A brief update: some of our contacts are reporting the Western social networking site Facebook is down in China. Herdict confirms this, listing 40 inaccessible reports and one accessible one. If you currently live in China, give facebook a test and let us know the results. If Facebook is blocked, it would be the...
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If you read any other China Blogs, you’re probably already aware of the Green Dam and Youth Escrot software the Chinese government is now requiring be provided with all new PC purchases in the country. Everyone reads ChinaSMACK, so you know that Chinese people are generally less than thrilled. You might also be aware...
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…and the government is preempting it by blocking everything and arresting some people. Among the victims are Wu Gaoxing, a “prominent dissident”, as well as websites Twitter, Flickr, Hotmail, and Microsoft’s new search engine Bing (how did anyone even notice this was blocked?). You might already be aware, as there are more than a...
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As you may have already seen elsewhere, Ai Weiweis blog has been closed. Well, the one hosted on Sina, anyway. His bullogger blog is still up, but it doesn’t contain some of the most recent posts everyone else is translating. As previously mentioned, Danwei and the China Digital Times have done the translation legwork...
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Three days later, Ai Weiwei’s blog is still silent. ChinaGeeks has confirmed that there was a brief update a few days ago that was quickly harmonized, entitled “Let Me Sleep a Bit Longer, Mom, I’m Tired”, which contained some updates and personal anecdotes about some of the students Ai’s project is attempting to memorialize....
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We recently translated a post on Ai Weiwei’s blog that can only be described as bitter and despondent. It is also harshly, sweepingly critical of the government, and we speculated that it might be harmonized. It has been, along with every single post from May (save one candle photo). The original Chinese of that...
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Your silence and ignorance have already become the price for your safety, become an important reason your existence is permitted. You have become the cost of maintaining the status quo in your republic, and for the sake of the great and kind mother, why not? If you can't see or hear anything, then you...
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Recently, we wrote a piece about how people attempting to collect names and information about students who died in the Wenchuan earthquake are meeting some resistance from police and officials. In the past few days, Ai Weiwei’s project has seen even more harassment. Yesterday, he posted a timeline of official messages from the last...
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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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Today the New York Times published a piece called Now Hip-Hop, Too, Is Made In China about the emerging Chinese hip-hop scene. It asserts that hip-hop’s popularity is growing fast in China among young and working class people despite the fact that rappers cannot broadcast their music through mainstream channels. As the Times points...
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