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 […]
Saturday, December 27, 2008
Time to put on your dancing shoes and get out the karaoke microphones. 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 to Somalia
Lyrics: Wang Lei
Music: Lei Yu
Make haste to Somalia, cruise the Gulf of Aden
With lofty sentiments, […]
Thursday, December 18, 2008
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. But it could only have been one person - Francoise, […]
Saturday, November 29, 2008
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 and earthquake this year.
The first five comments on the story at Netease:
ip：59.32.*.*：
The […]
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
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 People’s Court who notified her that the Supreme People’s Court […]
Monday, November 24, 2008
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 looking Finn. He turned out to be […]
Monday, November 24, 2008
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 of government regulations that are widely reflected in the numerous fake and knockoff electronics/commodities made in China today. The term “shanzhai” can […]
Sunday, November 16, 2008
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.”