The Taipei Times‘ story about “fake” pandas from China had the right elements—counterfeiting, geopolitical tension, bear sex—to make the list of most popular April Fool’s stories last week. Not everyone appreciated it though. The Taipei Times writes:
Taipei Zoo director Jason Yeh (葉傑生) did not see the funny side either and
…
If you toddle over to the White House site you can find a fascinating transcript of the “BACKGROUND READOUT BY SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICALS ON PRESIDENT OBAMA’S MEETING WITH PRESIDENT HU JINTAO of CHINA.”
It’s a pretty comprehensive run through by “a senior administration official” of what the two men talked about in the hour long …
Let’s hope it’s the start of a beautiful friendship, as the man in the movie says. They both seem relaxed anyway. Certainly much more so than that awful White House fiasco back in 2007 2006. I notice from the picture that there doesn’t seem to be an interpreter nearby for the photo oppotunity, so presumably President Hu is …
My colleague Howard Chua-Eoan has a nice round up of various April Fools jokes that appeared in the media yesterday including the inspired Taipei Times one about the pandas china gifted to Taiwan actually being common brown bears painted black and white. The punchline was that keepers became suspicious when the two animals spent all day …
Though I haven’t seen Li Yifan and Yan Yu’s first documentary Before the Flood (淹没), I just watched Before the Flood II at the Hong Kong International Film Festival. The last couple years have produced a fair amount of cinematic attention on the impact of the Three-Gorge Dam, with films like Jia Zhangke’s 2006 feature Still …
A couple of reports out of Canada and the U.K. allege that a huge hacking ring that may or may not be based in China penetrated thousands of computers around the world. This story has been going on for a while and is routinely denied by the Chinese authorities. These reports don’t have any kind of a smoking gun tying the operation to …
Wander through the stands of the Hong Kong Rugby Sevens—the city’s biggest sports event—and it’s as if the 1997 reunification with China had never happened. The English-speaking community, at other times a collection of dissipated stragglers in the population statistics, becomes a roaring, Mexican-waving, demographic powerhouse, …
Austin’s point about blocking youtube is well taken. I too pretty much ignored the videos as being hard to verify (though they look convincing). But in the last couple of days a bunch of people have asked me about the youtube blocking and what caused it, and if Austin hadn’t beaten me to it, I was going to post about. . For the record, …
From the blogs today, here are two posts about Beijing and history. One is poignant, the other whimsical. Evan Osnos writes at the New Yorker’s Letter from China blog about shuttering the Chicago Tribune‘s Beijing bureau, where he once worked:
As it happened, I was scheduled to meet this morning with a Chinese accountant who is handling
…
Last weekend the Tibetan government-in-exile released a disturbing video of the aftermath of last year’s riots in Lhasa. It showed Chinese police clubbing handcuffed detainees and, more gruesomely, the infected wounds of a man who had been beaten and denied treatment. Watching the video left me feeling upset by the violence. But I was …
Our colleague Tim Padgett in Miami has a piece today on what appears to be another problematic export from China. Some U.S. residents are discovering their houses were built using tainted drywall. Tim writes:
It wasn’t until her repairman got fed up with fixing inexplicably corroded air-conditioner coils that Beck finally discovered what
…
As some of our commenters have noted, the China Blog is now unblocked in China. We were censored last fall after the Great Time Blog Migration to WordPress. It looks like the mainland’s block on blogs hosted by WordPress has now been lifted. The reasons for such actions are never explained, but the end of the recent National People’s …
