Results tagged “books”

Much like China's ongoing efforts against actual piracy, it seems that the government has been taking steps to curb piracy of the intellectual variety. Shifting from targeting individual sellers to wholesalers and manufacturers, Shanghai's "Cultural Inspection Team" has apparently confiscated over 20,000 pirated cds and 5,000 books in 246 "significant" busts in preparation for the Expo. If you do the math, though, that's about 100 cds/books per bust, which doesn't seem that significant to us. As it seems the goods aren't even made in Shanghai, we're not altogether too impressed.

We've always marveled at the immense chasm between the Chinese book market and the rest of the world. Of course, issues of translation and appeal abroad have kept the market pretty domestic, but that seems to be changing slowly. Chinageeks makes a great point in response to the coverage of Frankfurt Book Fair: it seems that the only interest the west can muster towards Chinese literature is when the book or author carries some sort of scandal with it, leaving the vast majority of authors and books unnoticed. There's a lack of foreign awareness of books that split the difference between banned-in-China and sterilized-by-censorship that leaves a big old lacuna where books by talented Chinese authors should be.

Clocking in at only 99 pages, Shanghai: High Lights Low Lights Tael Lights is an excellent appetizer for those of us who generally dine on heavier reading fare. The authors, Maurine Karns and Pat Patterson, make their purpose known early in the book: in the preface, titled “an explanation but not an apology,” Karns and Patterson state that they have written Tael Lights “with the hope of enjoying ourselves, of making a little money, and of not committing ourselves to anything for which we might be sorry” (xx). They proceed to describe, with delightful if decidedly un-PC irreverence, the Shanghai they saw before them when writing the book in 1936.

• This is pretty damn cool: Two Iranians are reshuffling scenes from Persepolis, a black comedy cartoon by Iranian-French emigre Marjane Satrapi, into a story about President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's disputed victory. Where are they working from? GOOD OLD SHANGHAI. Check out the comic here. [AFP]
• The average price of commercial residential houses in Shanghai reached 19,603 yuan per square meter last week. Anybody got a house to sell? Now seems like the time. [People's Daily]
• The Book Fair was wildly successful this week - about 240,000 people visited, buying 28 million yuan worth of books. [Shanghai Daily]

Yesterday afternoon we attended a talk at the JC Mandarin with Cherie Blair and guest speakers Jane Huang and Sha Sha. The Chinese version of Blair's autobiography Speaking for Myself was launched at the Shanghai Book Fair yesterday.

• Why China Can't Create Brands [Newsweek] "China is famous as the factory to the world, but even its best companies enjoy little if any fame. That paradox has become a vexing problem for China's leaders. The nation is now too rich to continue growing at a double-digit pace by simply putting more peasants to work in factories, and then underselling its Western, Japanese, and South Korean competition. The job of making cheap clothes, toys, and electronics is moving on to even cheaper labor markets, like Vietnam. In a March report, Premier Wen Jiabao called for China to create companies that can innovate and churn out "brand-name export products"—meaning companies with reputations for quality, innovation, and service so strong that customers are willing to pay a premium for their products."
• Kazakh Uighurs hold mass protest [AP] " More than 5,000 ethnic Uighurs rallied in Kazakhstan's largest city on Sunday to protest China's use of deadly force to quash Uighur protests this month. The show of solidarity was the largest in any of the former Soviet republics — home to a half-million Uighurs — since the July 5 violence in Xinjang that authorities say claimed almost 200 lives."
• Caution urged in bids for US Big Three [China Daily] "As the ongoing financial crisis pressures Western automakers to consider selling some of their assets, Chinese vehicle producers are seeing more opportunities to enter the global market through overseas acquisitions. However, unlike the positive responses to purchases such as China's Lenovo acquiring IBM's PC business in 2004, bidding for assets from ailing Big Three automakers has attracted more criticism."

This week: Chill out with some live jazz, rock out with some funky beats at Shelter, then cheer on Shanghai Shenhua before eating some good ol' American grub at the Bulldog.

Earnshaw Books, your favorite purveyor of China-related reading material, is pleased to announce that it will host an evening of conversation, books and live jazz to celebrate the release this month of two new tomes - Shanghai Story Walks by Yvette Ho Madany and I Sailed with Chinese Pirates by Aleko Lilius, featuring a new foreword by Paul French.

Shanghai-based journalist Paul French's latest book is one that ought to excite all you ol' Shanghai history buffs (and press nostalgists as well) - an examination of the convulsive history of the China press corps between the 1820s and leading up to the revolution of 1949.

Earnshaw Books will host an evening of conversation, books and live jazz featuring Graham Earnshaw to celebrate the release of Tales of Old Peking, authored by Shanghaiist contributor Derek Sandhaus!

   

Anyone taking a stroll down Taojiang Lu towards Hengshan Lu is bound to spot the bright green shutters of 'The Cottage', a new coffee shop at number 25a.

• On Foot in the Mystical Mountains of Yunnan [NYTimes.com] "It was for a moment like this that I had made the long journey last fall to northern Yunnan Province from my home in Beijing — which has the dubious distinction of being both one of the most polluted and one of the most populous cities in the world. Back home, looking at a map of the rugged Tibetan areas of western China, my eyes had fallen on the deep river valleys of Yunnan, where three of Asia’s great waterways come tumbling down from their glacial sources in the mountains of the high Tibetan plateau."
• Getty’s $100,000 Tab for Chinese Photos Signals Bargain Time [Bloomberg.com] "Wang Qingsong’s theatrical, large- scale photographs have been a hit with collectors, rising in price to $864,943 from $40,000 since 2006. Now, with prices for Chinese contemporary art eroding, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles has purchased three prints by Wang and six by Hai Bo, who contrasts photographs of friends and relatives taken during China’s Cultural Revolution with their recent portraits."
• Sichuan Earthquake Memorial Museum To Cost 2.3 Billion [chinaSMACK] "The complete plans for the Beichuan National Earthquake Ruins Museum that has been the subject of much attention by citizens from all walks of life have been released, with a preliminary budget requiring a ~2.3 billion yuan total investment/cost. The moment the design plan was introduced, it immediately caused huge amounts of heated discussion from all walks of life in society. Some netizens have questioned whether using vast amounts of money to construct a museum amounts to an “image project.”"

Didn't manage to make it to all the Shanghai Lit Fest authors you wanted to see? CityWeekend, already having done us a great service by liveblogging the event, was nice enough to record a bunch of podcasts for everyone who couldn't be there. Currently, they've got Week 1 and Week 2's writers up, and Week 3 is supposedly going to be added soon. Head over there to listen to the people you couldn't catch live... or just the people you want to hear again. We know we'll be re-listening to the James Fallows podcast. Maybe on repeat.

Zachary Mexico's first book, China Underground, just came out this month. It's an edgy look at margins of modern China—and it's a real page-turner. Mexico mixes it up with the masses, returning with sixteen tales of unique individuals "trying to figure out what's going on, trying to carve a place out for themselves in the new China."

Let's make this as short and sweet as possible. You've had three weeks to pony your lazy arse to Lit Fest, so if you miss it, don't blame us for not keeping you blissfully well-informed. And if you miss out, you really ARE missing out--if not just for the fabulous view out the window of Glamour Bar in broad daylight.

Danwei recently wrote an excellent post an on a new graphic novel we would love to get a peek at called Tibetan Rock Dog by rock star, Zheng Jun. Zheng Jun, combines his interest in animals, cartoons and music to create a graphic novel that he hopes will "give ourselves the decent childhood we missed, a deluxe childhood that a healthy, happy individual ought to have." Zheng Jun sees the graphic novel as a medium for adults to "enjoy the storied benefits of childhood."

• B.C. model's killer sentenced to die in China [CTV British Columbia] "He has two years to show good behaviour and if he proves this his sentence could be lowered to a life sentence to be served in jail or even lighter depending on his performance," CTV's Beijing Bureau Chief Steve Chao reported Friday.
• China's last eunuch spills sex secrets [Reuters] "Only two memories brought tears to Sun Yaoting's eyes in old age -- the day his father cut off his genitals, and the day his family threw away the pickled remains that should have made him a whole man again at death...This turbulent life has been recorded in the "The Last Eunuch of China" by amateur historian Jia Yinghua, who over years of friendship drew out of Sun the secrets that were too painful or intimate to spill to prying journalists or state archivists."
• Lonely Boys and Losers: Are we overstating the fenqing phenomenon? [Jottings from the Granite Studio] "I don’t think that fenqing can be defined by a particular perspective or viewpoint. Certainly adopting the CCP or Han nationalist worldview doesn’t make one a fenqing... For me, the defining characteristic of a fenqing is not strong belief in a particular view, but rather an inability to accept that other valid perspectives might exist."

When we first arrived in Shanghai a long, long time ago, all there was to do on weekends was vogue at Bar Rouge---balancing champagne glasses and tottering around on stilettos while trying to not catch our hair on fire. Well, things have changed. Champagne is no longer as popular and now there is a Barbie shop to vogue around at, plus this weekend our Pearl of the East has oystered out an arts scene involving more than the usual bomb shelters, beer and beavers.

The live music selection may be amazing this weekend, but it's not the only thing going on! Today also marks the beginning of two super special events and if you're a fan of sexy things or literary things (or sexy literary things), you've got great reason to be psyched.

People who looked at this cover and thought that it would be an insightful and sexy look into being a foreigner touring through a China just newly opened to the world will ultimately be disappointed.

Danwei brings us pages from the "Old China" book by Graham Earnshaw, called Tales of Old Shanghai.

Go here to listen to Terry Gross' interview with Beijing-based (and formerly Shanghai-based) writer James Fallows, The Atlantic's "man in China." Fallows discusses a variety of topics, including China's extensive investment in the United States (see his Atlantic story on the topic here), his new book of China essays (excerpt on Danwei), internet censorship and his recently deceased father. Around the 24-minute mark, Fallows makes some interesting statements about how he thinks Chinese people would have voted in the recent U.S. election — we're curious how his observations compare to what Shanghaiist readers saw and heard leading up to November 4.

Xu Xi, author of Evanescent Isles talks to Zhang Lijia, journalist and author of the book Socialism is Great. In her book, Zhang tells her fascinating story of how she worked as a teenager in a Nanjing factory which produced missiles designed to reach North America, participated in the Tiananmen Square protests and eventually became a journalist.

A few years ago, locally-based writer and publisher Graham Earnshaw began releasing a series of out-of-print books about China pre-1949 and, more specifically, the interactions between foreigners and locals during that period (a copy of Carl Crow's Foreign Devil's in the Flowery Kingdom which made to Shanghaiist was particularly excellent). These books were extensions of an earlier web-based project, the Tales of Old China website, which has a remarkably extensive library and picture database cataloging the rich and fascinating colonial history of China.

A photographer, his camera, a backpack, two years, one country, 56 cultures, 1.3 billion people, 33 provinces and 56,000 kilometers.

As we mentioned earlier, the start of school term has been followed by suicide attempts among the city's middle and high school students. Only yesterday, another two high school students attempted to end their lives but were saved.

Jeremy Goldkorn of Danwei speaks to Zhang Lijia, journalist and author of the new book Socialism is Great. Zhang worked as a teenager in a Nanjing factory which produced missiles designed to reach North America, participated in the Tiananmen Square protests and subsequently became a journalist.

Tony Parsons' (“Man and Boy”, “Stories We Could Tell”) new novel is set firmly in Shanghai.

And so it begins. Today, with the Olympics to open at 8:08pm tonight, the world will see China, and more importantly, Beijing in all its splendour. For better or worse, Beijing and the lives of its 16 million residents have been irrevocably changed.

The Wall Street Journal reports that 4.3 million copies of "an etiquette book outlining rules on good manners and foreign customs, including rules about what not to wear" have been distributed to Beijing residents for use during the Olympics. A snippet: "No matter what, never wear too many colors...especially during formal occasions. When you wear [formal shoes], be sure to wear socks in good condition...socks should be a dark color -- never match black leather shoes with white socks. Older women should choose shoes with heels that aren't too high." Let that be a warning to you.