Results tagged “associatedpress”

Selling sex may be the oldest profession in history, but selling virginity? That's new. Chinese naughty toys company Gigimo (motto: Let's play!) has advertised an artificual hymen kit throughout the Middle East that has sparked controversy in Egypt.

Guess what? We're "hipper than Hong Kong and more alluring than Beijing," according to the Associated Press. The words appeared in an AP article on Shanghai pursuing luxury travelers in a strong effort to restore a "reputation for opulence and elegance that once made it the Paris of the Orient." Funnily enough, the article seemed to insinuate that this is something new for our city - a transformation we're rushing to finish in time for the Expo rather than, say, something we've been striving for since the late 1990s. Before this metamorphosing push, we were a "gritty industrial hub of crammed tenements." Huh. We guess the Jinmao and Xintiandi and all the Bund buildings that aren't the Peace Hotel can be considered really, really ahead of their time then?

Following up on our previous post entitled "Attack on an American volunteer by anti-Carrefour mob in Zhuzhou, Hunan," we were contacted today by James Galvin, the unnamed American volunteer mentioned in the story which has now gone on to receive coverage by the Associated Press. In his email, Galvin provided his first-hand account of the alleged incident outside a Carrefour Sunday night in Hunan Province. He feels the story has gotten blown out of proportion. He called the initial email summary of the incident submitted to Shanghaiist by one of his fellow volunteers "sensationalist," adding the colleague "had only seen me for thirty seconds. That should have been enough to see I was not 'cut up.'" Shanghaiist ran the initial post on the incident on April 22 after receiving a copy of an official email from the volunteer organization's China field director — which spoke of a "mob mentality" and "punches" being thrown — that appeared to corroborate the initial version of events we were given. We had also seen an email from a U.S. Vice-Consul in Beijing saying she had spoken with the field director and that the Embassy was "highly concerned about what happened." We felt it was newsworthy and posted the story as a word of caution to our readers in various parts of China. We updated the story after the initial tipster contacted us again saying he was worried his account was "factually inaccurate in many ways."

A group of Shanghai residents who had applied to the government for the right to hold an anti-maglev protest were rejected by the government. Despite this, small numbers of them intended to go on another "walk" in order to publicly air their grievances. This time, they were stopped by some other residents. According to this AP article, this is what happened:

Residents in armbands used a megaphone to warn people not to "linger here too long," to avoid problems with the police, who had rejected their petition to hold a protest march against the magnetic levitation, or maglev, train.

... not Santa Claus! We wonder if the Chairman would be rolling in his grave Mao-soleum if he knew he was on the cover of the latest issue of The Economist, looking all festive with a santa hat. Well, according to them, Mao is a role model of sorts for top Chinese executives even today. The four key ingredients of the Chairman's art of management are: a powerful, mendacious slogan; ruthless media manipulation; sacrifice of friends and colleagues; and activity substituting for achievement. Here's what The Economist says CEO's can learn from Mao's PR tactics:

Chief executives are not in a position to crush the media as Mao did. Nevertheless, his handling of them offers some lessons. He talked only to sycophantic journalists and his appeal in the West came mainly from hagiographies written by reporters whose careers were built on the access they had to him.

Continue reading "It's Christmas, folks! And the man of the moment is..."

They say bad news travels fast. That Pudong gas blast we told you about on Saturday has made it to international news. The Associated Press, Reuters, the International Herald Tribune, BBC, Times of India, ABC (Australia) all reported on the blast.

The propaganda department is definitely going into overdrive this week. First, if you still didn't know that China has political parties other than the CCP, the People's Daily has an interesting backgrounder of the eight parties, with short descriptions of the history of the parties and their membership size and make-up. These parties are namely: the Revolutionary Committee of the Chinese Kuomintang (RCCK), China Democratic League (CDL), China National Democratic Construction Association (CNDCA), China Association...

The Ministry of Health will soon relax a 14 year old rule that bars foreigners with HIV/AIDS from entering China, although a date has not yet been set, reports the Associated Press. Needless to say, this is of MAJOR significance. As everyone who is employed in China on a work visa (and we're referring to the 'Z' visa, not the 'F') will know, if you are found to have the HIV during your health check,...

Shanghai is back in Beijing's good books. Or so an article published by the People's Daily two weeks ago indicates, claims the Associated Press. The article, titled "Glad to hear the new good tidings from Shanghai", lavished praise on Shanghai for it's recent successes. "A golden breeze refreshes Shanghai; one important, auspicious event after another" gushed the lead article. It is a sign, claims AP, that the fallout from last year's pension scandal has started to settle. As AP points out:

...such propaganda is a cue that top communist leaders have come to a consensus that the scandal was confined to a few "bad elements" and that China's biggest and richest city has Beijing's support.

People who made the news this week

During her speech at a conference on quality and safety issues held on Thursday, Chinese Vice Premier Wu Yi described a new four-month nationwide campaign to improve the quality of goods and food safety as a "special battle" to ensure the people's health and interests and maintain a good image of Chinese products.

At least 20,000 police surveillance cameras are being installed along streets in southern China and will soon be guided by sophisticated computer software from an American-financed company to recognise automatically the faces of police suspects and detect unusual activity.

Down-side of Chinese in outerspace: Finding out the Great Wall isn't actually visible to extraterrestrials.

Video of mudslide in Sichuan Province from Youku.

There seem to be some varying opinions on whether China is really going to be requiring bloggers to register their blogs using their real names or not. Earlier in the week, it was widely reported that the ISC (Internet Society of China), a quasi-governmental organization that exists under the umbrella of the MII (Ministry of Information Industry), had published a draft "code of conduct" that would encourage but not mandate that users register under their own names. According to Xinhua:

The tiny Caribbean island of Grenada suffered a huge diplomatic embarrassment at the inauguration of a US$40 million China-financed stadium built as a gift from Beijing when its police band decided it would perform the Taiwan anthem instead of the March of the Volunteers. Oops.

Today is one of those days where count our blessings that we are not rich and powerful and have never once (OK, once) been called a "tycoon." If those words describe you (and you are Chinese and corrupt and/or friendly with the corrupt) then you may not be free to breath in Shanghai's fresh sea air much longer. Just ask Zhou Zhengyi (also known as Chau Ching-ngai), who in 2002 was called China's 11th richest man with a fortune estimated at US$320 million. He was released from prison in May after serving a three-year sentence for fraud and securities manipulation, then detained again in October and formerly arrested yesterday on charges of bribery and using phony tax receipts. Someone needs to update his Wikipedia page.

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It's good to know the good members of the Shanghai police force are rolling up their sleeves and hitting the mean streets in an effort to protect us from all the ills of modern China ... like shops that sell bubble tea. From the Associated Press:

Our brothers and sisters at Londonist breathed a huge sigh of relief yesterday — they no longer have to redesign their logo. They will remain, for the foreseeable future, the city with the biggest ferris wheel. Pop open the champagne, guys! They have Shanghai to thank. Our idiot city planners have decided to scrap plans to build a "spinning giant":

From the Associated Press:

From Alpinist.com:

Famed Singaporean photographer Leslie Kee has found himself in the centre of a controversy over the launch of his latest photobook and exhibition, SuperStars, featuring 300 top Asian celebrities — many of them almost nude — a project that has taken him two years to complete.

Expanding on earlier reports, the Associated Press reported on Friday that Major League Baseball plans to open an office in China "within a month" and they'd like to have the regular season opener played in Beijing by 2008. Baseball's bobble heads are gonzo about the sport's potential "in a nation that has a population of more than 1.3 billion." The subhead for the first story linked to above says the "search for baseball's Yao Ming is on." (We've heard that before.) Back in 2004, an observer of Chinese baseball told us China was 10 to 15 years behind most other countries when it came to baseball. And this paragraph from the AP story would make it seem like that isn't going to change anytime soon:

In another case of contamination of regional water supply, officials in Shanxi province of northern China have cut off the water to 28,000 households after a truck overturned due to 'brake failure' on the highway, spilling 33 tonnes of toxic chemicals into a river that supplies water to Xiyang county.

It's good news for those of you who stand accused of one of the nearly 70 offenses that are punishable by death in China. Under legislation enacted on Tuesday, as of January 1, all death sentences handed out by provincial courts must be reviewed and ratified by China's Supreme People's Court. This reverses a 1983 law which gave such powers to the provincial courts in an effort to crack down on rising crime and corruption that occurred early under the reforms implemented under Deng Xiaoping. However, such liberal use of the death penalty in the world's most populous country and in a poor legal environment led predictably to large numbers of death sentences, many of them carried out on innocent people. Last year, a woman in Hunan reappeared 16 years after her accused killer had been executed for her murder.

Beijing will play host to an NFL preseason game next year, the professional American football league announced today (it had been rumored for a while). The New England Patriots will take on the Seattle Seahawks at 8:30 pm on August 8, 2007 in Workers Stadium. The game will be televised live in both the United States (NBC) and China (CCTV). (The Associated Press story, linked to above, said the game "will be shown live on NBC at 8:30 a.m. ET on Aug. 9. The dateline was "FOXBORO, Mass." -- forgive them if they don't quite understand how the time difference works up in New England.)

Photo by raincontreras taken from 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.

Judging from the comments on our first post on Chinabounder's now infamous Sex and Shanghai blog, there seems to be some who believe that the entire thing is a hoax. Everyone, it seems, wants to know who Chinabounder is -- even the BBC，which emailed Shanghaiist's editor asking for the scoop on Chinabounder. Bloggers often seem omniscient, but we're not, or at least not in the way that God is.

There now seems to be something Beijing has that Shanghai doesn't -- hospital clowns. The clowns work in several hospitals, including the large Women and Children's Hospital, as well as orphanages and schools for the children of migrant workers. Magic Hospital, the Beijing-based charity that organizes this, was the brainchild of German Claudia Vogg. The article notes that the hospital clown is a more familiar figure in the West than in China. Certainly China does not yet have anyone like Shobhana Schwebke (try saying that five times fast!), aka Shobi Dobi the Clown, who publishes the Hospital Clown Newsletter , which is probably one of the most informative sites you can find on anything relating to hospital clowns and the therapeutic effects of clowns and laughter. You can find out where clown conferences and festivals are being held or buy Japanese books on hospital clowns.