CHINAYOUREN

I just finished reading that book 蚁族 (Ant Tribe) that is all over the place on the Chinese internet and media. I was curious why it was becoming so hot here while Western media covered it only briefly.  I think I know the answer now, but let me introduce the book first and more on [...]

I just noticed this picture I took this morning in the little lane. The intention was to illustrate how the Olympic spirit is finally coming to the Shanghai local communities. The result is I unwittingly took a cool portrait of myself reflected in the announcement board glass cover.

This is the typical Chinese motivational message that [...]

I visited an Expo for the first time as a kid, when my school took all my class together to Seville ‘92. Spain was living a crazy year, the Olympics where happening at the same time that Summer, and the Expo was designed to be one of the largest ever. Like now in China, there [...]

This morning I was doing some tests on Google to see if there was any change in the search results, and I noticed one detail I had not thought of before: although everyone is describing Google.cn as “hosted in China”, the IP is American, as you can see on whois.
In fact, other than the deals with advertisers [...]

Disclaimer: In the interest of science, this post contains sexually explicit material. If you are underage and/or a sensitive person you are advised not to scroll down. If you don’t read Chinese it’s OK.
This is the continuation of the previous post in the series, where we ended up rambling off the main topic and into [...]

The case of Google’s new approach to China is moving slower than expected, but I have the feeling that we may see something happen pretty soon. After the New Year, the Double Meetings are almost over and the Chinese government will probably want to have this cleared before the next big item in the agenda, [...]

Finally, after a long week of intense NPC-CPPCC coverage, the first signs of the spring are starting to bloom in the press of Shanghai. The Oriental Morning Post opens with a picture of the large billboards promoting the EXPO on New York’s Times square, while its archrival, the more conservative Shanghai Morning Post, shows the [...]

This weekend I have taken a break from my exhausting research into the the sex of Chinese conservatives, to update old parts of the site and finish implementing some new features I had been trying lately.
The changes in version 2.0 are not related to design, so they may not be immediately apparent to the [...]

It looks like Charles over at the new China Divide blog has found a new source of clicks to revive the China blogging scene: debating the crackdown on pornography in China.
While I don’t usually support any kind of censorship, I have to say I couldn’t care less for the cause of porn in China. From [...]

The Oriental Morning Post of Shanghai is doing a nice coverage of the annual NPC-CPPCC meetings. I liked today’s paper edition, which carries a couple of cute alpacas right next to a picture of Hu and the boys walking down the aisle from the CPPCC they’ve just inaugurated.
It is a long story for those that [...]

NOTE: For those readers who’ve been offline for the past 3 days, this is a post about Google Buzz, the new Google service that has invaded the World’s mailboxes this week.
But take it easy, hold on a sec, don’t rush to your GFW test tools, this has not happened yet. I just want to be [...]

Holy Smokes!
Something is moving in Google China.
I have been working for the last 12 hours with Google docs, and I just realize I was using Yi’s computer, the one that doesn’t have the VPN installed. This means that Google Documents is unblocked since  yesterday evening at least.  And so is Google Groups! Both sites were blocked [...]

All this G talk of the last days has brought me a lot of readers from the tech world, and I feel a responsibility towards them now to report the latest innovations. That is why yesterday during my Sunday walk I decided to stroll into the local public lavatory, where the latest developments are always [...]

Back on the job. On re-read, I have the feeling that I might have been too optimistic yesterday. Sure, the style of Google’s announcement betrayed personal involvement, and once at the negotiation table it is to be expected that a more businesslike atmosphere will prevail. But even if G shuts up, it is not sure [...]

You might be wondering why this story of Google is taking up so much space in this otherwise low-tech blog. I am as well. I think what fascinates me is the almost complete absence of first hand news after the G bomb. The time is for speculation, and for China bloggers and tea leave readers [...]

Looking back to what I wrote last week I realize that, in my effort to keep a cool head and analyze the events, I forgot to say a very important thing: I Respect Google. I have never had any doubt of the non-business nature of their decision, and, in spite of our poll’s results, I am [...]

The news of the resignation of Baidu’s Chief Technical Officer Li Yinan came as a shock to Chinayouren, where I am still gaping at the CDT with goggling eyes.
This is going to make more noise now than it would normally, as people will be quick to find connections with the Google China affair and the [...]

Some images of the battle of the decade, the non-evil corporation Google against the dark forces of the commy government of China. Below the logo on Google.cn today. Clearly, the big G is sending a message to the Chinese: we respect you, we dig your ancient culture, it is just the disgusting authorities of your [...]

I know, there are other news in the World, and I am probably not paying enough attention to them. But I can’t help it, I’ve been overclocking for the last 48h trying to understand Google’s decision, I have read every single article appeared on the internet since. And I still don’t get it.
I want to [...]

There has been very little new information today and most of the media and the blogosphere is turning around the same ideas, many of them mentioned already in the previous 2 posts of the series.
Here are a few interesting new points I have gathered that I think are worth commenting:

There has been a call by [...]

Following the previous post about Google and China, here are my reflections regarding the foreseeable consequences of all this. First of all, an important clarification: I don’t think fighting against censorship is bad. Censorship in China is very real, it is a disgrace not only for activists but for most honest Chinese, and it only [...]

First of all, read this article posted on the Google official blog. It is all you need to read for the moment because there is no more first hand info out there yet.
It was published some 5 hours ago. What it says in a rather muddled way is essentially:

That Google has detected attacks resulting [...]

Wow. Baidu.com has been hacked this morning around 9:30 and is just back on at 3pm. More than 5:30 hours downtime.
Worst of all, they have no way to hide it was a hack, even the People’s Daily published the picture. Perhaps the party media does not consider websites as part of China’s glorious industry and [...]

By the way, I watched the movie Avatar last night. It was an amazing experience for a China observer, and I draw this enlightening conclusion: the film has absolutely nothing to do with China.
Even if the king of the internet and man of the year Han Han thinks the opposite, the plot has [...]

The Tiger is coming to the surface. The New decade has already come in the West, and in China we are again in this no man’s land between the Solar and the Lunar New Year, between the Bull and the Tiger. It is time to look back and see where we stand.
In World politics [...]

Goodbye 2009. Here is another Year-End Special of Chinayouren, the first after a full year of operation. Thanks all for sticking around.
As usual we will start with the popularity of China in the news. This year it is more interesting than ever, because 2010 is a round number, and the early-birds of the China Experts [...]

The summit of Copenhagen has inspired some hot debate on the media, for the most part more related to international politics than to climate change. Some spectacular pieces like Mark Lynas’ on the Guardian have been followed by more moderate opinions, like those appeared on Danwei and Inside Out, trying to understand the roles of [...]

I have been away for a while because all my holiday time has been absorbed by two fascinating stories of Shanghai, one of them a TV serial, the other a novel.
The serial is WoJu, the Snail’s House, stupidly translated to English as Narrow Dwellingness, or whatever. It has been red hot in China since [...]

Happy Christmas everyone. Sad Christmas for China, and for all of us who love that country and who believe in freedom, dignity and truth.
Exactly one year ago, on Christmas Day, I published this post about Liu’s Charter. I was critical with the initiative for many reasons: it contained contradictions, it was reactive rather than active, [...]

Look what I found in my letterbox today. An advert for the "Toothy Rabbit’s Children’s EQ Camp!"
Those of you who are patient enough to stick to this blog might remember the last post I did about the popularity of self-help/business books in China, and in particular those related to Emotional Intelligence (EQ). Not surprising [...]

Read this rant against Han Han on the China Daily. I have to say I didn’t like the tone, it reads like it’s written by an envious loser. But it is the intelligent kind of loser, and he hits the nail on the head several times.
He is absolutely right in the main thesis of the [...]

I was tinkering with some statistics last night, considering that strange idea of the Insularity of the Chinese Internet that we’ve been discussing lately. The expression itself is odd, because “internet” and “insularity” form an oxymoron, but you hardly notice these things when you live here. It’s normal routine in the land of socialist market [...]

There’s been a lot of things coming up lately in the field of “demise of the media“. In particular in China we have seen the spectacular series of posts by James Fallows and others, casting some light on the results of Obama’s visit to China. For the Old vs. New media debate this cannot count [...]

You might have heard the term Laobaixing (老百姓), literally “the hundred surnames”, the common people of China. They are also known as LBX in this website dedicated to them.
Laobaixing is a great word, not only because of its obvious etymology, but also because its connotations are quite different from our  “common people”. From what I [...]

In the first two posts of this series, we saw that Chinese is the last language in the World to maintain a complete set of independent vocabulary roots and a non-phonetic script to represent them, what we might call a separate Word System. For this reason I argued that Chinese may be the most difficult [...]

Last Friday I wrote a very long post where I ended up including too many ideas. The main point got a bit obscured as a result, but it was simply this: that vocabulary plays an essential role in learning a language, and that because of this Chinese is not only extremely difficult at an advanced [...]

There comes a point in the life of every student of mandarin when he feels the call to write about the difficulty of the language. The time has finally come for me, and I will follow the path of the masters. In fact, I intend to go even further. I am set out to prove [...]

I just received an email that reminded me of this funny post on the China Hearsay blog. In the blog, he says of Wen:
This guy never ceases to amaze me. When he retires from politics, he should really start his own PR firm. The “everyman” stuff is handled perfectly. The only folks who have surpassed [...]

I saw on ESWN this Time magazine interview of Han Han, and since I have written before about him, I think it is worth a comment. It is also interesting because it illustrates the scary misunderstandings between East and West that Kaiser Kuo warned against recently. This is, in my opinion, the key passage:
…despite his [...]

Do not miss this story by A. Galbraith of the China Economic Review. In the long debate of China’s reaction to virus, this is the most reasonable opinion I’ve seen in a long time, and also the best informed.
The story reminds me of what my friend, a doctor back in Spain, told me when I [...]

There are some beliefs that, although not originally from China, were embraced so thoroughly by the Chinese that they became part of the local culture. One example is Buddhism, imported from India in ancient times. Another one, I have found out, is the teaching of the modern management gurus, imported from the USA.
It is [...]

So Obama is in China, and even if he is not my president he is still my favourite president. Here is my first-hand analysis of the visit.
The most important news, surprisingly gone unnoticed by all observers, is that Obama wants to become Euro-bama in Chinese. That is how I read the new spelling of [...]

I have realized lately that, due to a certain unbalance in my training methods, my Chinese reading skills might be running ahead of my speech, and I have been forced to take severe corrective measures. At the risk of turning this into an SM blog, I am going to speak today of the terrible penance [...]

This business trip in Sichuan is really full of surprises. Today we went to visit the Project, a giant industrial complex which will be, upon completion, the largest factory in the World to produce X. A typically Chinese megaproject on the bank of the Yangtze.
But the surprise came when we went to town for lunch, [...]

It has to be my lucky day. Today’s marathon meeting in Chongqing was aborted mid-session, and we had the whole afternoon for ourselves to explore the city in the mist.
The place feels like all the energies of China concentrated in one tiny peninsula. The result is not beautiful, perhaps, but it is intense.  By dinner [...]

I know, I should be studying right now, and not writing posts. But I was just breathing slightly between two sessions of 模拟考试, and I reflected on the fascinating process of learning a new language, and on how, when you have been through it a few times, you end up developing your own secret methods [...]

I am back to Shanghai with some interesting anecdotes and some mildly funny pictures of Japan. Unfortunately, I will not be able to post any of that,  because this week I am busy with work trips in China, and especially because this is the HSK week. It is just as well, I guess, after [...]

Now that I am in a free internet country, I have taken the chance to look at the CDT website, and I have found this interesting question coming from al Jazira: what would have happened if Mao had lost?
I am not in principle against counterfactual history,  it can be useful in many cases to see [...]

First impressions are usually mistaken, but they are also interesting because the eye is alert to any novelty, and the culture clash is rich with ideas. Warning: this post contains sweeping generalizations. Take it for what it is, and if you are serious about understanding Japan you might want to look somewhere else.

I came [...]

I was pleasantly surprised when I booked my last minute flight to Japan, I got a very reasonable price for the 1st October National Day. When I went to Pudong airport I understood why: the streets were empty in Shanghai, nobody flew at that time because they were all at home with the eyes glued [...]

A middle aged man in a dark suit left this car. He didn’t look in the least embarrassed. Was he a pedophile? A cadre under the influence, bringing it home to sweetie? Or just the resigned father of a normal Shanghai girl?
I didn’t stop to ask. But I appreciated the customized kitty steering wheel, [...]

I am finding it difficult to concentrate on my work with a band of spidermen in overalls hanging outside the window. It is tower rinsing day today, like every year, and again I find myself paralyzed by panic. I know, it is a common sight in a vertical metropolis like Shanghai. The problem is, through [...]

Yesterday I went for a walk on Nanjing Lu and I witnessed a strange phenomenon I had not seen before: the mooncake brokers. It was last Saturday of mooncake picking season, so they were all busily walking up and down the street, scanning the crowds for potential buyers and sellers.
A bit of background: Every few [...]

The other day I saw a tourist bus from Nanjing that caught my eye. On one side the name of the travel company was written in Chinese characters, and below it there was a text written in a mysterious language:
“ISGNOG NAIXUOY EHCIQ UOYVL NAITGNEH GNIJ NAN” 
Initially I thought it must be Uyghur, but then [...]

One of the things I learned this Summer is that, while I may leave on holidays to Europe, China doesn’t really leave me anymore. More than just a country, it is a force of nature, the other face of mankind that is now part of my life. China is always there, and she is everywhere, [...]

The discussion about racism in China keeps coming back every once in a while, and each time it arouses the strongest passions. This is a post I’ve been wanting to do for some time, following the interesting comments we had in March, and as a conclusion to the Xinjiang series.
The story that sparked the debate [...]

It has been a while since I last wrote, and now I feel the typical blogger’s guilt, the same that drives some weaker souls to start all their blog posts with unasked apologies. But worry not, we are not that kind of blog. We don’t ask for forgiveness here, and that is because we already [...]

One more from the fantastic world of China mobile.
These last weeks I have encountered what has to be the weirdest form of political activism ever tried in China.  It has happened twice, each time on a Sunday afternoon. It comes in the form of a phone call from an inexistent number. A very professional recording, with [...]

You haven’t really seen a city until you have been to its zoo. I have known this fact since I was 5 years old, and after many years I suddenly remembered it again last Sunday, and I decided it was about time I went to the Shanghai zoo.

When you grow up you realize zoos have [...]

Many blogs have written about this already, but I still want to do my own post for Xu Zhiyong, who was arrested 3 weeks ago. I have no new information to offer here – info will be forthcoming only when the police decides it – but if you are reading this please do not let [...]

I just learn from Reuters that U.S. is testing system to break foreign Web censorship. This is the first news I have that the US government is trying to outsmart the GFW. Fantastic, after the anonymous hackers now it is the most powerful state in the World that will confront the dreaded wall. The war [...]

Following last week’s posts about Xinjiang conflict, I see this AFP dispatch: China promotes Xinjiang armed police chief. Mr. Dai,  the man at the top of the armed police has been promoted. Which means that the first of the failures I noted in the last post (i.e. failed to protect the citizens on 5th July) [...]

One of the essential purposes of a government is to ensure the safety of the citizens and, from this point of view, the Chinese government has failed spectacularly in Urumqi.
To begin with, it did not afford sufficient protection to the Han victims during the night of 5th July. Some wrong decisions were most likely [...]

I was not there and I do not know more than what is in the press. But in the light of the available information, I think it’s worth it to have another look at the events, and see what we make of it. Refer to the NYT diagram linked on the illustration, this paper is [...]

Have you been watching Xinjiang TV these days? I am a fan. It’s the new Love TV, a 24-7 concentrate of all the corniest efforts by the Chinese official media to promote harmony after the events of 5th July. Smiling kids, flowery dances, long meetings of interethnic neighbour associations discussing love and togetherness. Best [...]