For anyone looking for amusement in the Big Dumpling (alternatives happily accepted on this one: Big Steamed Bun definitely doesn’t do it; if it has to be fruit related –Bangkok is the Big Durian–I guess it could be the Big Peach, but that doesn’t fly either), please click through to my somewhat whimsical take here.
Because the China Blog will never tire in our dogged pursuit of this story, here’s a link to a video imploring China Central Television to embrace the “inelegant” nickname of its new headquarters, “Big Underpants.” (Or, if you’re easily offended, “Big Shorts.”) The song, sung to the tune of “Jingle Bells,” is frankly terrible; it’s the …
Amidst the gathering gloom and snowballing conventional wisdom idea that China is going to have a hard landing (which is not neccessarily untrue; all I’m saying is that, as per the previous post about protests, some people now seem to be looking for evidence to back up the idea rather than examinging the fact and forming a hypothesis), …
Casino mogul Steve Wynn has often said that the only way to make money in a casino is to own one. Well, in this economy, that might not even be true. Last week, Wynn’s nemesis, Las Vegas Sands’ Sheldon Adelson, announced that he would halt construction on the company’s $12 billion Cotai Strip project in Macau–the company was in danger …
The last few days have been particularly busy ones for China’s security personnel. No less than three cities including huge metropolises Chongqing and Shenzhen suffered strikes by taxi drivers. And many other places suffered demonstrations and protests. One particularly huge incident was in Gansu province, where thousands, perhaps as …
Our corporate overlords have just announced a deal with Google to make more than 10 million images from the LIFE Photo Archive available via Google’s image search. For those of you interested in Chinese history this is worth checking out. The vast majority of the images have never been published. It will be a few months before they are …
The Communist Party’s most liberal, reform-minded publication is a modest monthly called Yanhuang Chunqiu (炎黄春秋 for you purists), usually translated as the Annals of the Yellow Emperor. As I remarked in a previous post, the magazine’s publisher, 85 year old Du Daozheng is a redoubtable, no-nonsense figure who won’t be intimidated
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From the current issue of Time, Jeffrey Kluger examines how several nations including China are pursuing ambitious plans for space exploration.
As regular China Blog readers know, we miss no opportunity to write about underpants, especially big underpants. So when Dan Washburn of Shanghaiist posted some photos of plus-sized men’s underwear on display at a Shanghai-area Wal-Mart, we had to chime in. Below is a photo I took last year of “Fatty” briefs from the Wanda Plaza Wal-Mart …
A reader objected that in his blog below about the CCTV tower’s unflattering names, Austin mistranlated the word that should be rendered as “shorts,” instead translating it as “underpants.” Well, in defence of Austin’s translating abilities, the word in question, 大裤衩, dakucha, actually does mean underpants. I guess occassionally …
The ever sensible (that sounds too dull: I mean it as in the sense of someone who casts a cool eye on conventional wisdom) Imagethief gives a balanced take on the supposed eruption of rage among chinese netizens that pneumatic actress Gong Li has traded in her Chinese passport for Singaporean version, presumably …
Following on from the previous post, here is the photograph referred to in the FT story that purports to show a healthy Kim Jong Il at a football match. As in a couple of other images released at the same time, his left arm is immobile, feeding speculation that he is recovering from a stroke. An earlier picture, released at the …
