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......

To help foreign media confront the challenges posed by covering the Beijing Olympics, the International Federation of Journalists has teamed up with Play the Game, a non-profit democracy advocacy organization working in global athletic coverage, to produce a series of helpful tools for reporters on a new website — Play the Game for Open Journalism. The aids include an online discussion forum and a series of background and tips for reporting in China. Most impressive,......

Since Monday, we've been having problems accessing Facebook here and thought we were the only ones having that problem. Tuesday, we began to hear from friends of ours all around China complaining of the same problem, on the Shanghaiist Contribute page and among the China Twitterati. And then this piece by the WSJ's China Journal appeared, devoting five full paragraphs to Facebook's mysterious outtage. God forbid the day when we have to turn on our......

From Danwei: "But conspicuously missing from the list are the Big Three of the Chinese Youtube clones: Youku.com, Tudou.com and 56.com. Although 56.com has been off line for nearly two weeks after an apparent porblem with the authorities, these three websites have the largest amount of funding of any video websites in China, most of it foreign. By most accounts they are also the most popular video sites in China."......

It's finally happened: Anonymouse.org, the proxy service that many of us use to access blocked websites and surf the Internet anonymously, has been blocked by Net Nanny. Shanghaiist first noted it at 10:30PM last night Shanghai time, along with the block of ComedyCentral.com. While the decision to block Anonymouse is self-evident (okay, sort of), we're not completely sure why ComedyCentral got the axe. In the mean time, Shanghaiist suggests using alternative proxy services ProxyChina......

Tough times ahead, it seems, for the English-language magazines up north in Beijing. Too months ahead of the Olympics, the powers that be have declared time out on Time Out Beijing, writes Jane Macartney of The Times:The June issue of Time Out Beijing has been banned from distribution by China's censors, The Times has learnt. But the decision seems to have been taken not because of any racy or politically incorrect content. Time Out Beijing......

Cara Anna of the AP reports police dragged away over 100 parents protesting outside the courthouse in Dujiangyan (都江堰) holding pictures of their children who died in the Sichuan earthquake:"Why?" some of them yelled. "Tell us something," they said as black-suited police wearing riot helmets yanked at them. The parents had been kneeling in front of the courthouse yelling, "We want to sue." Police dragged an Associated Press reporter and two photographers who were......

UPDATE: More photos are available here (link in Chinese). We should warn you that they are pretty tasteless though. (h/t to Danwei) ----- The New Travel Weekly (旅游新报), a Chongqing based magazine, has been closed down by the government after it ran a series of pictures of scantily clad models surrounded by rubble at the start of this week's 3-day period of mourning for the lives lost in the Sichuan earthquake. Government officials in the......

It's early Monday morning and the China twitterati are abuzz with the news that all major Chinese web sites have been ordered to shutdown for the three days of national mourning which begins today. Here is an announcement sent out by the government in Hefei, Anhui, followed by Shanghaiist's translation. Good reason to believe similar announcements have been sent in other provinces and municipalities:各市、县委宣传部，各市、县网宣办（外宣办），省直各厅局，各有关网站： To all propaganda departments, online propaganda units and foreign affairs offices,......

From Panthea Lee and Dan Shemie, two very tired organizers of Shanghai's Pangea Day movie marathon that wrapped up not too long ago: So after weeks of plotting, scheming and ceaseless fretting, our Friends of Pangea Day event in Shanghai has gone off without a hitch. For those unfamiliar with the situation, a brief explanation: the Chinese government has launched a serious crackdown on cultural events in the lead-up to the Beijing Olympics. Case in......

digg_url = 'http://digg.com/world_news/CNN_website_blocked_in_China_as_the_Net_Nanny_strikes_again'; Two days after Danwei reported the unblocking of Blogspot, it looks like the Net Nanny has struck again. Nobody we've asked seems to be able to access CNN.com right now. One guy at the office on China Netcom was able to for a while, and then started getting the connection reset. The latest block could be a result of the recent Jack Cafferty saga and perceived biased reporting on the part......

Anti-CNN.com, a website set up to protest the Western media's "distortion" of recent events in Tibet, has been hacked according to The Dark Visitor. There's a clue in the name as to what anti-CNN.com is all about but, in case you haven't heard of it, here's how they define themselves:This website is estabished to expose the lies and distortions in the western media. The site is maintained by volunteers, who are not associated with any......

Shanghaiist has just spoken to a promoter from Yuyintang. As of yesterday, they have had their application for the Midi Festival performance licence rejected, and have since announced on their Facebook page that the festival is now officially off. It was going to be held in the park behind the venue (Tianshan Gongyuan). The reason is confirmed as being a knock on from the Bjork incident and concern about ongoing protests in the run up......

This Sunday, kick back and enjoy this discussion on press freedom in China on Al-Jazeera's 101 East. The show begins with an excellent backgrounder on the current state of press freedom by Tony Chen who interviews people like Melinda Liu, Newsweek's Beijing bureau chief and president of the Foreign Correspondents Club of China; former CCP official Bao Tong who is now under house arrest, and Huang Tianliang, the former chief editor of Bai Xing......

Updating yesterday's post, the once-canceled Dandi Wind concert in Shanghai is now back on ... but at a different venue. At 12:55 am, the handy SMS hotline the promoters set up (see previous post) told us: Dandi Wind confirmed at Windows Tembo ... Door open at 9PM today. Brad Ferguson to the rescue! The details: Dandi Wind at Windows Tembo TONIGHT, doors open at 9 pm 66 Shaanxi Lu (near Yan'an Lu) 陕西北路66号(近威海路) [map] And......

UPDATE, Friday 9:45 am: The show will go on ... at Windows Tembo. UPDATE, 5:27 pm: This just in via email from the promoter: PRESS RELEASE Dandi Wind will NOT play Shanghai’s Shelter this Friday, April 4. Due to the heightened sensitivities around live music in Shanghai at the moment, Dandi Wind will not play the Shelter this Friday. However, she remains committed to performing in Shanghai if at all possible. For further updates, people......

To be frank, we were kind of hoping that we wouldn't have to do a whole post about Celine Dion on Shanghaiist, but then this article from China Daily struck us as somewhat odd and we felt we should share our cynicisms with you. Here's what China Daily reported yesterday: The highly anticipated Celine Dion show on April 13 in Beijing might be canceled because the singer is suffering from a throat infection. What's so......

Do films with titles like "Feathers of Dongtan" and "Sounds. Breaths" give you a tingle in your special area? If not, fret not, there's still some time to develop that acquired taste which is promotional films for really-big-Chinese-events. "Vision Shanghai", like "Vision Beijing," is going to feature documentary films by famous directors, thought the names of those directors have yet to be released. However, Shanghai Film Group has announced its next Expo film, a full-length......

An Associated Press video on the Taiwanese Presidential elections Just in time for Easter, YouTube has come back from the dead after an absence of around a week. As we reported last week, the block was most likely due to certain sensitive content, a move that has left some people questioning whether Google/YouTube were involved at all. Unfortunately, its resurrection doesn't appear to be fully complete — some video clips don't seem to load......

International news channels such as CNN and BBC are also getting routinely blacked out. While we think this is a really poor way to deal with all the shit that's going on, we have been there many, many times, and survived. Time to turn on your VPN again, people! And if you still don't know what it is, let me tell you it's the only way to maintain your sanity here. Shanghaiist highly recommends the......

We know he's meant to be quite a bit more brilliant in concert than we saw the other night, but it seems as though a few things conspired to make Harry Connick's Shanghai show this past Sunday less great than it really should have been. For one, the role that the rest of the band played was way too small — it seems that we heard more from Bjork's brass section the week before! And......

It’s shaping up to be a bad week for the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television (the catchily acronymed SARFT) – and it's still only Wednesday. Recent events surrounding bans of video sharing site Tudou and then actress Tang Wei (汤唯) seem to suggest that SARFT is slipping into farce. First off, there were attempts to mash Tudou due to alleged pornographic content on the site – as we reported a few days ago.......

By Kenneth Tan and David Feng Not good news: Tudou may be in for a squashing by the Chinese mainland authorities, specifically, the State Administration for Radio, Film and Television. A Sohu IT report claims that the presence of porn -- a big no-no on the Chinese Internet -- was all that it took for the potato (which is the Chinese translation of "tudou") to be squashed. The squashing is long-term and has no set......

- ESWN has translated the sad story of a 31 year old woman who left a goodbye note on her blog before commiting suicide because of her unfaithful husband, an employee at Saatchi & Saatchi Beijing. The story is now making the rounds big time in the local advertising scene and has also unleashed a manhunt which saw enraged citizens coming up to his apartment to seek revenge for the dead woman. More pictures here.......

(h/t to Zhongnanhai) It's just about time, isn't it, that Anonymouse came up with its own toolbar, so we don't have to go to its website each time we want to purvey the tonnes of dissident and pornographic material on Blogspot, Wikipedia and Wordpress? The toolbar for Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox on Windows, Mac OS and Linux can be downloaded for FREE here. Other options that have worked wonders for us include the......

As you know, Feedburner is being blocked in China, thus many people are having difficulties using the Shanghaiist RSS feed, which uses Feedburner. Per reader request, here's an alternate Shanghaiist RSS feed you can use until Feedburner becomes accessible again: feed://shanghaiist.com/temp_rss.xml Sorry for the delay in making this accessible.......