Xinhua featuring weird science, poor grammar and hybrid boobs

It's tough being a Chinese press agency. It's even tougher being the Chinese press agency. Everyone's just waiting for you to stumble, people label you as a "mouthpiece", call you "unethical" and "biased", and dub you "pseudo-journalists"; but through it all you staunchly hold your head high and publish this:

Xinhua editors must have felt the much-truncated rewrite of a Daily Mail article was lacking a bit of …

What the hell’s with all these primary school attacks?

What the hell is going on? I know times are tough, I know there is huge economic disparity between the rich and the poor, I know nobody likes you, I know your boss made you lose face, I know society looks down on you, I know your parents beat you. But why the fuck do you feel your only out is to go to a primary school with a knife and start stabbing kids?

When I opened this story this morning I couldn't figure out…

Obama Speech Censored in China

It is said that an individual's fears can be seen in what they spend their life avoiding and evading. As for governments, their fears are exposed in what they censor, and yesterday's Inauguration speech by the new US president Barack Obama (wow, it feels good to type that for the first time ever) seems to have struck a few chords of fear and worry in Beijing, as parts of Obama's speech which referenced “Communism…

The 21 edicts from the Chinese government’s propaganda unit

The Sydney Morning Herald has published a list of edicts from China's spin doctors of the highest level. The first edict says it all: "The telecast of sports events will be live [but] in case of emergencies, no print is allowed to report on it." Interestingly, the SMH makes no mention of how they came to have the edicts, nor do they attempt to put it into any sort of context.…

BBC Chinese Website Unblocked; Jaws Drop

It's only been a month since BBC's English-language news website was unblocked by Net Nanny for the first time in the three years that I've been in China with regular web access.

And now today, more astonishingly, the BBC's Chinese language news site has also been unblocked, quite possibly for the first time in the history of the Interwebs.

Here are the two front pages, as I wrote this now on the evening of Jul…

There’s A New Massage Tout in Town: China Daily!

I'm not a big fan of China Daily, China's national language newspaper but I do read its website occasionally when there's nothing better available for work. I recently noticed one thing at the bottom of the each news story, a massage ad.

Now I thought that was something only The Shanghai Daily did -- and even then the ads appeared in the back of its classified section not on the news stories of its website. Maybe …

My Brush with China Daily Hong Kong

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 frie…

Chinese netizens strike blow at Western media ethics

Chinese citizens and netizens alike have long claimed Western media shows an unfair bias towards their country, and though most Western media outlets seem to pay it no heed, one site has caused them to pause and take notice.

Anti-CNN.com, as its name suggest, puts a thumb in the eye of US media giant CNN, but doesn't stop there. The site gives an endless supply of photographic examples where North American and Eur…