Friday, January 1, 2010

The Joys of Baidu Baike

Baidu is billed as a home-grown Chinese Google, and given that Google here is almost laughably prone to sudden, mid-query failure, it is by and large the search engine of choice for China's savvy young Netizens. For me at least, their most noticeable difference is that while Google often pulls up Wikipedia within its top 5-10 search results, Baidu summons its own (mostly) user-edited reference work called Baidu Baike.

Recently, I used Baidu Baike to find a Chinese perspective on the music of the Qiang people. Living primarily in northwestern Sichuan, the Qiang lost over 10% of their population in the earthquake last May, which has, according to state media, spurred a massive, government-funded cultural preservation effort.

No mention of preservation, but I did find this:

"Called "Lana" or "Lasuo" in the Qiang language, [Qiang mountain songs] are mostly sung during manual labor and in mountain fields, with relatively free rhythm... Their traditional lyrics used to express much hardship, reflecting the bitter lives of Qiang people in their old society. After 1949 [the founding of the PRC], the Qiang people rewrote many of their songs so they could sing new mountain songs for their new lives." (My own shoddy translation).

There's something wrong here. Claiming that the Qiang rewrote their songs after 1949 strikes me as heavy-handed, as if someone were to unequivocally claim that American slaves rewrote their songs after Lincoln. The way I'd like to see it, 1) when people are sad, they sing sad songs; when they're happy, they sing happy songs; and 2) in most musical traditions, songs exist for both occasions, which is why we don't have to rewrite them every time the wind turns.

Of course, the communists engaged in a lot of minority folk song collecting/rewriting themselves... but the Netizens must not have been informed.

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