[tokenadult]

I see the comments in this thread (several of them) are going off on the issue of the author's description of the 被 construction as "passive voice." It really isn't. The author was writing for an English-speaking audience and tried to make an analogy to something familiar to English speakers. But the Chinese language actually doesn't have the category of voice in its verbal system at all, and the 被 construction is better described as an "adversative" construction. I learned this from the authoritative Chinese grammar textbook by the late Chinese linguist Y. R. Chao while an undergraduate student of Chinese.

In Chinese in the most recent century, mistranslation of Western writings with passive voice constructions by the 被 construction (whether or not the Western passive constructions have an adversative meaning) tempts a lot of casual observers to suppose that today's Chinese uses 被 simply as a marker of passive voice. But I have many times tried out, as part of personal linguistic fieldwork, newly composed sentences that use 被 as a straight-up translation of normally grammatical sentences in English, and the Chinese sentences are regarded as ungrammatical unless the 被 construction can plausibly be construed as adversative.

(I just Googled for a good Web reference about this, but didn't find one quite to my satisfaction.)

[xiaoma]

Yeah, it's pretty messy. 被 is usually but not always adverse. And while 被 is the most common, there are at least half a dozen possible passive markers such as 讓,弄,給,叫,據說, etc... The topic comment construction of Chinese further complicates things, since it's very common for passive constructions to lack any passive marker at all.

For example:

The article has been finished. 文章寫好了.

The meeting has been postponed until Monday. 會議延到星期一舉行.

[nandemo]

Couldn't you say it's adversative passive? What about this?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_voice#Adversative_passi...

(it happens to inaccurate in respect to Japanese, since the mentioned indirect passive is not always adversative)