EmmyNoether
@Biff @GalacticTurtle @HebrideanHecate @blingring https://andrewbatson.com/2023/03/22/how-chinese-ruined-a-perfectly-good-gender-neutral-pronoun/
(Annoyingly this particular account has a “yay, we could have handled non-binary people” vibe to it - the article I was looking for was by a linguistics scholar at Harvard, but I can’t find it.)
GalacticTurtle
Biff
@GalacticTurtle @HebrideanHecate @EmmyNoether @blingring If you do go, maybe change your pronouns for protection!
EmmyNoether
@Biff @GalacticTurtle @HebrideanHecate @blingring Wouldn’t work in China.
Written forms are different but he/his is ta/ta de, and she/hers is ta/ ta de.
(The history of that is fascinating - initially there was no written difference either, but western missionaries in the 19th century insisted there had to be a way of translating the Bible which would maintain the difference between he and she, something that various what we would now call feminist writers in China strongly resisted!)
EmmyNoether
@HebrideanHecate @blingring @GalacticTurtle JUst checked and the silk road one is on Prime.
HebrideanHecate
@EmmyNoether @blingring @GalacticTurtle We liked them, she did a few of them.
HebrideanHecate
@EmmyNoether @blingring @GalacticTurtle Yes, very different to what he experienced. Did you see the Joanna Lumley travel thing? They got arsey with her and crew on the train.
EmmyNoether
@HebrideanHecate @blingring @GalacticTurtle No, I missed that one. Sounds interesting. Can I watch it anywhere like i-player?
HebrideanHecate
@EmmyNoether @blingring @GalacticTurtle I can’t remember it it was the trans siberian or the silk road one, but you might find them if you dig around.
Viceroyess
EmmyNoether
@blingring @GalacticTurtle As someone who’s been to China (work-related) I’d say your worries are justified. I’d be wary of going back. Increasingly, there is the risk that they will have some sort of minor political spat ongoing with your country’s government and decide to grab a random national from your country on trumped-up spying charges to use as a negotiating lever. And that random might be you.
I was warned don’t take your own or work IT kit (even smart phones) into even their embassy, and take a burn phone with you.
Also, you will be approached by members of their security services trying to suss you out - if you’re there on business, you will be assigned a “minder”, there will be random strangers on trains trying to get you into conversation, the “work colleague” from the organisation you’re visiting trying to get you drunk (that failed hilariously because being white European, my alcohol tolerance was way higher), randoms trying to come into your hotel room as part of sex-blackmail sting (particularly used against male visitors, but I had a scary incident round this).
On the plus side, you will be totally safe walking the streets over there.
HebrideanHecate
@EmmyNoether @blingring @GalacticTurtle My partner taught for almost a year in a Chinese uni at either dead end of the 90s or might have been say 2000, can’t remember exactly. Mostly it was ok he said, except they openly would say, on being asked what do you think re some text or other, what do you want us to think. He did some travel within the country and took photos, that was ok but one time the police stopped him and confiscated that particular film, and there was terrible corruption within the university itself.
EmmyNoether
@HebrideanHecate @blingring @GalacticTurtle I would say, having had a handful of visits over about a decade, that the country has totally changed in that time.
In the 2000s there were signs that it was opening up and becoming a more liberal society.
Xi’s government has now done a 180 and totally cracked down on any openness. People are much more guarded about what they say, a lot of what they say comes across as “scripted”, the minders/watchers are far more numerous and far more overt.
GalacticTurtle
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