“The Ningbo City Managaers Welcome You!”

The ongoing experimentation in online governance and bureaucratic transparency continues. It would be interesting to do a comparison between municipal management department websites in China and elsewhere, to see what the categories of information are.  Ningbo’s site has news such as the prosecution of an illegal construction project, or the announcement of…

Continue readingChinese urban life: city management online

QQ号为什么值钱？“Why are QQ numbers worth money?” is the title of a December 4 article in the Fan Group’s Computer Fans《电脑爱好者》 .  What kinds of QQ numbers are considered the best? How is the value of numbers calculated?  The anonymous author sheds some light on these and other questions, with the caveat…

Continue readingmarket value of virtual QQ assets

MaryAnn O’Donnell continues her clear-eyed thinking about the land and people of Shenzhen and Guangdong province, at her blog Shenzhen Fieldnotes.

If you want to know how Chinese addresses work and how to parse China’s various administrative naming practices–if you want to know more about the kinds of places that drive the southern China manufacturing miracle–read her post “emplacements…

Continue readingon Chinese addresses and what a township is

Link. It’s a great collection.  Most of the photos speak for themselves, but a few riff on Chinese political or religious images, or college student experiences such as mandatory military camp (see third photo below).

The IT news site cnbeta has this clip on it today, from China Daily: “Purifying National Culture: Iran Shuts Down Popular Websites”. The Guardian reports on the story here: Iranian government has blocked access to a wide range of sites, from the New York Times to Amazon, Youtube to Wikipedia and the BBC’s Farsi service.  The China Daily…

Continue readingChinese on Iranian web censorship

What are Chinese video viewers watching?  “Her First Time”
她第一次做鸡 can currently be found on Youtube-esque sites across Virtual China.  Since being posted on Nov. 12 it’s been viewed over 444,444 times on Mofile, one of the top sites, for instance. 

It opens with a young couple and a voice-over in a high-pitched…

Continue readingChinese adolescent humor: “Her First Time” video clip

A tour of 50 photos that “testify to the real life of the peasants over the last 50 years” has been put together by a blogger and reposted on Tianya BBS.  It’s got many great pictures, though unfortunately there are no specific dates or origins on them.  For instance:

Members of a people’s commune put on Mao buttons together

…

Continue readingFrom the BBS: 50 photos, 50 years of peasant life

Number two on a Baidu search for 农民网 is Jiangsu’s Modern Peasant 现代农民, a site run by the provincial committee for implementing a policy called "万名科技专家兴农富民工程" — can’t quite understand it, but something like "Scientific Experts Promoting Rural Wealth and Rural Projects."  It’s a government site listing current policies, meetings, and projects.  Not much human interest here.

The next is…

Continue readingpeasant webs 2

(Via ChineseInternetResearch)       Quacor.com — “The world first website for copyright movie absolutely free!” launched last weekend in Beijing.  You can download everything from Minority Report to Pepsi commercials with Chinese basketball player Yao Ming, to a treasure of Chinese films. Since I can’t download yet (the old Mac problem, I suspect), I…

Continue readingget it while you can: Chinese website for downloading free, legal movies

Just finished the eye-opening Will the Boat Sink the Water? The Life of Chinese Peasants, the English translation of The Chinese Peasant Investigation 中国农民调查, originally published in 2004 and banned two months after publication.  It’s a fast, good read, and sounds awfully familiar if you’ve read any Chinese history–case after case of Chinese peasants trying desperately to make…

Continue readingpeasant webs