Recently, browsing through the Chinese blogs in my favorites list, I came across a rather surprising image (click here for full size version, image after the jump), a mockup of "evolution" in several different countries parodying the classic from-monkey-to-man evolution image found in high school textbooks. The reason it was posted in...
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Today's poems come from the poet/writer/filmmaker Yin Lichuan's blog (a tip of the hat to Danwei is in order for listing it among their Model Worker blogs) and some websites that collect her work. According to the China Daily, Lin "is now well known within China for her novels, poetry...
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They're called "Little Emperors" -- children whose experience has been shaped by the twin forces of increasing financial prosperity and the Chinese government policy dictating that they are only children -- and the first real generation of them is coming of age. They are arguably the richest and best-educated generation of Chinese ever. So...
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Part II: Hauntings.
As long as people have been around there have been reports of ghosts. Indeed, Chinese culture has a long and rich history of belief in otherworldly spirits, especially the spirits of the dead, and the ways they affect the living. These days, many people (Westerners and Chinese) have written off these traditional...
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As you can read in today’s New York Times, fascination with a “mythical” creature is the latest internet meme to go mainstream in China. That creature? The Grass Mud Horse. Ostensibly, the Grass Mud Horse is an alpaca-like creature that lives in the Ma Le Desert and fights River Crabs. In actuality, though, the...
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Wang Hongzhe thinks so. The Chinese netizen (going online by the name RNAmonkey) recently conducted a little experiment to see whether Chinese people would pay more attention to a foreign critical voice than a domestic one, and subsequently discussed his results with The New Yorker‘s Evan Osnos. His conclusion? Yes. Wang wrote an article...
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As an economic crisis rocks the world and life in Tibet carries on as “normal,” an American corporation has just the thing to spruce up life in Shanghai. Beijing has an Apple store, why can’t Shanghai have a Barbie store? The new Barbie store will open Friday, coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the...
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Any formal student of Chinese language who’s made it past the second year has likely gotten to the point where each chapter of his or her textbook takes the form of “: is it good or bad?” One of the most common social issues is 同居, or “cohabitation”, specifically, the cohabitation of men...
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Is the Spring Festival tradition of making things explode more or less at random over the course of the festival really compatible with an increasingly urban China? Having heard reports of accidents and even deaths, we decided to investigate.
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As far as so-called paranormal phenomena go, the sighting of UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects) is one of the oldest and most common in the West. Is it common in China, too? We weren't sure, so we took to the internet to find out, using extremely informal methods.
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