The Sticker Wars: WeChat’s creatives go up against Line (updated)

February 5, 2014 by Jason Li

ICYMI, the background for this story:

“Line” is a chat app for iOS/Android.
It’s from Japan.
It sells different sets of stickers, well-illustrated emoticons.
Line is probably the first chat app to find a booming revenue model. (See TNW.)
Other…

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Book Review: My First Trip to China: Scholars, Diplomants and Journalists Reflect on their First Encounters with China

January 28, 2014 by Jason Li

FirstTripToChina

My First Trip to China houses a collection of accounts from early, foreign visitors to China about their first impressions of the country as it was slowly opening up in the 70s and 80s. Each account is separate from one another, though the writers are predominantly North American and academic in some shape or fashion.

Because each account…

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Father-child reality TV show also a hit in China

December 30, 2013 by Jason Li

Where Are We Going, Dad? (爸爸去哪儿) is a reality TV show starring celebrity fathers and their kids, the latest Korean import that’s a huge hit in China. In it, father-child duos compete with one another on tasks assigned by show organizers. We get to watch as awkward fathers try their hand at parenting, a practice that, in China and in South Korea, typically…

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Behind the Scene at the Toy Factories of China

December 3, 2013 by Jason Li

I stumbled across this imgur the other day that featuring photographer Michael Wolf’s work on Chinese Factory Workers & the Toys They Make:

Cheat Sheet for Hardware Startup Accelerators

November 10, 2013 by Jason Li

Here’s the link to the original Google spreadsheet. Please feel free edit! 🙂

* * *

What’s interesting about the data above is that there are two programs that criss cross China, and a bunch that don’t:

HAXL8R starts in Shenzhen and does their final demo day in San…

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Documenting the Toishan-US migration

October 24, 2013 by Jason Li

From Kickstarter:

I need your support to return to Toishan, China, and complete my photographic and historical documentary project tying together my family history and the larger story of the Chinese-American diaspora and emigration abroad.

Over the next several years, I will spend six to twelve months in China, photographing and interviewing Toishanese…

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Phone maker Xiaomi’s incredibly charismatic (and trilingual) Twitter account

October 17, 2013 by Jason Li

Much has been stated about Xiaomi as the rising star in China that’s making premium-but-affordable phones with its own UI for Android. But it seems like they’re also a formidable force on social media.

The tweets below come from their official account:

…

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Hong Kong’s First Online Petitions Platform

October 14, 2013 by Jason Li

Full disclosure: I worked on the design for this project.

Online petition platforms have taken off in the English speaking world, but what about a Chinese petition platform? In the US and UK, the government both run official petition platforms (remember the Death Star petition to the White House?) and there are a whole…

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Watch This Super Cute Animated Intro to Alibaba’s Personal Finance Product

September 30, 2013 by Jason Li

It’s pretty great. First, it pokes fun at how people are told to save and not spend. Then it introduces their product which allows people to save AND spend from the higher-than-usual interest rates if customers put their savings there.

Check out Alibaba’s Yuebao 余额宝 for yourself.

The Long-list King of China Bloggers Returns

September 16, 2013 by Jason Li

When I first started blogging about China, Roland Soong’s EastSouthWestNorth was an essential destination for any China watchers at the time. This was back in 2005. A former media analyst, and now heir to some formidable Chinese-literary estates, Soong would translate page-long excerpts from multiple newspapers and magazines about the same “suddenly breaking incident.” Then he would throw in a few terse…

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八八吧 · 88 Bar

Author: Jason Li