八八吧 · 88 Bar – Page 3 – A group blog about Chinese tech, media and design

An illustrated love letter to the Beijing underground music scene

May 7, 2019 by Jason Li

Cover image of Open All The Buddha Boxes (excerpt)

This early excerpt from Open All the Buddha Boxes chronicles the rise of two seminal Beijing bands, Hang On The Box and Chui Wan, as they carve out a space for themselves in and outside of China. We follow members of the two bands as they develop their sounds, identities and aesthetics, and we see how they affect and are…

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Stop Calling It A Cold War

February 18, 2019 by Graham Webster

From Technology Review’s The US and China aren’t in a “cold war,” so stop calling it that, by Graham Webster:

Unlike the US and USSR, in which science and technology developed on largely independent tracks, the US and China are part of a globally intertwined ecosystem. As an example, ZTE, the Chinese maker of network equipment and smartphones, was…

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An Anthology of Naked Underground Chinese Comics

February 13, 2019 by Jason Li

I started working with Orion at Paradise Systems a few months ago, and ICYMI we launched a Kickstarter campaign to publish an anthology of semi-illicit, nudity-flaunting comics from China:

Naked Body is a 100-page, full color anthology edited by Yan Cong. It began life a few years ago when Yan Cong was told by…

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The Internet’s Warring States Period

January 29, 2019 by An Xiao Mina

From Foreign Policy’s The War-Torn Web, by Sean McDonald and An Xiao Mina:

Contention on how the internet should be run isn’t new. Some have identified this as a world of parallel internets, or rifts in the vision of how the internet should operate. But the gulfs in governance and action opening up and the active efforts to influence…

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Chinese Comics Review

Night Bus: journey through the fantastical Chinese countryside

January 15, 2019 by Jason Li

Cover image of Night Bus

A young woman with big, circular glasses is nudged out onto the platform by the rivers of the passengers going in and out of the train. She finds herself at an unfamiliar stop, but close to home, and she is forced to take the night bus to complete her journey. The bus, and its inhabitants, have other ideas, taking her on a…

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Starting Up in Shenzhen

Shenzhen Everywhere

January 8, 2019 by An Xiao Mina

Excerpted from the MIT Technology Review’s Inside Shenzhen’s race to outdo Silicon Valley by An Xiao Mina and Jan Chipchase:

In much the same way that open-source software enables a global community of developers to copy and remix each other’s work, rapidly creating variants on a piece of software to meet different needs, the shanzhai method delivered “hardware…

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Chinese Comics Review

Ping Pong 4: cataloguing explorations through illustration

January 7, 2019 by Jason Li

Table display of candy, caricatures and collected trash objects — Objects and drawings from the Ping Ping Vol. 4 exhibition opening

Ping Pong Vol. 4 marks the Hong Kong publication’s continuing shift away from comics to the world of illustration. Titled Field Guide Collection, this latest volume finds its artists cataloguing various objects, behaviors and techniques through their drawings. As with the previous issue,…

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Chinese Comics Review

City of Darkness: A macho Hong Kong comic exemplar set in the Kowloon Walled City

December 4, 2018 by Jason Li

city of darkness squad illustration

City of Darkness (九龍城寨) chronicles the fall and rise of prominent gangster and martial artist 陳洛軍 (“Lok”) as he goes into hiding in the Kowloon Walled City after a bitter fight with his former boss. Set in a picturesque rendition of 1980s Hong Kong, City of Darkness pays homage to what co-creator Andy Seto calls the most beautiful…

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Cyberpunk Pollution Masks, Editor’s Picks from China

November 16, 2018 by Jason Li

Photos of smoke, dust and children — Image from the UBT Taobao store.

As the deadliest fire in California’s history rages on, we trawled through over 500 items on China e-commerce behemoth Taobao to find you the most stylish pollution masks on earth today. What we found was better than anything created by this Dutch designer or …

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The coming cold war of internets between China and the US in 2038

November 14, 2018 by An Xiao Mina

By 2038, there won’t just be one internet — there will be many, split along national lines in the midst of a tech cold war between China and the U.S. That’s the prediction of writer and technologist An Xiao Mina, who joined Intelligencer’s new podcast 2038 this week.

Click/tap above to listen to the episode,…

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