China Blog Parade: May 5-May 11, 2007

Our weekly round-up of some of the highlights from China's English-language blogosphere:

Native inhabitants of a large Chinese city looking down on Chinese newcomers from outside that city? Eyes East is surprised that Dalian may not be as "open" as it advertises after all. He ends his post by asking: "Is this just a Dalian thing?" We glance up and take a look around and conclude that it's definitely not.

Beijing Newspeak writes about the sham that is "the world's largest Siberian tiger breeding base," citing this Xinhua article about the complex in Harbin. BN doesn't think the place should be called a "base" but a "farm," since it's privately funded and the owner is hoping the government lifts a ban on the trading of tiger parts so he can start making some profit. Shanghaiist suggests he give the Shanghai stock exchange a go rather than make the purportedly pro-tiger compound into a profit center.

Sinocidal posts that there are two basic ways of ordering food in China, then goes into a hilarious but unfortunately very accurate description of what happens in local Chinese restaurants. Key message: no matter how good your Mandarin is, you'll still be picking pubic hair out of your dish.

Yellow is a wonderful colorful, perfect for smiley faces and Brazilian soccer jerseys. But tap water? Probably not so perfect, and Imagethief hopes that, like Beijing, his new home of Shanghai can start cleaning up its water act. In the meantime, he'll be trying to fish out dead rats from his water tank. Maybe when he's done he can come to our place and do the same. Yuck.

Everyone's favorite cunning linguist Sinosplice provides the first part of a personal history of how he learned Chinese. Of course, as he admits, his path is not for everyone, and Shanghaiist agreed when we learned that he started off as a student majoring in microbiology on an exchange program in Japan. We're waiting for the next part in the series as we'd like to learn how to speak Chinese as well as he can one day. We may need a new podcast on how to say "microbiology" in Mandarin.

The recent election result in France will be good for China's communist government, writes Richard Spencer, calling Sarkozy a pragmatist rather than an idealist when it comes to the issue of human rights on the mainland. The CCP would be happy with more right-wing pro-China allies in the west, he writes, while they are seemingly taking a more sensitive approach to foreign policy in the run-up to the Olympics.

Photo of Siberian tiger (not Sarkozy) courtesy of ebenlindsey.