"Searches in Chinese took me to some interesting places. As a ham radio operator, I looked up postings from Chinese hams including a cute video about learning Morse code and electronics hobbyists at work building stuff. Some Russians are contributing videos to the platform in both fluent Chinese and English. Looking up Mencius/Meng Zi/孟子 I saw an interesting video ascribing the differences in the approaches of Confucius (laying down and explaining moral principles) versus Mencius (same basic ideas but engaging in debates more) to the differences in their times. In Mencius’ era two generations later there was much less social consensus on moral ideas than in Confucius time, so naturally Mencius would be in more debates.
One intriguing posting explains the most common idioms used in the People’s Daily of January 18, 2025. The tags on it include PRC Civil Service Examination so I’d suppose it is a study aid.
I ran it through the ChatGPT4o translation app, adding pinyin after the characters for each idiomatic expression. Students of Chinese might find it interesting. Internet search engines, Chinese websites and now ChatGPT4o (my favorite search engine) have become a great help in figuring out Chinese idiomatic expressions not in my dictionary. Some are neologisms and some are local expressions confined to particular provinces such as Hunan. While the summaries ChatGPT generates are not always completely accurate, it does dig up lots of good sources, so check the summaries against the sources listed, and if not listed query it for sources. Naturally enough if I search ChatGPT in Chinese on Chinese topics I usually do better than if I query it in English. What it generates depends on the sources I find, so if I query a communist ideology topic, I might get a tutorial that seems written for a student at a Party school!"
I don’t necessarily see neither the issue nor the problem. The vast majority of TikTok’s users don’t care the least about Chinese politics, nor about what role the CCP has in their platform.
They want to look at cute animals, dank memes or food. And they resent the fact that American politicians have taken them hostage in some ridiculous neocon pissing contest. (Encouraged by big tech who hates the competition that TikTok brings.)
I have been exploring it a bit too. From my posting 2025: Exploring Little Red Book — RedNote/Xiao Hongshu https://gaodawei.wordpress.com/2025/01/18/2025-exploring-little-red-book-rednote/
"Searches in Chinese took me to some interesting places. As a ham radio operator, I looked up postings from Chinese hams including a cute video about learning Morse code and electronics hobbyists at work building stuff. Some Russians are contributing videos to the platform in both fluent Chinese and English. Looking up Mencius/Meng Zi/孟子 I saw an interesting video ascribing the differences in the approaches of Confucius (laying down and explaining moral principles) versus Mencius (same basic ideas but engaging in debates more) to the differences in their times. In Mencius’ era two generations later there was much less social consensus on moral ideas than in Confucius time, so naturally Mencius would be in more debates.
One intriguing posting explains the most common idioms used in the People’s Daily of January 18, 2025. The tags on it include PRC Civil Service Examination so I’d suppose it is a study aid.
I ran it through the ChatGPT4o translation app, adding pinyin after the characters for each idiomatic expression. Students of Chinese might find it interesting. Internet search engines, Chinese websites and now ChatGPT4o (my favorite search engine) have become a great help in figuring out Chinese idiomatic expressions not in my dictionary. Some are neologisms and some are local expressions confined to particular provinces such as Hunan. While the summaries ChatGPT generates are not always completely accurate, it does dig up lots of good sources, so check the summaries against the sources listed, and if not listed query it for sources. Naturally enough if I search ChatGPT in Chinese on Chinese topics I usually do better than if I query it in English. What it generates depends on the sources I find, so if I query a communist ideology topic, I might get a tutorial that seems written for a student at a Party school!"
I don’t necessarily see neither the issue nor the problem. The vast majority of TikTok’s users don’t care the least about Chinese politics, nor about what role the CCP has in their platform.
They want to look at cute animals, dank memes or food. And they resent the fact that American politicians have taken them hostage in some ridiculous neocon pissing contest. (Encouraged by big tech who hates the competition that TikTok brings.)