A group blog about Chinese tech, media and design
Much has been stated about Xiaomi as the rising star in China that’s making premium-but-affordable phones with its own UI for Android. But it seems like they’re also a formidable force on social media.
The tweets below come from their official account:
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Continue readingPhone maker Xiaomi’s incredibly charismatic (and trilingual) Twitter account
Full disclosure: I worked on the design for this project.
Online petition platforms have taken off in the English speaking world, but what about a Chinese petition platform? In the US and UK, the government both run official petition platforms (remember the Death Star petition to the White House?) and there are a whole…
Continue readingHong Kong’s First Online Petitions Platform
When I first started blogging about China, Roland Soong’s EastSouthWestNorth was an essential destination for any China watchers at the time. This was back in 2005. A former media analyst, and now heir to some formidable Chinese-literary estates, Soong would translate page-long excerpts from multiple newspapers and magazines about the same “suddenly breaking incident.” Then he would throw in a few terse…
Continue readingThe Long-list King of China Bloggers Returns
Spurred by this article on MOOCs taken hold in Hong Kong, I decided to do a survey on MOOC adoption by Chinese institutions. I did not, as you can see, survey any Chinese MOOC platforms (are there any?), so it’s a bit of a biased selection.
Entrepreneur ShaoLan Hsueh has teamed up with designer-illustrator Noma Bar to breathe new life into the age old practice of teaching kids Chinese characters using its pictorial etymology. And they need your support for their Kickstarter campaign.
Even though the campaign over sells itself (with prosaic catchphrases like “The real agenda behind…
Continue readingChinese etymology meets modern graphic design
The third volume of “Understanding China through Comics” continues Liu’s epic quest to chronicle all of ancient Chinese history in comic form. As with the first two volumes, the book zips through Chinese history, in this case 907 to 1368 AD, with text and illustrations.
Liu spends more of the third volume explaining Chinese cultural ideology and geopolitical context than…
“Factory Towns of South China: An Illustrated Guidebook” is, despite its title, more social science research than it is a real guidebook. But within the realm of social science and urban planning, it compiles an incredible wealth of information – from the history and sociology of factory towns under communist rule to a peek at a day in the…
Continue readingBook review: Factory Towns of South China