WWW.CND.ORG

Reviewed  by

Peter Tong

Some years ago, the book "The Whole Earth Catalog" was quite popular in the States for a period of time. In essence, it was a detailed review of all the available literature at that time in the US deemed helpful to our lives by the authors. For example, one of the articles was on the selection of cutlery. It advised that a best all-around choice for the kitchen was a hard carbon steel chef knife. This type of steel rusts and stains easily if you don’t keep it dry. It also becomes dull after some amount of use. But this kind of knife is very easy to sharpen. Guess what? I have half a dozen kitchen knives at home. In the last eighteen years, the one that gets use most regularly is the very inexpensive high carbon chef knife.

Nowadays, the current rage is the INTERNET. Supposedly, you can find anything and everything on the NET if you know the URL. If you don’t, YAHOO and EXCITE etc. is ready to help. Sometimes, a little too ready. The last time I asked YAHOO about travel in Europe, it returned 11,000 articles on the subject. No joke. I wish I can live long enough to read them..

While there is much stuff on the NET, to find the good stuff on any subject is a challenge. Often, a big challenge that is beyond any of us. Of course, there are review articles in magazines about the cool and useful sites all the time. I read them often. Even so, most of the review articles are very brief and seldom specific. For example, MICROSOFT EXPEDIA was one of the travel recommendations in one of my PC magazines. However, the writing is so brief that it is simply impossible to find what is on the site without spending a lot of time on the site. It is like advising you to visit Washington, DC without mentioning the Smithsonian, the White House or the Cherry Blossom Festival.

So, why can’t we start our own WEB site review? When we find something interesting or useful, we can put the URL on our surf list just like we are doing now but beyond that, write a few paragraphs about what is on the site and where to go when we get there. And to start this off, I shall review here the site www.cnd.org. You remember a couple of months ago, Charles Kao wanted a Chinese calendar. When I went looking, I discovered there are many types of calendars in existence. Most of them seem to base on the lunar cycle. It is not clear what the differences are among the lunar calendars but they are not the same as the Chinese calendar. After visiting a few of these sites, I eventually found the site www.cnd.org. There, I found the calendar that I was looking for and a calendar converter. The site is now on our surf list. By the way, our own list growing rapidly.

A few days later, I revisited the site and did some more looking around. I discovered that ‘cnd’ is short for China News Digest. It is organized by a number of Chinese volunteers in the United States. Of all places, its home based is in Gaithersburg, MD, only ten miles from my home. The key item of this site is not the calendar or the calendar converter. Instead, they are a twice weekly Chinese news summary, a weekly news magazine and occasional feature interviews with prominent Chinese personalities. For example, recently there is an interview with Iris Chang , the author of "The Rape of Nanking". Most of the news is from PRC but it also has news from ROC and Hong Kong. The news is in summary form but the interviews seem quite extensive.

As with most things on INTERNET, cnd.org is changing too. When I first found the site, it was mostly black-and-white and text oriented. These days, it spots a new multi-color GUI. The basic material on the site is still text oriented. Only the interface has changed. Even so, some of the items are now harder to get to while others are easier. There is more color. The table of content is found on the opening page with links to the details. The extended index of the more lasting subjects such as the calendar is found on the bottom of the home page in table form. You can get there by selecting ‘infobase’ or just scrolling down. Many of the topics in this section should be of interest to us. I’ll give you a run down on these topics in a minute. But first thing first. On one of the visits, I downloaded a picture of Gong-Li from the site. I did not know who Gong-Li was at that time and I did not know why her picture was there. But, here is the picture.

Now on to the regular cnd features.

Calendar: This is the Chinese Calendar page which led me to the site in the first place.

Fairbank Chinese Library at Harvard: This consists just a link to that famous library.

Chinese Classics: On this page, I found considerable classical Chinese literature in electronic form. You need a Chinese reader like NJSTAR or AsianViewer to read it. You will find Book of Poems, Four Books, Tao Te Ching in here. You will also find the complete Three Hundred Poems from Tang Dynasty and Dream of the Red Chamber. Of more recent vintage, there are novels by Lao Shun and his contemporaries.

More Recent Chinese Literature: Here, I found writings by authors of our time. Not very extensive. This may change in time but then it may not. In the US, a book is copyrighted for fifty years.

Scenery of China: There is an extensive collection of scenic pictures from famous locations in China. The quality is not that good. I’ve seen much better pictures in book form.

Match-Making: This section contains self introductions of men and women looking for husbands and wives. I scan some of the entries. There are no pictures. From the descriptions, I don’t know how one can decide who would be suitable unless the chief concern is the candidate’s home town.

Reading and Writing Chinese: This segment contains an extensive collection of articles on how to read and write Chinese. Some of the articles appear to be written specifically for this site. After scanning a few of these, they confirm my impression that reading Chinese is relatively easy. Writing Chinese is an entirely different story. What is unusual here are articles on the different ways of coding Chinese, BIG5, GB, etc. If you have any interest on these codes, you may find this a good place to start.

Tax: I was surprised to find a page here on US income tax. The information seems spotty and outdated. Some articles dated back to 1993, 1994 and earlier. This page does not appear to be too useful.

Overall, this site is worth a visit. As I said, it is manned by volunteers much like our own. I don’t know if the organizers have any kind of political agenda but I suspect most of the authors were originally from mainland China. In one of the pages, there is a solicitation for monetary contributions and other kinds of help. There are also a few advertisements here and there.