The year 2009 was the year the innocent Chinese populace were forced into all kinds of things — the year when the average soul in a nation of 1.3 billion were coerced into doing one thing or the other that they probably wouldn’t have done if left to their own devices. The biggest news of the year: someone being forced into employment (被就业 in Chinese; in essence, being forced into a job with the paperwork done in secret, behind the backs of the victim without him or her ever knowing about this); the next biggest bit of “bad news” was the Railways Ministry, always a synonym here for poor service and bureaucratic arrogance, forcing people to high speed trains by cancelling regular service on railway lines where high speed lines already ran. (The few that were left in service — as in the regular lines — obviously weren’t enough to satisfy demand, rhetoric would have it.)
Those were cases of brutal leaders “up above”, but it seems like, with the action happening in South Africa, the average next-door (or next-bunk; read on) comrade seems to have just gone into “Force Others” mode as well. Twelve years ago, the France ’98 theme song was a mere question — Do You Mind If I Play? Today, in China, it’s a command — as in there are now reports that university students have turned on the TV volume so much that others who prefer to sleep and not watch have no choice but to tune in to the action — like it or not. The new hot-button word: “forced into watching football” (被看球).
While not exactly the latest cutting-edge bit of Web 2.0 news here, your tech blogger just wanted to let you in on a bit of the Bei (被) or by-force world here in China — remember, the Bei biz was coined by a buzzword on the Chinese-language interwebs.
