After wandering the halls of the China blogsphere for a few years now, it generally takes a pretty unique China-themed site to raise my eyebrow. ChinaSMACK is just such a site.

Essentially the site digs up, translates and reposts all the shit and sludge, peppered liberally with the plain weird, that are hot (or “viral”) topics in the Chinese-language Internet (blogs, bbs, etc.).

The site is well summed up by its tagline:
“Viral Chinese internet stories, pictures, & videos, translated. See what’s so popular, sexy, scandalous, or shocking behind the Great Wall”

I remember back in the early days of the net me and my high school buddies couldn’t get enough of the site rotten.com …

This guy has guts. And I like him for a bunch of reasons.

For those who don’t know, Hong Laowai (means “Red Foreigner”) has been a bit of an internet celeb over the past year. He stands in front of a webcam, and belts out the most ridiculous old communist propaganda tunes. But you can see he’s having a good time with it, and a lot of it is tongue-in-cheek. 

Unlike Dashan, I like Hong Laowai because he knows he’s being ridiculous.

I love music. Don’t well all? Music is awesome. But I hate pre-fab pop. Don’t we all? Pre-fab pop is crap.

That China’s mainstream music scene is near completely made up of boy bands and girl groups is a sad fact. But mainstream music scenes usually are (sad facts). So, when after digging around a bit I couldn’t find even the remotest signs of an independent music scene to offset the crud cracking out of cheap shop-front speakers, I was crushed.

That was three years ago. Despite being a musician (of sorts) and having worked as a music journalist (of sorts) before coming to China - I shelved my musical appetite and accepted that when it came to …

Recently a friend forwarded my name to a freelance reporter for the China Daily Hong Kong edition. Yes, like many of you, I didn’t know China Daily had a Hong Kong edition …more on that later.

The Canadian born Chinese China Daily reporter emailed me a list of questions regarding English teaching and English use here in Hong Kong and I was more than happy to help her out. I even invited her out to join some friends of mine for dinner later and she commented that she’s “always searching around for freelance gigs and it helps to talk to journalists and people looking for English-language writers.”

In my email I casually asked the reporter what the readership numbers of the China …

I just got finished reading that Time Out Beijing, one of the city’s preeminent English-language entertainment guides, has been suspended indefinitely.

Not, as one might guess, because it had been publishing subvert-the-youth articles or anything of the sort - but simply because it wasn’t properly licensed.

Fair enough.

I mean, in pretty much any country you’d need proper business licenses and if you didn’t have them, you could be shut down for any number of legalities. That’s not too bizarre.

But the part that I think is… amusing (?)… is that the magazine was operating just fine for more than three years without complaint, or proper forms filled in.

This is strikingly in line with the …

Perhaps it was in the strictest sense an unlawful gathering; maybe they were naive. But the people who were assembled in Tiananmen Square on this day in 1989 formed a cross section of Chinese society. From farmers to teachers, students to shopkeepers, and factory workers to intellectuals, all were looking to their government to fulfill the promises enshrined in the very name of the country; the People’s Republic of China.

Indignant towards widespread corruption and angered by the staggering indifference of a party elite more interested in their own private power squabbles, the People came together to ask for a better tomorrow. Nineteen years later most of them have their wish.

None of those gathered were …

What follows is the fourth part of a series of posts we’re running by fellow Laowai - Turner Sparks. Turner and his friend Jake decided just sitting around Suzhou and watching quake relief efforts on TV was not good enough, and so hopped into Turner’s car and pointed it towards Chengdu. Read Part I, Part II and Part III
After spending Wednesday down at the Red Cross continuing to load and unload supply trucks, we returned Thursday to find out our services were no longer needed as they already had enough volunteers.

One trip through the …

Last summer acclaimed documentary filmmaker Tan Siok Siok headed out into the streets of Beijing with a rather ambitious goal of capturing the essence of the city and its people the summer before the Olympics.

The result is Boomtown Beijing, a film that paints a picture of not just a city or the sporting event that it will play host to - but rather how a singular event has inspired people to do what in the past was so difficult and dangerous - dream.

The documentary follows the story of three Beijingers - an 11-year-old boy who hopes to be an Olympic torchbearer, a street sweeper looking to put together …

There’s this spot on my university campus that we’ve taken to calling “The Makeout Garden.” During the day it’s like any spot of green on the grounds of the ivory tower – a blip of green to contrast with the blase bathroom-tiled buildings of academic boredom. It’s full of elderly people performing taiji and students sprawled out sleeping during the morning and afternoon, but as soon as the sun goes down, it turns into a live re-enactment of an AXE commercial.
And I’m not really surprised. All of my students have at least three to five other roommates. They need to go somewhere. If it’s not The Makeout Garden, then it could be any of the “love …

With the swarm of anti-France/boycott-Carrefour messages still plaguing the wireless networks, IM chats and BBSes, it was a pleasant surprise to run across Jason’s post at Over and Out sharing a QQ forward he received that - shockingly - doesn’t rise up and call to arms the seething masses of ultra-nationalists.

For this laowai, I couldn’t be happier to see that there are young Chinese standing firm and illustrating that China HAS actually changed - and that the Red Guard-like mentality that has coursed through the country as if it were some common-sense killing virus is not necessarily representative of the population - but rather just more vocal.

From Over and Out ‘a breath of fresh air’:
most of the crap flying …