Shanghai China Snippets Observations about living in Shanghai and China in general

May 19, 2008

Black and White Search

Filed under: China News — Shanghai @ 9:52 pm

search engines mourn

Search engines in black and white for the 3 days mourning period that started yesterday with 3 minutes of silence on 2:28 PM.

3 minutes/days to think of the devastation the earthquakes in Sichuan have caused.

If you like to donate, I suggest you to check the Shanghaiist website which is very up to date with the latest news.

August 1, 2007

No Food News is Good Food News

Filed under: China News — Shanghai @ 4:16 am

In the very unlink able SCMP from yesterday I read that the publication bureau in Beijing is working overtime to make sure no negative reports are published, especially about food safety.

The tabloid Beijing Daily Messenger will have to scrap its political and social pages. Instead it will have to offer entertainment and lifestyle news. The current 40 pages will become 32 and many reporters will loose their jobs.

The First, another daily is said to be pressured to only start publishing about sports.
The Beijing Youth Dailly and the Beijing Evening News have been told not to run any negative news.

Welcome to Happy Land and all this because of a fake or not so fake (nobody knows for sure anymore) dumpling?

April 25, 2007

China’s Environmental Car Future

Filed under: China News — Shanghai @ 10:12 am

Chinese environmental frienly carJust before the opening of the Olympics China will make an important announcement to the world on how they will start tackling the environmental problems that China faces. That’s at least what Wolfgang Grulke said (I hope I’ve quoted him correctly) during his talk about the Future last week here in Shanghai.

Wolfgang is a futurist and as such talked about, as he calls it, lessons from the future and helps companies to apply this to the present in order to survive and keep on growing.

I had to think about his words when Gordon sent me an article about Chinese car companies starting to focus on future technology. (more…)

February 21, 2007

Chongqing Style Pedagogics

Filed under: China News — Shanghai @ 6:07 am

Municipal bylaw enforcement officers in Chongqing stuck confiscated paper advertisements all over the bodies of two boys, aged 10 and 15 and paraded them after they were found dispensing the ads.

The goal was to publicly humiliate them.

pedagogics in ChongqingBut using public humiliation to attempt to control the use of the adlets in China has met with strong criticism from the public.

“It is an insult to the boys,” an anonymous local resident told the web portal, with another asking “how would these officers feel if their children had undergone a public parade?”

Chongqing style pedagogics, what can I say.

From the China Daily

January 11, 2007

China Internet Still Terribly Slow

Filed under: China News — Shanghai @ 5:53 am

The Internet in China is still at snail speed and for some weird reason it gets worse in the evening.

Is everybody trying to play games after 18:00? Is the available bandwidth less in the evening to cut cost for China Telecom’s use of satellite back ups or is there another explanation for this?

The news is that it will take until the end of the month to make the great leap back to 2007 but it wouldn’t surprise me if we may linger a bit longer in 1997.

It’s not an important medium anyway, I can’t recall any business, let alone individuals that actually rely on it and China is scientifically & technologically advanced enough to do without.

December 18, 2006

Dutch Journalist Doesn’t Do Research and Deletes Own Post

Filed under: China News — Shanghai @ 10:01 am

I was rather surprised to read recently, to be more specific, a couple of days ago, that a Dutch journalist wrote on her blog for the NRC Handelsblad (a Dutch quality newspaper) that Wikipedia was available again in China. I was even more surprised that she quoted an article from the BBC that was a month old. I commented that the wise minds in charge of the censor switch had deemed it necessary to block their citizens again from the encyclopedian knowledge of Wikipedia.

A couple of days later I checked whether the comment was published. Well, it wasn’t. in fact the whole article had disappeared in oblivion, erased from the website so no one will ever know there was once an article that used outdated data and wasn’t fact checked before publishing. Thank god there is Google and their cache, nothing is lost on the Internet, even if you want it to be…
NRC Wikipedia
Mistakes happen, I know, I make them daily. I just wonder why she didn’t just adjust her post instead of deleting it.
You can find her current China articles minus 1, all in Dutch

February 24, 2006

Socialist Countryside

Filed under: China News — Shanghai @ 6:56 am

socialist countrysideTwo days ago I finished another episode of Nip & Tuck and zapping a bit I hit bingo as the 10 ‘o clock news of [tag]China[/tag]’s only English channel ([tag]CCTV[/tag]) had just started. My eyes probably doubled their viewer ratings.

That day was the day of the [tag]New Socialist Countryside[/tag]. Field reports from, yep the real fields, glowing comments from those selected, nice shots of healthy farmers harvesting their latest crop, altogether one big socialist countryside galore. It has something to do with improving the life of the farmers.

A new bl*g, started by the editors of the [tag]China Economic Review[/tag] has their own view on the term.

The characterization of this process as the “New Socialist Countryside” raises a smile. There is nothing socialist about China’s cities these days, and the countryside, even less so. The genius of China manifests itself in so many little ways, one being its ability to hold two conflicting positions simultaneously without blinking. The West totally lacks that sophistication.

This quote raises a smile as well. I tried this genius approach many times when I was young, still try it some times but I can’t recall being ever praised for it by my parents.

I just checked and the domain “newsocialistcountryside.com as well as socialistcoutryside.com are still available. Tip for western investors, get it, one day you’ll be selling tv’s and toothbrushes online to the inhabitants of these places. Never to early to start marketing a domain name with government credibility.

(Disclaimer, I don’t buy dvd’s anymore, I rent them for 2.5 Rmb. a piece, saves me the trouble of one day having to import them back to a country where the don’t accept [tag]Chinese[/tag] receipts as genuine prof of a legal buy)

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