Archive for January, 2008

Freezin’ your laowai ass off? Tips for staying warm

With us expats in China deep into the country’s chilly months, perhaps we’re a little late for these tips – but none the less, here’s a bit of advice for anyone currently reading this with gloves on.

Now, quite obviously these don’t apply to big-salary expats that are living in apartments with floor-heating and double-glazed windows. But for the rest of us poor whelps that frequently get blown over by the drafts running through our apartments, some of these might help.

Confessions of a Chinese School Dropout

I was enrolled in formal Chinese studies at a university here in Dalian for one year. And today I realized that one year was just not enough. Let me explain why. I’ve been living in China for 4+ years, and picking up Mandarin bit by bit over that time. Practical Mandarin. First it was the [...]

BBC World Earth Report: Guangxi’s Biogas Revolution

One of my New Year’s resolutions in 2008 is to fight pessimism. Anyone else fed up with BAD news about the environment? Why is it always BAD news when there are pockets of resistance all over the world fighting for the environment against something much more dangerous and insidious than the build up of greenhouse [...]

Report says China still poor and no threat to America

I just finished reading Walter Russell Mead’s cleverly titled opinion piece in the LA Times: The great fall of China. I gotta say, he paints an interesting picture of Americans, never mind the “China” he is writing about. The article points to a recent study by the World Bank that concluded that their previous figures [...]

Mind the gap this Spring Festival

With Spring Festival just a couple weeks away, time to remind any first-time Laowai to be careful as they venture out in what must be the world’s largest annual mass-migration. Despite being one of the larger stories on Chinese-language news channels, little has been mentioned externally about an accident in Wuhu, Anhui, on January 13, [...]

Photo of the Week: Things to Come

We return to the expressive photography of Shelby Karns for this weeks Photo of the Week. With Spring Festival only a couple weeks away, I thought this shot might be a good reminder for all of us to find some cottonwads before it’s too late. Every week we’ll feature an interesting, funny, beautiful or otherwise [...]

Bloggers put “An” back in Tianmen

Just a little over a week ago reports came out about a man, Wei Wenhua, being beaten to death by hired city official “enforcers” in the city of Tianmen, Hubei. Wei had stopped near a clash between city officials and locals who were protesting the dumping of garbage by their homes. When Wei attempted to [...]

Chinese Zoos – Animal Cruelty or Cultural Ambiguity?

One of the first things ever said to me about Chinese zoos was from an English friend of mine shortly after I first arrived in China. He explained that before I head to any of China’s various “zoo”-like establishments I need to understand that in a country where are limited, don’t expect to see much [...]

Book Review: China – People Place Culture History

When I got an e-mail a few months back from book publisher DK to see if I was interested in reviewing their new book, “China: People Place Culture History“, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I had, wrongly, assumed that the book would simply be a token collection of pages about [...]

Cartoon: Baidu vs. Google

Those Mac vs. PC ads are getting a little tiresome now, so for my next cartoon I’ll rip into those two familiar characters to pit the Chinese search engine Baidu against the international search giant, Google. There are huge regional variations in terms of which search engines and portals are favoured by which nations. The [...]

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