Plateless in Peking

First it was easy to remember. Cars with license plate numbers ending in 1 and 6 couldn't be driven on Mondays, 2 and 7 on Tuesdays, 3 and 8 on Wednesdays, 4 and 9 on Thursdays, and 5 and 0 on Fridays. 20% of the vehicles have to stay off the road from 7 AM to 8 PM each day. This went on for a while. This initial "trial period" was for 6 months, from 10/11/08 to 4/10/09. Then some drivers pointed out how "unfair" this was. Those with cars with plate numbers ending in 0 or 5 would never be able to drive on Fridays!!!

To address this, Beijing City government imposed a 3-month automatic rotation, starting on April 11th, 2009. Each rotation would last 3 months. During the first 3 months, from 4/11/09-7/10/09, it would be 5 and 0 off road on Mondays, 1 and 6 on Tuesdays, 2 and 7 on Wednesdays, 3 and 8 on Thursdays, 4 and 9 on Fridays. The second 3 months, from 7/11/09-10/09/09, it would be 4 and 9 on Mondays, 5 and 0 on Tuesdays, 1 and 6 on Wednesdays, 2 and 7 on Thursdays, 3 and 8 on Fridays. And so on ... (hmm...  perhaps I could convince Steve Strogatz to write a NYT blog on modular arithmetic?)

[Quick quiz: Which 2 numbers shouldn't be on the road today?]

Some times I would play a little game during our morning commute. I would try to guess which day of the week it was by looking at the plate numbers of cars during my commute. let's see, there's a 9, so it couldn't be Thursday; I see a 6, so it's not Monday, ... But wait, today is Wednesday. That number 3 shouldn't be on the road at this time! And hold on! That car has a CD stuck over the last digit of its plate. Hmm....  (Some times instead of a CD covering the last digit, there would be an ad leaflet, or some tape, or just plain dirt ...)

When I moved here, oh barely over 2 years ago, there were a little over 3 million cars in Beijing. Now there are well over 4 million! In the last few months, each month there has been roughly 100,000 new cars sold in Beijing! Talk about exponential growth!!!

Last December I noticed that the number of new cars seems to be growing fast. Before the (lunar) New Year, every day I saw 1 or 2 brand new cars without license plates. Presumably, the Beijing City Traffic Management Bureau just cannot handle the sheer number of new license plate applications each day! Though why cars without plates (and without temporary stickers with ID numbers) are being driven is beyond my simple mind!

Lately, I'm seeing more and more plateless cars are on the road. Just last night, during the 12 min, 4.5 km ride from my wife's lab, we saw 4 cars without plates. These days I see these plateless cars running traffic lights, driving in the bicycle lane or down the wrong side of the street, making U turns from the right lane at a stop light, ..., and parking with impunity on sidewalks or firelanes! (These were normally the "privilege" reserved for military cars and government vehicles a few years ago.)

A few times I saw that the car ahead has no plate on the back, but has a plate on the front. That's when I realized that some Beijing drivers are now purposely removing their license plates! (After all, some of these plateless cars did not look brand new to me.) One late night, just after we saw a plateless car run a red light and into the Datun tunnel (one of the underpasses going underneath the Olympic Park), we noticed a few cars parked in the breakdown lane in the tunnel. A few drivers, all looking to be 25-30 in age, were talking on their cell phones. None of the cars had plates! My guess was that they were about to drag race... We called the Beijing Traffic Bureau immediately.

But my wife's e-mails to the Beijing Traffic Bureau remain unanswered. And the number of cars without license plates is most definitely increasing!


Addendum 25 April 2010. Early this month, CCTV News had a short segment on a female Anhui bus driver. Supposedly when she was driving her route, she blocked a car following her bus from turning at a corner. The car tailed her, and at the next bus stop, one of the guys in the car got off and came on the bus.  Here's link to the video taken from the camera on the bus of what ensued. She tried to explain to the guy that she was not trying to block him. However, the guy started to kick her in the head and face a few times!!! Unfortunately, the camera was not very well positioned and could not get a clear shot of the guy. The car drove off without anybody stopping it. In any case, the car had no license plate.

From "chink" to "gap" and back

Here's an e-mail I got last night from my good friend A.


Dear All:

I am writing to inform you of a racist pun appearing in an April 5th New York Times article entitled "Researchers Trace Data Theft to Intruders in China."

I wrote one of the authors (David Barboza) the day the article appeared and he apologized for the problem and said the offending word was removed (which it in fact was: the word CHINK in the article was changed to GAP). The problem is the word CHINK is now back in the article. Please see the excerpt cut and pasted below, along with hyperlink and entire article.

I believe this problem needs to receive publicity, the New York Times needs to apologize for a double mistake, and the authors should be fired. The US media has a real problem punning on words such as "NIP" and "CHINK" whenever there are stories related to Asians or Asian Americans. It is an absolutely intentional and racist wisecrack. I pointed out this issue in the "Comments" section of the article (I cut and pasted the passage into the comments section and wrote: "This statement is racist"), before emailing the author. My comment never even appeared online.

Because the New York Times and David Barboza have both censored and ignored my complaint, I am writing to you for help in publicizing this issue.

Thanks, xxx

"The intruders even stole documents related to the travel of NATO forces in Afghanistan, illustrating that even though the Indian government was the primary target of the attacks, one chink in computer security can leave many nations exposed."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/06/science/06cyber.html?emc=eta1

------ 

I had made a screenshot of the original article when it first came out but did not think about doing the same for the edited / "gap" article. Fortunately, a quick search using google yielded a number of sites that featured transcriptions of the article containing "gap":

RSSBroadcast

Tech News Daily

Slashdot.org 

If I recall correctly, the edited online version of the NYT article had an extra (I'm tempted to say gap) space between the word "gap" and the phrase "in computer security." The extra space is reproduced in the Tech News Daily version.

Seating and Ink

In my younger and more vulnerable years, my good friend P. told me something about the Chinese that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. She told me that the Chinese tend to place too much emphasis on starting salaries and on “brands.” P.’s the COO of a tech company and has much wisdom dealing with people in general. So when she told me this, I nodded and didn’t question her, but I understood by “brands” she meant more than Goldman-Sachs, Lehman Brothers, or Harvard and Stanford...

Fast forward a couple of years to me sitting in front of the TV in our Beijing apartment. (I’m not as young but perhaps just as vulnerable.) I must confess that I probably watch entirely too much TV. There’s always something to see. At least that’s the excuse I give myself.

Besides the different formats of sit-coms and serials and other TV programs, there are also advertisements that give me pause. One is a commonly used tagline, 中国驰名商标, which literally means “China Famous Brand” that comes with many products, ranging from cough medicine, to snacks, to clothes and to makeup. Those of you who’s ever shopped in any Chinatowns around the world must have seen items with ad-lines similar to “China’s Famous Brand”.

I don’t quite remember when I first saw Seating (CCTV 座位篇). But the first few seconds immediately convinced me it was very different from other Chinese commercials.

The clip opens with a sofa in the middle of someone’s living room. A modern living room. The sofa is facing the TV.  (You can see the reflection from the TV shimmering on the glass coffee table as the camera frame slowly zooms in.) A small white “1 排 1 座” (“1^st Row, 1^st Seat”) floating effortlessly above the sofa.

Then a shot of the top of a chair, sitting in front of a red wall and beneath tiles that look like they are from the Forbidden City, with a white “七排、八座” (“7^th Row, 8^th Seat”) floating above the chair.  A park bench (for two: 12^th Row, 36^th Seat and 12^th Row, 37^th Seat, respectively) facing Beijing's 什刹海/后海 (ShiCha Hai, Hou Hai, which are part of the series of man-made ponds to the west of the Drum Tower). As the camera zooms in, you can see boats moving in the background. Next is up is a sliver of a view of a traditional Beijing courtyard, with 2 chairs (88^th Row, Seats 207 and 208). A full view of a old Beijing courtyard (307^th Row, Seat number 1832).

A panning view of an office lounge chair, sitting beneath an overhang, looking at modern office buildings (835^th Row, Number 8104). Frontal view of a yard of an old peasant house (1032^nd Row, Number 10350). An office view of modern skyscrapers. Housing development, with a lawn chair on the grass out front. Small space (a park? a private yard?) behind a circular arch. (By now, the seat number is over 800 million.) Yellow chair facing blue ocean (1 of over 1 trillion seats)

Yellow cabs streaming past Times Square; a reflection of that traffic on the shop windows of a coffee shop. The chair & table sidewalk seating outside the shop belongs to one of over 12 million rows and one of more than 1 trillion seats. View of the British Parliament, with an office lounge chair and already more seats than the number of people on Earth. Frontal view of a French château. A small bench in a Spanish (Italian? Argentine?) arcade, with kids playing in the background. One kid is bouncing a football up and down with his knees. A wooden chair in a field with haystacks neatly rolled by modern machines. Then an arty, modern chair, in front of a rectangular opening, with a view of a modern downtown area filled with skyscrapers. The phrase in white, floating above the chair, is

世界在看

(The World is Watching)

And finally, a shot of a flat panel TV, framing

2010   看我    看中国

(2010   Look at Me  Look at China

First, ‘2010’ by itself, then ‘Look at Me’ appeared next to it, before ‘Look at China’ appearing last.)

And then the CCTV logo (White with the second C in Red) with the CCTV tagline beneath.

Lately, there’s an even more visually stunning CCTV commercial, entitled Ink (CCTV 水墨篇) .

CCTV Ink from Troublemakers.tv on Vimeo.

A droplet of ink falls in water, senseless swirls finally emerging into a Chinese mountainscape, reminiscent of the ones in classical Chinese paintings. Chinese words in (what else?) ink appear

从无形到有形

(From Formless to Having Form)

A second ink droplet falls. Goldfish emerge from the swirls and swim about, finally swimming upwards and breaking the surface of water to reappear as flying cranes that flap their wings farther and farther, disappearing in the distant landscape.

从有界到无疆

(From Having Borders to Sans Frontier)

The words and the landscape fade into a dragon sweeping across the screen leaving a segment of the Great Wall.

A third droplet falls into a person practicing Tai Chi and with a full extension of his left arm, a bullet train speeds across the land before turning into a person practicing martial arts in front of where the Birds Nest emerges up from the ground. More people exercising and one does a flip in the air and becomes a plane flying, flying over the Beijing CCTV Complex.

[Chinese history in 60 seconds.]

Finally, the CCTV towers disappear in a swirl that eventually reveals the CCTV logo.

Both Seating and Ink end with the CCTV logo and the same CCTV tagline beneath:

相信品牌的力量

(Literally) Believe in the Power of Brands

[But perhaps more accurately, “Believe in the Power of Our Brand.”]

FYI, 品牌 and 商标 can both mean “brand” in Chinese, though I would place 品牌 above 商标, as in “this is not your grandfather’s brand” brand. Indeed, 商标 is very generic, and is usually used to mean simply “trademark.”

Full disclosure: The first lines of this blog are a tribute to “The Great Gatsby,” one of my favorite novels. The TV in our living room is a 27 inch Samsung, whereas the LCD TV in our bedroom is a 32 inch TCL. My wife and I are in no way affiliated with CCTV.

In case either of the embedded videos fail to play, here are links to Seating and Ink.

The working title for this blog was once, a sinicized,  “Seating in Lounge Chairs, Watching Ink Flow,” but I opted for “Seating and Ink.”

And finally, a Happy (Lunar) New Year to Everyone!!!