#chinaisawesome

[all-about-china]

Why China?

Hello All,

My name is Antarctica Lover, and I will be studying the culture of China, specifically Hong Kong for my blog posts this semester. I chose this culture initially, because I had picked Antarctica first, but realized that nobody really lives in Antarctica. When going through the CIA factbook list of countries, Hong Kong stuck out to me because my grandad lived in Hong Kong for a number of years in the nineties, and I'm curious about what culture he experienced there. I think that when communicating with Chinese people after my research about China will make me more respectful and aware of their traditions, seen and unseen. Even with other cultures, including the surrounding cultures of Korean, Japanese and Indian I will use my knowledge to better understand their experiences.

Hong Kong is an administrative district of China. In doing some preliminary research, the official language is Chinese, English, and Mandarin. There are three variations of Mandarin which are Beijing, Chengdu, and Nanjing. They have no official religion. Hong Kong is very small, with a square milage only being 430 in total area. They have an extremely large population projection of almost 8 million! 100% of people live in urban areas. The president of China is a man named Xi Jinping. In the total area of China, there are multiple ethnicities or geographical ethnicities of Buyi, Miao, Dong, Tibetans, and Mongolians. For some fun facts, China produces the most rice in the world. Other big crops are wheat, corn, soybeans, and peanuts. All these facts are from Encyclopedia Britannica Here. 

The statement of "In studying other cultures, we do so very often from the perspective of our own culture," means that we will have prejudice when learning about different cultures. We tend to have the point of view that it is our way or the highway. I don't think this method of judgment uses critical thinking skills, and to combat prejudice, I will use critical thinking skills. In collecting data that is least biased and accurate, I will make sure my sources are mostly .org websites or .gov websites. This means that they're an organization, backed up by statistics, rather than some random redditors opinions on a .com website. After I use these unbiased sources, I will follow the bibliography back to their primary source and examine how they collect their data. If data collection is somehow skewed by unaccountability of certain demographic groups or variables, I will not consider that data credible.

I also used The World Factbook for more of my analysis on China.

-AL

[thejacksonsdochina-blog]

Good morning World!

Yes, we’re awful bloggers. We’ve established that, so let’s move on. The kids have been having a blast, I’d say Nathan especially. He’s meant to be sending me entries to post of his experiences, in his own words, but the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

I’m taking a class on places and settings, and the instructor asked me what the most interesting place/setting I’ve seen/experienced thus far. Good question. This is what I sent to him, slightly verbatim:

“I love this city, which is Harbin. The pace and flow of everything is amazing to me. The street markets are awesome. There is so much going on all over, but the markets are the one place in which you find so much compacted. Vendors of all sort…anything you can think of can be found in the street markets. Typically they pop up before and after shops open and close, otherwise what’s the point? People could just go in the shops. A large majority of the vendors also run the shops, so the carts and such go up during the hours there shops are still closed.”

I said alot more too, got off on a tangent of how amazing the Chinese are. Granted, you’ve assholes like in any other part of the world, but as a whole they’ve mastered and fully accepted what it is to be human beings. Everyone is so helpful and they do not accept thanks because it isn’t necessary. They are being who they were born to be, human beings.

More at a later time….work is soon and I’ve much to do before then.

It’s the pace and flow I referred to. Not much time for nothing to do, and the environment just rubs off on you. #inlovewithitall

- Devon