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 cast their compulsory vote in favor of a single candidate to represent them in the […]
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 blog, I need to be careful about throwing too many stones inside my glass house. […]
Sunday, February 15, 2009
(Update: The word is that the attackers have now been caught. Some details known, others not yet clear.
Update 2: One of them was indeed caught and will now stand trial.
Update 3: The attacker has been convicted and sentenced to four and a half years in prison.)
Big-name Chinese blogger Xu Lai, better known as ProState in […]
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
See Update Below.
(And see Sun Bin for eyewitness account (and now video); also Shanghaist, Danwei and ChinaSMACK. 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 news, it’s not unusual for […]
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 quaint transport system to a grinding halt for a day - and then melted as quickly as it came. That […]
Uploaded to Flickr by musicoooool.
Lotus Temple (Lianhua Si) in Tongnan County, Chongqing
(h/t Prostate in Flames)
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 number of ways to tell a real note from a fake one. Photographs […]
Thursday, January 15, 2009
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 final preparation for the end-of-term exam. Siliutun is a mountain village with 60 households. After third […]
Thursday, January 8, 2009
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 paper was the Liberation Daily.) After the defeat of the KMT, the Xinhua Daily […]
Thursday, January 1, 2009
Happiness in Britain, 1982, as seen by CDP, the advertising agency for Hamlet cigars:
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
You didn’t go to Chenzhou in February*
You didn’t visit Lhasa in March
You didn’t […]