There are few things I love more than photography, Photoshop and good Chinese controversy. Imagine my delight then when I stumbled across a WSJ article, “China Eats Crow Over Faked Photo Of Rare Antelope“, that melds the three. In what has become this month’s journalistic black-eye (in a LONG line of similar cuts and bruises) [...]
Archive for February, 2008
Getting the basics on Baidu
Think Baidu‘s just a Google copy? Think again. The Chinese search engine that dominates domestic searches may have a lot in common with the “do no evil” American search giant, but it is in itself a whole other animal. On March 10th my good friend and business partner, Professor Lonnie Hodge, will be joining Grace [...]
3 Ways To Kickstart Your Chinese for the New Semester
Xinhuanet is dead right about one thing, it may be three weeks ago now, but I really am only just getting over my “gasp” at Zhang Ziyi’s dress on the phenomenon that is CCTV’s annual Spring Festival gala, they were just wrong about the reason. Bowled over by the fairy-pinkness of it yes, but the [...]
Great Firewall of China: Explained
Finally. Finally a journalist has sat down and hashed out a detailed, sourced explanation of how China’s Internet censorship works. May I just say, thank you Mr. Fallows. James Fallows is The Atlantic’s “man in China”, and his article “The Connection Has Been Reset” is the first article I’ve seen that has given an extensive [...]
A Man at the Center of Change in 19th Century China
For all those Chinese parents looking to get their kids into Harvard or Yale, they should take their noses out of those how-to-books writen by parents of successful students and instead read the biography of one of their countrymen. Yung Wing’s My Life in China and America (China Economic Review Publishing) is the biography of [...]
Space Invaders
With a U.S. ailing spy satellite being put out of its misery two days ago (Feb. 20th, 07:26 PST) by the U.S. Navy, comes a new source of confrontation between the U.S. and China, just a matter of a few days since Steven Spielberg resigned as an artistic director of the Beijing Olympics in protest [...]
ChinesePod hits the big time
I’ve long been a fan of ChinesePod.com, a site that offers free mp3 podcasts for learning Mandarin. Having used various aspects of the site for nearly the entire time I’ve been in China, it was with a lot of interest that I read the company being mentioned in the New York frigin Times! In my [...]
The Great Firewall of N. America?
I was just chatting with a friend in Canada and she suggested a check out the new Foo Fighters single – The Pretender. Being the suavy Chinese Internet surfer I am, I jumped over to Baidu’s handy mp3 search and immediately brought it up. Impressed with my slick mp3 finding prowess, my friend asked how [...]
Sportplomacy, as stupid as it sounds
For months, scratch that, for years I’ve been thinking that China’s vision of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing is just completely out of whack with the reality of the event. Seeing large city squares be constructed, buildings erected, national pride stoked, all in preparation for Er Ling Ling Ba – the year of China’s Olympics [...]
LLW’s Rick on the radio
Lost Laowai’s Rick Martin was featured on The China Business Show the other day giving the run-down on the state of China’s Internet sector. For any that don’t know, Rick also runs CNET Asia’s Little Red Blog as well as his personal blog, Panda Passport. All that and he still manages to hold down a [...]
