China Stories

It's raining vox-pops!

3rd November 2008, Flora

Yippee! I'm starting to get lots of emails from China from vox-pop contributors... and they're really good! Now I have to go through them all and work out which quotes to use to illustrate different points.

Because some of the vox-pop contributors don't speak English, Xiao translated some of the questions for me before I sent them out. Now lots of the responses flooding in are written in Mandarin! I'm only going to use a couple of quotes from each vox-popper and I only have a limited amount of Xiao's time to use, so I've been running the answers through an online translator to get a good idea of what each answer says, then I'll ask Xiao to do a professional translation of the best answers.

Here's a wee taster of the kind of replies I've been getting. This is from Shi Liuying, a student of English from Shanghai. I asked her :-

What do you think about the changes in China recently - especially the growing wealth in towns and cities?

She replied in both English and Mandarin:-

在中国实行改革开放政策后，我认为最近中国的变化真的很快很大。城市和乡镇地区都有了很大的变化。尤其是上海，一个现代又国际化的城市，包含了来自各个不同方面的人。就像人们说纽约是个大熔炉，我觉得上海也是。当然，通过中国人民的辛苦劳作，我们的生活提高了。我认为这对人民是有利的，我们的生活提高了，我们就会为国家做出更大的贡献，这是个良性循环。

Well, after the open-up policy, I think the recent changes in China are really fast and dramatic. Both towns and cities have changed a lot. Especially Shanghai, a modern and international city, which contains people from all walks of life. People say New York is a melting pot, I think Shanghai is too. Of course, through the hard work of chinese people, our lives are improving. I suppose it is good for the people, our lives are improving, so we will contribute more to the country, it is a beneficial circle.

I'm waiting for more replies to come in. For example I'm hoping to hear back from some volunteers who work at ChinaDialogue - a bilingual website about environmental issues. The site's Deputy Editor agreed to forward them some questions about environmental issues in China, and about what it's like being an activist in China (where there are quite strict laws about what you can campaign and protest about). I'm looking forward to getting their answers back because it will be a glimpse into a very different world.

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