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As with most things in Shanghai, the Zombie Walk started a little later than we had planned. Still, by around 8:45pm, a good crowd of 30 to 50 people had gathered at the corner of Tianping Lu and Hengshan Lu. After making sure everyone had gotten a little yellow bracelet to signify their zombie walking prowess (and to get them into Not Me for free), Shanghaiist Editor Elaine Chow, dressed as a videogame character, rallied the troops and commenced the walk.

"In this province we have 30 million migrants living apart from their wives or husbands whose hunger for sex has never been recognized by society or the government...

While his son, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong has been busy meeting up with former US President George Bush, Singapore's ever so feisty and sprightly 86 year old Minister Mentor¹ Lee Kuan Yew has gone halfway around the globe to meet US President Barack Obama in Washington ahead of his debut Asian tour that will include China, Japan, South Korea and Singapore. Lee's tour also saw him meeting two key Cabinet members of the Obama administration - Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

Here are the rest of the photos (if you're looking for the Zombie Walk stuff, check it out here. Thank you to MNO, R3, Baijiu Robot and Kidplastik for their awesome sets and that crazy live show. Thank you to Not Me for keeping up with the hundreds of people that crowded the bar. And most of all, thank you Shanghaiist readers (and friends) who helped populate a super cool, super be-costumed Halloween extravaganza.

Photos by Jeremy Breningstall.

Or so it would seem from CNNGo’s most recent Shanghai Hot List of 20 people you should watch. Both former and current editors, Kenneth Tan and Elaine Chow, made it to the rankings, which also include such Shanghai notables as the founder of Dianping.com and Yao Ming. How or why they've been listed alongside the founder of Dianping.com and Yao Ming we shall never know - however, since they're not ones to check the mouth of a gift fame horse (or so the saying goes)... Thanks CNNGo! If you see them around town, feel free to ask for an autograph… but please, no pictures.

With everything that's going on tonight, FREE the WAX has got one more gig vying for your attention featuring American electro-cinematic producer maestro Eliot Lipp who is best known for his seamless weaving of 80s electro, 70s jazz-fusion and Bay Area hip hop.

In our ongoing Threesday feature, Shanghaiist takes the time to count out three of well... whatever catches their fancy that week. This week: Places to get that warm bowl of healthy something now that flu season is upon us.

• In an effort to plug the gaping money hole the Bird’s Nest stadium has turned into after the Olympics, CITIC Investment Holdings has given up its management rights to the Chinese government. We wonder what’ll happen if even the government thinks it’s 200,000RMB a day upkeep is too expensive to handle. [AFP]
• An author details the slight craziness that comes with renovating an apartment in China (Dalian for him). After the carpentry and wiring were done and the workers paid, the extortion letters came. And after those threats were paid off too, what did they happen to find but another letter - this one a thank you note. [New York Times]
• In case you want a long, but incredibly thorough, write up of what’s been happening in the massive Chongqing Corruption trials, here’s one from China Brief about how the whole matter exposes “grave woes in China’s legal apparatus.” [China Brief]

With the Expo approaching, Shanghai is quickly become more and more official, with roads being paved, mandatory uniforms for taxi drivers, and even rules guiding citizens' subway etiquette, just to name a few of the changes. To keep the changes rolling, the names of Shanghai's official top eight scenic spots have been announced by the Shanghai Tourism Administration, selected from over 1500 suggestions from city dwellers.

But first! An announcement to make. One of the acts we're most excited about to catch this weekend - The Toxic Avenger - has generously offered us two free tickets to give to Shanghaiist readers. That means YOU GUYS.

Brrr, did it get chilly over here or what? While Saturday's Halloween night was still unseasonably warm, it seems like someone flipped a switch on November 1, causing the city's temperature to drop a good 10 degrees. Today, it dropped another six, with temperatures hovering between 8 and 12 degrees Celsius. But no need to get out your thick winter coats yet - according to Weather.com, this cold snap will only be staying with us until Wednesday, when temperatures will return to a much more reasonable high teens.

On the night of the incident, at around 18:30, Zhang Chong ran in the National Games men’s 400-meter hurdles final and won fifth place with the time of 51’63”. For a young athlete debuting in national games for the first time, Zhang Chong was still very excited after the game. After leaving the venue, Zhang Chong returned to Jinan Olympic athletes warm-up field where Liu Xiang was warming up on the runway.

Continue reading "Good thing to know: Liu Xiang hates sneak hug attacks"

By Elaine Chow on November 2, 2009 7:15 PM 1 Vote 2 Votes

This is probably one of our favorite Chinese traditions so far: apparently lottery winners, in order to conceal their identities from the populous, dress up in costumes when receiving their fake oversized media checks. This has been going on for a while, and netizens have begun to give awards for the best costumes on Chinese forum sites. It's kind of like a taste of Halloween year round!

We're still bummed out that Halloween is over, so we figured we'd stretch out the mystique of the holiday by featuring this video, shot by contributor Jeremy Breningstall, of what our terrorizing on the Zombie Walk actually looked like.

Nien Cheng (鄭念), author, has passed away in Washington D.C., according to the Washington Post. The 94-year-old former KMT diplomat is best known for her bestselling autobiography Life and Death in Shanghai, which chronicled the six-and-a-half years she spent as a prisoner during the Cultural Revolution. In one of the most harrowing tales from the book, she finds out that her daughter, a prominent Shanghai film actress, was killed by the Red Guard for refusing to denounce her mother. For summaries and reviews of her seminal memoir, check out the original New York Times book review and this article from Time Magazine.

• We've found a mascot uglier than Haibao: Yabi, who represents the 2010 Taipei International Flora Expo. And the two of them standing together kind of looks like a turd floating in water. [CRI English]
• Hellooooo sailor, Fleet Week's here - U.S. Coast Guard cutter "Rush" is now throwing its uniformed men onto our shores. [CNN Go]
• Wanna see robot butlers, robot cooks, robot nurses and robot teachers? Check out the China International Industry Fair, which has come to the Shanghai New International Expo Center and lasts until Saturday. [Shanghai Daily]

A blogger out of Fujian has compiled an open-source google map that places major pollution sites around china. While similar sources have existed in the past, this is the first one that allows other users to contribute sites with pollution problems. The map, which was created by Guo Baofeng, has attracted a lot of interest on Chinese BBS' and Forums: check it out while you still can, because you never know when it could suddenly disappear.

More photos on the Shanghaiist Contribute page. To see your photos on our Contribute page, use Flickr and tag your photos “shanghaiist”. Or you can email your photos to photos@shanghaiist.com and they will automatically appear on our site (and here).

Our knowledge of fashion extends to figuring out when H&M is having a sale so we've left it up to That's Magazine to shower us with the top 25 you should keep an eye on in the China fashion sphere. While we raised a finely groomed eyebrow at some of their picks (especially the supermodels - really? Unless they've become the Kate Moss/Agyness Deyn's of the Middle Kingdom, we don't see how they're influencing anything), we did also get a good run down of important people, it seems, to know if you can actually pick out a Jimmy Choo from a Manolo Blahnik.

Hey VIPs! Just because you’re VIPs doesn’t mean you get to drive all willy nilly on the road, despite there actually being regulations that allow you to do so. Shanghai mayor Han Zheng has warned government officials and emergency vehicles to stop abusing the privilege, scolding that “vehicles for the government departments should set a good example.” In three weeks in October, there were 57 cases of privileged vehicles breaking traffic regulations. Stop it, Han Zheng has requested, adding that police will be checking for these kind of violations more stringently.

The past couple of days, traffic to China Sports Today from people searching for "Ding Hui" has seen a little uptick. Could it be a coincidence that a recent story in The Guardian said that Ding Hui, the Chinese national volleyball team's first black player, was booted from the national team last year, implying that it was because Ding Hui is black? But If you came to find out about the volleyball player who was kicked off the Chinese national team for being black, you won't find what you're looking for because it didn't happen.

We've got a pretty awesome weekend ahead of us. Even if you're not going to one of the many music parties planned for tonight (which you can check out in our midweek music preview), there's still a lot more going on. For instance...

• A recent prostitution bust in Henan has gotten netizens into a fury... against the police, who were videotaped interrogating a naked woman in an incredibly rough fashion. [CNNGo]
• We can't get enough of stories about the Chongqing corruption trials, so we're glad we get to hear two of our favorite China journalists, Paul French and Malcolm Moore, discuss "China's Chicago." [Ethical Corp]
• So how are Chinese propaganda departments dealing with new media rules that don't allow them to really "stop" people from being interviewed? By wining and dining reporters and other "soft" forms of intimidation. [Telegraph]

Twist is a tiny little depot that specializes in cold Taiwanese desserts. They've got smoothies and juices, but what you really need to go to Twist for is the shaved ice. Though we're sure there are similar offerings sprinkled around the Taiwanese enclaves Hongqiao/Gubei, we're positive that in Shanghai proper, Twist has the freshest and most authentic ingredients meant to sit atop a mound of shaved ice.

Alliance Française keeps serving movies to all who are charmed by the rich French cinema history. On Saturday they offer a "crossed movies"- experience, where one 1953 Jacques Tati classic meets a 2008 drama featuring Isabelle Huppert. The event is called "Crossed Movies : Modern and burlesque society".

So the iPhone was finally launched in China after much rumor mongering and fanfare and... well, it seems like most everyone who wanted an iPhone already has one. While the launch party in Beijing was a rousing success, actual first day sales were nowhere near as wild as in the U.S. or Japan. About what you could expect, we guess, from a crippled product (no WiFi) that came months and months after it was released elsewhere. Especially if it has turned out to be actually more expensive than its gray market brethren.

With the recent news about Beijing giving Disneyland Shanghai the go ahead, it looks like it's only a matter of time before the mouse lands in town. After a recent meeting of the City's International Business Leaders Advisory Council, Mayor Han Zheng declared that a decision could be announced as early as next week. But between the lines, we all know that's code for unequivocal approval, right? After all, it's not like the Shanghai government would announce a greenlight on Disneyland and then snatch it away last minute. Oh wait.

Distract yourself from the rapidly dropping temperatures in Shanghai this week with a smattering of eclectic events, from Chinese performing Hitchcock and Koreans performing Italian opera to Norwegian jazz and the International Puppet Festival.

We've caught ourselves thinking about the difficulties of being disabled in China on many occasions: a significant amount of city spaces and public transport are simply handicapped-unfriendly. Besides the occasional beggar, you rarely see disabled people in public, which is probably thanks to the many social factors constraining handicapped people. But at a very basic level, it's more troubling to think of the difficulties a set of stairs are for someone incapable of using them and the effect it would have on both their ability to travel and their quality of life.