Age-Related Digital Divide during the COVID-19 Pandemic in China

China has adopted a variety of digital technologies to effectively combat the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic. The massive utilisation of digital technologies, however, to a great extent, magnifies the age-related digital divide. This paper aims to examine the impacts of the age-related digital divide on older adults in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Cases of three age-related digital divide scenarios, including older people taking public transportation, seeking medical care, as well as conducting digital transactions, are collected from Chinese official news outlets. The results indicate that the COVID-19 pandemic accelerates the pace of digital technology utilisation but exacerbates the age-related digital divide. Such an age-related digital divide has largely excluded older adults from both the real society and the virtual society. Older adults’ personal attitudes and motivations, as well as education and income, governmental policies, and family and social supports, are all major contributors to the severe impacts of the age-related digital divide on old adults during the pandemic. More measures should be adopted to bridge the age-related digital divide and build a senior-friendly e-society.

Cremation Based Estimates Suggest Significant Under- and Delayed Reporting of COVID-19 Epidemic Data in Wuhan and China

Objective:China’s COVID-19 statistics fall outside of recognized and accepted medical norms. Here we estimated the incidence, death and starting time of the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan and China based on cremation related information. Methods: Data sources included literature on COVID-19 in China, official Chinese government figures, and media reports. A range of estimates is presented by an exponential growth rate model. Results:For the cumulative infections and total deaths, under different assumptions of case fatality rates (from 2.5% to 10%) and doubling time 6.4 days, the estimates projected on February 7, 2020 in Wuhan range from 305,000 to 1,272,000 for infections and from 6,811 to 7,223 for deaths - on the order of at least 10 times the official figures (13,603 and 545). The implied starting time of the outbreak is October 2019. The estimates of cumulative deaths, based on both funeral urns distribution and continuous full capacity operation of cremation services up to March 23, 2020, give results around 36,000, more than 10 times of the official death toll of 2,524. Conclusions:Our study indicates a potential significant under- and delayed reporting in Chinese official data on the COVID-19 epidemic in Wuhan in early February, 2020.

Purple Ruins

Symbolic reconstruction of “purple ruins”—the abandoned ruins of traditional Tibetan buildings, monasteries, temples, and old manors of the aristocracy—has become one of the main topics of Tibetan Sinophone dissident writer Tsering Woeser. Her effort to preserve them not so much as testimonies of the glorious Tibetan past, but rather of the dark chapters of modern Tibetan history and as an indictment of Chinese rule in Tibet, has intensified during the last decade with the surge of commercialization and increase in mass tourism—trends that are rapidly changing the face of Tibet and the urban landscape of Lhasa. In her book Purple Ruins (Jianghong se de feixu), published in January 2017 in Taiwan, Tsering Woeser has combined a subjective perspective (poems, personal memories, interviews, etc.) with “folk tales” (minjian gushi) including legends, oral histories, and gossip, and with historical material. While reconstructing the image of both the “old” and the “new” Tibet in her book, she contests the official Chinese representations and narratives of Tibet, Tibetan history, and Tibetan culture, appropriating postcolonial theories to reinterpret Chinese imperial/colonial endeavors in Tibet from past to present. The aim of this paper is to examine how Tsering Woeser engages with the complexities of official Chinese representations of Tibet in an attempt to (re) construct the missing parts of modern Tibetan history that have been concealed or even intentionally erased by the Chinese official discourse and to (re)construct modern Tibetan identity against the background of the dominant Chinese culture and ideology.

Einfluss von Kultur und Fachdenken auf offizielle Tourismus-Reports

Governments and official organizations usually publish their tourism reports in print or online to provide information about the current status or future tendencies in the tourism industry. These special-purpose texts are tied to the cultural values of their respective states. Therefore, the contrastive analysis of these texts from different countries allows us to determine the differences in language conventions and to perceive the cultural-cognitive differences reflected in them. This corpus-based study conducts an interlingual-contrastive investigation of German and Chinese tourism reports. Both qualitative and quantitative analyses are employed to answer the following questions: 1) What are the differences between the language conventions of German and Chinese official tourism reports; 2) How are these interlingual differences characterized by cultural and socio-cognitive perspectives?