A group blog about Chinese tech, media and design
My talk at the Personal Democracy Forum at NYU’s Kimmel Center
My talk at ROFLCon III at MIT
Political memes have been on my mind as of late. It started with ROFLCon at MIT and moved on to more discussions,…
Continue readingIn Defense of Memes Defending Themselves
From the Atlantic blog, by Dan Chinoy:
This suburban expansion has taken place so quickly that in some places, it has created what are known in Chinese as 城中村 or chengzhongcun, which translates roughly to village-in-a-city: older mud and brick houses and abandoned fields surrounded by brand new apartment complexes. Often,…
Continue readingVillage-in-a-city, 城中村
The following are the excerpts of an informal email conversation I had with Marco Sparmberg, a trans-media filmmaker & content developer based in Hong Kong.
Q: What brought you to Hong Kong?
A: I grew up with the 80s and 90s HK films running at the midnight slots of German…
Continue readingInterview with Marco Sparmberg, Hong Kong-based trans-media filmmaker
This is a follow up of our review of Volume 1.
Understanding China through Comics, Volume 2 picks up where its predecessor left of – on a hyperspeed journey through Chinese history starting with the Three Kingdoms era. As before, Liu employs illustrations and diagrams to explain events and lighten the…
Continue readingBook review: Understanding China through Comics (Vol 2)
Text reads:
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Continue readingFeatured design: Navel
The literal meaning of Shanzhai (山寨) in Chinese is “stockade village on the mountain”, many factories of Shanzhai products indeed started as small underground workshops in marginalized areas. But Shanzhai has evolved from the synonym of low quality copycat to a mode of production so efficient that even the global tech giants have to take it seriously. Culturally Shanzhai is…
Continue readingShanzhai State of Mind
Spotted in Shenzhen on the west side of the Nanshan district.
Anyone know how the lettering is made (the old and new instances)?
The website of People’s Daily, the mouthpiece of the CCP, is now a listed company in the Shanghai Stock Exchange. The company raised 1.4 billion yuan (US$222.2 million) in its IPO, nearly three times the amount it hoped for. On the first day of its trading, its stock price surged 76%. Before People’s Daily’s IPO, some pro-democracy activists said that…
Continue readingThe IPO Farce of People’s Daily: Washing People’s Brain with People’s Money
Titanic 3D is out. Yes, we all know this, the world over. The film is expected to make hundreds of millions in China alone.
But it will be missing the nudity scene. I remember watching the Colbert Report and seeing James Cameron report that the reason it was cut was because censors feared…
Continue readingChinese Weibos: The Meme Behind the Titanic 3D Censorship Hoax
