There is a Vancouver Forest in Beijing, a Thames Town in Shanghai and an Oriental Yosemite in Dalian, China.
China’s suburbs have been filling up lately with housing developments whose names and architectural styles are meant to evoke the US, Europe, Canada, Australia, anywhere, but China. And the authorities do not like it.
Chinese Minister of Civil Affairs Li Liguo (李立國) on Tuesday said that “bizarre” names that “damage sovereignty and national dignity” or “violate the socialist core values and conventional morality” would be stamped out, Xinhua news agency reported.
And it is not just foreignness he objects to. The report quoted Li as saying that excessively grandiose or strange names for roads, bridges, buildings and residential compounds would also face scrutiny.
Housing developments have been the biggest generators of odd names. Beijing alone has a Chateau Regalia, a Rose and Ginkgo, Merlin Champagne Town, Le Leman Lake Villa, Beijing Riviera and International Wonderland.
Developers say the international flavor helps sell houses. On the outskirts of Beijing, the Jackson Hole resort community, known in Chinese as Hometown America, attracts residents dreaming of a “free and uncomplicated life.”
Tides of embrace or rejection of foreign arts, styles and philosophies have occurred through Chinese history. In recent years, officials have tried to push back against Western values in textbooks and English-language acronyms in television and radio broadcasts.
The concern over place names has been raised as part of an official Chinese geographical survey that began in 2014. Along with an explosion in foreign names, there has also been a noticeable disappearance of traditional names, Li said. The survey found that since 1986, 60,000 township names and 400,000 village names had fallen out of use as a result of development and urbanization, Beijing News reported.
It was not supposed to happen. There has been a regulation on the books in China since 1996 that prohibits the use of the names of foreign people or places for locations in China, including housing developments, Beijing News said.
However, the rule has had little impact.
And once a name is in use, changing it can be problematic. Officials tried to rename a street in Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan Province, ostensibly because the Chinese character used to represent its foreign name was often mispronounced by people unfamiliar with the place, China National Radio said.
However, residents objected and filed a lawsuit to block the change, citing the potential loss of historical identity.
Previous efforts to change foreign place names in China have not been wholeheartedly embraced, either. In the southeastern city of Fuzhou, a housing development known as Fontainebleau was ordered by local officials to change its name, which became Gaojiayuan. Afterward, one resident complained to a local newspaper that she missed her bus stop after the signs were changed.
And a real-estate agent confessed that while the official name was now Gaojiayuan, for the purpose of selling houses it would always be called Fontainebleau.
Thousands gathered across New Zealand yesterday to celebrate the signing of the country’s founding document and some called for an end to government policies that critics say erode the rights promised to the indigenous Maori population. As the sun rose on the dawn service at Waitangi where the Treaty of Waitangi was first signed between the British Crown and Maori chiefs in 1840, some community leaders called on the government to honor promises made 185 years ago. The call was repeated at peaceful rallies that drew several hundred people later in the day. “This government is attacking tangata whenua [indigenous people] on all
The administration of US President Donald Trump has appointed to serve as the top public diplomacy official a former speech writer for Trump with a history of doubts over US foreign policy toward Taiwan and inflammatory comments on women and minorities, at one point saying that "competent white men must be in charge." Darren Beattie has been named the acting undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, a senior US Department of State official said, a role that determines the tone of the US' public messaging in the world. Beattie requires US Senate confirmation to serve on a permanent basis. "Thanks to
UNDAUNTED: Panama would not renew an agreement to participate in Beijing’s Belt and Road project, its president said, proposing technical-level talks with the US US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday threatened action against Panama without immediate changes to reduce Chinese influence on the canal, but the country’s leader insisted he was not afraid of a US invasion and offered talks. On his first trip overseas as the top US diplomat, Rubio took a guided tour of the canal, accompanied by its Panamanian administrator as a South Korean-affiliated oil tanker and Marshall Islands-flagged cargo ship passed through the vital link between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. However, Rubio was said to have had a firmer message in private, telling Panama that US President Donald Trump
‘IMPOSSIBLE’: The authors of the study, which was published in an environment journal, said that the findings appeared grim, but that honesty is necessary for change Holding long-term global warming to 2°C — the fallback target of the Paris climate accord — is now “impossible,” according to a new analysis published by leading scientists. Led by renowned climatologist James Hansen, the paper appears in the journal Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development and concludes that Earth’s climate is more sensitive to rising greenhouse gas emissions than previously thought. Compounding the crisis, Hansen and colleagues argued, is a recent decline in sunlight-blocking aerosol pollution from the shipping industry, which had been mitigating some of the warming. An ambitious climate change scenario outlined by the UN’s climate