There are several differences and most of them are hard to describe to someone who has not seen the everyday life in China. Liu Yang (刘扬), a young Chinese artist who has spend some time in Germany has put some of the differences into pictures, and not surprisingly, pictures can sometimes can explain a situation better than words. Her works are quite simple, however, they describe the situation quite well. Of course, some of the works are depicting stereotypes, but I am quite familiar with the situation depicted in one or the other image.
Waiting line.
Boss.
More images and comments (in Chinese) can be found here.
June 30, 2007 at 7:44 pm |
Hi, I was just browsing (found your marriage posting first) and I quite enjoyed this post. I was just wondering, do you think that there any significance to have the German background coloured blue?
July 3, 2007 at 11:01 am |
Hi, thanks for the comment! I’m sorry, I don’t know why the artist chose blue to represent Germany. Maybe just to find a color the matches the red of China?!
July 4, 2007 at 10:37 pm |
Hi Matt,
Just two quick links that you might be interested in:
http://www.welt.de/politik/article987381/Der_Papst_schreibt_den_Chinesen_einen_Brief.html
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privoxy
Privoxy is pretty awesome. Or as I might say…more awesome since you just need to install it once. After this you can easily impelemnt into any browser you are using. I hope things are good in Beijing and you’re having a blast.
Hope to see you soon
reza
July 9, 2007 at 12:57 am |
I guess that could very well be possible. Blue does complement red quite well.
July 29, 2007 at 4:45 pm |
[...] ultimate goal would be to create an equally meaningful Blog as my fellow student Matt did, whose insights I enjoyed during the last months that he himself stayed in Beijing [...]
September 22, 2007 at 11:17 pm |
[...] either, there is still a huge difference of traveling within China of going back to Germany. In a recent post I already noted that some of differences that Liu Yang points out in her artwork are just too true [...]
December 14, 2007 at 7:57 pm |
Update: Just found an interesting list about differences of search behavior of Internet users between Chinese and English speaking users: http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2007/12/top_ten_lists_differences_between_chinese_and_english_i.php
However, some questions seem to be present all over the world…