With less than 3 weeks to go before the Games, some of the most famous stars in show business are lending their voices to the latest stand on behalf of Tibet — a move that's sure to anger the Chinese government. Sting, Dave Matthews, John Mayer, Alanis Morissette, Moby and a host of others are performing on an album entitled "Songs for Tibet," the International Campaign for Tibet announced in a press release on Tuesday.......

Baidu has released its video search report, and Kaiser Kuo of the Ogilvy China Digital Watch translates and summarises some of the key findings. Interestingly, “adult-related” search terms account for 34.14% of daily search volume, followed by celebrity-related (14.74%), TV serial related (12.48%), and animation-related (12.21%) searches. Google is reportedly under investigation in China for tax evasion, says Paul Midler of The China Game.Chinese Skype users now exceed 25% of the global total.While venture capital......

The massive NBA marketing machine rumbled through Shanghai last night in the first of three “China Games,” the latter two to be held in Macau beginning tonight. The pre-season game between the Orlando Magic and the Cleveland Cavaliers was held at the Qizhong Sports Stadium in the Min-hang district. Some observations: The stadium is FAR. We’re literally talking “120 RMB cab ride to a place literally off the Shanghai city map” far. The sad thing......

Yup, that’s the guy, the face representing millions of Chinese retail investors chasing a red hot market. Every time, there is a foreign piece on China’s stock market or about rabid Chinese speculators, you can bet that this mug shot is prominently displayed atop the article, thanks to Reuters, apparently. Shanghaiist is wondering if the man is aware of his cult celebrity status. Along similar lines: How well has he done in the market? What......

... at least that is what Shirley Phelps-Roper of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas would have us believe (h/t to Danwei). She recently wrote in to China Daily columnist Raymond Zhou after reading his opinion piece on recent comments by Chinese celebrity Sun Haiying (孙海英) who not too long ago ignited a huge debate with his comments that homosexuality was unequivocally "criminal in nature" ("同性恋就是犯罪“):Dear Raymond The very day that Godless China decriminalized......

Seoul, Korea - Police shut down group sex website, arrest participants [Asian Sex Gazette] Korean police have arrested a 42-year-old website operator identified as Kim who they say arranged 20 group sex parties in and around Seoul and collected participation fees. They also booked 53 male members who had group sex and 11 females who prostituted themselves through Kim's website. Tokyo, Japan - Retired Japanese porn star Ai Iijima needs sex [Asian Sex Gazette] Even......

On the left, you have an image submitted by the Yangzhou Evening News to the 17th Annual Chinese Journalism Awards, for which it won a Class I award in the Best News of Jiangsu province, as well as a Class III photojournalism award in the national round. Lots of inspiring pictures and smart captions that would befit any award-winning page (see details of pictures here on ESWN). Some smart chap then decided to do......

It's been about three days since the BBC apologised to the Queen for misrepresenting a sequence in a program in which she appeared to have lost her temper with celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz (the one who took the picture of John Lennon in the nude hugging Yoko Ono). But we find our dear China Daily still linking to the following story on its homepage about the BBC program, A Year with the Queen, which tells......

Much has been said about the Shanxi province slavery scandal, and China (and the world) has been shocked by footages of child slaves being beaten and whipped and forced to work under harsh conditions in brick kilns. For those of you who have not caught up with what's happened yet, EastSouthWestNorth offers an excellent translation (and a must-read!) of an article that first appeared in yWeekend detailing how Henan journalist Fu Zhenzhong (付振中) uncovered the......

Shanghaiist is not one to visit the many, various, countless, plentiful, and numerous gossip sites on the internet and saved in our bookmark folder. However, after an accidental click or two while innocently surfing the internet at work, we stumbled upon several interesting reports claiming that Christina might be performing at her upcoming Shanghai concert with a "noticeable bump". Could Christina have a bun in the oven? The speculation has the celebrity gossip blogs in......

Killer bashes, knifes victim. Local prosecutors yesterday charged a 71-year-old man with killing a 76-year-old woman by bashing her with a spade, trying to suffocate her with a quilt, and then attempting to strangle her. Finally he knifed her in the face and neck, prosecutors allege. Messy, messy!U.S. avoids labeling China 'manipulator'. China is not intentionally manipulating its currency to gain an unfair trade advantage but its massive buildup of foreign reserves raises risks......

Tradeshows are big business in China and here in Shanghai there is at least one trade show per year per industry, regardless of how obscure it maybe. However, the one tradeshow that is sure to catch people’s attention and make Bund partygoers salivate next weekend is this one. The Millionaire Fair (read our previous posts here, here, here and here) is an international tradeshow for the luxury products and services industries, across a wide range......

This is a little old, but we have a feeling many of you haven't seen it yet. From what we have read and seen (front row last month at Yunfeng Theater) of ?uestlove, drummer for The Roots, we always thought the man also known as Ahmir-Khalib Thompson would be a pretty cool guy to hang out with. And then someone told us to check out his blog on MySpace and now our new goal in......

We've all seen those fancy-shmancy bidet/toilet combos from Japanese-brand Toto. Heck, we have even enjoyed using one every once in a while (that seat-warming feature is really nice on a cold winter's morn). We believe Kelly Chen, the Hong Kong starlet who informed us (via danwei.org) that she trusts her private washing to Toto's premium bidet technology. But we have always felt that something has been missing from Toto's tech. After pondering long hours in......

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. The Straits Times reports that Aaron Kwok's manager, Siu May "accused Kee of releasing a picture that shows an apparently nude Kwok without approval". Apparently, Kwok had posed for......

Halloween is Tuesday, which means this weekend is really the time for all of the –ists to celebrate. And whether they’re designing super-spooky costumes or talking about the super-spooky upcoming elections, we’d say that they’re doing a fine job of it. Austinist knows that few things in life are scarier than zombies, people with way too much money, and politicians who try too hard to be funny. Slightly less scary, depending on whom you ask,......

So what does this hullabaloo over Chinese Internet idols really mean, you ask? Why waste so much airtime over them? Shanghaiist thinks the fact that these guys actually become celebrities through the new media -- no matter how pathetic you think they are or how detested they might be among the general public -- goes to show that a critical mass of the Chinese population has actually arrived in the Internet generation. While it took......

UPDATE: Show canceled? We admittedly don't know much about Robbie Williams' music -- we lived a sheltered existence in the United States from 1973 to 2002 -- but we do know the guy is huge (as in a huge megastar ... not in any other way ... as far as we know). We also know he is coming to Shanghai on November 4 -- and that show also will be huge. Some 26,000 people are......

Manchester City become the latest big European club to swing by China, as more fat cat chairmen attempt to stuff a slice of the lucrative East Asian football market pie in their already obese and money-obsessed faces. The English Premier League side take on Shanghai Shenhua on Friday night in the 2006 Shanghai International Football Tournament. Last summer, everybody who was anyone in the glitzy world of European football embarked on an Asian tour, fuelled......

The phrase “ends at 8” sends us back to that Goa party we ended up at once. Unfortunately that phrase also came up this past weekend in regards to the Female Flower Fest at YYT. Now, we understand that it’s a long and dark walk from that warehouse to the street, but we hadn’t even finished our brisket by 8 pm! We did receive stories of some laowai proposing (like, really -- not just a......

There's an interesting piece in the Shanghai Daily today about the habits of China's rich, who, instead of learning from the moral paragon that is Warren Buffett, are spending more money on themselves. Says the report: In sharp contrast with their attitude towards money, a Chinese real estate business man was reported to have had hundreds of thousands of yuan flown to Chongqing city just to make his car "safer." The anonymous man paid a......

Blame it on the World Cup, but it’s a testament to the steady improvement of the Shanghai music scene that we now consider a weekend with four live shows “slow.” We unfortunately missed the Beijing rockers, Camel, at Live Bar on Friday night, but heard from reliable sources that they put on a fun, up-beat, pop-punk set. On Saturday, Hackbuteer played a wild show worthy of a crowd of 400 people at Yuyintang, except that......

Miss World, Miss USA, Miss Hong Kong, and now here comes Miss Blogger PRC! Earlier this month, BlogChina, a poupular -- you guessed it -- Chinese blog site held a nationwide beauty contest for female bloggers. Both the public and a panel of celebrity judges took part in deciding the outcome. In addition to the usual “hotness” factor, contestants’ writing/blogging talent also played a significant role, supposedly. One look at the final awards had us......

Shanghaiist is sure your eyes glaze over, like ours do, when we hear of a celebrity buying a house worth several million dollars. Or maybe they don't, because you're rich, in which case we hate you. Still, some things manage to really shock and awe us. Some "Middle Eastern" person, with the help of Gateway Capital, just bought some apartments where the average price was 40,000 yuan per square meter. So what, you ask? Well,......

Forgive us while we turn into a celebrity gossip blog for a moment. Adam Clayton, bassist for U2, arrived in Shanghai last week ... without a visa. So, his agent called Ireland's Vice Consul here in Shanghai (in the middle of the night) and she pulled some strings and got Clayton and his girlfriend into the country -- just like she would have done for any Irish citizen, we assume. Another perk to being a......

For whatever reason, Hong Kong locals just don't like our Zhang. They claim that she speaks English with a funky Beijing accent, that the Armani dress she wore to the Oscars made her look flat-chested, and that she "squats on the floor like a vulgar Chinese farmer when she goes shopping". The Hong Kong media enjoys castigating her: "Lacking in youthful vigor", "Zhang Ziyi two decades behind the times", they hiss, even if she was......

Yao Ming is tall. He is also good at basketball. We already told you that. He is also China's top celebrity, three years running, according to Forbes. The list takes into account all that is important in life: income, television appearances, newspaper mentions, magazine covers, internet searches, and the like. (Hmmmm. We do a lot of internet searches and we weren't ranked. Likely because we weren't born in Mainland China. Same reason why Jay Chou......

Tipped by Fons at China Herald, we found this interview with the founder of what Fons calls "China's Gawker." Edwyn Chan runs BlogKu Media, a network of five blogs in China. They are: DianZiRen (gadgets and electronics), Shuanga ("funny stuff"), Starpapa (celebrity gossip), Jiaexp (gaming) and Movblog (film). Another blog, Postshow -- which Chan says is "Boing Boing-like" -- is "affiliated" with BlogKu. Chan is from Hong Kong, attended New York University and is now......

It's that time of year again: the Forbes annual China celebrity list is coming out on March 8. This article (in Chinese) tells us that the top 10 has already been released, and Li Bingbing (李冰冰) has graduated to the big time, garnering top honors. The Forbes list is calculated using a "income+media exposure" criterion, and while we aren't privy to how much Li makes, we know that she graced the covers of more magazines......

... And you should be, too. In fact, Shanghaiist has so much time on our hands that, despite cognizance of our own mortality, we surf places like Youtube for cheap laughs. And we're happy to report that we've found some things that might be of interest to you. First there's this video about a Shenzhen Disney factory and how they the workers there are paid miserably (33 RMB a day), are in constant danger of......