| | |
|
18 Nov 09
|
|
Buckle Down and Link After several weeks of travel, and one Presidential visit, it’s time for me to buckle down and write; the deadlines loom. But before I go underwater, some items that I found interesting.
Like many bloggers, I was taken by Yang Hengjun’s... |
|
17 Nov 09
|
|
Media Note A quick post to let US readers know that I’m scheduled to appear on Minnesota Public Radio’s Midmorning with Keri Miller on Tuesday at 10:45 AM, CST (that’s 12:45 AM, Wednesday, in China, for you night owls). We’ll discuss Obama... |
|
16 Nov 09
|
|
“I’m a big supporter of non-censorship.” This phrase, more than any other, personifies the disappointment that I’ve been reading online, and hearing in-person, from Chinese friends who watched the Obama Town Hall in Shanghai. It’s an awkward phrase, many miles from “I oppose... |
|
16 Nov 09
|
|
How to Watch the Obama Town Hall outside of Shanghai Somebody’s got a case of cold feet, so it looks like the Obama Town Hall in Shanghai is going to be broadcast in Shanghai, only. But fear not, Shanghai Scrap is here to help: If you’re out of Shanghai, and you’d like to watch the show... |
|
14 Nov 09
|
|
Obama-mania I have a new essay up at the Atlantic, “Obama-mania Sweeps China,” which is just what the title suggests: some thoughts on why President Obama is so strikingly popular here. He is, of course, about to arrive here, and I’ll have more to... |
|
13 Nov 09
|
|
China’s Migrant Laborers Enjoy the Downturn, take a Year in the Countryside I spent the first half of November on assignment in Guangdong Province, and though I can’t say too much about what I was up to down there, I did come across some interesting labor-related items unrelated to my assignment.
So. In the space of two... |
|
11 Nov 09
|
|
Photo: The Improvised Welding Mask I’ve just returned to Shanghai after 12 days of roaming up and down Guangdong. I’ll have a bit more to say about some of what I saw down there in the coming days. For now, though, I leave you with what stands as one of my favorite photos out... |
|
10 Nov 09
|
|
Dept of Having-Seen-It-All-Now: Chinese Safety Reduction Devices The other afternoon I was riding in the back seat of a late model SUV owned by a successful businessman based in Guangdong. He’s a busy guy, with a high risk tolerance, so it really shouldn’t have come as much of a surprise that he... |
|
08 Nov 09
|
|
Jobs You Didn’t Know Existed, Chap. 1: The South China Coin Recovery Lady I’ve had the pleasure of running into a few of Shanghai Scrap’s readers in the recycling industry over the last couple of weeks, and several have asked the same question: “Who took the ’scrap’ out of Shanghai Scrap?”... |
|
06 Nov 09
|
|
Photo: Friday Night in the drought-striken Bei Jiang Riverbed A companion photo to the one in the prior post, taken around 8:30 PM, Friday night.
He wasn’t the only person down there. Couples wander beneath the bridge arches, hide in its corners and shadows; groups of college-aged kids light campfires and get... |
|
05 Nov 09
|
|
Photo: the Bei Jiang River running dry through Qingyuan Regular readers might have deduced that Shanghai Scrap is in the midst of its own version of the Deng Xiaoping’s famed Southern Tour over the last week or so. This afternoon, as part of this sally through Guangdong Province, I arrived in Qingyuan... |
|
03 Nov 09
|
|
One Seriously Cold Shower: My Visit to the Guangzhou Sex Festival Yesterday morning I opened the drapes in my Guangzhou hotel room and what a surprise: I’m located directly across the street from the convention center hosting the 7th Annual Guangzhou Sex Festival. Believe it or not, this was inadvertent –... |
|
02 Nov 09
|
|
Photo: Prayer hall, Great Mosque of Guangzhou There seems to be quite a bit of photography out there showing the interiors of Chinese churches, but – so far as I’ve been able to tell – very little photography showing the interiors of Chinese mosques. So, in pursuit of some balance,... |
|
01 Nov 09
|
|
What Tiajuna and Zhuhai have in common. Below, a photo of the Macau side of the border crossing into Zhuhai, China (for those not familiar with the region: despite the fact that China has sovereignty over Macau, the border is still treated as international). I took it late this afternoon, when... |
|
31 Oct 09
|
|
Apple’s Chinese iPhone: bad for the environment. Last night Apple and China Unicom finally rolled out the Chinese version of the iPhone. So far, at least, the introduction seems to have been a low-key affair, with media attention focused – if at all – on the fact that the Chinese version of... |
|
30 Oct 09
|
|
The Cat Thief Last night I was walking south on Fenyang Road when, at the intersection with Fuxing Road, I saw a small crowd of five or six people standing around a tricycle outfitted with cages packed tight with terrified cats and a few small dogs. In front of it, ... |
|
27 Oct 09
|
|
The colors are never so bright as when you lower your standards. This afternoon, around 4:00 PM, I left a friend’s thirteenth floor apartment and paused to wait for the elevator. While I did, I gazed out the window and noticed a stunning, multicolored striped building in the near distance. Though incomplete, I... |
|
25 Oct 09
|
|
New trends in Shanghai restaurant marketing: Extreme Honesty Say you’ve been running an Italian restaurant on a busy, crowded street in a busy, crowded part of Shanghai where Italian restaurants aren’t likely to do well. You think to yourself: “I need a change. I need a gimmick … I need a... |
|
25 Oct 09
|
|
Mad Mission: a Shanghai Street Scene The other afternoon I was in a very busy part of Shanghai, on my way into the subway entrance which I use several times per week. It’s been getting harder, though. Over the last two weeks the stairway has become a crowded marketplace of sorts, and... |
|
21 Oct 09
|
|
Exclusive Play-by-Play: Monday Night Football’s Chinese Announcer Explains Everything. In American sports broadcasting, there’s no seat more coveted than one in the broadcast booth of Monday Night Football, the thirty-nine-year old, once-per-week franchise for which ESPN pays US$1.1 billion per season. Over the years, it’s been home to ... |
|
19 Oct 09
|
|
Of Minnesota interest, only: Overseas Absentee Ballot Follies, Very Local Edition I’ve spent seven years abroad, and in that time I’ve cast a ballot in every presidential and mid-term election dating back to the Fall of 2002. In one case, for sure, I cast my ballot in person, back home. But otherwise my ballots have been... |
|
19 Oct 09
|
|
The Happy Neighborhood E-Waste Merchant Earlier this morning I walked out of my apartment building en route to the post office when I came across the corner scrap dealers selling their inventory of home appliance scrap – ie, e-waste, as the kids now like to call it – to their... |
|
16 Oct 09
|
|
Novel Hazards Associated With Chinese Stairwells (and living here) By popular demand (you know who you are), promoted from twitpic to the blog:
[Clarification, also by popular demand: the sign hangs in a stairwell]
For the record, this fulfills Shanghai Scrap’s official allotment of exactly ONE Chinglish-related... |
|
14 Oct 09
|
|
East Seward Road Elegy Spend time in the lanes and alleys of Shanghai’s rapidly disappearing, European-built tenements, and you’ll inevitably find tourists and well-heeled expats taking photos. It’s a legitimate exercise, I think: not only the buildings, but... |
|
13 Oct 09
|
|
New lows in expat advertising: no ugly ladies in the sud de France. Of the many journalistic beats that Shanghai Scrap really wishes it could cover more fully, none is more tantalizing than the sometimes – nay, often – ridiculous state of expat-oriented advertising in China. It’s a marvelous arena, both... |
|
11 Oct 09
|
|
The faces of China’s next gen foreign correspondents. On Friday, I had the pleasure and honor of speaking to a group of MA students in journalism at Fudan University’s School of Journalism in Shanghai. For those who don’t know it – Fudan’s journalism program is the oldest in China... |
|
11 Oct 09
|
|
When the Walls Come Down. This afternoon I was poking around some demolished residences in Hongkou District (more on that in a few days), when I looked up and noticed a poster hanging from the collapsed wall in the background of the photo, below. I’ve blown it up a bit, and... |
|
10 Oct 09
|
|
Games Hongkou People Play? Before this afternoon, I thought I’d seen just about every street corner amusement that Shanghai’s game-loving citizens enjoy playing in front of their neighbors: chess to Chinese checkers; dominoes to mahjong; poker, to that weird poker... |
|
09 Oct 09
|
|
This is not a pipe. [With apologies to Rene Magritte.]
Not the sexiest topic in the world, but certainly important: on Wednesday, the US Department of Commerce into whether or not to impose anti-dumping and countervailing duties on imports of steel pipes from China. This... |
|
07 Oct 09
|
|
In China, baseball’s feminine side? Due to unexpected but very welcome events in Minneapolis, Shanghai Scrap has baseball on his mind, and thus – while running errands earlier in the day – I was stopped in my tracks by the Major League Baseball stall at a busy shopping mall in... |
|
07 Oct 09
|
|
Exclusive Shanghai Scrap Interview: The Guy Hanging Outside My Window While the rest of Shanghai’s media and blogs have been concerned with ethnic uprisings, military parades, and trade wars, Shanghai Scrap has maintained an unwavering focus on the ongoing renovation of his building’s exterior in advance of Expo... |
|
03 Oct 09
|
|
How many IOC members have heard of Oprah? [To non-IOC members who also haven't heard of her, here's a wiki to help you along]
An official, non-China-related Shanghai Scrap tirade:
I’ve traveled widely – perhaps, not as widely as some of my colleagues – but widely enough to know... |
|
02 Oct 09
|
|
My gift to anxious NFL fans in China Due to a September 2008 blog post complaining that ESPN (in Asia, at least) broadcast a dog show instead of a Vikings-Packers Monday Night game, Shanghai Scrap appears to have become a top google result for the not insignificant number of NFL fans... |
|
02 Oct 09
|
|
“Why have prices of Chinese antiques remained buoyant if not speculative?” Earlier this week I blogged about the now-notorious mid-September auctions in Chinese antiques that took place at Christie’s in New York. As described by Souren Melikian in the New York Times, the event was a speculative frenzy, with even... |
|
01 Oct 09
|
|
Giant Pink Highrises. As noted back in July, Shanghai’s US$45 billion makeover in advance of Expo 2010 has arrived at my apartment building (located on a prominent thoroughfare). Despite the inconvenience and noise, this was a needed renovation: my two building complex... |
|
28 Sep 09
|
|
“Who likes Chinese art?” There’s this Cantonese restaurant out in Shanghai’s Putuo District where my friend G., a Shanghai school teacher, and I used to go for dinner on a semi-regular basis. It’s one of those massive places you only find in China – maybe... |
|
24 Sep 09
|
|
E-waste – There’s an app for that. My first piece for Foreign Policy, “E-waste – there’s an app for that” is now live. It covers a couple of different issues, including the growing tide of Chinese generated e-waste, and the rather limp response to the problem by... |
|
21 Sep 09
|
|
Ghosts of the Machines – OR – Just where do all of those Chinese PCs go to die, anyway? On August 28, Science, one of the world’s most prestigious scientific journals, ran a news item regarding ongoing studies of the health effects caused by environmentally unsound processing of e-waste (PCs, monitors, printers, etc) in south China... |
|
17 Sep 09
|
|
Culture Sample: what Americans might learn from Chinese health care. Roughly half-way down the list of things that expats in china are most often asked by folks back home is some variation of “what’s the health care system like?” I’ve visited enough Chinese hospitals and clinics to provide the... |
|
16 Sep 09
|
|
Resumption of Hostilities: The Scrap is Back! [Updated] [UPDATED: Not sure how I did it, but somehow I managed to delete this entire post - including the comments - earlier this morning. Thanks to the generous help of an anonymous citizen at NFG World (who read my tweeted cry for help!), the full post has been... |
|
15 Sep 09
|
|
Resumption of Hostilities: The Scrap is Back! [In which the blogger touches on a couple of issues currently on his mind.]
Back in June, before I placed Shanghai Scrap on a needed hiatus while I dealt with several issues located outside of China, Shanghai Scrap visited – and documented – a... |
|
25 Jul 09
|
|
Offline Until September 8 Mind and body are going to be outside of China for a while, focusing on some long delayed projects and issues, so – rather than bore my readers with commentary on what other people are saying about China (Shanghai Scrap is, and always will be, ... |
|
22 Jul 09
|
|
Eclipse Eclipsed. I spent the last 24 hours out in Sheshan, in southwest Shanghai, where I was covering the eclipse for a dispatch that should be out shortly. Below, an image of a few of the several hundred observers who gathered atop the Shanghai Astronomical Observator... |
|
20 Jul 09
|
|
Why is this recession (potentially) different from all other recessions? A small but significant set of data points in the ongoing discussion of how – potentially – China’s economy has altered the global economy, especially as it impacts the current economic downturn.
I received this first one last week f... |
|
19 Jul 09
|
|
Save the Eclipse: An Open Letter to the Honorable Han Zheng, Mayor of Shanghai Dear Mr. Mayor:
As you are no doubt aware, the longest eclipse of the century will pass over your city on Wednesday morning. This singular event is not exclusive to Shanghai, of course: the narrow path will wind over much of Asia, into the Pacific.... |
|
17 Jul 09
|
|
Shovel Girls and Sandboxes: The US Pavilion Groundbreaking, at last! Two things I want to make clear from the outset. First, despite appearances, Shanghai Scrap is not becoming all US Expo 2010 Pavilion, all of the time. It just seems that way. Rest assured: I’ll be back with some quality iron ore/Rio Tinto blogging... |
|
10 Jul 09
|
|
A US Expo 2010 pavilion, after all. Coming at the end of a tumultuous week in China marked by earthquakes, riots, and continued economic uncertainty, the news that the US had finally confirmed that its participation in Expo 2010 (a/k/a, next year’s world fair) didn’t seem... |
|
08 Jul 09
|
|
Experience Urumqi as a journalist would. From a media standpoint, Urumqi riots seem to signal a shift in the manner in which reporters are allowed to cover “sensitive” events in China. Unlike, say, last year’s riots in Tibet, the relevant authorities in and out of Xinjiang very... |
|
07 Jul 09
|
|
Tweeting Urumqi Despite the fact that Twitter is blocked in China, and the internet is completely shutdown in Xinjiang, a handful of foreign correspondents have managed to tweet real-time updates on events outs there – either directly, or via colleagues back in... |
|
06 Jul 09
|
|
The view from here, the view from there. As noted last week, my Shanghai apartment building is currently undergoing a much needed face lift in advance of Expo 2010. On balance, this is a good thing: My dumpy building gets a makeover, and I get to know the brave daredevil migrants who swing past... |
twitter
blogs
china
thailand
japan
technology