From Chinese spambots, ads for a device that allows you to turn anyone’s mobile phone into a listening device.  We followed them to a little company called usa peian, whose homepage says, helpfully:

Every product on this site is illegal.  The products on this site are professionally used by the American FBI. Chinese technicians can discuss high level technology…

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Shanghai’s One CIty Nine Towns program and foreign-themed New Towns are strange and wonderful things. All are collaborative efforts between Chinese and international design teams.

Shanghai urban planners are trying to preserve the center of the city by not building any more new highways, and by setting up 9 satellite cities, or “New Towns” far out in the Shanghai suburbs.  But…

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SinoCities Awards 2007 is an urban design competition sponsored by the civil engineering company MaxitGroup, and related to a Shanghai nonprofit architecture center called FAR (who also write the very interesting SInocities blog, with an impressive list of architect and urban planner authors).  You download the map…

Continue readingSinocities: open-source urban solutions?

We should really start a list of what new services and infrastructure are being promised for Beijing in 2008 Olympics.  Here’s an interesting one: live TV coverage on the new subway line. The line:

will have a transmitter every 200 meters that can receive
above-ground TV signals, said Ding Shukui, assistant general manager of
Beijing Railway Construction and…

Continue readingnew tech and Olympics: subway TV

From the News BBS at Netease 网易, a discussion of how truthful you can be on Netease BBS. Could be a shill for Netease (as some of the commenters point out), but even so the discussion is interesting for its candid discussion of life in Virtual China–at least for those who want to discuss the news.  The…

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Can NOT resist.  Myspace.cn has just opened up and you must take a look if you haven’t already.  It’s almost worth creating a MySpace page.

The front page shows 3 mainland Chinese users and 3 international users, and they can all friend each other.  How do they choose who gets on the page as international users?  Unclear.  But Tom is every…

Continue readingChinese MySpace: strange crosscultural platform

Came across this during my car roaming yesterday.  The China Motor Vehicle Documentation Centre, founded in the Netherlands in 1972 and currently located in France, publishes a series of what look like wonderful books on automotive history of China and North Korea. They have, for instance, a book on the history of the Hongqi (Red Flag) limousines, made by…

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2007 Auto Shanghai (English site here) opened over the weekend and is exhibiting all this week. There were over 100,000 people on the first day. The theme of the show is “Technology and Nature in Harmony.”  Kind of different!  I know that Shanghai planners are serious, and aware, of the issues related to car ownership in the city.  With…

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Memedia is a Chinese blogging collective that, as I noted last month, is a project of Isaac Mao’s among others.  It’s going strong with its 6th issue (looks like the longest yet!) put out on 4/22.  What Memedia is doing is a quantum leap into opening up dialogue and understanding across the Chinese- and English-language blogospheres and other virtual environments. …

Continue readingChinese blog collective, in English

Citizen journalist site Moobol.com 直播客, which is run by China Daily, is running a “day in my life” photo contest that will be over on Wed. April 25.  As described on the site:

Record the most real day in your or someone around you’s life.  Is your current life busy or leisurely? A riot of color or boring…

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