China’s digital underdogs

March 31, 2011 by Jason Li

Tricia Wang just posted her presentation from SXSW called “睡在网吧 [Sleeping at the Internet Bar] The Next 300 Million Chinese Users.” It has some great insights on the fringe community of migrants around China and how they are adamantly connected. Tricia observes that these migrants spent lots of time in internet bars/cafes because they’re cheap and because they can connect…

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Chinese Mothers are Forced to be Tiger Moms

March 22, 2011 by Jason Li

My Country My People translates a great article from China’s Southern Weekly. My favorite points:

In Sun Yat-Sen University Professor Feng Zengjun’s view, the core of American education is freedom, which “levels up excellent ones, but also brings down lazy ones”. Thus, it’s easy to understand why Americans perform poorly on average scores but succeed in cultivating…

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Female technicians progress in China

March 12, 2011 by Jason Li

Al Jazeera celebrates International Women’s Day by interviewing Baidu’s VP of search, Ms Wang Mengqiu. Includes a bunch of nice shots of the Baidu complex.

(Via Danwei.)

Tencent buys into Groupon’s secret sauce

March 10, 2011 by Jason Li

Tencent, the company known for its ubiquitous and domineering IM (or QQ) client in China, has partnered up with the American Groupon to launch its China branch. The resulting site is called GaoPeng 高朋 and takes on the Groupon look and feel:

As we reported back in 2006 (under our old moniker Virtual China), the internet…

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Shanghai + one-dog policy

March 10, 2011 by Jason Li

From BBC News:

From May a one-dog policy will be introduced, and more than 600,000 unlicensed dogs will be declared illegal. The new regulation has been the subject of long and heated debate among the city’s lawmakers.

Last year more than 140,000 people told police they had been bitten by an unlicensed dog. There are four times…

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The rise of technocrats in China

March 2, 2011 by Jason Li

From Quora:

Why do Chinese political leaders have engineering degrees whereas their American counterparts have law degrees?

My favorite answer, from Frank Yu:

Communism and central planning has in many ways skewed the career progression for generations of Chinese citizens. Very much like the former Soviet Union, early communist doctrine…

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八八吧 · 88 Bar

Month: March 2011