Welcome to the inaugural episode of Chinese Soundbites, a podcast series brought to you by ChinesePod and Shanghaiist. Every week we'll be bringing you topics and words pulled straight from the headlines, in Mandarin Chinese. This week we're taking a look at Shanghai's favorite son -- no, not Liu Xiang -- the humble hairy crab. If you're wondering why people would put in so much effort into eating an animal with such little meat, you'll......

Welcome to the latest episode of Chinese Soundbites, a podcast series brought to you by ChinesePod and Shanghaiist. Every week we'll be bringing you topics and words pulled straight from the headlines, in Mandarin Chinese. We've been covering some pretty heavy topics lately, but now it's time for a break -- a week-long "Golden Week" break, in fact. Millions of people will be on the move this week as they celebrate the 59th anniversary of......

Welcome to the latest episode of Chinese Soundbites, a podcast series brought to you by ChinesePod and Shanghaiist. Every week we'll be bringing you topics and words pulled straight from the headlines, in Mandarin Chinese. The turmoil on Wall Street and across the world's financial markets have us all looking warily at our investment accounts, waiting for the so-called other shoe to drop. The turmoil is being felt in China, as well, and the economy......

Welcome to the latest episode of Chinese Soundbites, a podcast series brought to you by ChinesePod and Shanghaiist. Every week we'll be bringing you topics and words pulled straight from the headlines, in Mandarin Chinese. Unless you happen to work for Lehman Brothers, the biggest story in China this week has been about melamine, a fun little chemical first discovered in Sanlu infant formula and then in dairy products from pretty much all of China's......

Welcome to the latest episode of Chinese Soundbites, a podcast series brought to you by ChinesePod and Shanghaiist. Every week we'll be bringing you topics and words pulled straight from the headlines, in Mandarin Chinese. This week the topic, and food, on everyone's lips... mooncakes. As the gifting and re-gifting festivities take place this weekend, get informed about what this holiday is all about. And if you're lucky enough to receive the gift of......

Watch out ladies, Chinese men are on the prowl. According to this article in Mop, one Chinese man set out to settle a score against Western men, by staking out Western women visiting Beijing during the Olympics. The man in question is from a small town in the middle of nowhere, the kind of place where "in 20 years only one student made it into Tsinghua or Peking University." He managed to test into a......

Welcome to the newest episode of Chinese Soundbites, a podcast series brought to you by ChinesePod and Shanghaiist. Every week we'll be bringing you topics and words pulled straight from the headlines, in Mandarin Chinese. This week Jenny and Amber jump into a topic that's on (almost) everyone's lips -- the US presidential election. If you're in China this Fall (and especially if you're an American), you'll need to be able to answer the inevitable......

Welcome to the newest episode of Chinese Soundbites, a podcast series brought to you by ChinesePod and Shanghaiist. Every week we'll be bringing you topics and words pulled straight from the headlines, in Mandarin Chinese. This week Jenny and Amber talk about the drenching Shanghai received on Monday. It was a case of flooding worse than any in recent memory, but it actually had a surprising effect on the commuters caught in the maelstrom. Vocabulary:......

Welcome to the inaugural episode of Chinese Soundbites, a podcast series brought to you by ChinesePod and Shanghaiist. Every week we'll be bringing you topics and words pulled straight from the headlines, in Mandarin Chinese. In this first episode Jenny and Amber talk about Liu Xiang (刘翔, Liú Xiáng), the Chinese hurdler who carried the hopes and dreams of the Chinese nation on his back but was brought down by an Achilles' tendon injury before......

For those of you still dwelling on the age of a certain Chinese gymnast, we've got good news for you: Someone is more obsessed about the controversy than you! A blogger has done some internet sleuthing (see here and here) that has some people convinced that He Kexin (何可欣) is all of 14 years old (Olympic rules state that gymnasts must be 16). All the cyber-digging might be in vain, however — we doubt the......

Just when the story of Spain's basketball team's slanty-eyed mischief was on the verge of exiting the news cycles, it gets a dose of revitalization from the blogosphere...with a little assist from their countrymen/women. From Gawker: But maybe Asia-mocking is actually a favorite pastime of all Spanish athletes—because their 2008 Federation Cup Tennis team, which beat China to move into the finals, was photographed in the same god damn pose! One of these tennis players......

And those reports were published by China's state-run media. On November 3, Xinhua listed He Kexin as being 13, referring to her as "this little girl" (an apt description for any of China's diminutive gold medalists). A May 23 story in China Daily listed He as being 14. Gymnasts must be 16 the year of the Olympics to be eligible to compete. He's birthday is officially listed as January 1, 1992, a rather eye-opening date......

An interesting inside look at how China's state-run spin machine operates from the Sydney Morning Herald. Wonder how they got their hands on this.......

That's the headline of a New York Times story about the controversy surrounding a now much-talked-about photo of the men's Olympic basketball team from Spain (See: "Spain's Olympic Basketball Team: Racist? Or just stupid?" for details). Oddly, the story has nothing to do with any possible punishments the Spaniards would face (honestly, we can't think of any — the bad PR and embarrassment should be punishment enough), but the story does offer a little bit......

In the quest for perfection during the Olympics opening ceremony, another boo-boo has been revealed. It seems that pig-tailed seven-year old Lin Miaoke who "sang" "Ode to the Motherland" during the Olympics opening ceremony was actually lip-syncing! That's no suprise to anyone who watched the ceremony ... but this part of the story might be: Lin Miaoke wasn't even lip-syncing her own song. This is because the original angel voice belonged to Yang Peiyi, of......

From The Guardian: Spain's Olympic basketball teams have risked upsetting their Chinese hosts by posing for a pre-Games advert making slit-eyed gestures. The advert for a courier company, which is an official sponsor of the Spanish Basketball Federation, occupied a full page in the sports daily Marca, the country's best-selling newspaper. The advert features two large photographs, one of the men's basketball team, below, and one of the women's team. Both squads pose in full......

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......

China's Premier today urged the country's men's basketball team to "win honor for the motherland." But mostly we just wanted an excuse to run this photo of 65-year-old Wen's proper form — and, yes, we are talking about his decision to don dark socks with black dress shoes. Photo from huanqiu.com.......

Either that or they look like McDonald's managers circa 1975. Check out pics and commentary here.......

Well it was in 1967, anyway. Courtesy of Popsucker, here's a 41-year-old ad from the Rice Council of America that's about as un-PC as you can get. And, really, we have our doubts that the pictured serving of rice topped with butter is going to have the desired slimming effect based on the plate's other contents, or lack thereof. You may also also enjoy this other 1960s rice ad which makes up for what it......

In an article about official Olympic protest areas, the Wall Street Journal linked to some scanned pages from Olympic Security English, a training manual for Olympic police. We have reproduced those pages for your enjoyment. Poor Mr. Leer. He's an honest man. He can only make Indian pan cake. He's never seen a bomb. Yeah, right. Source: Enzaji Leer is caught red handed with the bomb!......

Well, you might want to check out these Chinese website search plugins for your browser. Some work for IE7, too. [Source]......

Liang Wenchong, a native of Guangdong province, moved one step closer to becoming a contender in international golf with his performance at the Open Championship (known in the United States as the British Open) this weekend. Playing in his third major, Liang finally made the cut at Royal Birkdale with an eight-over-par 148 over the first two rounds. Liang, currently number one on the Asian Tour, shot a 77 and a 74 on the last......

View Larger Map Remember when Google's English-language map of Shanghai was, save for some groovy satellite pics, pretty much blank? Remember that? You should. It was like a week ago. Anyway, thanks to a tip on our Contribute Page, we learn that the map has gotten a makeover. To do this, looks like Google has teamed with MapABC, that same firm that does Google's Chinese maps and the same firm City Weekend is experimenting with......

Take a little time to check out an interesting series on the ordinary man and woman in China (plus a few other non-commoner types including tycoons and an internationally-renowned avant-garde artist) by Swiss photographers Mathias Braschler and Monika Fischer. Commissioned by The Guardian, the duo spent six months on the road, traveling 20,000 miles to 31 provinces across China. Navigate on the interactive map to view portraits by the region, the short description by the......

Despite both China and Taiwan having agreed way back in 1989 that the latter would compete at the Olympics under the name "Chinese Taipei" and “Zhonghua Taipei" (中华台北) as the designated Chinese translation of that term, spokesman Yang Yi of China's Taiwan Affairs Office has suggested that "Zhongguo Taipei" (中国台北) is just as valid as an Olympic designator, sparking a protest from Taipei's Mainland Affairs Council because the name implies that Taiwan is a part......

As any English speaker knows, reading translated menus can sometimes be more mind-boggling than struggling through the Chinese. With that in mind, the government has come up with a booklet of 2,000 translated titles for different dishes, which it is distributing to Beijing hotels in time for the Olympics. Sorry kids, no more "Chicken without sexual life." It's "Steamed pullet" now. [Source]......

... the Two Chinese Characters are here to help. Seriously, we've seen this cartoon sent around the Internet a million times, but we had no idea the logo of the Beijing Olympics was meant to be a stylised form of the character for "jing" (京).......

From the Durex Sexual Wellbeing Global Survey Really strange results just in from the Durex Sexual Wellbeing Global Survey this year: 78% of the Chinese have sex weekly, but only 24% were able to achieve an orgasm everytime they had sex. Any sexperts out there wanna tell us what insightful analysis one can make based on the above two statistics?......

Protests, protests everywhere — in Europe, within China, and all across the United States. Quite frankly, we can barely catch up with it all. Watch protestors shout "CNN liar! Cafferty fire!" in this video of the anti-CNN demonstration which took place outside CNN's studios in downtown LA that we told you about earlier. [h/t to Danwei] Related links Photos: Chinese students show their love for the motherland at Place de la République in Paris Anti-French,......