I can’t say much about other countries, but young people in China’s and India’s cities loooove the Fox TV show Prison Break.  On the advice of a friendly DVD shop salesman in Beijing (who, incidentally, hated 24 and loved the Sopranos), we bought the first two seasons this summer in China and began watching.  We were hooked.  Who knew that…

Continue readingPrison Break, Chinese fan art

I like to check in every now and then at Sina’s best photo posts to see what’s “hot.”  You can often find stories here that end up being circulated around the web, such as the video of the students abusing the teacher.  Most of the popular photo posts are about girls, such as this game that begins with a…

Continue readingwhat’s on Sina BBS photos: girls, goofs, and social injustice

Hello all — Lyn here.  I’m on vacation in China and have been traveling for work a lot in the past couple weeks, thus my posts have been, well, nonexistent.  Hope to have more to share once I get back in late July.  Look forward to hearing from you or seeing you!  Also, for those who don’t know, all TypePad blogs are blocked in China…

Continue readingon vacation in China

Youtube is a forum for independent media that could never get a voice in China. Low cost cut-and-paste TV news clips, with voice-overs and bilingual subtitles, will be an increasingly powerful tool for cross-cultural dialogue.  These types of DIY videos will also be rallying points in PRC 外的虚拟中国/Virtual China outside the PRC, for discussions that cannot take place openly online on the mainland, drawing a…

Continue readingPRC 外的虚拟中国/Virtual China outside the PRC: child labor on Youtube

From Chinese IT guru Keso’s Flickr stream, a t-shirt with the latest rallying cry against Chinese Internet censoring, most recently of Flickr itself: Fuck GFW (Great Firewall).  Above, in Chinese, followed by “Please use Tor”.  Tor is an anonymity network — a free service that, according to Tor’s website, works like this:

…

Continue reading“Fuc* GFW”: coming to a t-shirt near you

From citizen journalism site Moobol.com, this glimpse of parents and caretakers sleeping outside the doors of Beijing Children’s Hospital.  Translated text and selected comments below:

Late night, June 12 2007, over 100 parents of sick children, and some children themselves, sleep on the ground in the underground parking garage and on the disabled ramp…

Continue readingcitizen journalism: outside a hospital’s doors

I was looking for something else on Flickr, when I came across a bunch of photos posted by someone named “missing person net” 寻人网.  Since April 21, 2005, “missing person net” has been posting photos of missing mainland Chinese people on Flickr.

The most recent was posted on May 28, 2007:

Na…

Continue readingChinese missing persons website

Paper Scenes: Appreciating Engraved Paper Creations was posted May 31 07 at the design show forum at Yesky.com, a  popular Chinese IT portal.  The photos came from a Netease BBS, apparently, but a quick Baidu search didn’t turn up anything more, and there’s no artist attribution. I don’t even know…

Continue readingfeatured design: [not-Chinese, Danish] paper art

Ethical Corporation is a publisher and conference organizer on corporate ethics–broadly defined.  Their material is fresh and thorough.  You can sign up for a newsletter, and they have short podcasts as well.

Listen to this podcast with Toby Webb, EC’s Editor, and Paul French, their Asia-Pacific Editor (who is also publishing and marketing director at Access Asia…

Continue readingpodcast: on China’s “eco-Potemkin village”

Found this interesting account today, titled: This is how North Korean quality restaurants entertain foreign guests!  It’s a series of photos and commentary on what really matters–what’s the food like in North Korea?  Rough translation:

North Korea is the same as we were before the 1980s; the standards for receiving foreign and domestic guests are completely different.  All…

Continue readingon Sina BBS: a Chinese tourist eats in North Korea