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Zhibo: Encirclement Chess and the Holy Bible

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Zhibo is a weekly column in which Beijing-based American Taylor Hartwell documents his journey down the rabbit hole of Chinese livestreaming app YingKe. If you know nothing about the livestreaming (直播; “zhibo”) phenomenon in China, start here.

Survey Topic: Pick a Chess, any Chess

Chinese Chess, or xiangqi (象棋) is, as you might imagine, a pretty common sight in Beijing. I don’t really play, but it’s in the same basic vein as international chess — and before any sophomore IR majors accuse me of being an imperialist pig for assuming the Western version of something is the International version of something, I would like to point out that 1) Chess originated in India, and 2) the Chinese term for it is 国际象棋 (international xiangqi), so I now feel confident that I’ve won the argument against myself that I created for no reason.

It can be tough to think clearly from way up here.

Wait, what was I talking about? Right, chess.

Overall, xiangqi looks pretty similar to international chess. The pieces are round little disks with one of two different characters, which tell you their role depending on if they’re red or black. There’s 兵 and 卒 for foot soldiers (like pawns), 將 and 帥 for generals (like kings), and so on and so forth. You’re trying to capture each other’s king, there’s a special piece that has to jump to capture stuff, and there’s a row of foot soldiers that can’t retreat. It’s obviously not the same game, but they’re definitely in the same family. Kings of old played it in lieu of real battles to fight and now old people play it in the park. Got it.

What was an utter mystery to me up until very recently, however, was this:

As it turns out, this is NOT a modern art project

This game is called weiqi (围棋) or literally, “encirclement chess.” For all the things China makes questionably-sourced claims about regarding what they’ve invented, this game — commonly known as Go — really is just about the oldest board game on earth. The basic rules are deceptively simple: players take turns putting down black and white stones, and the player who captures the most area wins.

However, as a friend recently explained to me, because of all the spaces on the board, there are literally more possible game combinations in weiqi than there are atoms in the whole goddamn universe. Even though there’s perfect information and therefore technically no luck involved, there’s such an impossibly large range of options involved that it took until just last year for an AI (AlphaGo) to beat the world champion.

For those of you who aren’t supercomputers, that’s twenty f@#king years after Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov at what I guess I now have to call Chess Lite. That means that figuring out how to program an algorithm that could play this game at an above-human level took more time than smartphones, tablets, social media, and six out of seven seasons of Game of Thrones.

Though not as effort-intensive as getting that 6^th book out, apparently

It kind of puts the past few years watching students mess around with *that dumb-looking checkers-type game* in a new light.

So, I posed a question to my viewers: If you could be a master of one of these three games, which would you choose?

Chinese Chess/xiangqi (象棋): IIII I

Go/weiqi (围棋): IIII IIII IIII IIII III

International Chess (国际象棋): IIII IIII

I don’t know how much stock to put in the fact that International Chess slightly beat out Chinese Chess, but the main point is clear: Go mastery wins. Guess I should start spending more time in Beijing’s parks.

Video of the Week:

This fearless woman who is definitely not getting paid enough for this shit.

The not-at-all-uniform nature of the tire tracks is what has me particularly worried. You may say that obviously cars starting in slightly different places results in a wide spread of burnt rubber. I say that scientific levels of precision should be involved in several-ton vehicles doing donuts around squishy bags of blood and organs.

Worrisome Comment of the Week:

You often speak of God, you like reading holy Bible

I think this commenter might be mixing up “speaking of God” and my proclivity for… um… taking the Almighty’s name in a hellauva lotta vain. As you might imagine, serious conversation about religion isn’t exactly a common occurrence on Yingke. I’ve mentioned before that the app has intentionally vague definitions when it comes to what you can and can’t do when it comes to religious discussion.

People do occasionally ask me “what I believe in,” to which my answer is usually something along the lines of “death, taxes, and being called a foreigner.”

Depressing Comment of the Week:

Sometimes you look handsome. But sometimes you look old.

8am is too early for existential crises, buddy. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to cover my face in coffee grounds or whatever the internet says this week.

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Photo of the day: Solid Gou-ld

Our photo theme during the Spring Festival holiday is Enter the Dog: the funniest, cutest, weirdest, or otherwise most noteworthy images of our canine companions circulating around Chinese popular culture as we christen the Lunar New Year.

OK, it’s been a lot of dogs… we’ll leave you with this glorious golden statue, available right here on Taobao among a plethora of other golden dog statues priced between ~ $10-$200, if you wanna boost your Dog Year feng shui:

Happy New Year!

Source: Taobao

Photo of the day: Red & Gold Fursona

We’ll wind down our holiday photo theme with a few choice Taobao picks for the Year of the Dog. Like these, some adult-sized dog costumes for a bit of zodiac roleplaying, in seasonally appropriate red and gold:

Source: Taobao

Zhibo: Valentine’s Day, Freedom, and “Getting Black”

Zhibo is a weekly column in which Beijing-based American Taylor Hartwell documents his journey down the rabbit hole of Chinese livestreaming app YingKe. If you know nothing about the livestreaming (直播; “zhibo”) phenomenon in China, start here.

Survey Topic: Relationship Goals

Valentine’s Day is upon us — or at least, it was when I started writing this — so I figured I’d ask the folks on Yingke what they’re looking for, relationship-wise. The obvious stereotype is that every single person in China is desperate to get married and have kids because that’s the societal imperative, but even to the casual observer it’s pretty obvious that China’s young adult population is starting to push back on that — if very gently and cautiously.

So on Valentine’s Day, I asked the audience to choose one of the following:

1: You want to get married and have kids soon.

2: You want to get married and have kids… when you’re ready.

3: You don’t want to get married and/or have kids.

4: You don’t know.

5: You’re already married (this one had to be added mid-survey)

To my surprise and great delight, “I don’t know” (#4) swept to victory with a solid 25-30 votes vs. only around 5 votes for #1 and #2 and 8-10 for #3. Of course, it could be that my audience is telling me what I want to hear — or that the people with the boldness to actually answer the foreigner’s personal question are a self-selecting sample.

But then again, it could be that young people hidden behind the anonymity of a screen might be more willing to say what they actually think. As with all things, I can only imagine the truth exists, unsatisfyingly, somewhere in the middle.

Question of the Week:

Do you make love?

This is a lot classier than the usual questions about my personal life. Still, pass.

Worrisome Message of the Week:

I can’t stand you getting black.

I’m not sure you know what “black” means

Apparently a week in Florida was enough to cause people to worry that I’m losing that basement-dwelling alabaster glow they’ve come to know and love. I’ve tried to explain that they have nothing to fear on that front, but we’re kind of coming at the issue from completely different ends of the spectrum (pardon the pun). As we’ve talked about before, the Chinese obsession with pale skin dates back many centuries, and very much pre-dates any significant contact with Europeans.

Now, the choice of the word “black” can probably be chalked up more to a Chinglish-y attempt to express the word 晒 (shai; sunned) than the apparent racism, though I’m sure there’s room for both. Shai means the sunshine (the pronunciation similarity is probably a coincidence, but who knows?) or the drying/darkening effect of the sun. There’s no question, though, that a whole lot of people in China are pretty straightforwardly unapologetic when it comes to their opinions on dark skin and the people walking around in it. Of course, trolls also call me a *white ghost* (白鬼), so at the end of the day I suppose pointing out how someone looks different will always be a solid low-hanging fruit for the uncreative.

Then again, this just happened:

I invite you to draw your own conclusions.

Insight of the Week:

“Single life is freedom”

I mean, *I* think it’s an insight. Certainly when it’s coming in the midst of a thousand “Happy Valentine’s Day Why Aren’t You Married Yet” messages.

Video of the Week:

This truly bizarre music video

There is so much to unpack here, I don’t know where to begin. Is he walking around a mini-golf place? Is this just a snippet of a larger video? Why is something with seemingly high production value so out of tune? And what the holy hell is with that terrifying Attack on Titan thing?

This is screaming for a caption contest

I haven’t actually looked into who/what this is out of a combination of laziness and enjoying the mystery — but if you know, please tell me.

Zhibo: New Year’s Plans and Foreign Invasions

Survey Topic of the week: Spring Festival

Even as I write this, Beijing is emptying out. Everyone — or so the common wisdom goes — heads back to their laojia (老家; hometown) to celebrate Chinese New Year (Spring Festival) with their families. Actually, laojia literally means “old home,” and although it’s often also used to mean the town someone is from, it’s technically supposed to be the place your family is *originally* from.

Beijingers in particular are very possessive of their 老北京人 (old Beijinger) status; if you want to be considered a “local,” you’d better know which hutong your great-grandparents lived when the Qing Dynasty was still kickin’.

Basically, you need to have been hutong hipsters since before the word “hipster” existed

But for anyone not from the big city, Spring Festival is a time to head home to see the folks, eat a whole lot of dumplings, and exchange little red envelopes full of cash. While I’m very excited to be spending my first chunjie (春节, Spring Festival) in Beijing and enjoying what I’ve heard are downright surreal levels of peace and quiet, everyone else seems to be getting out as per usual. So without expecting anything other than the obvious answer, I posed the following survey question to the audience:

Where are you going for Spring Festival?

1: I’m going to my hometown (老家) to celebrate with my family.

2: I’m traveling somewhere that isn’t my hometown.

3: I’m staying where I am (and I don’t live in my hometown).

Results: By my increasingly-scientific survey methods (I actually got a pencil involved this time!), I counted around 65 for option one, 10 for option two, and 8 for option three.

老家 was option one, so I think this pretty much sums it up.

As with the previous survey about coffee, I guess sometimes the common wisdom is common for a reason. Perhaps what I should have asked is whether people want to spend their (very limited) holiday time with mom and dad, as most personal conversations I have on the subject indicate that quite a few people would prefer a bit of vacation time for themselves.

Question of the Week:

What do you think of the invasion of China by the West in nineteenth century?

Easy: It was bad. I wasn’t around for it and neither were you. The European powers treated China like shit in the 19^th century and, knowing what we know now, I wish they hadn’t. Next question.

Pictured: somewhere around time 9-10 he sent this question

Oh, I see. You’re going to repeat the question 19 more times and tell me that American devils aren’t welcome. Cute.

See, this is what happens when you bundle a whole bunch of people and places into one blanket term. China obviously is pretty famous for lumping all foreigners into one basket (外国人 = out-country-people), but our hands aren’t exactly clean here; we all-too-often use “The West” when what we really mean is “the group of countries that are closer together and more like each other than they are like China but nonetheless each have their own unique Sino-Something relationship.”

Case in point: while America can’t claim total innocence in China’s famous “Century of Humiliation” (their term, not ours), the British and French were the ones doing the actual invading, so I dunno what this fella was getting salty at me about. Has he not heard of the Korean War? Much better line of inquiry if you want to go after Americans.

Of course, I barely even want to go down that rabbit hole on RADII — we already have Jeremiah for matters of real history. I sure as hell am not trying to engage in a historical debate about a famously touchy topic in China with a zhibo troll who copy-pastes the same question twenty times inside an hour.

Comment of the Week:

Taylor is not a foreign devil, but a messenger.

Aha! Take that, invasion-of-china-by-the-west-in-nineteeth-century-troll!

Not sure what my message is, though. Other than what’s rapidly becoming my Yingke mantra — I’m just one American and I can only represent myself, not every other foreigner on earth — I think the vast majority of my “message” is made up of thoughts on coffee, it being too early to sing that song, and promises that I don’t dye my hair or wear colored contacts. Not exactly sermon on the mount stuff.

Video of the Week:

This sand in a bottle artist doing his thing.

I had no idea this was a thing, but I love it. (GIF version here.)

Photo of the day: Dog and Baby

We’ll kick this off with one of the many, many, many images that have come out of the unexpectedly viral Spring Festival campaign by childrens’ lifestyle brand PUPUPULA. Radii’s Fan Shuhong explains:

Spring Festival and the Year of the Dog are four days away. Although today is still a work day for most Chinese companies, people seem to be distracted from their day jobs by “2?18汪年全家福” (Family Portrait of the Year of the Dog), a viral campaign developed by child lifestyle brand PUPUPULA that has reached over 100 million hits. […]

“It is greatly exceeding our expectation, totally,” Han Yi, PUPUPULA’s co-founder and the person in charge of the family portrait program, told Q Daily in an interview (link in Chinese). “We were expecting only 500,000 direct hits at first, we didn’t even promote it,” Han said, marveling at the fact that the app has received over 3 million direct hits and the above-mentioned 100 million total clicks.

Find plenty more dogs here: