| | |
|
18 Oct 09
|
|
They built something outside my flat Half of it seems to have ended up on my window. How close is that building that wasn’t there a few months ago? This close:
There isn’t much light in my living room anymore. Good job I’m moving, really. |
|
11 Oct 09
|
|
Sorry, your ethnic group can’t use the internet Translated from a blog post by 27-year-old Uighur photographer Nuerbanjiang Saimaiti during the National Day holiday:
The people of Xinjiang are “welcome” throughout the country
Saturday, October 3, 2009
Yesterday I arrived here in Shenyang... |
|
03 Oct 09
|
|
Coup surrealism: embassy turns into boat, threatens US warship As the crow flies, Tegucigalpa is just over 50 miles from the sea. So Brazil’s ambassador may have wondered why Honduran troops had pointed sonic weapons at his building and (very loudly) informed him in English that he was approaching a US warship... |
|
15 Sep 09
|
|
Ai Weiwei’s surgery in Munich Ai Weiwei’s surgery in Munich apparently went smoothly - two holes drilled in his head on Tuesday to remove 30 ml of fluid from his skull. He says the pressure in his head has gone and so has the pain.
He’d been suffering from headaches since... |
|
14 Sep 09
|
|
Before Urumqi: the 2002 needle attacks in Tianjin and Beijing There’s nothing new about the use of hypodermic needles to threaten and rob people. It happens all over the world. What is unusual is for an entire city like Urumqi to be gripped by fear, with hundreds of people claiming to have been stabbed, and... |
|
11 Sep 09
|
|
US invited Honduran coup regime to military drills The United States has supposedly ended military cooperation with Honduras because of the June 28 coup. So why has it invited the coup regime to take part in military exercises that start today?
The US Southern Command invited the Armed Forces of the de... |
|
07 Sep 09
|
|
When weird tank-things drove down Chang’an Avenue I originally planned to post this months ago, but other things got in the way and I forgot all about it.
It was just after 11 o’clock one night in April and there was nothing happening at work so I popped out to the shop. I was just starting to... |
|
02 Sep 09
|
|
When I grow up I want to be a corrupt official On the first day of term, Southern Metropolis Daily asked primary school children in Guangzhou what they want to be when they grow up. Here are some of the answers:
(After much head scratching) “I don’t know”
“A... |
|
30 Aug 09
|
|
Nothing to do with genitals I haven’t got the slightest idea if Rem Koolhaas was or wasn’t thinking of genitalia when he designed the new CCTV building.
Likewise, no one has ever proved that church doors were built with the same thing in mind.
And I certainly... |
|
27 Aug 09
|
|
ProState in Flames attacker jailed for four and a half years Xu Lai just before the attack on Feb. 14
This news is now three weeks old, but I only just noticed it and no one else seems to have mentioned it in English. The man who stabbed the blogger ProState in Flames (journalist and writer Xu Lai) at a book... |
|
14 Aug 09
|
|
Rape and beatings in a Beijing “black jail” hotel Entrance to the Juyuan Hotel on Majiabao Road, Beijing
Last week’s edition of Southern Weekly (Aug. 6) carried an extraordinarily rare article on a subject that is usually off-limits for the mainstream media in China: the “black jails”... |
|
12 Jul 09
|
|
How did a protest become mass murder? ABC News:
We arrived at one of Urumqi’s biggest mosques with about 80 journalists in a convoy of about six or seven mini-vans.
Almost every journalist still left in Urumqi was there, because there was almost no violence on the streets.... |
|
09 Jul 09
|
|
La Prensa accidentally removes all the blood One of the great defenders of truthiness in Honduras is the newspaper La Prensa. Monday’s edition blamed Manuel Zelaya for the death of Isis Obed Murillo, the 19-year-old protester who was shot dead by the army. Readers noticed something slightly... |
|
04 Jul 09
|
|
Announcement: There is no interspecies sex on this blog It’s always nice to see that people have arrived at my blog via a Google search and, though they may not agree with what they read here, the content is at least relevant to their queries. It’s not so encouraging to see so many people coming... |
|
29 Jun 09
|
|
It’s not a coup, it’s a transition to “democracy” What are we to make of a congress that votes to accept a “resignation” lettter in which the president purportedly says (I paraphrase) “I’ve split the country and no one likes me anymore. Oh, and by the way, I’m incurably... |
|
25 Jun 09
|
|
Google’s G-spot and Baidu’s B (WARNING: Some of the content of this post is not suitable for young readers. If you are under the age of 18, please go here immediately and download the Green Dam censorship software which should prevent your computer from ever being able to open this... |
|
18 Jun 09
|
|
China and Russia’s fake anniversary This year is the 60th anniversary of diplomatic ties between China and Russia, at least that’s what Chinese and Russian leaders keep telling us whenever they get together. It’s a load of bollocks. Sixty years ago, the People’s Republic... |
|
14 Jun 09
|
|
Will Green Dam block everything? Looking through Green Dam’s list of Falun Gong related vocabulary is quite a surreal experience. (See Danwei and ESWN). It begins, predictably, with dozens of FLG terms and the special police unit in charge of suppressing the cult. But if you grab... |
|
12 Jun 09
|
|
A rare sight in Beijing A long time ago, a friend’s student from Jiangxi complained that you never saw individual clouds in Beijing. The sky was always uniformly blue or, far more often, a single sheet of grey. I’d never noticed this before but it was one of those... |
|
05 Jun 09
|
|
The Umbrella Men of Tiananmen With apologies to the BBC, CNN, Sammy Kaye, Beijing’s paramilitary police… well, everyone, really.
The Umbrella Men of Tiananmen @ Yahoo! Video
Somehow I didn’t think Youku would pass this one. The picture quality didn’t... |
|
03 Jun 09
|
|
No, we will not forget Nothing happens in this video. It’s just a candle tonight in Beijing. |
|
25 May 09
|
|
The other massacre of 1989 Of memory and forgetting
Drive east from Algiers and eventually the road will carry you up through the mountains and valleys of Kabylie. From the city of Tizi Ouzou, continue to climb into the villages where children stop and stare at a rare Arab visitor,... |
|
11 May 09
|
|
The end My Dad sent me an email saying my blog had been silent for a long time and suggesting it was time for another session on Skype. And then he died.
So now here I sit downstairs back in England. It’s five in the morning and my Mum will wake up soon.... |
|
14 Mar 09
|
|
What the US said in 1998 about North Korea’s missatellite The North test-fired a ballistic missile over Japan in 1998, a launch the regime also claimed was a satellite. Associated Press
The world is divided into good countries (us) and bad countries (them). Bad countries’ leaders “say,”... |
|
09 Mar 09
|
|
Dispatch from Pyongyang: Xinhua’s sense of humor? Double Happiness: women dance on election day in Pyongyang (Xinhua photo)
Sunday was a day of extraordinary happiness for North Korean women. Not only was it International Women’s Day, it was also election day so they could exercise their right to... |
|
01 Mar 09
|
|
No commie homo-lovers, please It’s nearly a week since the Oscars, but my computer’s been at the shop for an upgrade. So, anyway, how did CCTV-6 translate the first main sentence of Sean Penn’s acceptance speech?
Given the many failings of my translations on this... |
|
15 Feb 09
|
|
Blogger stabbed in Beijing Big-name Chinese blogger Xu Lai, better known as ProState in Flames, was stabbed at the One Way Street bookshop in the Wanda Plaza, Chaoyang district, Beijing, on Saturday afternoon, just after a talk he gave to readers of his blog and his book Fanciful... |
|
10 Feb 09
|
|
The Big Boot burns - now you see it, now you don’t (See Sun Bin for eyewitness account; also Shanghaist, Danwei and ChinaSMACK.
But if you want to see for yourself exactly how the fire started, check out this excellent series of videos on Youtube: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5.)
With breaking... |
|
08 Feb 09
|
|
When news isn’t news… and then it is The leaders fight the drought (Xinhua)
When does a drought become news? Droughts aren’t like most other kinds of disaster. They don’t usually happen overnight. They’re not like the brief dusting of snow that brought Britain’s... |
|
02 Feb 09
|
|
Religious freedom in China Uploaded to Flickr by musicoooool.
Lotus Temple (Lianhua Si) in Tongnan County, Chongqing
(h/t Prostate in Flames) |
|
24 Jan 09
|
|
The BBC says a big “impartial” Fuck You to Gaza The BBC considers Palestinians in Gaza to be unique among the peoples of the world. They, and they alone, are too “controversial” to be worthy of humanitarian aid at a time of extraordinary crisis. Blankets for children whose homes were... |
|
18 Jan 09
|
|
How to tell if your 100 yuan note is fake There’s been loads of news lately about fake 100 yuan notes that are supposedly so good that they’re almost indistinguishable from the real thing. The People’s Bank of China has repeatedly said that this is not true and pointed out a... |
|
15 Jan 09
|
|
A school with three children A short photo-essay from Xinhua:
A four-person school
January 13 was the last of day of Autumn semester for primary schools in Rongshui county in Guangxi. At Siliutun school, Donghua village, Rongshui town, only one teacher and three pupils entered the... |
|
10 Jan 09
|
|
Targets in Gaza “Israeli forces pound targets…” (AP)
What, you mean this?
Oh, no, you mean this:
United Nations News Centre, January 8, 2009:
The Israeli operation has so far killed 758 people in Gaza, of whom 257 were children and 56 women, with... |
|
07 Jan 09
|
|
Xinhua demands democracy and human rights No, not the Xinhua News Agency. The Xinhua Daily. And those demands were made rather a long time ago. The paper was launched in 1938 as the mouthpiece of the Communist Party in KMT-controlled regions. (In Communist-controlled territory, the main official... |
|
31 Dec 08
|
|
Happiness was a year called 2008 Happiness in Britain, 1982, as seen by CDP:
Happiness in China, 2008, as seen by Netease commenter IP：120.84.*.*, via ProState in Flames (Links added by me):
What is happiness?
Happiness was 2008
You didn’t go to Urumqi for the New Year
Y... |
|
26 Dec 08
|
|
Harmonizing the Gulf of Aden Time to put your dancing shoes on and get the karaoke microphones out. The Navy’s Political Art Troupe has released a stirring song to commemorate the mission to defeat the pirates of Somalia:
Translated, it goes something like this:
Make Haste... |
|
24 Dec 08
|
|
Santa’s last Ho ‘Tis the season for right-wing hacks to grumble about politically correct phrases like “Happy Holidays” and “Seasons Greetings” and the lack of religious symbolism on Christmas cards. So, here’s my religiously symbolic... |
|
18 Dec 08
|
|
Truck vs police car Filmed near Qingdao: |
|
17 Dec 08
|
|
The life and death in Rongshui of Francoise Grenot-Wang The Xinhua headline was like a dagger in the heart. A fire had killed one person in Rongshui county, Guangxi. A Frenchwoman was missing. As I clicked on the link to open the article, I desperately hoped it was someone else. Someone else’s tragedy.... |
|
28 Nov 08
|
|
People to the power, power to the people, all comments deleted Power, in this case, being the electricity companies. On Thursday morning, news went out that the power companies were losing money and would receive nearly 20 billion yuan in subsidies to help them recover from the heavy damage caused by the snow storms... |
|
26 Nov 08
|
|
Why would so many people support a police killer? On Tuesday evening, Liu Xiaoyuan, who has acted as a lawyer for family of Yang Jia, announced on his blog that Yang will be executed within a week. Yang Jia’s mother told him that around 7pm, she was visited two officials from the Shanghai Higher... |
|
24 Nov 08
|
|
Scary-looking Finn and the Liuzhou pothole One evening, seven or eight years ago, I popped over to say hello to people working at the hostel where I stayed when I first arrived in Beijing. I was sitting at the bar, when the manageress came in, accompanied by a very large, very fierce and scary... |
|
24 Nov 08
|
|
China’s “Super-Shocking Shanzhai Trains” Shanzhai, as defined by ChinaSMACK:
山寨 = shan1 zhai4 = literally “mountain stronghold” in reference to historical warlord holdouts that were outside of government control. A “shanzhai” edition product thus refers to products outside o... |
|
15 Nov 08
|
|
To further promote the shrub-moving industry The leader came, heralded by shrubs.
The leader left. So did the shrubs.
Quick quiz for 50 points - fill in the blank space:
“Potted plants and trees for politburo members’ visits account for __% of China’s GDP.” |
|
09 Nov 08
|
|
Five and twenty blackbirds There’s more than one way to skin a cat. And there’s more than one way to report a story. For example, will dozens of Chinese-made passenger planes soon be winging their way through the skies of the United States? After this last week’s... |
|
06 Nov 08
|
|
Africa is a Country First So, the prospect of Sarah Palin with nuclear weapons has been averted, at least for the next four years. There was a wailing and gnashing of teeth from the lunatic far right of America who are still terrified that a communist Islamist terrorist is going... |
|
03 Nov 08
|
|
A 1.9 million yuan cell phone bill How much is 1.9 million yuan? Just under US$280,000. Translated from today’s Southern Metropolis Daily:
Cell phone mysteriously “leaves the country”
3-day bill comes to 1.9 million yuan
Something weird happened to Mr Ding, a company... |
|
01 Nov 08
|
|
Beyond Chinglish and gyfieithu I can’t speak, read or write Welsh, so I haven’t got the slightest idea what gyfieithu means. Neither did Swansea council when they put up this bilingual road sign:
From the BBC:
When officials asked for the Welsh translation of a road sign,... |
|
30 Oct 08
|
|
HIV is a shipping company The National Art Museum of China is taking part in the Heresies Project - a retrospective of Mexican photographer Pedro Meyer. (Today’s the last day if you want to see it.) One visitor wondered what this photograph was about…
…so he... |
twitter
blogs
china
thailand
japan
technology