China Blog Parade: June 2-9, 2007
Our round-up of some of last week's highlights from China's English-language blogosphere:
With all the recent talk about scary Chinese-made toothpaste, do we have a reason to be worried? Black and White Cat does a number on a test tube and unscientifically concludes: yes, if you eat it. Shanghaiist doesn't even brush, so we think we're OK.
Ben Ross finishes up his one month experience working at a Fuzhou hair salon with some closing thoughts, particularly on how everyone at the salon, including the owner, wants to get out of the hair business. Ben had the luxury of leaving, albeit with some bittersweet emotions.
Eyes East discovers that it's not so much that there are things people aren't allowed to talk about, it's more that 18 years after the fact, people don't really know enough to talk.
The hyper-competitiveness surrounding the gao kao is not so much rooted in Confucian principle as it is the Way of Bling, writes The Useless Tree. It's not Taoist, either, as the author shows by whipping out this quote: "If you give up learning, troubles end..(Tao Te Ching)." Thankfully for us, we stopped learning anything new years ago.
Wild Wild East wonders what the Chinese perspective is on American pop culture, and conducts some street interviews on such important topics as Donald Trump's hair.
Lost Laowai finally finds some honest advertising in China after seeing posters and billboards posted everywhere in Nanjing touting a new apartment complex called "Muma," which translates into English as "Trojan Horse." As the author writes: "Think about what a Trojan Horse is: a huge structure used to bedazzle townsmen so that they throw open their gates unarmed, resulting in being plundered and overtaken." At 17,900 RMB per square meter, "Muma" is definitely doing some major plundering.
