While in the Shanghai Museum a month ago, I picked up a museum guide flier “Treasures in museum’s collection” which featured this instantly forgettable sentence:
“Yuan Ji (Shi Tao), Zhu Da (Bada Shanren), Kun Can (Shi Xi), and Zhan Jiang (Hong Ren) were the four monk painters of the late Ming and early Qing period.”

It’s hard enough to internalize Chinese names if you don’t know Chinese (or if you do, but the characters aren’t alongside). But it’s even harder when everyone has two names, like all of these painters. The names in parentheses are their hao, what I would equate with self-selected pen names. Hao are often stamped onto paintings, in addition to signing. If the museum translated the hao after …

Hi, my name is Zheng Xiaoyu, and the reason I look so happy is that I’ve just won a no-expense paid trip to visit my ancestors.

That’s right folks, I have been awarded the coveted title of 2007 Chinese Scapegoat of the Year - an honour unlike any other.

I mean, I had wished and hoped, hoped and wished, but was beginning to doubt I’d even get nominated. Now here I am, the winner!

Please don’t get me wrong, it took a lot of hard work to get here; I had to stay up late, drink buckets of baijiu (I know I’m Chinese, but fuck, does anyone like this stuff?), and come up …

As many of you likely know, Lost Laowai runs a sister site, The Hao Hao Report.

HHR is a social bookmarking site for all us sinophiles that just love reading blog posts and news about China. Essentially it works the same as other social bookmarking sites (digg, netscape, del.ico.us, etc.), whereby community members submit links for everyone to vote on. If a story gets enough votes it gets promoted to the front page.

In so doing, visitors can get a quick glance at what the most popular stories circulating the English-language Sinosphere are. Simple enough eh?

Well, if you’ve not visited recently, or are just hearing about the HHR, you may have …

Of all the countless things that us Canadian Laowai miss about being at home, missing the Stanley Cup Playoffs has to rank way up there — right along side real maple syrup and Anne Murray.

Well, imagine my surprise when I saw that CBC was going to stream the playoffs live on their website.

Wow!

But then imagine my disappointment when I found out that it was only available if you’re watching from inside Canada.

Doh!

But then imagine my surprise when I found that you can work around that little stipulation with a Canadian Proxy.

Fucking A!

Step 1 - go to the …

By now, just about all laowai should have heard of our “Harmonious Society”.

The first time I saw those words was about three years ago, in Chinese, written in huge font on a billboard along the road just after the Lupu Bridge in Pudong, Shanghai. At the time the sign was an anomaly, but within the last year it’s become ubiquitous.

It’s on red banners. It’s on billboards. It was a major theme in CCTV’s 2007 Chinese New Year program, probably the best indicator of its priority as a government message. It’s the name of the new high-speed trains, the “Harmony Lines 和谐号”, which started running in April. It has even jumped the party …

It’s been pretty hot today: a reported 30 degrees Celsius (that’s 86 Fahrenheit, if you prefer to count it that way), coupled with near 70% humidity that is tempered only slightly by a gentle, warm breeze.

No complaints from me whatsoever. Being from the U.K., where the number of summer days can be counted on the fingers of an individual’s hands, I consider each sun-kissed day a blessing.

What’s got my goat today, then? Well, it’s the fact that we’re now stuck in a kind of purgatory whereby it’s amazingly hot in confined spaces - taxis, restaurants, shops, hospitals, schools, etc - and yet nobody will contemplate turning on the air-conditioning because, and I quote local wisdom here, “It’s not summer yet”….

Knock-offs of Disney apparel, toys and, of course, DVDs are so common here in the Mainland that none but the strictest IPR pundits raise an eyebrow about it anymore.

However, Beijing’s Shijingshan Amusement Park has got to take the cake for blatant infringement of an endless amount of trademarks. The park, until recently, waved proudly a slogan that stated “Disneyland is too far!”, and featured a virtual cornucopia of characters from various Disney, Dreamworks and Japanese cartoons - with absolutely no permission given by the trademark holders.

For Beijing kids that couldn’t …

There. I just coined a phrase.

I’ve been doing some reading today (Note: that makes it a good day for me), and I’ve been seeing many articles and postings published by the China-focused academia or journalism community. Like the Nutty Yale Professor a while back, these articles leave me with a certain sour taste in my mouth. I just can’t place it.

I mean, really long articles like this one (I had to go for a sandwich mid-read) from Rebecca MacKinnon about DCMA, the youtube/Viacom fight, and digital copyright in Hong Kong.

Yes, Youtube’s getting hassled for hosting copyrighted clips, but yet there’s no mention in this article about the multitiude of Chinese youtube clones which continue to …

When I started this site, and this blog, my intention was (and is) to give foreigners coming to or recently arrived in China an inside look at the country. Of course, usually this means “from an expat perspective”. Well, Ben Ross, of Ben’s Blog, has taken this a step further:
“As an American living in China, I have spent the last three years of my life enjoying the benefits of being a citizen of a country which is far wealthier than the one in which I reside. I travel around town by taxi. I drink at expensive bars. I eat sushi. I take trips across the country, and when my apartment …

Here’s a cool idea: Tear up the gray concrete of Tiananmen Square and turn it into a Chinese version of New York’s Central Park. One leading architect is suggesting something along those lines, the Guardian reports (via CDT):
Ma Yansong, an award-winning urban planner, says the grey concrete symbol of China’s red politics should be given a green makeover. To heighten awareness about the environment, he believes the Beijing square should be transformed into a park and forest. In his model, the vast expanse of paving slabs outside the Forbidden City are replaced by trees and grass. There are lush thickets around the mausoleum containing Mao Zedong’s embalmed body and a verdant entrance to the Great Hall of …