TripDingo

The Peking Duck reports and bickers over the recent Taiwanese elections for their Legislative Yuan. The KMT successfully secured an overwhelming majority, dealing a major blow to the DPP. I can already imagine millions of pro-independence Taiwanese and anti-China foreigners shedding a massive tear while the pro-unification supporters and “Taiwan-is-part-of-China” Chinese grinned just a wee bit wider. (As someone who recently visited Taiwan and noticed no major social unrest or turmoil, I must admit that I’m constantly amused by people here in China who are convinced that Taiwan must be a huge mess awaiting big brother China to guide them towards social harmony.)

Of course, the overall issues surrounding this power-shift in the Legislative Yuan aren’t so simplistic nor limited to that single contentious China-Taiwan issue. Much of it is about making sure your side has more heads than the other when the infamous Taiwanese legislature brawls break out. However, we can safely say that, yes, the KMT generally is doing a better job of not pissing off the CCP than the DPP, especially with Chen Shui-Bien at the the helm. I mean, not pissing off China when it is poised to relegate your island into the abyss of irrelenvancy is probably a good idea overall, right? (more…)

Yesterday, a good friend of mine (yes, I have friends) told me about Sunday’s protests around People’s Square here in Shanghai over the proposed extension of the Shanghai Maglev train. A few days earlier, there were similar protests (pictured above) around the XuJiaHui area also in Shanghai. Some protestors were out to complain about the dangers of the magnetic fields generated by the Maglev. Others may be exhibiting NIMBY motivations, fearing the construction of the Maglev train will reduce the value of their property. Still others questioned why the government seemed to keep the extension plans quiet, suspecting that the government had malicious reasons for not letting the public know.

Perhaps more interestingly (but somewhat expectedly), there was plenty of hearsay about the government cracking down on the protests and any dissemination of information, coverage, or discussion about the demonstrations. Supposedly, any threads about the incident posted on popular Chinese forums were promptly deleted within minutes and their posters punished (albeit by deducting various forum-based rewards points or whatnot). Several western blogs and forums still have some coverage and material so perhaps the censorship is mostly limited to preventing only the local Chinese from bitching too much amongst themselves.

What I found refreshing, however, was when my friend confided that this is perhaps the first time she has ever really felt upset and disturbed by government censorship. Maybe that’s the silver lining to this all.

As most (especially foreign) internet users in China are aware, large chunks of the internet are regularly unavailable to view or use without some sort of proxy service. This can get really annoying for those looking for porn or regard the BBC as an authoritative news source. It can also prevent people from using Wikipedia to substantiate every argument they use for any internet debate, trolling, or flame-war they’re engaged in. 

While perusing Danwei this evening, I came across a short list that may be helpful for reminding us of what is blocked by the Great Firewall (GFW) or “Net Nanny” (which is not to be confused with the actual www.netnanny.com, I think):

Blocked sites
Wikipedia
Wordpress blogs
Livejournal
Opera blogs
Typepad blogs—although Typepad.com itself does not seem to blocked

Partially blocked or filtered
Large parts of the BBC website are unaccessible
Flickr—some photos on older servers do not load properly
Google.com’s Image Search and News are unreliable in China and seem to be heavily filtered

Blogspot has popped on and off the list randomly throughout the past and frankly, I wouldn’t bet on it staying available in China for long. Xanga seems to still be down as well which, at one point in time about 1.5 years ago, it wasn’t before. Google’s Image Search is particularly annoying for me, especially when it works for a bit then suddenly becomes red X hell.  

An article on CNN today notes that, as of June 1, shops and supermarkets in China will not provide free thin plastic bags to their customers. If a customer wants one, they will have to pay for it. Despite increasing coal power production and plenty of other enterprises categorically laying waste (hah) to the environment throughout China, this is still something of a bona-fide effort by China to reduce litter, albeit the most unsightly kind and just in time for the country’s great PR event, the summer Olympics. Environmentalists worldwide rejoice and this move by China, if sufficiently successful, would at least make China seem a bit more progressive than the United States. Only San Francisco, ever progressively liberal and politically correct, has outlawed the use of plastic bags at supermarket check-out counters.

I especially hate those ultra-thin plastic bags (not for your pleasure) many Chinese restaurants and street food vendors use to package any food you take to go. Can you imagine carrying your dish of Chinese food home in a small plastic bag? Whereas Westerners are accustomed to cute little take-out boxes or at least styrofoam containers, employing small, thin plastic bags are common here. I don’t know for certain but I always wondered if pouring in really hot food into these plastic bags was somehow causing a small reaction in the plastic that would release untold poisons and toxins into the food I’d then ingest later.

Anyway, while many consumers will certainly find this somewhat inconvenient during a transition phase, it really isn’t asking too much for a greater good. When the propogandic banners and television commercial spots admonishing the masses to be civilized and not litter fall deaf upon their ears, it does make sense to just reduce the amount of stuff they can casually drop on the ground. We’ll need to ban skewer sticks next.

I was over at EastSouthWestNorth and encountered the story of a rural teacher (presented as the girl to the left) who began selling her body to raise money for the school she was teaching at, already for free. Twenty months later, she passed away.

Apparently, the story made some waves within China and even reached some foreign audiences.

It was also completely fabricated.

The person who posted the story has clarified his intent as trying to raise awareness for the impoverished schools of the mountainous western region of China. Through his dramatic fictional story, he feels he has already done good and accomplished his goals due to increased public attention and “awareness” and some resulting allocations of funds by the relevant government authorities.

Zhang said: “I want to clarify to the media.  The story about the memorial meeting for the teacher-prostitute has even reached the north American and European forums.  It is a public interest campaign that I am doing for the poor schools in the mountainous western region.  As a Chinese person with a conscience,  I want to call the people’s attention to education in western China.  As an individual, my means are limited.  So I created a touching story to motivate people to take action.  Although this has created many doubts and controversies, all of that is not important.  The important thing is that my essay has caused certain western mountainous region education departments to allocate funds to the impoverished schools.  I am very grateful and that is enough for me.  As for the vicious rumors and insults, I will ignore them with a laugh, because those people failed to understand why and what I wrote.” 

This is very much a “do the ends justify the means” sort of issue.

More interesting were the comments Zhang, the writer responsible, gave during an interview regarding his ideas about the internet and the “truth and lies” of information:

(more…)

I recently had the pleasure of meeting Elliot Ng, the VP of Marketing for Kango.com (who sponsors this blog) and having quite a few exchanges about the China blogosphere, entreprenuership, travel, technology, Shanghai nightlife, and the flows of information between China and the West (amongst many other things). Fantastic guy and I want to bake cookies for him already but I’ll jump straight into what I want to talk about in this post by referencing a post of his over at his blog, CNReviews.com:

There is an incredible one-way mirror (technically a two-way mirror) effect in the world today. People (ok, educated elites) in China have a high degree of awareness about what is going on in the US. But most people (including educated elites) in the US have a low degree of awareness of China.

Elliot then goes on to give an “especially clear” example of this one-sided “awareness” where a marketing director for a Chinese company shared that she watches the American TV shows Prison Break and Entourage. 

I have a few problems with Elliot’s statement (which I’m sure likely stems just from the lack of precision when using certain terms). For one, how are we defining “awareness?” Awareness of what? Of popular media entertainment? Social trends? Political trends? Societal values? Business environments? Professional norms? History? What? I could go on and on. Granted, there are more Chinese (absolute and per capita) who have exposure to American popular media than vice versa but is that sufficient to generalize “awareness?”  (more…)

I spent much of my time watching The Warlords / Tau Ming Chong remarking about how much fatter Jet Li seems to have gotten. I spent much of Assembly / Ji Jie Hao sniffling, wiping away tears, and trying not to break down and start wailing.

The movie follows Captain Gu Zidi (pictured above) through the tumultuous decades following World War II. Though the movie depicts both the Chinese civil war between Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalists and Mao Zedong’s Communists and the Korean civil war that involved both the United States and China, this movie wisely avoids becoming a propogandic political statement and stays intensely a human story. This is not a movie about which side, or ideology, is right or wrong. This movie is about the tragedy that war inflicts upon men and the men that “survive” it.

I haven’t cried this card since Michael Bay’s Armageddon.

One of the little quirky things I did when I first moved to Shanghai was to get a map and highlighter to keep track of what places I’ve been to or through. Given how large and foreign Shanghai was to me at that time, it was a novel little project that I hoped would encourage me to break my comfort zones, get out there, and explore this incredibly vast and dense metropolis. Armed with a 2005 city map and my trusty yellow highlighter, I’d fill in all of the new places I’ve trekked each day.

Two year’s later, I’ve simultaneously highlighted plenty and plenty still remains blank. To be certain, I stopped bothering quite some time ago as I really had better things to do than to pore over maps trying to remember and ascertain what new real estate I covered recently. On the other hand, however, this city is just too big…and it changes really fast.

They say a third of the cranes are located in China. Whether this little factoid is true or not, there certainly is a ton of construction going on all the freaking time. My 2005 map is, for sure, quite outdated. In fact, quite a bit of the information that was on it was wrong from the get-go or maybe certain projected developments were changed and revised over time. Street names change, new skyscrapers are erected, and new metro lines are added.

 I used to think the Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Hall over in People’s Square was pretty darn nifty. In fact, I thought it was so nifty, it became a mandatory sight to take visitors. Surely, they would be as awe-struck as I was by the model replica of the city that takes up nearly an entire floor of the building, right? I mean, you don’t need to be an architecture model geek or SimCity nerd to appreciate a massive scale replica of a city, right?

Tip of the World Financial Center, Jin Mao Tower, and where Ethan Hunt did crazy shit.

With that in mind, imagine my nerdgasm when someone passed on the link to www.edushi.com to me. Holy shit. This shit is fucking AWESOME. Oh sure, it is mostly eye-candy, but damn, that shit’s delicious. It makes me squeal with delight. You can’t help but zoom out and in and drag around searching for places and buildings you recognize. Okay, duh, I’m not really saying but the obvious here but, obviously, this is beyond nifty.

And how so?

Well, first of all, you do have to admire the amount of work that putting something like this invariably requires. They must have a ton of modelers on staff (or someone who is just really productive…which is reasonably impossible in China) and I can’t even imagine how frustrating it’d be to update these cityscapes as things change. As I mentioned above, things change pretty quickly here in China. It’s definitely not the Big Dig.

Second, the potential applications. According to the company behind this, they definitely envision virtualizing the urban environment. While I doubt these pretty little cityscapes are built upon a foundation that would eventually allow people to “wander” around in them with virtual avatars, it is a reasonably entertaining channel for mashing and then disseminating urban geography and services. And while men may do better than women when it comes to reading maps, women are better than men when it comes to orienting oneself according to discernable landmarks. Even if on a most superficial level, it definitely helps to know what the building you’re looking for looks like.

But yes, this is mostly about eye-candy. Sweet, delicious eye-candy.