This week I was heckled for my lazy pronunciation of shui3jiao3, “boiled dumplingâ€, which apparently sounded more like shui4jiao4, “to sleepâ€, making the restaurant name Grandma’s Dumplings, sound something like Grandma is sleeping. This mistake is another example (as if anyone needed more) of the importance of tones in Mandarin. For non-native speakers, Chinese can …Read More
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
Most expats in China have likely run across Yang Rui while flipping through all one channels of English-language programming. The host of CCTV 9’s desperately dry Dialogue, Yang has a disposition that is as unforgettable as it is annoying. Dialogue has been likened to a Larry King Live-style talk show, whereby Yang interviews various guests …Read More
To help relieve a drought in Northern China, the gov’t induced snow by seeding the clouds over the capital with silver oxide. Some Beijing residents are using the rare flake fall to take part in classic winter activities – with not so classic designs. From the photographer, Scott Sykes (blog): “People are relieved and happy. …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
From the photographer (blog): “A pair of teenage girls watches a snake show at the Ditan Park Spring Festival temple fair in Beijing.” NOTE: The original photo of the week has been changed, as it was pointed out in the comments that it wasn’t actually taken in China – heavy sleuthing guys. It’s still an …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
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