Continue readingHong Kong’s most famous graffiti artist and typographer

Hey all, our site has now been moved away from the Typepad servers (unavailable in China) onto our own servers using WordPress. So if any of you still have this typepad.com URL bookmarked, please update your bookmark for us to:

http://www.virtual-china.org

Subsequently, the new feed URL is:

http://www.virtual-china.org/feed/

Thank you for reading.

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Continue readingSite migrated to new server

A recent photo montage on Tianya, called Smiles of the Past 50 Years. You won’t be able to link to it without registering at Tianya, so I’ll post some more below the jump.

Early spring1957, Hubei province, Macheng County, Xujia Village, 549 Production Brigade: soldier Yang Zhiyi shows off on the bar.

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Continue readingremembering pleasures of the past: Chinese black and white photos

Another good source for information on Tibet and other areas in China is the Lonely Planet’s Thorntree Forum, the North-east Asia section.  Seems to have regular postings such as this one:

Tuesday morning update from sources in Lhasa.

Things are quietening down significantly. Many streets are now open
again and cars and…

Continue readingtravelers’ news on Tibet: lonely planet china forum

Dave’s experiment is brilliant.  It probably takes this kind of situation to open up new practices across virtual spaces, which even though technically just a click away, tend to seem as far away as Mars.

In a nutshell, he’s got a tutorial for non-Chinese readers to sign up to a Chinese twitter-clone called fanfou, in order to start…

Continue readingopening up to Chinese tweets: Dave’s experiment

Photo: Teaching people to distinguish fake goods from real, Zaozhuang city, Shandong, 3/9/08

As an anthropologist, March 15th has always been one of my favorite holidays in China.  It’s International Consumer Rights Day/ 国际消费者权益日, the day when there are tables set up in public for consumers to learn more about their rights, the streets are festooned…

Continue readingthe biggest Chinese rights game in town: it’s March 15

CityIN’s press release arrived in my box this morning, and it looks pretty interesting.  It’s a Hong Kong-developed social networking service that can work on your mobile, and it uses QR codes, which always seem so smart to me but which have not taken off much of anywhere outside of Japan.  The Wikipedia entry…

Continue readingCityIN: mobile networking, QR codes in China?

If you’re looking for a place to find people to do translation jobs for you, either from English to Chinese, or Chinese to English (or possibly any other languages), one place to check out is 1x1y.com, or 翻心翻译.  On the jobs board you can find people and companies who post their prices, number of words per day, and email addresses. …

Continue readingChinese translators site

I put this together for a talk today and thought I’d share it for those who haven’t read the latest CNNIC report (#21) or who don’t feel like combing through it for some of the basics.  The data comes mostly from that report, but also a bit from ESWN and ars technica.

Number of Internet…

Continue readingChinese Internet stats, some basics circa late 2007

Netease’s “news” forum has this item today, on a group of rather shabby streetwide fortune tellers: On those who know the fate of others.

With great difficulty I managed to sneak up on these people and secretly take a few photos.  Could it be that they can see their own fates?

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Continue readingon the BBS: fortune tellers on the edges