The controversy surrounding journalist Oscar Garschagen, a Shanghai-based correspondent for the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad, reached a fever pitch earlier this month, after his Chinese news assistant accused him of fabricating stories and quotes. NRC initially supported Garschagen, counter-accusing the Chinese assistant of dubious affiliations and undisclosed meetings with the Chinese government. Former news assistant Zhang Yajun wrote for Radii at the time:
I have a lot of experience writing statements for organizations in crisis, and would like to provide my communication expertise to NRC: The audience is always sympathetic to the underdog. A respected news organization needs to take the high ground by launching an independent investigation and providing trustworthy evidence to the public. Changing the topic by smearing your former employees will never help your reputation, and will only make people wonder about the true reason behind the accusations.
It appears that NRC has conducted just such an internal review, and is now retracting its support for Garschagen. According to a statement just issued by the paper (in Dutch; this is a Google Translation):
Oscar Garschagen, who was a ten-year correspondent for NRC in China, has made serious mistakes in our journalistic rules over recent years. He thereby harmed the trust that the editor and the reader put in him. This has been shown by an internal investigation conducted by NRC over the last few weeks. Garschagen (64) leaves the organization. […]
The newspaper opened an investigation internally and asked Oscar for evidence that could prove its version of the facts. The main editorial and the head of foreigners conducted extensive talks with him to review the allegations. The Ombudsman also, at the request of the main editorial board, moved into the case.
After several conversations with Oscar, the editorial officer had to find out that he was not able to make his version of the facts difficult, but again had to admit that he had been very messy or even plagiarized.
All this week, Radii is posting a photo essay by Liu Qilin (aka Jady) entitled Lost Land of my Campus: “An area less traveled or known by others. Like a desert. A paradise.”
After quite a long time, finally I picked up my curiosity again to step into one of the mysterious areas of my campus（Beijing Normal University). Beside the gate there is a room with many beautiful fish, which I can see through the windows. Entering the gate, I found it was like an abandoned garden, where everything seemed to have frozen for a long time, except captive animals. Many items were put there, rusting or growing on their own.
A road sign saying Mu Duo Road has been discarded here along with a red flag. I happened to be wearing a t-shirt referencing Ge Yu Lu, an art student who had a street named after him after a hoax.
Mu Duo, a word that originally referred to an ancient instrument, and whose meaning later changed to represent instructors, is a symbol of Beijing Normal University.
[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.
Despite being by definition a type of social media, it’s sometimes easy to forget that live streaming can, in fact, be social. That is to say, there is opportunity to actually engage with other humans in a way that extends beyond simply standing on a soap box and hoping the crowds gather around you. To that end, I’ve recently been making a bit of an effort to engage with the Yingke community and possibly — wonder of wonders — make a few friends on this network of tens of millions.
The most obvious way to get to know other people on Yingke is simply watching other streams. Wandering through the top streaming rooms is a schizophrenic experience to say the least; it’s like jumping from ’90s radio shows to American idol auditions to NSFW webcams all within the span of a few seconds. And no matter where you go, you’re always treated to a seriously intense blast of Chinese — usually spoken rapid-fire between barrages of sound effects and out-of-tune KTV wailing. Actually, that’s not fair. There are some amazingly talented people on this app, from singers and instrumentalists to beat-boxers, comedians, calligraphers, jugglers, and even magicians. It’s the Greatest Show on Earth and it all fits into your pocket.
Trying to understand any Chinese on YingKe is… challenging, to say the least. Besides the obvious fact that streamers are generally shooting for a casual comedic vibe (imagine if American teenagers spoke an even more foreign language) the Chinese internet has become an unintentional conservation effort when it comes to the many of the dialects and languages of China. Half the time I’m not even familiar with the words coming out of streamers’ mouths, let alone do I have any idea what they mean. But even when the host is speaking perfectly standard Mandarin, trying to keep up with anything more than a very general sense of what’s going on is usually a fool’s errand. If I can follow along well enough to laugh occasionally, I call that a win.
Of course, there are some other foreigners on the app — several of whom have been around Yingke for quite a bit longer than me and have the fan base to show for it. We’ve got a little WeChat group (you can imagine how a chat group full of people who make part-time-jobs out of blabbing at their phones goes), and frequently show up on each other’s streams to give gifts, provoke speculation about relationships (all foreigners are either related or dating, it’s a law of nature) and generally provide some middle ground between mockery and moral support.
Although watching other foreigners isn’t necessarily helpful to my Chinese-learning goals (though sometimes it is — these people are light years ahead of me), it’s a fascinating study in what to do and not do. I almost never watch my own playbacks (you can’t even imagine the cringe levels), but watching other people deal with the same set of repeated questions and frustrations is actually very helpful and borderline therapeutic. That may sound silly, but when you get asked where you’re from close to a thousand times a day, it can be immensely satisfying to watch someone else roll their eyes at the same thing, and see what kind of snarky answers other people have come up with for the most common foreigner-specific questions.
That being said, there’s also a strategic reason to watch other people’s streams — and really, would you expect anything less of a multibillion dollar industry that’s figured out how to commodify online social interaction? When you send a host gifts, you rise in the ranking of the audience: a literal scrollable line of everyone in the streaming room up at the top of the screen. The top three gift-givers appear with gold, silver, and bronze emblems around their pictures, and in a room with tens of thousands of viewers, those people find themselves on the receiving end of quite a few new subscriptions as well. If the host knows you, they might even decide to give you a shout out. In one of the top rooms, that could give a brand-new streamer their first few hundred fans in minutes.
It was, in fact, while watching another foreigner who knows what the hell she’s doing that I realized I’d been simultaneously neglecting the social norms of Yingke and leaving money on the table.
You see, when someone gives you a bunch of gifts and rises to the top of your audience ranking, streamers with brains (and gratitude) give that person a big shout out: “Hey, thanks so much, crazymonkeyking888 — everyone, you should go follow him, he’s great!” If you actually DO know the person at the top of your audience rankings, even better. You can tell your audience what that person does, and talk them up.
It was only when seeing this from the other side that I noticed the obvious pattern: someone gives a bunch of gifts, rises to the top, and starts getting fans of their own because the host thanks them by name and asks people to follow them. Then someone else out-gifts the first person, rises to the top of the audience, gets their own shout-out, and the cycle continues. The more gifts the host receives, the more people try to out-bid them and take their place in the spotlight.
Sold! Sold to the man in the corner sending the digital Lamborghinis!
As much as all of this indicates that Yingke is nothing more than a cold exchange of cash meant to land you your fifteen minutes of bizzaro-fame, there’s more of a real community here than you might think.
I’m not worried about trying to get a handful of fans from being at the top of anyone’s audience ranking, but I still like digitally tossing some coins in the hat. Hell, it’s almost a form of greeting. Hey! How are you? Here’s an animated flock of chickens flying over your head! And as a result of actually being pseudo-social, I’m becoming familiar with a whole lot of people — both those who stream themselves and those who are simply part of the friendly gift-giving audience group that frequent a whole bunch of streaming rooms.
The best way I can explain the social interaction on Yingke is that it’s like going to a college football game (in my case, a cappella concert might be the more apt metaphor, but I’m shooting for relatable). You show up to this thing and there are tons of other people you don’t really know, a smaller group that you’re vaguely familiar with, and a very small group you’re sitting with who you know well and are joking around with, all while some other friends of yours are the main event in front of you. 90% of what you say is lost in the crowd, but let’s be real: you’re all probably drunk anyway and everyone’s having a good time.
You have to remember that this is a world with no Twitter, no Facebook, and where the #1 social media (WeChat) doesn’t let you see any comments on anything made by anyone with whom you’re not already friends. The chat-room effect with spontaneous interaction happening in real time is new and exciting. Certainly, China already has chat rooms and forums, but meeting new people and making new connections in the background of goofy streaming rooms is a new kind of fun in a superficial, kill-10-minutes-on-the-subway kind of way. And at the end of the day, there is a strange yet fun community to be found in the world of Chinese live streaming.
Do you read buzzy, quick-hit news about China? If the answer is yes, you’ve almost certainly heard about Beijing’s controversial shared sex doll company, Touch. We did a post about it the other day:
The news immediately spread all across the English-language internet. And how couldn’t it? It hits three key points readers have loved since the beginning of time: 1) weird news, 2) China being weird, and 3) sex. Our own take on it tried to delve a little deeper into the story, but I can aggregate some main talking points from other outlets into a condensed, paraphrased quote of sorts:
Yo this sharing thing is wild right? We got bikes and stools and umbrellas. But now we got SEX DOLLS. You can rent these weird sex dolls, and keep ’em in your home. For sex! There’s Wonder Woman, and a Korean girl, Russian girl… gross! They clean the parts, but still, I mean… classic young Chinese dudes. Here’s a link to our other article about their testicles being too swollen to join the military.
Not a direct quote, per se, but if you peek around at English coverage of the app from the past week, I think you’ll find five or six articles that pretty much match this blurb in structure. So it might not come as a surprise that the company Touch has been ordered to shut down its shared sex doll operation after only four days.
Touch issued a statement on Weibo saying it “sincerely apologized for the negative impact” it generated, that sex is “not vulgar”, and that they hope future products will promote a “healthier and more harmonious sex lifestyle.”
Harmonious is the favorite word of government cultural arbiters. If something needs to go, it’s because it’s not harmonious. If something needs to happen, it’s because it is harmonious. The not-harmonious part of shared sex dolls likely isn’t the hygiene, the business practices, or even the cultural factors. More likely, the overall media attention, from both local and overseas outlets, played the biggest role in the shutdown. China is ever-conscious of its place in the world, and how the rest of the world sees it. When foreign media pick something admittedly weird like this to zero in on, there’s always the chance it can have repercussions for people and businesses on the home front.
It’s likely that media attention, from both local and overseas outlets, played the biggest role in the shutdown
Moreover, English-language social media reactions to the government shutdown have rung out as largely positive. We’re glad the government stepped in to put a stop to that weird shit seems to be the general consensus. But censor someone’s freedom of speech, and that’s downright barbaric. The actions of a police state seem to be forgivable, as long as they line up with Western cultural norms.
Anyway, the shared sex doll phenomenon is over, just as quickly as it started — another swing and a miss in modern China’s Wild West startup economy.
All this week, Radii is posting a photo essay by Liu Qilin (aka Jady) entitled Lost Land of my Campus: “An area less traveled or known by others. Like a desert. A paradise.”
After quite a long time, finally I picked up my curiosity again to step into one of the mysterious areas of my campus（Beijing Normal University). Beside the gate there is a room with many beautiful fish, which I can see through the windows. Entering the gate, I found it was like an abandoned garden, where everything seemed to have frozen for a long time, except captive animals. Many items were put there, rusting or growing on their own.
Sunlight comes in, illuminating the dim lights in prison, where old things sit layer on layer and side by side. Time freezes here, and they all fall victim to it. No matter how shiny the surface is, the heart has grown old.
Most people in the West, my dental colleagues included, cringe at the notion of putting long needles into someone’s face and body to cure an allegedly incurable disease. Any success from these treatments is deemed to be a coincidence, a psychological trick or a placebo effect. A quick Wikipedia search for “acupuncture” reveals a very narrow view of the practice, dismissing the overall treatment as a placebo. But how much do you really know about acupuncture, and is there a scientific explanation for its supposed effects?
Are the benefits of Acupuncture purely a placebo effect?
I was fortunate to work alongside a consultant in special care dentistry at King’s College London who was studying acupuncture. How exactly did he integrate an ancient Chinese technique into modern-day dentistry?
Acupuncture alone was enough to prevent gag reflexes in patients who previously required sedation.
The field of special-care dentistry involves treating patients that are difficult to manage, whether it be psychologically or physically. Many patients referred to this department may suffer from severe anxiety or pain. This department acted as a referral center for patients all around London.
The condition that treated by acupuncture in this department was the gag reflex. Some patients are unable to receive dental treatment because of a strong gagging reflex when any kind of instrument is placed in their mouth.
In this scenario, a needle was placed by the ear lobe, halting the gag reflex and making treatment possible. The patients we received had already sought treatment at several other clinics before being referred to this specialist center.
Is this better than Western methods of controlling anxiety and gag reflexes?
Western methods include intravenous sedation with a sedative called Midazalam. When a patient receives IV sedation, he or she must be accompanied by another person to make sure they get home safely. The whole procedure can be lengthy and costly for all parties involved, and there are considerable side effects a patient can suffer from the drug.
Acupuncture is far quicker and cheaper. There are no side effects, and the patient does not have to go home accompanied by another adult.
“I have wanted something to work for the last twenty years”
In the study, it was noted that one patient had been looking for a working solution to this problem for the last 20 years. This patient was very motivated to receive dental treatment and get on with it.
Can acupuncture be used to treat other dental problems?
As a Western-trained dentist, I will not say acupuncture can treat all dental pathology. For example, someone with a raging toothache caused by infection will need the infection appropriately dealt with by a dental procedure. I do, however, believe that acupuncture can be used to treat jaw pain, particularly temporo-mandibular dysfunction, since acupuncture has been shown to be effective with many types of musculoskeletal conditions, including back pain.
How does it work?
“It’s just psychological!” one of my colleagues said the first time she saw this. “To be honest, I can’t fully explain this, but one thing for sure is that it works,” the consultant I worked with replied. Being trained in the Western way, there is very little to explain how this actually works — but if does works, does it really matter how?
Although I am not fully trained in dental acupuncture, I can definitely see a place for acupuncture in dentistry. It’s a shame that these techniques are not explored more widely. This is due to a variety of reasons, including inadequate government funding and support or blockages from the drug industry. However, as shown in the study mentioned above, the technique of acupuncture has worked in the case of gag reflex, and can save patient and dentist alike much cost, in terms of both time and money.
Cover illustration by Marjorie Wang
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