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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?

…

Continue readingon the BBS: fortune tellers on the edges

Apologies for those of you who’ve been bumped off the RSS feed or accessing strange 404 errors, but we’re in the middle of transitioning off of the Typepad platform (not very accessible in China) onto our own servers.

I’m currently hosting the blog myself (it currently forwards to virtualchina.hongkonggong.com), but I’m hoping to throw it on an IFTF…

Continue readingVirtual China: Server switching woes

“We are very pleased to announce that 13th FIRA Roboworld Cup China 2008 will take place in Qingdao from 22-25 July, 2008. We would like to invite you to take part in the FIRA Cup and Congress.

13th FIRA RoboWorld Cup China 2008
Date: 22-25 July 2008
Venue: Shinan Software Park, Qingdao China”

…

Continue readingRobot Soccer World Cup China 2008

Remember the “Numa Numa” song, originally performed by the Moldovan band O-Zone (actual title of song = Dragostea din tei)?

It’s been a while since the song, the MTV and its spoofs were circulated around the internet, but I found a witty animated version today on Tudou that transliterated the Romanian words into…

Continue readingDJ麦啊喜: the Numa Numa song in China