my life: my dissertation.
That being said, some of these were so interesting that I felt the need to give a summary of the top two that have come across my message board in the last few weeks: 1) 'Jigs med rgyal mtshan's most recent discussion of language and education. 'Jigs med rgyal mtshan is one of the most recognizable clerics in A mdo at this point. He is very well respected not only as a man of the maroon and gold cloth, but also as an educator. His most recent post is a series of nine points about education gleaned from some talks he has given at recent conferences. They include: encouraging a better Tib. language curriculum for teaching not just language but also math and the sciences [leading my always clever wife to wryly comment that C probably doesn't want too many people out here overly skilled in chemistry], providing better and more teachers on the plateau, getting leaders who are more sympathetic to education, learning from C education which incorporates foreign ideas without giving up its cultural "heart" [a viewpoint eerily similar to late Qing ideas of 中学为题,西学为用] , development programs that better understand local conditions, better and funding for environmental preservation programs, ignorance preventing unity, and finally the need to translate more official documents into Tib language. In some ways, none of these are very penetrating, but it has still been re-posted time and again throughout the Tib intellectual WeChat-o-sphere . 2) A less popular article was one in which a young Tib. woman told of her childhood, how she took some undesirable jobs in order to help her sick mother, how that led to prostitution and AIDS. This tell all provides some disturbing details about life on the plateau; the sorts of details I would love to translate but wouldn't dare (they wouldn't exactly make me popular with, umm, anybody considering the very one-sided discourses many demand). Anyway, maybe someday I'll have time to translate the first of the two. I'm too cowardly to try the second.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
About TimAs you can see elsewhere on this webpage, I conduct research on ethnic minorities in western China. This blog offers semi-academic musings on the minutiae of daily life out here--the sort of information otherwise destined for footnotes. Categories |