“City 2046” 《都市2046》Chinese MMORPG officially launched on Sept. 26, after several months of beta testing.  The game takes place in a futuristic urban environment, obviously. It’s billed as “the first massively multi-player 3D online game set against an entirely realistic urban background,” but was alleged in the Chinese gaming media in July to be a copy of a Korean game also…

Continue readingmarriage in the virtual city: City 2046 《都市2046》

On Sept. 23 China announced the launch of the world’s largest pure next-generation Internet. Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) will replace the current Internet, which is Internet Protocol Version 4. The Chinese network, called CNGI-CERNET2/6IX, or CERNET2 for short, and broadly referred to by the name China Next-Generation Internet (CNGI) project, currently links 167 institutes at 25 universities, in 20 different cities (…

Continue readingIPv6: China’s next generation Internet

From a strip entitled 奔向2008·漫画奥运 (Towards 2008: Olympics Comic).

As always translations in maroon.

Link to original comic on Sina.
Link to Sina’s comics front page.

ESWN has a story about “the Second WoW War,” where the First WoW War would be based about The Most Famous Pervert In China. It is, in short, a tale about a virgin maiden and her seduction at the hands of a powerful WoW guildmaster. The tale is told by the maiden’s elder brother on…

Continue readingSex Scandals & WoW (redux)

One of our first posts on Virtual China, and still one of the most popular, was on the homemade inventions of various farmers across China: boats, cars, subs, and so on.  There are also homemade airplanes out there.  Now it’s an amphibious vehicle, being reported via “China’s BoingBoing,” Postshow.

On…

Continue readingthe inventiveness of Chinese farmers Part Two

Talking about bridging language barriers, there is a really quick solution that I like to use for translating e.g. Chinese websites into English (of course I am still studying hard to learn the Chinese characters… but until then, I can cheat a little using this software 🙂

This solution is the translation application called Foxlingo; it is…

Continue readingInstant translation

K.M. Lawson at the multi-author China history blog Frog in a Well, provides a detailed tutorial on how to use Google Books to find open source historical material about China, and how to download texts in pdf format. Google Books allows you to do full-text searches of the books that are indexed already by Google, and apparently, to…

Continue readingGoogle Books + Chinese materials

I sometimes come across a Chinese character, often part of someone’s name or a place name, that I don’t know how to pronounce.  Here’s a handy character-to-Pinyin translation application, which is generously offered for free on a website called Ping Asian Imports.  They say that they get over 500 visitors a day using the service.

As many of us experience on a daily basis, the language barrier is an important part of the reason why the Internet appears divided up into different Internets – e.g. an English and a Chinese Internet.

A number of good translation software applications exist today. In the future translation software will definitely develop into levels that provide more accurate translations, easier to use…

Continue readingOvercoming Language Barriers

“Have you ever seen such a fancy government building?  Seeing the broad, stylish square in front of the Tai’An Municipal Government [in Shandong province], who would still dare to say that we Chinese are poor?!”

An example of what’s driving the Chinese economy: massive real estate projects intended to project power, respect, and wealth.  Apparently also a topic…

Continue readingon the BBS today: luxurious government buildings