|
Advertising and Marketing
Characters in the public interestPosted by Joel Martinsen, December 13, 2006 8:00 AM
Exhortations to "write standard characters" appear on banners and billboards throughout Beijing. This clever full-page spread in The Beijing News on Tuesday announces itself as a "public service advertisement," (公益广告), only the composer has mistakenly replaced "public welfare" (公益) with the homophone "justice" (公义), [and his editor has called him on it]. The copy (click the image for the full thing) reads:
An image of the list of one-hundred misused characters is here; errors are in red and corrections are in parentheses. The characters are judged according to the 5th edition of the Dictionary of Modern Chinese, published by The Commercial Press, so there may be more wrong with the "public service advertisement" line than just a mistaken character. Links and Sources
|
Partner Links
Jobs in China
Recent Comments
大门牙 on
Blockages
Joel Marti on
Chengdu bus fire blamed on 62-year-old suicidal gambler
vivian on
Bound feet in China
Sajid on
China first police blog
China Media Timeline
Major media events over the last three decades
Danwei Model Workers
![]() Recommended blogs and new media
Books on China
Foreign journalists in China, from the Opium Wars to Mao : Paul French, author of a book on Carl Crow has written a book about the lives and exploits of foreign journalists reporting from China from the 1820s to 1949.
Earnshaw Books' Tales of Old Peking: Tales from Old Peking is available from Earnshaw Books, and like its sister, Tales from Old Shanghai is a book of fragments of information about periods, events or places in Beijing's history, collaging together pictures and text about eunuchs, concubines, the Lama Temple, Opium Wars, art, emperors, and a miscellany of other interesting topics
Henry F. Pringle's "Bridge House Survivor": Pringle was imprisoned by Japanese forces from October 1942 to August 1945, and Bridge House Survivor, available from Earnshaw Books, is his harrowing account of torture under the Japanese.
Front Page of the Day
A different newspaper every weekday
From the Vault
Classic Danwei posts
+ A short interview with Muzi Mei (2004.02): Danwei interviews Muzi Mei + CCTV vs. classic movies (2006.03): A rundown of several pastiches of Chinese movies appearing online as 大史记 - "The Year That Was". Some from CCTV, others not. With links to video. + Street hawker cries of Beijing (2006.12): Yang Changhe demonstrates hawker's cries in a video shot by Muzimei.
Danwei Archives
Danwei Feeds
Via Feedsky
or Feedburner |






Comments on Characters in the public interest
Did you add the correct character (益), or was it already there in the original ad?
I mean, was it an intentional mistake to point out how silly it can look, or did they actual print the add with the wrong character accidentally?
Hmm...you're right, that's not very clear. The image is all original. I'll make a clarification.