NDRC website (and the surprise)

by Lawrence Zhan Zhang on Thursday, February 24, 2011 at 1:24am

Upon seeing that NDRC (National Development and Reform Commission)'s website is "sdpc.gov.cn," my initial reaction was, come on, as one of the most powerful government agencies in China, don't you even have the resource to change the "p" to "r"? And with this erroneous and misleading URL you have been visited 87436790 times?? Monopolizers are too lazy to lift their fingers!

Then I typed in "sdrc.gov.cn," and oops, that's being taken by "ShunDe [City] RenCai (Human Resourse) Exchange Center," which belongs to the Shunde Human Resource and Social Security Bureau, some obscure local government department...the moral is totally different then. Interesting cybersquatting case. As bullying as the Chinese government often seems to outsiders, sometimes it's astonishingly benevolent.

Jie Zhu
Neither of your theories sounds right to me. First of all, if you are trying to type NDRC's URL without google it up, most likely you would type "ndrc.gov.cn," which actually does get you to NDRC's website. Thus the sdrc.gov.cn domain nam...e is of little use to NDRC's potential web visitors. Second, the NDRC used to be named "the State Development and Planning Commission." Hence the sdpc.gov.cn domain name, which was registered in 1999. In 2003 the Commission was renamed "the National Development and Reform Commission," and the ndrc.gov.cn domain name was registered in the same year. So the NDRC employees actually have been doing their job - they registered timely the domain name that corresponds to the Commission's new name and kept the old domain name for the users' convenience. Not all Chinese government employees are as diligent as they should be. But in this case the NDRC guys have been pretty professional.

It took me literally two minutes to look up all the above information. So the real moral of the story to me is: the web has made two acts easier than ever: publishing and fact-checking. But just like in the good old days, efforts in these two areas need to be balanced.

o
Lawrence Zhan Zhang
You are right. I was grossly negligent in my research -- or during breaks between my research, for that matter. I was actually suspecting that "p" stands for something else, but I was too quick to jump to conclusion at 1:30 in the wee hours......

And you are right that the web makes publishing way too easy. I used to blog on a regularly basis (and my blog gained a lot traction, I guess exactly because I've been a good and diligent fact-checker), and for this last semester of law school I blogged too little. So this urge to publish something a little longer than the word limit imposed by FB status updates has been simmering in my subconscious for a while.

There were some good materials that I've been longing to write about, like Lung Ying-tai's speech at Lincoln Center on Jan. 8; but that kind of article inevitably takes a longer time to compose.

I kind of surrendered to this long-suppressed urge to publish something. And this quick and convenient anecdote won out at that particular point.

So the real moral to me is: I should go to bed earlier...

Thanks for pointing out my error!

o
Lawrence Zhan Zhang
I am quite embarrassed that I rushed to publish something not well-researched; even if it's on Facebook where most people don't bother to publish serious stuff.

It just underscores how many biases are based on very simple factual mistakes --... and even someone like me who self-consciously devoted himself to minimizing factual-mistake-induced-biases across cultures, is not immune.

Or sometimes the draw of drama just overwhelms the vigilance for facts?

o
Jie Zhu
Very good points and don't be embarrassed. Web has made fact checking easier - but not easy. In fact, it may have made fact-checking in many areas much harder exactly because there are so many voices on the Web, some well researched and s...ome not. So most writers just give up fact-checking, which is really bad because an average reader on the Web has a very short attention span and thus less time to think about what they read. On the web, a serious writer (e.g., Nietzsche and Russell) would never have a chance to win more eyeballs or even hearts than those sensational but senseless writers (e.g., Lung Ying-tai).