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…

Continue readingShanghai’s foreign themed satellite cities

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…

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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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Let’s do a fun little exercise.

Let’s compare profile pictures of MySpace.cn’s China and international users.

Note, however, that we hold the international users classification on MySpace.cn suspect — the one profile link that DID work (for me) in the international profiles section led to a white American woman who’s profile didn’t hint at any interest in China.

…

Continue readingCross-cultural analysis of MySpace profile pictures

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…

Continue readingold-school chinese cars

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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非常真人，非常娱乐 (Very Real People, Very Entertaining) is a blog that posts short, amusing photo-comics of every day life in Beijing. Whose life? In most cases it’s the middle-class youth. Even though I don’t find every comic funny, the photography and the postures employed in each scene are pure gold.

Here’s an example of an entry I found particularly funny (translation in…

Continue reading非常真人’s photo-comic blog

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