Are you a laowai who’s left China for cozier shores, but miss the fun and frustration that Chinese Web surfing brings?
Do you spend nights longing for the roulette-like spin of trying to access Web sites in one of the world’s most censored nations?
Have you found yourself typing in nonsensical URLs in hopes of resurrecting the now elusive “page not found” error?
Tired of being able to visit sites about insidious topics like 
, 
, 
, 
and the likes?
Man, have we got the Firefox plugin for you! The China Channel Firefox Add-on instantly teleports your browser behind the Great Firewall of China and allows you to experience the Internet the way …
Neocha, China’s premier online creative community, has just released the third album on its Netlabel: Tomorrow’s Afternoon Tea / 明天的下午茶.
You may remember a post a while back where we interviewed Neocho CEO Sean Leow, and talked about their awesome NEXT player, which streams indie Chinese music for free.
The new album contains 10 tracks loaded with the syrupy sweet sounds of some of China’s best female indie vocalists. And, get this, it’s 100% free! You can download the entire album from this link [38 MB zip file].
Recently a friend of mine from Australia recently confided that while he likes learning Chinese, he still fails to see the utility of characters. “I still don’t see why they just don’t use pinyin,” he said with a shrug.
I began to explain why characters are, in fact, useful, beginning with the sheer number of cognates in the Chinese language. The relative paucity of different pinyin combinations would make reading a Chinese text in the system maddening and difficult.
Hell, I could go on all day with this; better you refer to bloggers with better command of Chinese than yours truly.
But here’s an aspect of characters that I would miss would they been discarded; their aesthetic beauty. I was thinking …
The ebb and flow of Chinese Nationalistic fervor mixed with undying “historic” hatred of the Japanese should really replace ping pong as China’s national sport.
Japanese & Chinese Students Fight In Shanghai: A group of drunk Japanese foreign students making noise get into a fight with Chinese students at a university in Shanghai. Two Chinese hurt, hundreds protest - singing national anthem and marching on the foreign dorm.
The Japanese Train Controversy: Train makes a one-minute unscheduled stop to let some Japanese passengers off to assist them in catching their plane home. Chinese netizens respond.
In my four years in China I’ve yet to see a legitimate version of any software here. Generally when purchasing apps and games in the Middle Kingdom you have two choices - pirated software that looks pirated, and pirated software that looks real.
Like pretty much every other media, most notably DVDs, the software industry suffers greatly from the blatant distribution of pirated products in China - and most Chinese don’t give a damn.
Scratch that, most Chinese likely don’t have any real concept of what the difference is between paying for legitimate …
The comments on this photo’s flickr page say it all - “classic China”. As the warm weather is quickly becoming a memory, I wanted to slip this image, by Elephant on a Bicycle, in here before we bundle up and don our long undies for winter.
Banks collapsing, countries on the edge of bankruptcy, a near-return to the Great Depression. All looks somewhat surreal when viewed from the other side of the planet, does it not?
Precisely when - or how - the global crisis will impact on ordinary people in Asia is hard to estimate, but it’s likely to, in the first wave, be felt in a variety of manufacturing industries across Asia, including here in China, that rely on the U.S. and Europe for most of their exports. So, in the short term, it seems that China is heading for lay-offs and closures among small manufacturers of anything from sweaters to DVD players, as the ordinary folks of the Western world star to become more …
I was just leaving a comment on the always refreshingly drinkable Beijing Boyce blog when I saw one of my biggest Chinese Pinyin pet peeves - chuanr.
串儿, for those who’ve been in China for less than an hour, generally means tasty bits on a stick. Chuàn/串 (meaning to string together) + ér/儿 (a suffix that makes some verbs into nice little nouns) technically comes out as “chuanr/chuan’er/chuan’r”… but when pronounced it is “chuar”.
Never, not ever, have I ever, never, heard anyone, ever, say Chuan-er.
And good thing, because it sounds like something you call someone you don’t like. “Yeah, he talks big, but what a feckin’ chuan’er.” “Ohmygod, did …
Not sure if you’ve heard the news, but China has banned Western religious music. Well, technically, it was banned all along, but only now are the powers that be getting their red and yellow panties in a bunch.
The banning news hit the wire after The Messiah, as to be performed by Britian’s Academy of Ancient Music at the Beijing International Music Festival, was changed from a public performance to invite only.
Also shutout was Mozart’s Requiem, set to be performed in Dujiangyan, a city heavily hit by the tragic Sichuan earthquake this past spring.
According to an opinion piece in the Guardian by Catherine Sampson, the new ban signifies a step backwards by the Party in an attempt to regain control of the Christianity …
Rolling into Shanghai’s People’s Square last Sunday, New Zealander Rob Thomson was met with surprisingly little fanfare. No media to greet him, no friends or family to congratulate him. A lonesome end to an amazing journey.
The random Chinese man he asked to take his photo to mark the moment had no idea that Thomson has just completed a world record breaking odyssey. He had, in the course of 462 days, travelled an amazing 12,000 km solo and unassisted across Europe, North America, and China on a longboard skateboard.
Now relaxing for a few days in Shanghai before heading back to his native New Zealand, Rob was kind enough to field some questions for Lost Laowai.
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