Audio Transcript: more ›

The Shanghai Foreign Correspondents Club last night played host to Jia Zhangke, the man NPR recently dubbed "the most important filmmaker working in the world today." The evening began at Shanghai Film Art Center with a special screening of Jia's latest film, the Shanghai-focused documentary I Wish I Knew (《上海传奇》), released to coincide with the ongoing World Expo. The viewing was followed by a Q&A with the director down the road at Cotton's on Xinhua Lu. You can listen to to that 76-minute session right here (in Chinese with English translations). more ›

Randy Cohen, New York Times "The Ethicist" columnist, might be inclined to think so. Granted, Cohen's anti-auto podcast from last week is about Manhattan, but several of his arguments already seem applicable to Shanghai (and, in 2020, when our city's subway system looks like this, there will be few ethical excuses for owning personal cars in most of Shanghai). Cohen lays out five reasons why cars and Manhattanites shouldn't mix. Here's No. 1: "Cars kill. If you introduced a transportation system by announcing, 'It'll only kill 40,000 people a year,' it's hard to believe it would gain widespread popularity." (The number of "traffic deaths" in China was down to 73,484 in 2008, but up 100 percent over the last 20 years.) Listen to all New York Times podcasts here or subscribe via iTunes. They're all free. more ›

Adam Schokora of Danwei points us to this audio recording of a "disgruntled customer lecturing a telephone operator at a well-known, city-wide food delivery company based in Shanghai". Do a bit of research and you'll find there's only one food delivery company in town that delivers Blue Frog and it happens to be an advertiser on Shanghaiist. Does the voice of this douchebag sound familiar to any of you readers out there? We say unleash the foreign internet mobsters on this guy! more ›

Welcome to the latest edition of Chinese Soundbites, a podcast series brought to you by ChinesePod and Shanghaiist. Every week we bring you topics and words pulled straight from the headlines, in Mandarin Chinese. more ›

Welcome to the inaugural episode of Chinese Soundbites, a podcast series brought to you by ChinesePod and Shanghaiist. Every week we'll be bringing you topics and words pulled straight from the headlines, in Mandarin Chinese. more ›

Welcome to the latest episode of Chinese Soundbites, a podcast series brought to you by ChinesePod and Shanghaiist. Every week we'll be bringing you topics and words pulled straight from the headlines, in Mandarin Chinese. more ›

Welcome to the latest episode of Chinese Soundbites, a podcast series brought to you by ChinesePod and Shanghaiist. Every week we'll be bringing you topics and words pulled straight from the headlines, in Mandarin Chinese. more ›

Welcome to the latest episode of Chinese Soundbites, a podcast series brought to you by ChinesePod and Shanghaiist. Every week we'll be bringing you topics and words pulled straight from the headlines, in Mandarin Chinese. more ›

Welcome to the latest episode of Chinese Soundbites, a podcast series brought to you by ChinesePod and Shanghaiist. Every week we'll be bringing you topics and words pulled straight from the headlines, in Mandarin Chinese. more ›

Welcome to the newest episode of Chinese Soundbites, a podcast series brought to you by ChinesePod and Shanghaiist. Every week we'll be bringing you topics and words pulled straight from the headlines, in Mandarin Chinese. more ›

Welcome to the newest episode of Chinese Soundbites, a podcast series brought to you by ChinesePod and Shanghaiist. Every week we'll be bringing you topics and words pulled straight from the headlines, in Mandarin Chinese. more ›

Welcome to the inaugural episode of Chinese Soundbites, a podcast series brought to you by ChinesePod and Shanghaiist. Every week we'll be bringing you topics and words pulled straight from the headlines, in Mandarin Chinese. more ›

We were happy when the CNET web media empire finally got round to running stories about China. And now, today's CNET News podcast has a report from Tom Krazit who has just come back from his first trip in China giving a broad, down to earth, if not ground breaking summary of technology in this country, covering the issues of infrastructural development, the digital divide, censorship, the rise of Baidu, an explanation of pinyin, outsourcing, building works and pollution. Apparently, China has electricity already. more ›

Many thanks to studiozero for bringing Ramona Cordova to Shanghai and introducing his music to us. Last night's performance was one of the best musical experiences we've had in half a decade in Shanghai — the guy plays a mean acoustic guitar and his songs are painfully beautiful. We weren't sure what we would think about the falsetto he sometimes uses, but it worked. We actually think we like him better live than on his CD (which we bought after the show). more ›

You likely know that access to the great China news resource China Digital Times is blocked in Mainland China. So, you may not know that on Monday they published an audio interview with Howard W. French, the New York Times bureau chief here in Shanghai. It's part of their ChinaCast series of podcasts, "short and informal conversations with journalists, business people, artists and others doing interesting work in China." more ›

But they only get RMB 25,000 in damages. The movie companies involved in the suit were New Line Productions, Walt Disney, Warner Bros Entertainment, Columbia Pictures, Universal Studios, 20th Century Fox and Paramount Pictures. The defendant was listed as Shanghai Leying Audio Visual Co. Ltd, but this story tells us the company also went by the name "Kadi" and was " well-known to many expatriates in Shanghai for selling pirated products." We think it might be safe to assume that they are talking about Ka De Club, the chain (?) of DVD shops that has been fleecing foreigners for years (OK, perhaps fleecing is a little strong — their prices were around 3 or 4 kuai higher than other shops selling the same thing). Evidently, the name change occurred after charges were filed, so the shop could continue to operate. We've lost track of Ka De — it moved around quite a bit over the years, trying to avoid Johnny Law, we assume (the raid that led to this lawsuit was in Changning) — and then there were Ka De clones, we think, trying to cash in on the "good" name. We have a feeling they'll be back. more ›

At the risk of becoming Kunmingist for the day, we wanted to pass along info on a Kunming rapper who looks like he could be China's answer to Digable Planets (are we showing our age?). Here's a snippet from GoKunming's profile of Hu Xuan: more ›

We swear we heard the PA system announce yesterday that we were at Jinjiang Park metro stop, when we knew we were at Huangpi Nan Lu (and so did everyone else — lots of confused faces). We assumed the metro just got its sound files mixed up ... but could it have been someone's mobile phone ringtone? more ›

We're still feeling a little lazy over here at Shanghaiist headquarters — good thing other bloggers are picking up the slack. John at Sinosplice posted a nice collection of Christmas songs in Chinese. more ›

Have all your friends abandoned you? Got a case of the holiday blues? What better pick-me-up could there be than Chinese Brit-pop? (Just play along, folks.) more ›

About 99 percent French, 1 percent non-French. That's our educated guess on the composition of the audience Monday night at Yann Tiersen's concert in the Shanghai Concert Hall. (Read our previous Yann-related post here. That's right — he's French.) more ›

GigShanghai/GigLive: We never left! more ›

GigShanghai: Jazz, Korean-Africani and The Dirty Three more ›

GigShanghai: Pinkertones, goth an the NFL? more ›

GigShanghai: Trannies, 5 dollars and moon cake more ›

GigShanghai: Moshing, MoJo and more of 'The Man' more ›

GigShanghai: Swedes, condoms and the Ministry of Culture more ›

GigShanghai: Falling over, GigLive and noodles more ›

GigShanghai: I-GO, Jewish rock and the F-word more ›