Posts tagged ‘Chiang Kaishek’

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22/03/2013

* China’s glamorous new first lady an instant internet hit

The last time a Chinese leader went abroad on an official visit with is wife was probably in the 1940s when Gen Chiang Kaishek was accompanied by his wife Madame Soong Meiling. She so charmed the US, esp President Roosevelt, that she was regarded as China’s unofficial ambassador to the US. The inclusion of the Chinese ‘first lady’ by President Xi is no accident. It is the new leadership’s proclamation that they are breaking with the past in more ways than one. They are no longer just ‘sons of revolutionaries’ but power owners in their own right, leading the world’s second nation which, within the next few decades, will become the world’s first nation.

We don’t know if Premier Li will  also take his wife abroad. But he has sent his own signal as long ago as August 2011 by making a major speech in Hong Kong in fluent English. Another break with tradition where Chinese leaders always addressed foreign events in Chinese no matter how fluent they were in that country’s tongue. This is global diplomacy of the 21st Century. Recognising that English is the international language of trade, commerce, education, technology and, now, of diplomacy.

Reuters: “With a smile on her face, dressed in a simple black peacoat and carrying an elegant unbranded bag, China’s new first lady, Peng Liyuan, stepped into the international limelight on Friday and became an instant internet sensation back home.

Chinese President Xi Jinping (L) and First Lady Peng Liyuan wave as they disembark from a plane upon their arrival at Moscow's Vnukovo airport March 22, 2013. REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov

Stepping off the aircraft in Moscow – the first stop of President Xi Jinping‘s maiden foreign trip since assuming office – Peng’s glamorous appearance and obvious affection for her portly husband caused Chinese microbloggers to swoon.

“So beautiful, Peng Liyuan, so beautiful! How composed, how magnanimous,” wrote one user on China’s popular Twitter-like service Sina Weibo.

“Who could not love such a lady as this and be insanely happy with her?” wrote another.

Taobao, an online shopping site similar to eBay and Amazon, quickly began offering for sale coats in the same style of Peng’s, advertising it as “the same style as the first lady’s”.

Others wondered what brand her bag and shoes were.

“Her shoes are really classic, and who designed her bag?” wrote a third Weibo user.

Peng is best known in China as a singer, and for many years was arguably better known and certainly more popular than her husband.

People who have met her and know her say that Peng is vivacious and fun to be around, though she was ordered to take a back seat after Xi became vice president in 2007 as he was being groomed for state power.

But she is expected to be given high-profile events of her own to attend on Xi’s sweep through Russia, Tanzania, South Africa and the Republic of Congo on a week-long trip, as the government tries to soften the image of China abroad.

Peng has won praise for her advocacy for pet causes, most notably for children living with HIV/AIDS, and may visit charities related to this while abroad.

Unlike the baby-kissing politicians of the West, China’s Communist Party works hard to keep its top leaders from appearing too human – to the point that for many, even their official birthdates and the names of their children are regarded as a state secret.

Xi and Peng are different. Their romance has been the subject of dozens of glowing reports and pictorials in state media.

“When he comes home, I’ve never thought of it as though there’s some leader in the house. In my eyes, he’s just my husband,” Peng gushed in an interview with a state-run magazine in 2007, describing Xi as frugal, hardworking and down-to-earth.

Peng is Xi’s second wife, and the two have a daughter studying at Harvard under an assumed name. Xi divorced his first wife, the daughter of a diplomat.”

via China’s glamorous new first lady an instant internet hit | Reuters.

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05/04/2012

# Deciphering Chinese names

Chiang Kaishek with Muslim General Ma Fushou a...

There are around 100 common Chinese surnames and, apart from possibly Ma (馬), there is no religious or regional clustering. The colloquial for ‘the public’ is lao bai xing, which literally means “old hundred surnames”. The surname Ma, more often than not, is used by Muslim Chinese; and is thought to be derived from the Prophet Mohammed.

Traditionally, for many centuries, most Chinese families followed the standard practice of using three mono-syllabic words for their names, such as Sun Yatsen, father of modern China.
Maybe surprisingly, Dr Sun is revered in both the Peoples’ Republic and Taiwan. Both have huge memorials to him. The photo courtesy –
http://hcyip.wordpress.com/tag/nanjing-massacre/ – is of the mainland memorial.

The first, Sun (孫), is the family or clan name. After all what is most important, your antecedents, of course rather than you yourself – back to the collective mindset of Chinese.

The second, Yat, is the ‘generation name’. It is given by the parents to each of the siblings. So, all of Yatsen’s brothers and sisters would have Yat plus another word as their name. And, indeed, all his paternal first cousins. In some families, the boys and girls may have variants of this name.

If the family is conforming to old traditions, then the middle name (the generation name) is taken from a poem specially composed for the family, with each generation taking a successive word from the poem. Typically, the poem will be about something noble and aspirational, such as: “World peace, national unity; Social harmony, family prosperity”. So, the first generation’s middle name will be world, the next peace and so forth. Of course, in most families, long before they reach the eighth generation, some successor would have thought to create his own couplet to be more modern and so the cycle restarts.

The third, sen, is the personal name and can be any word in the Chinese vocabulary. Having said that, some words are regarded as more masculine and others more feminine.

Just to confuse everyone, some families use the second name as the personal name and third as the generation name. So, for example, Sun Yatsen’s wife Madam Sun was named Soong Chingling and her two sisters were Soong Ailing and Soong Meiling. Although Sun and Soong sound similar, Soong is a differnt name altogether (宋) incidentally, Meiling was Chiang Kaishek‘s wife, Madame Chiang.

Despite being a feudal society until recent times, women kept their names after marriage. So the wife of the disgraced leader Bo

 

Xilai is Gu Kailai; rarely – but confusingly – called Bogu Kailai.
In places like Singapore and Hong Kong sometimes married women, esp business women, would keep their maiden name along with the husband’s surname, making it four names. Sort of like the British ‘double-

barrelled‘ surnames such as the actress Helene Bonham Carter.

Most Chinese who live in Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and other enclaves of Chinese emigrees tend to keep to the traditional way of naming.

Her Excellency Wu Yi, Vice Premier of the Peop...

But since the revolution in 1949 and especially since the Cultural Revolution in the 70s, many mainland Chinese have stopped using the generation name and use just one name after the surname such as Madame Wu Yi, retired senior leader who led China into the WTO and who managed the SARS crisis of early 2000s.

This causes huge problems for the authorities as, it is not uncommon, at roll call in school, several kids would raise their hands– for example – to Wang Ta (= Wang senior). The authorities are encouraging parents to revert to a middle name when naming their children.

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