As a blogger in the China expat niche you tend to make a lot of fast friends, as we’re all sort of in this together. The downside is most of those friends are better known for their avatars than their actualities. Fortunately there are events like the one this Saturday (February 28) at M1NT in …Read More
It’s the Irresistible Force meets the Immovable Object. Apple, the Californian electronics firm, and China Mobile, the state-owned telecommunications giant, have been locked in a slow, secretive, yet embittered year-long struggle to release and control Apple’s iPhone in mainland China. By “control†I refer to both revenue from user contracts/subscriptions, as well as to the …Read More
The Mandarin Oriental Hotel, what upon opening this year would have been one of Beijing’s most exclusive and luxurious hotels, lit up like a, well, like a lantern tonight while the rest of the country celebrated Lantern Festival. Proving again the newsability of Twitter, the story broke online as it happened, with videos appearing on …Read More
An American group by the name of the National Labor Committee (NLC) has just released a shocking in-depth report on working and living conditions for factory workers in one particular ‘hi-tech’ plant in Dongguan, southern China, which makes computer keyboards for Lenovo, HP, Dell, IBM, and Microsoft. The deeply alarming report was compiled after months …Read More
A couple weeks back I wrote a rather exhaustive (at least for me) post for CNET Asia titled “Human flesh search engines — crowd-sourcing ‘justice’“. In it I called the human flesh search engines a “rather uniquely Chinese phenomenon”. I’d like to rescind that statement. Rather, I’d like to adjust it to say a “rather …Read More
We have come for various reasons, in a variety of guises from different places, with the educations and habits of our homelands as guides in our judgment of the world. We interpret what we find here, in the peerless republic of China, according to standards and assumptions formed in distant cauldrons of human experience and …Read More
This past week, while many people were out celebrating the Spring Festival holiday, I was stuck in my apartment with a disease I might fairly compare to demon possession in terms of severity. The upside of this condition was that I got to spend a lot of quality time listening to, watching, and being startled …Read More
Got my copy of Charter 08, bilingual, with the names of 300 supporters affixed. At the very least it is food for thought and fodder for conversation and that can go a long way in a country where words, printed, spoken, recorded, sculpted, etched, molded, callagraphised, stamped, blasted, tatooed, broadcast and fired like blazing arrows into the throng are …Read More
It’s been a long time since I’ve felt the need to criticize this nation with such a blanket statement as “grow up China”, but in watching and reading the country’s reaction to Obama coming to office – I can think of nothing more relevant to say. I’ve spent the last year looking at China as …Read More
It is said that an individual’s fears can be seen in what they spend their life avoiding and evading. As for governments, their fears are exposed in what they censor, and yesterday’s Inauguration speech by the new US president Barack Obama (wow, it feels good to type that for the first time ever) seems to …Read More
China’s wildly popular IM service has “quietly” launched a new portal focused on the international market – IMQQ.com. According to a post on Mobinode: “An email sent from an insider, reveals that Tencent has just quietly launched its international portal for QQ, IMQQ.com where you can find all the English information you need to try …Read More
According to an article at Caijing, Shanghai’s rapid development may be causing the city to sink into the sea. Built on what is largely sandy marshland, according to the Shanghai Institute of Geology, the city has sunk more than two metres in the past 40 years. This sinking is believed to be connected to the …Read More
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