The China Blog Restoration

On last week’s Sinica podcast, host Kaiser Kuo along with Jeremy Goldkorn and Will Moss held a semi-serious wake for the English-language China blogosphere:

The China blog is officially dead, moribund, cadaverous, extinct, buried, bereft of life, defunct and totally-and-utterly-inert. It could even be said to be resting in peace, save for the fact that Will Moss drove a silver stake through its heart before recording this podcast. “We single-handedly made the China blog obsolete,” he joked in our studio after further sawing off its head. But he has a point. Because who reads blogs these days?

Well…true enough.  I remarked a few weeks ago at a small gathering of…China bloggers that these days “blogs were essentially repositories for content disbursed and shared via RSS readers and Twitter.” I know that I do much of my blog-reading on Google Reader and I’ll admit that I get irked if I have to click too far to read.  If your RSS feed provides the full article, I’m just that much more likely to read your stuff.

While Twitter and the like haven’t completely killed the blog, they have done a number on the state of blog commentary.  As many (if not both)

July 26th, 2010

Guest Post: And that’s why…ya don’t go to Chengde.

We’re away this weekend (not in Chengde!) and so I’m turning the blog over to a guest host…kind of like the old Mike Douglas show but not nearly as hip.  This is a guest post from my former student Matthew “Maxiu” Bruzzese, who I will always remember fondly for his short film starring a Zombie Mao leading the “跳舞跳舞大革命”. Enjoy and I’ll be back next week.

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This past weekend, I took a four hour train ride to Chengde* with 3 friends for what we expected would be a relaxing weekend of hiking and sightseeing. First, a word on Chengde: it’s really not a bad city. Really. I’ve visited some truly depressing cities in my time here, and I wouldn’t count Chengde among them by a long shot. The hiking that we got to do was pleasant, and the Puning temple features a 42-armed, 73-foot statue of the Guanyin Bodhisattva which puts the Lama Temple to shame. By all accounts, the Summer Palace and recreation of Lhasa’s Potala Temple are also great. Unfortunately, we didn’t get a chance to see the latter two, for despite its attractive scenery and interesting history, we soon discovered that Chengde doesn’t exactly take kindly

July 25th, 2010

Image of the Week: Hiking the Great Wall in 2002

We're at the Great Wall this weekend…not for the first time to be sure. Here's a photo of me and "The Mighty Ho" hiking the wall between Jinshanling and Simatai in the summer of 2002. (If you blow up the picture you'll see the TMH is keeping hydrated with a lukewarm can of Yanjing.)

July 24th, 2010

The Party and History or “Glenn Beck and Xi Jinping: Twins of Different Mothers”

With the 90th anniversary of the CCP just around the corner (okay, next July…), the Party brass and their academic ass sucks got together for a high-level history hootenanny.  At the kick-off, China’s Heir-Apparent-But-We-Still-Can’t-Admit-That-Publicly-Yet Xi Jinping  called for more education regarding the Party’s history.

Xi said the Party, having experienced the tests of revolution, development and reform, “successfully united and led the Chinese people to achieve miracles under an extremely complicated circumstance.”

“Over the past 89 years, the CPC contributed greatly to the nation’s independence, unification and the people’s well-being,” he said.

Well, I for one am relieved…because THAT’S a story that hasn’t been told enough times through China’s education, media, or entertainment industry.

I suspect though that Xi’s main message had less to do with trumpeting a triumphalist narrative of Party history than about his accompanying admonition against those who sought to “distort or smear the Party’s history.”

For the CCP-impaired or if you are otherwise unaccustomed to Zhongnanhai-speak, allow me to translate:

“People are starting to see through all of our bullshit, so we need to pump some ex-lax into the cattle feed and get the shovels ready.”

It’s not clear if Xi was responding to an actual threat within

July 23rd, 2010

Being friends with China…

While I am not a lawyer and have very little interest in business, I nevertheless love reading Dan Harris’ China Law Blog.  Dan is a tireless blogger who always manages to make the most mundane issues of legal prudence and China business babble interesting to the non-business person.  Maybe I just like to fantasize about the road not taken, if only I had decided to study law and not, say, 19th century China.  Would spending my days reading legal briefs be more interesting than deciphering inter-office memos from the 1870s? Thinking a bit more (and knowing my temperament) probably not…but I bet I’d be closer to owning a nice boat.

Over the weekend, Dan blogged about this article (from China Market Access Blog) and how being a “good friend” to China is important for your business.  The original post, by Jason Patent, is based on a talk by Dr. James Chan.  The advice (via Chan via Patent and via Dan Harris) is this:

There is one thing many Westerners don’t think about when they walk into China. What the Chinese people really want from Westerners is “acceptance.” If you want to sell anything to the Chinese or, for that matter, build

July 19th, 2010
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