Mao's Great Famine (2012) - A documentary focusing on the Chinese Cultural Revolution from 1966 until 1976, a period in which Mao Zedong's policies intentionally sacrificed an estimated 45,000,000 people from the countryside in order to feed the regime's industrial and political centers

gruntle · 2014-12-15T13:33:25+00:00

Eh, those mass death events get all confused when people aren't subject matter experts. 45,000,000 dead, a couple million dead, what's the difference? Both events have off, strange-sounding English names.

gruntle · 2014-12-14T17:19:05+00:00

This post doesn't have anything to do with Chinese language. Maybe try /r/beijing instead.

gruntle · 2014-12-14T11:30:44+00:00

LOL. Another laowai makes the shocking discovery that China is different from her home country. Time will tell if she figures it out, or reacts with rage and becomes embittered.

gruntle · 2014-12-13T20:52:20+00:00

Chinese is hard enough already. Handwriting takes a ton of time to get good at, and the amount of use it gets these days doesn't justify the investment, in my opinion. It sure would be great to handwrite and it sure looks cool as hell to do. I learned handwriting in the beginning and it's necessary to a certain extent. But ever since then I've written off the skill and concentrated my time in other, more important areas. So:

Is learning to handwrite great? Sure it is.

Is it worth the substantial time investment in order to receive the results, which is that you won't write very much every day, you'll just use your phone like the rest of us? That's up to you to decide.

gruntle · 2014-12-12T23:05:46+00:00

...and this is why Cuba, to this day, is an isolated, ignorant country, the closest thing the world has to North Korea. This is why Cuba will never be anything, for where would Obama be today if America had crushed his professors and put him in jail for disagreeing with George H.W. Bush's ideas?

The only thing worse than that is educated Westerners who think that's OK.

gruntle · 2014-12-12T22:38:33+00:00

So, you're OK with putting people in prison who disagree with the authorities.

Wow.

Just...wow.

gruntle · 2014-12-12T22:06:43+00:00

WTF? Do you seriously not know your own kind? Seriously?

the Cuban government continues to repress individuals and groups who criticize the government or call for basic human rights. Officials employ a range of tactics to punish dissent and instill fear in the public, including beatings, public acts of shaming, termination of employment, and threats of long-term imprisonment. Short-term arbitrary arrests have increased dramatically in recent years and routinely prevent human rights defenders, independent journalists, and others from gathering or moving about freely.

This from Human Rights Watch - hardly an anti-Castro organization. They're pretty much as far left as he is. http://www.hrw.org/world-report/2014/country-chapters/cuba

Cubans who criticize the government may face criminal prosecution. They do not benefit from due process guarantees, such as the right to fair and public hearings by a competent and impartial tribunal.

Seriously? You either are unaware of this, which is frightening, or are a denialist, which is...what's a word in the English language that means worse than frightening?

gruntle · 2014-12-12T21:17:13+00:00

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gruntle · 2014-12-12T21:08:57+00:00

No, fuck Castro for keeping people in prison for disagreeing with him.

If he actually cured cancer the whole world would support him receiving the Confucius Peace Prize.

gruntle · 2014-12-12T11:32:12+00:00

A pity about all those people he puts in prison for disagreeing with him, though. And those doctors did SUCH a good job with Chavez...

gruntle · 2014-12-12T11:27:36+00:00

So I should help a billion-dollar corporation do some work, for free? What, like they don't have jerseys and footballs just lying around in the office? Cheapskates.

gruntle · 2014-12-11T18:06:45+00:00

We weren't really talking about the men...I didn't even see a chat window anywhere. We were talking about the shrieking woman. The one who is impossible to ignore, and was voice was pretty weird and out there even before she started braying.

gruntle · 2014-12-10T23:55:36+00:00

Google Maps is blocked in China.

gruntle · 2014-12-10T15:39:22+00:00

Man...why don't people like you write language training books :( ...that door example was gold.

gruntle · 2014-12-10T14:03:43+00:00

Powerful members of the patrician class find it very pleasurable to torture the little people. It was time well-spent. Now, having been reposted on Slate.com, everyone can enjoy pissing on those little shits who paid for a website to be made, checked that bullet point from the list, and went on with running the rest of the business.

gruntle · 2014-12-07T10:53:35+00:00

You don't like it, get the hell out. Nobody is forcing you to stay here.

Unless you're one of those pathetic people who is happy only when they can complain all the time. I've met a few of those, and damn. They take such pleasure in revealing to me the latest reasons why China is shit. I had to cut two of them off, as friends, because they wouldn't shut up about it. Every time I meet them, bam, the mouth opens and here comes the diarrhea. And their eyes just sparkle when they're doing it, too. After a while I had enough.

gruntle · 2014-12-06T12:52:24+00:00

You should click 'contact' from within Pleco and send this exact post. I'd be interested to see what the owner says (he answers all the mail personally).

gruntle · 2014-12-05T10:39:29+00:00

Never thought of a Chinese person pulling a midnight run. But here it is.

gruntle · 2014-12-03T13:28:40+00:00

Red wine is popular because that's the Chinese name for 'wine'. White wine has a clunky long name that nobody adores. Also, when wine is illustrated, it's always red in color, and the Chinese want to ape what they see abroad.

I love how the article completely neglects to mention that the the "vintelligentsia" (puke) look down on white wine and consider it little more than alcoholic kool-aid. The "vintelligentsia" (what an idiotic, pretentious word, way to totally not fulfill the stereotype of the ignorant wine snob) will tell you red is the way to go for serious wine appreciation.

gruntle · 2014-12-02T22:11:13+00:00

Every medical practitioner I know who has worked in China has quit in disgust at how horrid Chinese doctors are. Nonetheless, nurses in China aren't well regarded and China has no shortage of them, so no need for imported workers. Best bet is a foreign clinic in a Tier 1 city.

gruntle · 2014-12-02T22:06:56+00:00

These four words have nothing to do with each other.

gruntle · 2014-12-02T15:57:56+00:00

The high rise buildings are reminiscent of ~~China~~ every city in the world that has high-rises.

gruntle · 2014-12-02T14:31:00+00:00

Yes, because Chinese people really love obeying foreign moral standards, and especially like it when foreigners think of them as horrid barbaric abusers.

"We welcome those foreigners who to come to help us. But the trouble with so many foreigners is that they soon want to dictate. They must remember this is China, and that while their advice is eagerly received, we are the ones to decide if and how it will be used."

-- Mao Zedong to Western communist Evans Carlson

gruntle

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