A very smart, balanced, readable report, “How Much Inequality can China Stand?” has just been issued by Nick Young at China Development Brief.  The report relies on Chinese scholarly and government data to give a succinct summary of some of the key areas of inequality in China today: gender, income (including intra-rural inequality), access to basic services and…

Continue readingpolitical sustainability of Chinese inequality

Jay Dautcher alerted me to the current number one video on Google Video.  It’s been seen over 280,000 times, almost 100,000 of those in the last 24 hours.  It’s a 77 minute video called The Rape of Nanking (Nightmare in Nanking), originally produced in English by a Dr. Rhawn Joseph and his Brainmind organization, and now voiced over…

Continue readingtop google video: sensationalist “Rape of Nanking”

Check out the great article on Tao Ran’s Beijing military hospital Internet addiction clinic in the Washington Post yesterday.  It’s the best inside description I’ve seen yet.  One thing it does is highlight the pressure Chinese kids are under to perform academically in middle and high school, the pressure Chinese parents feel to ensure their children’s future success, and the perception that the…

Continue readingcreating successful children: no Internet?

It’s hard to take care of the public commons with a population 4 times the size of the U.S. This is especially obvious when you have hundreds of millions people mixing and milling across the country, going home, and taking vacations during their Spring Festival holidays. Often times it’s not the big issues that make a difference, but the
small things that can make…

Continue readingSpring Festival: 小处不可随便 don’t forget the small things

Jay Dautcher writes: I typed http://www.google.cn.com/ into the URL by accident, check out what
you get – Shenzhen call girls!

The desire to communicate across linguistic barriers is driving a lot of experimentation in the online world.  While we wait for translation software to improve, people around the world are studying Chinese in order to get closer to the Chinese people, and Chinese are studying English.  Virtual environments are starting to provide platforms for Chinese and others to learn from one another.  Here are a…

Continue readinglanguage learning drives virtual China experiments

Seeing Youtube from Chinese eyes, this video about Xu Jinglei and her blog traffic is being hailed as an example of “China’s first company to use Youtube for advertising.”  Donews has an article which discusses Youtube as a platform for promoting Chinese businesses to overseas audiences.  The video was posted on Feb. 7 by a Chinese fan and has been viewed…

Continue readingYoutube: ad venue for Chinese business

Having lived many years in Beijing, I’m partial to northern China in the winter (I realize it may be an acquired taste!).  Two photoblogs, one from Dalian and one from Xi’an, start to convey the flavor of the bare branches, straight avenues, steam rising from roadside food vendors, bundled up pedestrians, smell of coal, and blue skies of a northern Chinese winter in the city.…

Continue readingnorthern China in winter

China IT community Donews has an opinion piece by blogger Guo Yanjing called "If Myspace wants to succeed, it shouldn’t act like an outsider", that I quite like.  It gives you a sense of what some of the debates are in the Chinese online world regarding Myspace in China.  It also reveals some of what makes it so…

Continue readingon MySpace “localization”

Yesterday I came across a Tianya BBS forum called Tianya Myself 天涯真我 (Roland Soong of ESWN translated it as True Self Community Forum…I’m just using the Chinglish version from the website itself). It’s the place where February Girl first posted her photos, and I guess what I’m writing about here is just the latest version of that: pretty girls…

Continue readingBBS girls: mainstream voyeurism