Chuck Culpepper of the Los Angeles Times has been tracking this and as of his latest posting yesterday, the Beijing Olympics "MPC" leaders are — you guessed it — Armenia. Australia is No. 2. USA? 30th. China? 40th. (We have a feeling the Aussies might climb back to No. 1 after their efforts in the pool this morning.) Australia is not the two-time defending MPC champs, however. That honor goes to the Bahamas, which has......

From Hong Kong-based blogger Thomas Crampton: The Chinese link? The Fail Whale was drawn by Chinese graphic designer Lu Yiying, who sold it on iStockPhoto for US$10, according to Jay Oatway of the Hong Kong-based Charged magazine. 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. The Sydney-based Lu Yiying fanned the flames of fandom with a girlfriend (and the official......

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......

With constant building demolition, commercial clutter and disapproval from Chinese authorities, it's no wonder graffiti in Shanghai is generally a rare sight. Juxtapoz features some exceptional masterpieces around Moganshan Road.Peking Duck's Richard analyzes the "iconic" theory applied to the CCP in China: "the main fault lies with the local authorities, not with the central party, which is trying as best they can to control their local counterparts." Richard quotes from an article in the Washington......

Graph from WSJ Blogs Western journalists have long lauded China's blogs as edgy, provocative and balanced alternatives to China's official newspapers. Now, we have science on our side: In a new study at Middlebury College, assistant professor Ashley Esarey analyzed the 2006 news content of over 500 Chinese blogs. Esarey found that some 61% of Chinese blogs carry criticism, with only 19% of Chinese official news media doing the same. While Imagethief does point......

Fons Tuinstra of China Herald suggests that lots of hotel rooms, in particular 4-star rooms, are still available during the Beijing Olympics. Is Beijing really expecting 500,000 foreigners in August?Latest visa rumour from Richard Brubaker of All Roads Lead to China: Anyone born after 1983 will no longer be offered a Z visa.The Opposite End of China informs us of a Uyghur attack on a police station last week in Sangong, Xinjiang, which is right......

Jonathan Watts, the China correspondent for The Guardian, has recently put in his year so far article about the internet here. It covers a lot of familiar ground and quotes Zonaeuropa and Danwei.org, among others, as sources. One of the most quoted facts in these kinds of articles is the world’s most read blog being “Lao Xu”. Lao Xu is the Sina.com blog of actress/writer/director Xu Jing Lei 徐静雷. So what’s going on at the......

Photograph of Michael Strahan, coach Tom Coughin (holding the Vince Lombardi trophy) and quarterback and Super Bowl MVP Eli Manning by Tien Mao Gothamist was amazed after the Giants won the Super Bowl, the city went wild, and it witnessed a ticker-tape parade.Barack Obama drew 20,000+ ahead of Seattle’s Saturday caucus.Londonist had Super Tuesday too.Elusive guerrilla street artist Banksy revisits Los Angeles.After the Patriots lost the Super Bowl and came this close to making......

By JFK Miller So it’s Huckabee and Obama in Iowa. Clearly it’s early days, and neither candidate is a certainty for their respective parties’ nomination for the November presidential election. But it’s worth looking at what both candidates have had to say on the record about China. First Huck. Huck is a Baptist minister turned Republican politician who wrote a best-selling book about his fat-shedding experience entitled Quit Digging Your Grave with a Knife and......

Nominate us for Best Asian Weblog in the 2008 Bloggies! One time each year, Shanghaiist comes grovelling at your feet, dear readers, and asks you to nominate us in the Bloggie Awards, which is as close to the Oscars as you can get in the big wide Blogiverse. Last year was a record year for the Gothamist network, as we nabbed a total of four Bloggie nominations. Our parent blog, Gothamist was nominated in the......

Via our Contribute Page, we learn that ISpyShanghai.com is a glutton for punishment recently conducted a taste test of beers readily (and cheaply) available in Shanghai. The photo above shows the awful selection they had to choose between, although only seven brews were ranked (we're not sure why ... maybe they got sick?). REEB and Budweiser came in at the bottom and Harbin (owned by Budweiser) came out on top. If we had to choose......

If you have been reading Shanghaiist for a while now, you will realise that a major focus of our work is to bring to the attention of the English-language reader stuff that is happening on the Chinese Internet. Some time ago, we told you about how the Chinese internet rarely links to foreign websites. In fact, only six percent of the Chinese Internet’s hyperlinks leave China’s webspace. Like it or not, the Chinese Internet will......

Will the Dalai Lama reincarnate before he dies? Calgary Herald: Two Dalai Lamas? Reuters: China condemns Dalai Lama for ideas on succession The Times: Dalai Lama offers his flock a vote on whether he should be reincarnated The Economist: Communists can live with reincarnation. A referendum is a different matter AP: China Reports Riot in Southwestern Tibet Sino-US relations NYT: China Explains Decision to Block U.S. Ships Bloomberg: China Denies Saying Incident Was `Misunderstanding'......

The craze for Chinese language learning The Economist: False Eastern Promise: The craze for teaching Chinese may be a misguided fad Ken Carroll: The Economist at its misguided worst The Peking Duck: Is the rush to study Chinese a time-wasting fad? The Pudong petrol station blast Shanghai Scrap: China National Petroleum to Dead Workers: Blame Yourselves. Wang Jianshuo: Diesel shortage caused traffic jam The lifestyles of the rich and famous Sydney Morning Herald: Britney......

You guys ready for yet another ranking of most expensive cities? ECA International has ranked Shanghai the 8th costliest city in Asia for expats, so if they're to be taken seriously, Shanghai is cheaper than Beijing which came in 7th but more costly than Singapore which came in 9th. Seoul was the most expensive Asian city, while Guangzhou came in 10th. Also, Shanghai was named the 100th most expensive city in the world. That's 99......

Bokee.com is doing an online poll to determine who were the real movers and shakers of China in 2007. The plug they're using is "谁最敢动中国" (who most dared to move China), and you can vote and then see the results, live. They also have little blurbs about each of the front-runners, explaining why they've been in the news. The frontrunner thus far, with 19% of the vote is China Mobile, who people are accusing of......

EastSouthWestNorth has translated an excellent story on the translation crisis in China that first appeared in Phoenix Weekly. It talks about the more than 1,000 foreign literary works that are translated and published in China each year (and we assume that number is still growing). The story laments over the "awfulness of the translations, the crudeness of the translators and the absence of critical reflection on what is happening". It then looks into why translation......

According to a blog essay we found, a recent poll by Harris Interactive showed that of 6,000 people from France, Germany, Italy, the UK, and the US, the overwhelming majority considered China the second most powerful nation in the world after the USA. We did some searching on the internet, and couldn't find mention of that report. We tried on Harris Interactive's site as well, but no dice. Perhaps we haven't looked hard enough? Or......

Nanheyangrouchuan is the most unabashed China-basher and the most hated commenter/troll in the English-language China blogosphere. If you still haven't heard of him by now, check out the trail that he has left all over the Internet, and some of his comments left on this blog. This is possibly the most unconventional interview we've ever done on Shanghaiist (not to mention the "riskiest"), and some of you are probably going to wonder why we are......

Last weekend, we told you that Yahoo! is now apologizing for not telling the full truth to Congress at the February 2006 hearing where Yahoo! was taken to task for its role in the conviction of Chinese journalist Shi Tao. Now both Republicans and Democrats have launched scathing attacks on Yahoo. San Mateo Democrat Tom Lantos has called Yahoo "moral pygmies", and New Jersey Republican Chris Smith compared Yahoo’s cooperation with the Chinese government to......

We were right. The Olympic Bible ban controversy would spill over. And it has, in a most unbelievably crazy fashion. More ill-informed Christian and Catholic news media have given legs to the story. Somewhere along the way, the rumour became a fact, and a debate has made its way to the hallowed halls of the US Congress! Senator Lindsey Graham has made a complete idiot of himself by calling up the Chinese Ambassador to the......

If you guys have passed by CITIC Square on Nanjing Lu in the past month or two, you'd surely have seen that Mont Blanc has taken over the ground level store that used to be occupied by Starbucks, and apparently, they are building the world's largest Mont Blanc boutique right there. All Roads Leads to China reveals that Mont Blanc is paying US$11 per square metre per day, which works out to about US$250,000 per......

So both Myspace and Friendster have their own China versions. Now Kaiser Kuo of Ogilvy Digital China Watch points us to a report on China Business News (第一财经日报) which cites an “industry insider” who says that Facebook plans to release additional language interfaces and intends to enter the China market as early as December this year. The paper also claims that "Facebook has given up its initial plan to set up its own China-based site......

Shanghaiist has just touched down in Beijing. And just as we were wondering if it was just us, or if the air in the Jing was really that much worse *cough*cough*, this is what we read:Birth defects in Chinese infants have soared nearly 40 percent since 2001There is one Chinese baby born with birth defects every 30 secondsIn Beijing, the incidence of breast cancer has increased 23 percent in 10 years, with about 45 women......

Marc van der Chijs spends the weekend watching sailing races at Dianshanhu, a lake about 50 km outside Shanghai, and recommends it as a great weekend greataway. Membership at the sailing club starts at just RMB2500/year (gawd, that's cheaper than our gym membership), and you can rent boats there by the hour, if you're not bringing your own boat along, that is. Driving on the way to the lake, Marc catches sight of a......

We told you about the lavish homecoming party that was thrown by Pizhou (邳州) in our neighbouring Jiangsu province for its party secretary Li Lianyu (李连玉). John Kennedy of Global Voices Online informs us that Chinese netizens have reacted strongly to the series of pictures we showed you. On one particular forum, 800 comments were received on one single afternoon. Here's a kickass selection of comments that he picked up, followed with his translations:太牛的场面 让我呕吐了好久......

Who is Yacht ? Yacht, a musician you will love like a rainbow after the rain, or a lollipop after visiting the dentist. Any one remember the Blow? Well, the Blow’s last 2 albums was 90% Yacht and Yacht is made up of one man….the multi – talented Jona Bochtolt. Happy, positive rainbow music on speed, Yacht might currently be best known as that guy who used to be in the Blow or for......

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. But the mainstream media don't seem to be bothered with the Youtube block. If you don't believe me, just compare for yourself by clicking here and here. For......

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.......

On finding out about the Youtube block, these were the first reactions of Chinese blogger Ken Wong:昨晚YouTube发布了香港分站也即繁体中文站时，我还可以正常访问所有YouTube站点，而今天一大早起来，就发现已经全部撞墙了（广州电信ADSL）。看了一下昨晚读者朋友们的反馈，他们也和我一样。暂时还不知道该说什么好，或者一个字就够了：扌喿！ Yesterday when Youtube released its Hong Kong / Traditional Chinese version, I could still access Youtube normally, but this morning when I woke up, I found that it had been bummed (I'm on Guangzhou Telecom ADSL). Comments on yesterday's post from readers suggest they experienced the same thing. I don't really know how to respond to this, except......