I find it difficult sometimes to keep track of Chinese power politics.  Now the Brookings Institution has provided us with a lovely, succinct 2-3 minute video analysis of the two new top leaders (Shanghai Party Secretary Xi Jinping and Liaoning Party Secretary Li Keqiang) who were recently promoted as possible successors to President Hu Jintao, at the 17th Party Congress in October. The…

Continue readingthe Youtube approach to understanding Chinese politics

gorgeous, isn’t it?  Dr. Pan Meiyun is a professor and professional photographer who has been taking pictures of the Olympic construction sites over the past two years.  SSPhoto, a website for Chinese scenic photos, has a page of her National Swim Center, aka Bubble Building, photos.

Over the last three years, three and a half million mobile users have
created over 14 million “red” SMS messages (“红段子”), which have been downloaded
and passed on over 100 million times, according to this Xinhua article about Guangdong’s “red SMS culture” (红色短信文化) (in Chinese), found via Zhejiang Online.  “Healthy” red SMS have…

Continue reading“red SMS culture” in China

We had a visit in Palo Alto from Dr. Pan Haidong, CEO and founder of hoodong, China’s most popular wikipedia and wiki software.  The hoodong wiki has over 1.5 million articles written by over 250,000 contributors, and the HDwiki software has been downloaded 200,000 times and currently supports over 1000 other websites in China. Pan Haidong was in town for a meeting…

Continue readinginnovative Chinese wiki software: interview with hoodong

Researchers at Peking University’s Institute of Computer Science and Technology, with the University of Mannheim’s Laboratory for Dependable Distributed Systems, just released a fascinating paper laying out the technical aspects of virtual asset theft and modeling the relationships among various actors in the Chinese virtual asset economy.  The paper is quite technical, but contains a lot of meat for the nontechnical reader as…

Continue readingblack markets in China’s virtual assets economy

[Second Update: I guess I take comments more personally than I should!  This was an act committed by a single person and does not represent all of China, nor all Chinese people’s views on how to treat animals, any more than any act of violence committed anywhere represents an entire nation. It has gained attention and public outcry in China–that’s why it was posted on…

Continue readingwhat’s on Chinese video sites: dog trouble on Youku

OK.  This is just…where things are going.  Ten minutes of nasty American pop music, teenage hormones, voyeurism, and sheer curiosity, raging in broken English.  From an Internet cafe in China to a bedroom in some (I’m guessing) Eastern European country.  "You make me vidio/I kill you" and "I have this photo in my home. You give me."  They make plans to talk on 56.com.  Where…

Continue readingvideo chatting: foreign girls and chinese boys

Jason posted on Citybar/City8.com last summer, and I thought I’d give a little update because I love it. City8 gives you a beautiful high res full-screen photo of the place you choose, which you can navigate for a 360 degree view, move closer and farther, annotate, and see others’ annotations as well.  (Tip: click on the middle of the green nav…

Continue readingCity8.com: Chinese urban mapping tool

Mad that Youtube is BANNED in China Facebook group seems mostly to be expats, although not completely. It has over 700 members at present.

Update, July 15 2009: see latest post on this topic here, as well as ongoing conversation in comments section. –Lyn

Advanced Chinese mobile phones are gaining an audience, but judging from the comments that are still piling up on this ChinaTech news item from May, there seems to be a growing need for a Chinese mobile phone hacking website —…

Continue readingneed for Chinese mobile phone hacking blog in English