Election Cartogram

You know what this is? No, it's not an acid fever dream, nor is it the album cover of Pink Floyd's new release. It's also not Cobra Commander after being hit by a steam roller. What is though is a cartogram of the USA organized by voting districts. What we saw on November fourth looked something like this:






With the cartogram, made by a guy named Mark Newman, this same data is reorganized so that the states are resized by population, and then are colored red and blue, not just by the color of the state that voted, but by the voting districts within each state. To make it an even more accurate demonstration of how America voted, the voting districts are colored not just red or blue, but shades of purple depending on how many votes the red republicans or blue democrats got.

If you look closely you'll notice that the map has these large splotches of blue outlined by swaths of red. This is because cities that are geographically small but densely populated tended towards democrat while the geographically large but sparsely populated rural areas voted more republican.

The cartograms were made by Mark Newman under a Creative Commons license. Please check out his website for a more comprehensive explanation.

Voting in China

Yesterday the American Chamber of Commerce in Guangzhou had an event in the China Hotel to commemorate election day. I got up early and went, expecting to see 30-40 Americans huddled around a TV drinking coffee and waiting for Obama to win. The even turned out to be slightly bigger than that with a ballroom, two big screen projection systems, brochures on Amcham and a full breakfast buffet. There were also hundreds of Chinese people curious about what this whole democracy thing was about.

One projection system was feeding live coverage of CNN while the other one had a map of America showing which states had fallen to which party. There was also a map of the electoral college with Amcham staff explaining the electoral college system to curious Chinese onlookers. Probably the biggest demographic attending were college students, but businessmen, teachers and curious onlookers who happened to be at the hotel that morning were there as well.

In a nice touch, there was even a drawing for a round-trip ticket to the US in the form of election participation. Entering the drawing took the form of a polling station, where contestants got to chance to 'vote' for who they felt would win the election and then drop their entry into a ballot box. There were even pins for the candidates and "I Voted" stickers.

I went in front of the polling station with a friend of mine and, in an attempt to simulate a real election day experience, tried to disenfranchise a Chinese voter by asking for her passport, explaining she had to fill out a sheet in another room and come back, and told here that the contest was called off and she'll have to wait till tomorrow to enter. When she started to become frustrated, confused and then angry I tried to explain that was joking and trying to "disenfranchise" her and that there were people really doing this at polling stations in America. This made here more confused. I didn't know how to say disenfranchise in Chinese, but I have a feeling that even if I did, it wouldn't of helped. She wasn't very impressed with my experiment and pushed me aside to vote for her plane ticket.

As one of the few real Americans there, I was confronted by many curious Chinese about who I voted for, what I thought about the two candidates, how did I feel about a black man becoming president and whether or not there would be any contention, recounting, or even civil war if the race became too close. Most people were also a bit confused by the big screen on which was projected a map of the US with red, blue and brown states each populated with a number and then a score in the corner. What does Obama 195 and McCain 69 mean? Where's the popular vote? I helped explain the confusing electoral college system to about a dozen different parties over the course of the morning and how it relates to the popular vote, poll station closings, the population of states and different time zones in the US (there's just one time zone in China). Some were disappointed that the election wasn't just determined by the popular vote.

Most of the Chinese I talked to were Obama supporters, but there was a McCain fan here and there. When Obama was announced the victor the group of by then 500 onlookers erupted in applause, apparently they were pretty pleased with the decision.

My Chinese colleagues and friends all had eyes on the elction, but not all Chinese cared about it. On the way home from dinner the next day I mentioned to the cab driver that America has a new president and asked how he felt about. "American's president doesn't have anything to do with me, I'm just a Chinese cab driver," he said "It's not like I can drive this taxi to America! Maybe if I could then I'd care about the president, but I can't."

Vocab: Disenfranchise - 剥夺...公民权

Trip to Sichuan Day 1

October 1 was Chinese National day so that meant a week off of work and trip with some friends. We set off for southern Sichuan, and thanks to some research on some Chinese travel blogs we found a place that wasn't severely affected by the May 12 earthquake and wasn't a tourist hotspot.

Kangding 康定

We wanted avoid one of the tourism hotspots because when a country of 1.3 billion takes their fall break simultaneously, with year on year double digit increases in tourism and economic growth that gives more people some cash to travel, you quickly run out of places that haven't been overun by tour groups. A lot of my friends go to southeast asia to travel, and some don't go on vacation at all just to avoid the hastle, which is unfortunate, since there are plenty of great places to visit in this country.

The first stop was Kangding, a small city in southwest Sichuan about seven hours from Chengdu. The place is almost entirely ethnic Tibetan and the people are devoutly religious. Unlike many parts of China you don't have to buy a ticket to enter temples and the temples and monestaries are occupied by actual monks and buddhist practitioners. It's sad, but many buddhist and taoist templest in east and south China have become tourist destinations only, and have lost their religious meaning. Places like this were effected by communism and the Cultural Revolution just like the rest of China, but there beliefs and practices are still going strong.

Wild mushrooms for sale

In a temple courtyard

We started off in Kangding, but then went on for a three day hike around Yala Mt, and then hung out in a really cool little place called Danba for a day. I'm going to try to update my blog with the rest of the trip, but if you like the pics, check out my flickr stream.

Surf the Web Like Your in China!

At last, now all of my friends can have the same, filtered experience we all do in China! There's already a nice plug-in called the gladder (Great Ladder) that allows all of us within the great firewall of Chinese censorship to view our favorite censored websites, but what about all of those people outside the firewall? What about all of those people, some of them Chinese even, that aren't protected by their government's censorship devices? How can they learn to determine what's right and what's wrong? Who's to tell them what the difference between Province of Taiwan and the Republic of China is? How will they know that "Dalai Lama's fight for cultural atonomy" is actually a euphemism for "Dalamai clique separatist terrorists"? And in the worst case, they may even stumble upon some unfiltered blogger that's expressing dissatisfaction for the way the glorious Party has been guiding the country.

Well now all of those outside of China no need to live in fear, or knowledge for that matter. Thanks to a new firefox plugin called China Channel those outside of country can now experience websurfing under the protection and watchful eye of big red brother with all 'inappropriate content' automatically censored out. Welcome to slow, censored web browsing.