how chinese is weixin?
This past year, I have noticed that the age of text messages seems already over. Instead, the sarcastic couplets and stories that used to come by text, now come by weixin groups. On the face of it, it...
View Articleas chongqing turns: the trial of bo xilai (abridged)
Bo Xilai. Gu Kailai. Wang Lijun. These are the main characters in China’s ongoing soap opera As Chongqing Turns or “The Bo Drama (薄剧)” as it is known in Mandarin. Bo Xilai, of course is the disgraced...
View Articleupdates…
Yesterday, Baishizhou Superhero opened at Handshake 302. Impressions from the opening, below: Click to view slideshow. Also, the latest weixin meme: the next US Ambassador to China, Max Baucus is...
View Articleidentity card politics
So today a return to a theme near and dear to my heart: satirical text messages, or as we have now stopped texting and use WeChat, satirical blog posts that are forwarded via WeChat. This time, the...
View Articlejust what aren’t we seeing?
Currently circulating on WeChat news that apparently on May 20, 2015 China blocked Chinese Wikipedia, begging question du jour: just what triggered the block? (This is a serious question, if you know,...
View Articlewho upholds the peace?
You may be aware that many in China are protesting Christmas because the country has its own traditions. In turn, the nativist logic behind the protests has shown up all sorts of contradictions....
View Articlehow do shenzheners map covid elsewhere?
A friend from northern China once said (and I’m paraphrasing a long ago memory of Shenzhen, circa 1995), “If you want to see Chinese culture, go to Beijing, Xi’an or Shanghai. Even Tibet has more...
View Articleshenzhen covid update for inquiring minds
“What’s up in Shenzhen?” You and other inquiring minds want to know. Well, for starters, we have a new conspiracy theory about how Shenzhen’s successfully prevented a massive omicron outbreak on the...
View Articlea poetic primer for understanding these times
All that we do not know haunts us. In some sense, social media has only made us more aware that our knowledge about what is happening next door or in the next city is limited. Nevertheless, we still...
View Articlerumor has it… the government had a hell of a night on the town
It’s true, unlike the 2020 lockdown when the government subsidized the lockdown, during the 2022 lockdowns in Shanghai and elsewhere (Shenzhen, for example) the actual costs of game of germs are being...
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