The constitution of the People’s Republic of China states that Chinese citizens have “have the duty as well as the right to receive education have the freedom to engage in scientific research, literary and artistic creation and other cultural pursuits.” Yet anyone who has set foot in a Chinese classroom —...
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A couple weeks ago, I sent out an informal survey on race to the emails of many of the Chinese people whose blogs I read. I got nothing in response from anyone (a few “mail delivery failures” was all) until a few days ago when I got a response from a rather unexpected place:...
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Did you know that when you search Google images for “lion”, the image on the left is the first one that comes up? It is. I didn’t know this either until I stumbled upon it yesterday while watching Penny Arcade‘s new episode of PATV. What, I wondered, was the context for this photo, a...
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Perhaps you’ve already seen this. Still, we’re going to add to the madness because it’s fun, and because sometimes even very serious China watchers like us enjoy watching videos about crazy men with knives wearing underwear and threatening their bosses. First, the video (h/t to Ryan of Lost Laowai, click the link if the...
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This forum post on Anti-CNN asks the question of netizens: “Without the Great Firewall, would China be able to occupy the battlefield of the Western public discourse?” Here is a sampling of some of the responses by Chinese netizens: NO IT CANNOT. 1) China lacks language skills. You should know most people only study...
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Yesterday I translated this Han Han post for ChinaSMACK. In the process, I came across this passage, which I found rather interesting. Han Han is saying that he is willing to give Confucius (the recent Chow Yun-fat film) only two “points”, the second of which is thusly explained: Also, because the director is female,...
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In terms of video games, there has long been a divide between East and West. Even in the current climate, dominated by American and Japanese developers and publishers, there isn’t as much integration as one might expect. And Chinese games have, historically, failed to find much of a market outside the PRC’s borders. Still,...
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The following is a translation of this post from Han Song’s blog. It’s not immediately clear whether this is something that acutally happened to him or just a joke. On the one hand, it’s written like the sort of joke that often gets passed around on the internet; on the other hand, as it...
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The following is a translation of this post from blogger/writer/race car driver Han Han. Note that I have translated ”黄段子“ （literally, “yellow texts”) variously as “inappropriate texts”, “sexy texts”, and “pornographic texts” depending on what I think works best in context. Translation Today, all over the nation, the crackdown has started on pornographic/inappropriate text...
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…you missed some important stuff. (You can still read our translation of what Chinese people think about Google here, though) A Step Back in Xinjiang First, our poor friends in Xinjiang (who wouldn’t notice if Google left China since they don’t have access to anything beyond a few heavily censored domestic news portals anyway)...
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