I was excited about chinese.stackexchange.com when I first learned of it. I admit that I have since become less excited by it. It seems to me that many knowledgeable, expert users we have attracted have been chased away by users whose questions and answers are plagued by pedanticism, ineptitude, and laziness. Unfortunately, it will be difficult to attract higher quality contributors when a new visitor's first impression is of amateurishness and imprecision. (Take a look at the current front page and ask yourself whether such material really represents what we'd like this site to become.)
Our beta was doing fairly well when it first began; now it appears to be flagging (in terms of daily questions asked, daily visits, and user participation). Publicity efforts can only be so effective when the quality of our current content is low.
I believe that we need to think seriously about how we can use moderation policies to encourage better questions and answers. I know that one of our moderators has been encouraging community members to "vote to close" more regularly. I think that this is a good step, but it might also be useful to adopt stricter guidelines for questions in the first place.
What do you think? Do you think we need to be more aggressive about closing bad questions (and downvoting bad answers)? I see the argument that we should encourage participation as much as possible, but I also find it frustrating when the participation we do encourage is markedly deficient (as is sometimes the case now, I believe).
Perhaps I'm interested in this site becoming something that it's not. But I also am committed to seeing it be as good and as useful as it can be.