Purported open letter from Wang Lijun
The Wang Lijun affair continues to fascinate China. Read more
Posts from the ‘Internet and media’ Category
Feb 10
Feb 8
Vacation style medical treatment
The first Chinese Internet meme of the Year of the Dragon has emerged: Read more
Feb 1
Han Han the novelist versus Fang Zhouzi the fraud-buster
It’s been an exciting two weeks on China’s microblog scene. Megablogger, rally racer, and novelist Han Han has been defending himself against science writer Fang Zhouzi’s charges that he didn’t write some of his most famous work.
Dec 6
Teen digital habits in Beijing and Palo Alto
In August and September 2011, Danwei worked with the Stanford Program on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SPRIE) on a survey of the digital and media habits of high school students born in 1993 and 1994. The results were presented at the China 2.0 conference at Stanford Graduate School of Business School in September 2011. Read more
Sep 20
Groundhog day in China – Super Girls and the Internet
This morning, a reader drew my attention to an article on Danwei:
Alongside the movement for a “civilized” Internet, the anti-Super Girls campaign seems to be picking up steam as well. China Times published an interview yesterday with Liu Zhongde, one of the most outspoken critics of the Super Girls phenomenon.
Sep 15
A village with only one restaurant
Below is a translation of a joke that is currently being circulated widely on Sina Weibo and other Chinese social networks:
There is a village that only has one restaurant. Everyone in the village has to eat at that restaurant.
Villager: Why can’t we have more than one restaurant?
Waiter: Our village is in a stage of development where more than one restaurant can lead to chaos, so we only have one restaurant.
Read more
Sep 14
A Chinese student on 9-11
This image is currently being circulated on Weibo. It’s a series of screenshots from a Phoenix TV program on the tenth anniversary of 9-11. The screenshots show an interview with a student in Beijing. These are the captions: Read more
Aug 28
Miss Universal Values
The band was playing Cocaine as the small entourage entered but it was highly doubtful any of them would ever touch the stuff: these were international representatives of China, “athletes” in a land of contradictions, competing for fresh spoils.
After years of half-organized humiliations, the country is determined to seize an unusual new prize this September: Miss Universe, a controversial trophy offered by a US organization headed by the failed Presidential candidate and China-basher, Donald Trump.
The stiffly embossed invitations to the after-party offered the opportunity to “mingle with stars, celebrities and Beijing’s elite” but, despite the dozens desperate for a moment, or ideally a picture, next to one, none of those at the centre of this civilized scrum were remotely famous (yet). They are the finalists from this year’s Miss Universe China – the grand pageant, an impressively well-organized, if somewhat dull, event in Beijing’s Mastercard Center, had just finished. Read more
Aug 25
City Sun, the “undercover” paper
As commercial papers look for ways to hook readers’ interest, the City Sun (城市信报) appears to have found a reliable strategy: sending its reporters undercover.
Aug 24
A brief history of Chinese porn
The origins of Chinese erotica and pornography can be traced way back into antiquity. Though remnants have been found dating from as early as the 1st century, production of erotic artwork appears to have properly flourished around the 10th century and reached its peak during the late Ming Dynasty (17th century).
Read more
Aug 23
People’s Pornography – An interview with Katrien Jacobs
China has a long tradition of erotic art but pornographic films and pictures are currently illegal. Despite frequent anti-porn clampdowns, pornography remains available both online and in the form of DVDs.
A paper titled A Peep at Pornography Web in China compiled by scholars at Xi’an Jiatong University is one of the few authoritative sources of pornography statistics. The scholars examined “part of network traffic in Northwest Net of China, from Mar. 29 2009 to Jan. 25 2010″ and “collected 92,950 online porn web pages from 1,826 porn sites” of which only 12.8% were hosted on servers inside China. The paper looks at usage patterns of the people detected visiting porn sites, but does not attempt to derive any numbers about porn use nationwide.
Nonetheless, anecdotal evidence suggests demand for porn in China is growing. Aside from professionally produced films, there is a growing subculture of DIY porn movies, which is one of the subjects Dr. Katrien Jacobs examines in her new book, People’s Pornography: Sex and Surveillance on the Chinese Internet.
James Griffiths recently interviewed Dr. Jacobs about her new book:
Read more
Aug 22
Qaddafi’s imminent fall – some views from China
The news coming out of Libya this morning has been reported without much commentary by Xinhua News Agency and most newspapers and websites in China. That has not stopped editors from using the news to sell papers; see for example the front page of the Qingdao newspaper Peninsular Metropolitan News illustrated with a large photo of armed rebels running past a burning car, and the bullet-riddled headline “FINAL BATTLE – Libyan rebels enter the capital” (online version here).
Read more
Aug 19
We survived a day in China
Notes about social criticism and black humor on the Chinese Internet, by Victor H. Mair, Professor of Chinese Language and Literature at the University of Pennsylvania.
Read more
