"In history, there have existed two stereotypical attitudes towards Tibet: demonisation and sanctification. The result, however, has always been the same: Tibet and its people have been distorted." more ›

Chinese-Australian political blogger and writer Yang Hengjun (杨恒均) has finally broken the silence on his two-day disappearance in Guangzhou. Here's a quick recap of what happened: Shortly after tweeting one day in late March that he was being followed by three men at the Guangzhou Baiyun airport, Yang went incommunicado, sparking off a series of international media reports that yet another Chinese intellectual had gone missing. The Australian government began pulling its strings, and Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu, when pressed by foreign correspondents on the whereabouts of Yang, famously quipped, "I have not heard of that person." On March 31, just two days after his disappearance, Yang resurfaced, assuring everyone he was safe, "recovering" from an "illness", and on his way back to Australia. more ›

John Garnaut of the Sydney Morning Herald reports:

An Australian writer who many consider to be the most influential political commentator on the Chinese language internet has disappeared, apparently at the hands of Chinese police. more ›

Last month in Jiangxi, three people (mother, daughter, and family friend) set themselves on fire to protest the demolition of their home to make way for a public transportation project. The family friend, an elderly man, died of his wounds and the mother and daughter, both members of the Zhong family, were seriously injured. Now two party officials have been sacked for the widely publicized debacle. more ›

Okay, I can't help it. When this little blog gets mentioned by a newspaper somewhere, I get a big fuzzy feeling and it makes my day. So here we are, as at least one little outlet on the internet to learn about Shanghai in a recent New York Times article, "Bloggers Open an Internet Window on Shanghai." more ›

By Richard Yu more ›

• Deadly sex story puts 2 bloggers in court [Shanghai Daily] "The widow of the late Chinese film director Xie Jin has filed a libel lawsuit against twin-brother bloggers for claiming her husband died while having sex with a prostitute."
• Beijing teen hot-wires bus, causes chaos [AP] "A 13-year-old boy apparently hot-wired a public bus and took it on a joyride in downtown Beijing and crashed it into a dozen vehicles in a scene witnesses likened to a blockbuster movie, state media reported Monday."
• China plans to launch its own 'Google Earth' [China Economic Net]"Compared with Google Earth, the pictures provided by the State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping feature higher resolution and cover a wider range of national territory. As long as the place is not subject to significant security restrictions, online users can search wherever they want in the country."

Bryanboy, the campy, witty, bitchy Filipino fashion blogger who says he's "so gay I sweat glitter" is in Beijing right now. While in the Jing, Bryanboy has been tramping around town in his Dior moon boots, visiting posh hotels, shopping at American Apparel and Uniqlo, visiting haute couture exhibits, and molesting cute boys. With so much to do, it's no wonder Bryanboy's blogging activity has been light, but he did take some time off to educate his readers on what Chinese toilets look like. Baboosh! more ›

Thanks to Twitter’s perpetual failures, Lu’s Fail Whale now features on t-shirts and coffee mugs while other artists create kinetic Fail Whale sculptures. more ›

Freshly fired from Windows Underground, Brad finally has time to blog again. Here's a snippet from "My Shanghai Story (Part 1)", about the Texan's introduction to Shanghai's underground live music scene: "About a month later John, some other friends, and I went to our first real underground rock show at the Sus2 Music Factory (a real factory!) where Reflector (反光镜) and Loudspeaker (扩音器) played a late-afternoon show to a crowd of pierced/mohawked/Dr Marten’d students. I remember complaining that Loudspeaker’s guitarist was out of tune, and when I got home I downloaded Reflector’s EP from their website. Their song 'Wuliao Contingent' (无聊军队) is still in rotation on my iPod." more ›

After Xinhua reported that county officials in Weng’an—including its Communist Party secretary, Wang Qin, and head of the county government, Wang Haiping—were fired on Friday following the June 28 riots, Western media has hailed Weng’an as a turning point for China. Both WSJ and TIME remark that Xinhua’s handling of the Weng’an incident is remarkable in itself; not only did state media report the riots almost immediately, but quickly produced "unusually long investigative stories." Adding to this assemblage of information are the voices of Chinese bloggers, who are doing their part to increase transparency in China. "Aggressive Chinese bloggers make an art of challenging Chinese government propaganda. This week, they can claim a victory," writes Geoffrey Fowler and Juliet Ye for the Wall Street Journal. "The Weng'an incident and its seemingly more open coverage are signs of the greater latitude enjoyed by the state media in the wake of the May 12 Sichuan earthquake," adds Simon Elegant of TIME. more ›

China's bloggers have always gone to extreme lengths to share information and criticism. But after the Weng'an riots this weekend, bloggers have had to become especially crafty when distributing information on the riots and their aftermath. In addition to burying coding inside search phrases that hide the words from online censors and taking a screenshot of written text, the Wall Street Journal reports netizens on Tianya.cn now flipping sentences to read right to left instead of left to right, and vertically instead of horizontally to get past all the usual keyword blocks. Sinobyte suggests that this new method might be better than most, since Chinese is an ideographic writing system "probably easier to read in odd inversions than most alphabetic languages." Sinobyte further explains that since Chinese words are split into meaning-based units, reading reverse text is more like reading the English word "bass ackwards" instead of "sdrawkcab ssa." more ›

Photos from powerprints, beatdrifter, and David Feng. more ›

So in the meanwhile, Youtube remains blocked. Shanghai blogger John Pasden of Sinosplice informs us that Youtube wasn't the only unlucky fella. Revver.com and Dailymotion.com also appear to be hit. And of course Google Video was never accessible in China to begin with, so that's a no-count. more ›

Okay, Shanghaiist has got several hundred blogs on his RSS that he scans through everyday. Some things scream at us, others are quickly forgotten and yet others are hidden in some corner of our brain for (mostly useless) information ready to be used at some future point in time. There are all these bloggers that you've never met personally that you can form an impression of only after a long period of reading their blogs. You're reading them every single day, and sometimes it almost feels as though they're your friend, even though you don't really know them. It's most surreal. more ›

Even weirder stuff than the Youtube block seems to have been happening, though. Apparently, for a short while on the 17th, before the Youtube block occurred, blogsearch.google.com and live.com were both redirected to Baidu! Blogsearch.google.cn was totally inaccessible. This has been confirmed by Ken Wong (see screencaps on his blog) and other Chinese netizens. Google Blogoscoped reported that yet more exotic pages like search.ibm.com.cn were also being hijacked to Baidu. more ›

And in Shanghai...
• John Pasden talks about his (Chinese) wife freaking out over his fever.
• Swiss James of ISpyShanghai recommends the Ganzhi Blindman Massage on the corner of Beijing Lu and Shaanxi Lu.
• Marc van der Chijs (of Tudou fame) shares with us the inconveniences that the cancellation of a recent China Eastern flight brought him and how he was handled.

To improve pork quality, Beijing pigs will listen to soothing music more ›

Li Heping, an outspoken Chinese lawyer said Wednesday he was abducted and beaten for hours, and accused of causing unrest by representing clients with complaints of official corruption and police abuse. more ›

We had a good laugh when we saw this "patriotic" banner by Chinese blogger Xiucai ("秀才") which reads: "Joyfully welcome the 17th Party Congress, building a harmonious society together. Xiucai is a good comrade. This site has temporarily shut down comments and forum features." [h/t to Rebecca Mackinnon] more ›

A man on the inside sent us this Brand Republic story from late last week. If you've ever wondered why bloggers never link to the South China Morning Post or why you don't see any stories from them on Google News, here's why: more ›

Walking into Steak & Eggs, Shanghaiist was flooded with fond childhood memories of chowing down on big greasy breakfasts at truck-stop diners during family road trips along Interstate 10. Sure, we love Moon River and its classic 1950's theme, but Steak & Eggs is the first place we've eaten at in Shanghai that fits the mold of the no-frills American roadside diner. more ›

Here, Shanghai, were your favourite stories for the month of August: more ›

Pigs are back in the headlines once again, and with a vengeance. Here is an interesting juxtapose of three pig-related news stories found via the informative China Digital Times. more ›

Thou shalt not collude on pricing, the regulatory god said unto the Moses of industries in most countries, including China. But the instant noodle cabal either did not hear it or turned a deaf ear. In late July, noodle makers joined forces in raising prices by about 20 percent, and as much as 40 percent for some products.After less than three weeks of regulatory pressure, media assailing and public discontent, the industry backed down, apologized and initiated an across-the-board price cut. Is this a triumph of consumer rights and regulatory protection? Yes ... hmm maybe. more ›

The Chinese internet is currently abuzz with all sorts of reports and rumours of what went on at Yao Ming's wedding at Shanghai's Shangri-La Hotel on Monday. Earlier in the day, we called up our friend Sebastien Lathuile, who is floral meister at the hotel, thinking we could get some inside scoop or even pictures of the event. Unfortunately, all he could tell us was that he was not personally involved in the event and he knew absolutely nothing about the wedding. Apparently the management of the entire event had been farmed out to a local Shanghai company, and everything was kept under a very tight lid (with a generous budget dedicated to security), so there was nothing more that he could tell us. more ›

Image from Gemma Kate Thorpe. more ›

So while we're nursing our hangovers from last night's party and trying to get the damn Beatles songs out of our minds, it dawned on us that not so long ago, we wrote our very first entry here on Shanghaiist, and since then, two years have passed! In the meanwhile, the poor bloggers at Shanghaiist have been so busy trying to keep you entertained and supplementing our meagre writer salaries by peddling strange stuff on the internet that it seems we forgot to celebrate our first birthday! more ›

The blog Lost Laowai has started a group writing project called "If I Knew Then What I Know Now." The general idea is for other bloggers to write about what they thought about China before actually moving out here and how different the reality actually is. Once the writer has finished the post, he/she can notify Lost Laowai and have it put up on the consolidated submission list for everyone's reading pleasure. more ›

It seems that the TIME Magazine China Blog has been blocked by the Great Firewall of China (GFW), or "GFW-ed" to use the industry nomenclature. The blog normally covers a full-range of issues, including topics and analysis that local media wouldn't touch with a 10 meter 棍, and as a rule, TIME tends to "err on the side of free speech." However, evidently the blog took things a step too far for China's censors, when on June 4th, all three bloggers (Simon Elegant, Bill Powell, and Austin Ramzy) wrote about the world's largest public square. more ›