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BEIJING—It was a good and a bad weekend for Chinese in America.
And one that so far seems to have gone pretty much unnoticed amongst Chinese in China.
On Saturday night, the New York Knicks’ third-string point guard, Jeremy Lin, dribbled and soared into the hearts of hometown fans. He led the shambolic team to a tight victory over the New Jersey Nets, scoring 25 points and seven assists in 36 minutes.
The New York Times said Lin’s performance “ignited an instant love affair with New York.”
The New York Daily News ran a headline online, “It’s Lin-sanity!”
Lin, a California native whose parents are from Taiwan, was perhaps better known previously as being an Ivy League graduate--one of only 40 such players in the N.B.A. He’s a member of Harvard University’s Class of 2010.
But for many of his fans, it’s been more notable that he’s the first Chinese-American to play in the N.B.A.
A great moment for Asian-Americans until the Superbowl, when a controversial campaign ad by U.S. Senate Republican candidate Pete Hoekstra ran against his opponent, Michigan incumbent Debbie Stabenow.
The ad features a young Asian woman riding on a bicycle against a rice paddy. She stops to speak to the camera in broken English, “Debbie spend so much American money, you borrow more and more for us. Your economy get very weak, ours get very good. You get our jobs.”
Just in case it wasn’t clear, the website, debbiespenditnow.com, features the China flag and what one Twitter user called “chop suey” font. The message being that U.S. government officials like Stabenow are spending so much money that it benefits China, which is why America is in this economic mess now.
Criticism came swiftly on Twitter from American expatriates living in China, many of whom called the commercial "racist."
But so far there’s been virtually no reaction on Sina Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter, to either phenomenon.
As my Chinese colleague, Bo Gu, noted, Hoekstra’s ad didn’t make any sense to her. “It was just like that time with the Spanish basketball team.”
She was referring to a 2008 photo advertisement for which the Spanish national basketball team posed, each player pulling their eyes to make them look slanted. The ad -- which emerged just before the Beijing Olympics -- provoked an uproar in the U.S. among Asian-American groups, but it was shrugged off by Chinese in China. Most didn't understand the gesture; those who did found it amusing or flattering.
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Can't the media get the facts straight? Jeremy Lin is not Chinese, he's Taiwanese-American. He was born in the US, but his family and he are from the country of Taiwan, which is not a province of China.
Taiwanese-American. Show the people and culture the respect by not associating it with the Chinese. It would be as offensive as calling Americans "English citizens."
Yeah, Taiwanese people are not culturally and ethnic Chinese, because it makes you feel better.
Um...the country on the island of Taiwan is the Republic of China. (mainland is the People's Republic of China)
The island of Taiwan is controlled politically and economically by ethnic Chinese, but the original Taiwanese are different ethnically. I don't know if Mr. Lin is of Chinese descent or of ethnic Taiwanese descent. Just because his parents come from Taiwan doesn't mean he is Taiwanese.
The idea of calling people Taiwanese is political, but for good reason.
China is a totalitarian/communist state while Taiwan is a democracy.
If that does not affect your culture and your way of life then. . . perhaps we are hyping liberty and freedom too much. Apparently it makes no difference.
I guess the homesick yank still yearns for his ancestral England. You are just playing the political game. The orignal Taiwanese are Chinese period. Their ancestors came over to the islands from Chinese mainland hundreds of years ago. If you talk about the aboriginal Taiwanese, thats another matter altogether. Do you want to talk about the original Americans? That makes those of you European settlers very un-American doesn't it?
There's nothing new here, just an idiot Republican. What's with all the hoopla with that and how China is supposed to react? Crazy. China probably did not even watch the Super Bowl. Whatever happens in this country is not always a world event, even if we imagine it to be so. It's good to see an American (He is not Chinese or Taiwanese, he is an American!) of Asian descent play in the NBA. It's about time. And with real brains too! But it's not going to last. NBA is not basketball, it is just entertainment. James Naismith probably will shut down the NBA if he was alive and had the power to do so. That is just insulting to what he invented along time ago. Good Luck, Jeremy Lin. Don't worry, when it's over you are still a Harvard Graduate!
His grandparents are Chinese from Zhejiang, so he's not Chinese according to you? pathetic.
Taiwan is an independent, sovereign country. Fewer than 10% of people in Taiwan (and in some polls, fewer than 5%) identify themselves as Chinese only and fewer than 10% would want to be unified with China. A large and growing number of the people see themselves as only Taiwanese. Most of their ancestors came over from China hundreds of years ago.
So get the facts straight. (Well, at least the people here don't think Taiwan is a good place to get "Thai" food, like many Americans think.)
I totally empathize with Taiwanese and their political struggle vs Red China. Heck my wife is Taiwanese.
However, trying to clarify that Lin is "Taiwanese American" is silly. First of all, if you neglect his ethnicity, then he's just plain American since he was born here. If you want to point out his ethnicity, then he is Han, otherwise known as "Chinese".
I'm Han Chinese, my parents are from Hong Kong but I was born here. Should I tell people I'm Hong Kong-American? Haha, no that's just ridiculous.
Lin is either Chinese-American (to highlight his ethnicity) or a Chinese-American whose parents came from Taiwan... if you want a mouthful.
Oh no. J Lin's Grandmother is from mainland China. We must eliminate her from history or else we can't claim that he is not Chinese.
To think people in China would see the ads run in the United States, one is either delusional or does not know how the Chinese system works. China blocks MOST web sites on the Internet. Unlike the U.S. where every web site is available for the Americans, in China, only a limited few are available to the Chinese. The Chinese government gives blessing to all those that pass the censors. YouTube, for example, is not available in China except for the self ruled Hong Kong and Macau.
Also, it would be hard to find enough people interested in American football in China to merit the broadcasting of the game and its ads.
Even if they did see it there, the reaction would probably be more like, "yeah, that's pretty much right."
Self ruled Hongkong and Macao? They are not self ruled. They are the SRC, Special Admin Region of China. They have autonomy in certain matters, but China still calls all the shots. They still have 35 years remaining before the mainland absorbs them as part of Guangdong province, just like before the Opium War.
lol, the idea of chinese block most internet from some person who never been to china is really silly. i've been to china before, and i can access youtube, wiki, cnn, msnbc, bbc etc etc. the only thing they block is political sensitive material such as tiannmen sqaure massacre etc.
Huh???
So apparently, when Chinese people immigrated here, we taught them the principles of the West, including innovation, freedom, and playing the victim at every opportunity. Let's hear it for assimilation!
Assimilation? Be carefull what you say. The Tibetans, the American Natives and the African-American would call that genocide.
Wow! Time has certainly changed. Is 'borrowing' a dirty capitalist word now? I do believe that 'Communis' People's Republic of China has a better understanding of the meaning of that word than we do here in US.
Most of the responders don't know what the definition of racism is. The ad does not fit the criteria. The responders are ignorant liberals who celebrate 8.3% unemployment. The bottom line is the Chinese own a fair amount of our debt(and it is increasing), the government should stop trying to spend its way out of recession and the girl is pretty hot.
China only owns about 8% of our debt, slightly more than Japan. The majority of our debt is owed right back to ourselves.
I'm not sure, but I'm guessing the issue with this commercial is the mimicry of a "Chinese accent"? If this is in fact the issue, I would think the reason it's a problem to "Chinese-Americans" but not to the Chinese living in China is experiential. To the Chinese and many other Asians living in the US, mockery of the way they speak has long been a method by which these people and their communities have been belittled and marginalized (myself included). This would likely not be an issue in China where it is not considered a necessity to speak fluent English. Therefore, Chinese people who live in China would not have had the same kinds of negative experiences associated with this kind of mockery, that the "Chinese-American" as well as other "Asian-American" groups would have had. Now I don't claim to know the motivations of those who are responsible for this ad, but at the very least, to me it shows a lack of sensitivity to the experiences of a particular group of Americans who happen to speak the English language differently than those who are in power.
I don't consider it racist, but it is ignorant and stupid. Our government wants to sell bonds, the Chinese buy them. What is the big deal? The entire industrial revolution in America was financed by foreign money....
The author misquoted the ad. The author wrote that the woman in the ad said, "“Debbie spend so much American money, you borrow more and more for us. Your economy get very weak, ours get very good. You get our jobs.”
What the woman said was "WE TAKE YOUR JOBS."
While the ad is racist and deficit spending has nothing to do with it, the "WE TAKE YOUR JOBS" part is absolutely true. There have been millions of jobs created in China while millions of jobs have disappeared in the United States. The fault is not with China, it's with multinational corporations seeking the cheapest labor and the most lax environmental regulations. China allows a lot more polluting than the US and Foxconn -- the largest electronics manufacturer on Earth -- pays its workers about $150 a month to work 65 hours a week and live onsite in dorms.
Democrats are saying that the problem is not enough education, that we need more engineers, more computer science graduates, better science and math training in our schools. That's sort of dishonest. While it's true, the fact is that nurses get paid more than software engineers in the United States except for very good software engineers. A two year AA degree and a nursing board exam can get you easily $100,000 a year after two or three years of experience. A cop in the US makes $100,000+ a year after two or three years of experience and that job does not even require an AA, only a high school diploma. Cops and nurses don't have to worry about competing with Indian and Chinese engineers who enjoy a lower cost of living and who can work for lower wages and live more comfortably on lower wages (and in the Chinese context perhaps also, slave-like work camps like Foxconn where people are paid barely enough to eat and have clothing to wear.
Big business thinks the solution is the eliminate the minimum wage, eliminate environmental regulations and essentially turn the US into China where there is a lot of pollution and people work in factories 65 hours a week for $150 a month. That's the "market" solution. When Americans will work for less than Chinese at Foxconn, the US will start making iPhones and laptops and LCD TVs, smartphones, etc. But as it is, an American who never graduated high school can make $1,400 a month working 40 hours a week assembling cheese burgers at McDonald's, but a factory worker assembling a very complex iPhone, laptops, routers, some of the most complex microelectronics on earth, gets paid $150 a month to work 65 hours a week.
Globalization was all about reducing wages and lowering working conditions. But don't think that the plan to "make America competitive" means to create high wage jobs here. The people making money in China driving new Ferraris around Shanghai and Guangzhou are labor brokers. Like the robber barrons, they have access (perhaps temporarily) to unlimited supplies of super cheap skilled labor and are allowed to foist the many costs onto external populations (pollution, environmental degradation, air pollution, water pollution, surrounding population becoming ill, etc.). What big business would love is for the US to allow the same thing so that all of the unemployed people in the US could get jobs for $150 a month assembling electronics -- and better than that, when that model comes here, a lot of people getting $5,000 a month might start getting more like $1,250 a month.
The goal of capital is always to reduce labor costs. The reason it's possible is because workers are generally not very bright. It's why any worker reading this will probably say, "I'm not a worker... am I? I thought I was an investor because I have $150,000 in my 401K..."
Not sure if Chinese workers get paid US$1500 per month, then all the jobs will automatically come back to America. Not too sure if the Renminbi equals the US Dollar, then All the jobs in China will come back to America. Those low-end jobs are not coming back to America, period. If they shift from China, they will probably go to India, Vietnam, Philippines, Cambodia, or Indonesia.
The USA should emulate Germany. You shouldn't emulate China. Germany and Switzerland makes goods that the whole world wants to buy. And China buy loads of German high quality high tech goods. The USA should sell your high tech goods to China and the world. Then you can pay yourself US$15000 per month, instead of envying Chinese who just earns US$150 per month.
John,
Another problem with blaming it on education is that not all of those dorm dwelling factory workers are engineers. Most of them are peasants, who literally moved to the dorm from mud huts. The jobs they do don't require education. Just a little training, Only a small percentage of them will be operating any kind of machinery. Otherwise some minor reading skill might be useful, but the vast majority of the work is done with nothing more advanced than a soldering iron and a powered screw driver.
I was once put in charge of a new swing shift wave solder crew due to a misconception of one of the engineers, who thought he remembered seeing me running wave solder equipment at another plant. In fact I had run almost everything else. I was given eight know nothings fresh from a temp agency and had to train them and myself. In two weeks we were meeting our quota of 600 electronic voting booth motherboards per shift. in two months we were regularly beating our quota and setting new production and quality records and the day shift lead had been sent to work with us for a week to see how we did things. I know what it takes to train people to do this kind of work because I've done it. Education is not a major requirement.
The jobs aren't going there because they have engineers. That's BS. The jobs are going there because they have billions of peasants to exploit.
I don't know a cop or a nurse that makes that much a year. RN's start out at about $30k a year in my neck of the woods. My mom retired from the hospital having been a D.O.N. for I don't know how many years and wasn't making 45K. My brother in law has been a cop for almost 25 yrs and is making maybe 65k a year. I'd love to know where you got those numbers.
seems as if the writer did not listen to the ad,they wrote"you take our jobs"when it should say,we take your jobs.I hope they never have to testify on anything.
What......you no rike Bruce Ree ????
he's not a Taiwanese American he's a goddamn Americankeep hyphenating yourselves.better yet how about we all loose the "fill in the blank" American.we are all in the same boat so stop thinking your special bunch of self centered @!$%#s.
1. She's hot.
2. What broken English? Don't know if she's trying to effect a Chinese accent or not, but it's not coming through. True, she makes a couple of grammatical errors, but the writer makes at least a couple of her own errors too. Plus, how many native born American language speakers do you know that pseak with perfect grammer? Oops, I think I just made a couple myself.
3. Not sure this ad is racist, coz it's true about the money-borrowing. But it is in poor taste.
The point of this article rests on some faulty assumptions in insinuating that Chinese in China don't care/don't think it is racist so this ad must not be racist. First, China is a homogenous society so for better or worse, the concept of being discriminated against is not easy to grasp especially when they are the vast majority of their population.
HOWEVER, I have first hand experience of watching this transformation in business school as the Chinese International students became aware of race / racism for the first time. First, they came over with the idea of making all sorts of friends and races (like in the movies they told me). Then, things like being excluded from house parties, from social outings and circles of their American classmates happened. I saw it, they were really confused, didn't know what was happening, couldn't explain it. None broke through into any American social circle. Sure, the Americans were polite, but none wanted to be friends. Then MBA job hunting began. Then they noticed that recruiters didn't talk with them as much as other classmates. Fewer got any offer to even interview despite having some top grades in the class in various subjects. At the end of recruiting period, very few got a job offer and many then turned their eyes back towards Asia. They finally had discovered discrimination in the US and a lot couldn't handle it. Many were happy to go back to Asia in fact despite entering b-school with intentions of having an international work experience.
So when this article makes that insinuation that the Chinese in China don't care, it has no idea that it is b/c the Chinese in China don't even know what it is like to be on the other side of the discrimination. However, my b-school classmates did and they certainly did go back to China with a favorable impression despite coming to the US with a favorable impression.
1. She's hot.
2. What broken English? Don't know if she's trying to effect a Chinese accent or not, but it's not coming through. True, she makes a couple of grammatical errors, but the writer makes at least a couple of her own errors too. Plus, how many native born American language speakers do you know that pseak with perfect grammer? Oops, I think I just made a couple myself.
3. Not sure this ad is racist, coz it's true about the money-borrowing. But it is in poor taste.
If Chinese and other Asians are HOT how come they never win Miss Universe and Miss World? All the titles go to white chics and hot chics from Latin and India. Racism or discrimination, or both?
concern taiwan citizen your logic is a whiteman who happen to born in Hawaii ,They become a native Hawaiian.
Racist : Racist: but if you want the truth:Listen to all the GOP & Teabaggers R the party of No: No & Newt: that wants to go to the moon. & Mitt: sending his money off shore, so he doesn't have to pay Taxes.T Its all about the Wealthy getting richer and the middle class getting poorer.....They don't want to help out the poor, I do mean the poor not the lazy good for nothings...Who are the one's that leach off the taxpayer. They: are the Wealthy that get welfare both for themselves or for the Corps.TRUE So really All party are at fault...But it seems that the Wealthy get away with it like the .(.Democrat )... They steal billions and the few poor steals a few thousands. So what does the GOP want to do is Screw the MIddle Class to get even with the few. As I say its the me me me and F everyone else.... The failures of the Republicans party trying to take away SS and Medicare so they can give their wealthy Blackmailers more money... To hell with the Poor and Needy. Let them freeze in the winter and stave the Old and Babies,let them die from bad water, do away with the EPA and thats what you'll have, just like all you Teabaggers want..T.You make me sick with your Me Me Me altitude. It just a matter of time before the masses raise up against you .TRUE Greedy and you all call yourself Christains. What a laugh: Your no better than all the Muslims you all hate. Wake up America!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!WAKE UP.
The Chinese aren't offended because they simply don't care what we or anyone else thinks. They've never perceived themselves as victims, unlike other easily-offended groups. Not to mention that their economy is set to dominate the globe.
So they just don't care.
Looki! Looki! Balls on HOOKY! AMERICA!
7
Finally, a nation or geographical group of people (or whatever term I'm suppossed to use) that has better things to do with their time then scrutinize every move made in the media, unlike the rest of the "politically correct, your offending me so Im going to sue you and make sure that you call me by my new and improved name" groups out there. Although I'm sure I offended someone here by using words in the English language.
Disclaimer: At no point in my post was any word used in a derogatory manner, to include but not limited to, every word I wrote.
I would rather Pete spend it not give some rational explanations about what he would do to change things rather then resort to prejudice and racism to fail to get his point across. I’m not impressed with you Pete spend it not and your cheap dumb gimmicks to baffle the public with bull.
This islan 'Taiwan' was settled during World War 2 as Chinese fled the advancing Japanese armies. They refused the Communist government to settle down on their own island and became their own nation state. Ever since then they have been a ally of USA and Japan.
I like the commercial. You can't knock the truth.
The Chinese people don't have time to worry about these ads given that they are busy making the stuff that American's like to buy...