Results tagged “comments”

We rarely enforce this, since we are too busy to moderate our comments section and generally believe in a thing called free speech, but lately things have gotten a bit unharmonious in certain portions of our site. We apologize to anyone who has been offended (which basically means we apologize to all humankind).

The last time an anchor from our favourite TV channel made it to the news, he created such a brouhaha that culminated in the eviction of one coffee company from the Forbidden City. In the news this time is New Zealand-born anchor Edwin Maher who for many years before arriving in China was a weatherman with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. The Los Angeles Times published a profile of Maher that started it all off. It...

WARNING: GORY IMAGES This video clip is circulating big time on the Chinese internet right now, and has received over 470,000 hits and 5,000 comments on Youku within less than a day. And it is just plain disgusting. A security guard at Wenzhou University beats a helpless dog to death as students videotape from above. From the sounds of the students yelling out to the security guard, we imagine they are at a student dormitory....

Okay, so we've all seen people writing with their feet, but have you seen anyone doing calligraphy with their HEAD? Hell, eversince we received our first computer, we've barely been able to hold a pen! We can't be too sure where this amputee-calligrapher-busker is exactly because the guy who uploaded this video did not give more information, but from a few comments we gather he is somewhere out there on the streets of Guangzhou. Okay,...

The Red Laowai (红老外) — yes, that shirtless dude in New York that's been singing communist propaganda songs such as “My China Heart"《我的中国心》, "Without the Communist Party, there is no New China"《没有共产党就没有新中国》and "Oriental Red"《东方红》and putting his videos online — has done it again. This time, he has put his shirt on, created a music video and he's singing Jay Chou and rapping. The song 止战之殇 (The Wound That Ends War) is an anti-war song in...

Those of you that were fans of the gritty documentary realism of Li Yang's first feature, Blind Shaft, will probably take an intuitive liking to Blind Mountain for that very reason. Li Yang's use of regular folks--non-actors--always feels like a breath of fresh air, especially after watching movie/pop-star bloated films we've recently watched, such as Lust, Caution and King of California. The story: it's the early 1990s somewhere in bumblefuck northwestern China, and a Bai...

Overheard in the comment section of our earlier story on the Chongqing cooking oil stampede was the opinion that the pushing and shoving here in Shanghai is much worse than in Chongqing. Agreed. We see so many potential stampedes happening here everyday and wonder why more people are not getting tromped to death on a daily basis here. But this story by the Financial Times tells us a similar cooking oil stampede that occurred right here in Shanghai two weeks ago, at Tesco's (which we have confirmed from other sources to be the one in Baoshan district). Fortunately, nobody died in that stampede, but 19 people, mostly housewives, did need immediate treatment at the hospital.

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...

It was too much to watch something like this, kept me vomiting for a long time

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. You're reading them every single day, and sometimes it almost feels as though they're your friend, even though you don't really know them. It's most surreal.

Even weirder stuff than the Youtube block seems to have been happening, though. Apparently, for a short while on the 17th, before the Youtube block occurred, blogsearch.google.com and live.com were both redirected to Baidu! Blogsearch.google.cn was totally inaccessible. This has been confirmed by Ken Wong (see screencaps on his blog) and other Chinese netizens. Google Blogoscoped reported that yet more exotic pages like search.ibm.com.cn were also being hijacked to Baidu.

Hello again, people! We told you it was going to happen, and as of NOW, commenting on Shanghaiist (and the rest of the Gothamist network) is limited to registered users. Registration is easy — either click the Create an Account link at the top of this or any other page on Shanghaiist or, easier yet, create an account right at the bottom of the entry page that you want to comment on. So easy! All you have to do after that is confirm your e-mail address and you're good to start commenting.

Comments below don’t necessarily represent the Shanghaiist’s point of view or opinion regarding the Canadian government (we don't want them to hold a grudge and kick us out of Canada too!)… we just received it recently from the Busdriver promoter and thought it was kind of funny… shows are still on in Beijing and Shanghai…..and we are as giddy as a school boy in the girls locker room to see Busdriver play live!

Oops..we have been sitting on this a few days, all the beers and amazing shows made Shanghaiist a little loopy and unable to sit down and type. The entry below comes via Emily Moy who had a chance to sit down with Talib Kweli and Ozomatli at the Yue Festival press conference last Thursday........

... 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

Continue reading "God hates China?"

It’s been a while since we had any Meizu M8 news, but shame on you for thinking those damn brilliant reverse engineers down in Shenzhen weren’t hard at work. Two months after iPhone’s US launch, Meizu revealed the user interface scheme for its upcoming touch screen phone. J. Wong, the company CEO posted the following pics on an internet BBS. Looks pretty slick, but also quite a bit like the UI of iPhone. Not surprisingly, Chinese fans of Meizu are pretty excited over the release, but folks over at Engadget aren’t nearly as thrilled, and understandably so.

By now, you've probably noticed our new profile system, rolled out in June. In the system, people who comment on Shanghaiist are segregated into two groups: those who have registered for a free account to post (who have their name or alias attached to each comment) and those who haven't (who are universally called "guest"). As of this morning, Gothamist has rolled out another change, whereby guest comments are automatically not displayed for all users — to display them, you have to click "Show Guest Comments" below any post to display them, and a cookie will be set on your computer to always display them.

Shanghaiist loves our dear readers because you never hesitate to let us know when you disagree when it comes to a restaurant recommendation. Well, now's your chance to put a little of your own skin in the game. Famed restaurant guide Zagat is currently collecting survey responses regarding restaurants in Beijing, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. Users who submit the survey by the September 23rd deadline will receive a free copy of the resulting 2008 China's Restaurants and Hotels Guide when it's published. According to Zagat they are covering over 175 restaurants in Shanghai. We signed up (site registration is required in order to take the survey) to take a peek. The restaurants are broken out by district, and glancing at the full list it looks like usual suspects from the listings on City Weekend (which, by the way, appears to have upgraded their website).

Okay, this vid is slightly dated, but it only just appeared on our radar screen, so hold the mudslinging if you happened to have seen this elsewhere, please.

We had a good laugh when we saw this "patriotic" banner by Chinese blogger Xiucai ("秀才") which reads: "Joyfully welcome the 17th Party Congress, building a harmonious society together. Xiucai is a good comrade. This site has temporarily shut down comments and forum features." [h/t to Rebecca Mackinnon]

We've just spent an entertaining and enlightening weekend at the Learning2cn education technology conference at Concordia International School in Jinqiao.

On Bokee.com we read an article about Zhang Shaocang, a corrupt official from Anhui province, who seems to have cribbed his letter of remorse/self-criticism (悔过书) from similar letters written by other corrupt officials. The article claims that there is a striking resemblance between Zhang's letter and the letter written by Zhu Fuzhong in May of this year. The writer of the Bokee article has inserted, in red text, the places where the writing of the two letters seems most similar. On a more sardonic note, the writer has, on the side column, written an outline of the "eight-legged letter of self-criticism", where the "eight-legged essay" refers to the a form of scholarly writing used in imperial Chinese examinations known for being rigid, formulaic, originality-stifling format. They begin their essays by saying how they came from a poor background, had good intentions and character, and wanted to do something for their country. But then they began to slacken in their study of political thought and ideology, then emphasize that their mistakes were made in an environment where there weren't enough checks on their actions and behavior, emphasize that they let down the Party and the people, and then beg the court for a chance to redeem themselves (i.e. they ask for a more lenient sentence.)

Here, Shanghai, were your favourite stories for the month of August:

Not content with making cars and computers for the world, China is now on to its next big thing -- aircraft. The long-awaited ARJ-21 (pictured here) is China's very first homegrown commercial aircraft and has been launched amid much fanfare by the aircraft maker AVIC I. Now only a name is lacking, and if you can come up with a creative Chinese name of between two and four Chinese characters before September 28, RMB50,000 will be yours! (Sorry apparently English names are worth nothing).

On the right is a powerful photo story of a 16 year old village prostitute, Ah-V, who eloped with her boyfriend Xiaowu from Guizhou to an unnamed province, and to make ends meet, Xiaowu makes Ah-V prostitute herself. Along the way, of course, Ah-V gets pregnant, and has to go for an abortion, but she is so poor that the only thing worth money in her possessions is a broken fan which she got from a rag-and-bone dealer for RMB10. As a result, because she couldn't pay for her hospital bed, they put her on drip by the door of her home.

Yet another fire has broken out in Shanghai and not too far away from where the last fire broke out! This video shows some building on Nanjing Lu on fire and the fire brigade actively working to douse the fire. It remains unclear from the video (or from the comments) which building that was. Was any Shanghaiist in the area today?

Shanghaiist is going to give Senator Clinton the benefit of the doubt -- that she actually knows better but is just being the politician that everybody expects her to be. But the following infuriatingly pandering comment puts Senator Clinton right up there with the lovely Senator Schumer on this Shanghaiist's "too-political-for-America's-own-good" list:

"We have to have tougher standards on what they import into this country," she said. I don't want to eat bad food from China or have my children having toys that are going to get them sick," said Clinton.

Henan Province's Qilu Television recently featured 24 year old Wang Chengke (王成科) who claims he has been eating glass since he was six. In the video clip on the right, he starts by smashing a Tsingdao bottle on the ground, then eating it piece by piece. Subsequently he smashes a glass ashtray on the ground, eats it and comments that it doesn't taste too bad at all! Like us, some commenters on 56.com were cynical and expressed their disbelief, what with the recent fake news reports and all, but we googled around a bit, and found that Wang's story has been reported in many other media outlets. In fact a Google search for the search terms 王成科 (his name) and 吃玻璃 ("glass eating") registered 173,000 search results! (Then again, one could always argue that this doesn't come as a surprise considering how much the Chinese media copy from one another!) In this story from Qingdao News, a doctor is quoted as saying that Wang's gastric acid is 5 times stronger than the average person's and estimates that he must have eaten about a tonne of glass by now, while another story on Jiangnan News way back in 2003 tells us that he's even found a talent agent for himself (we hope the freak show makes them both lots of money)! Just plain bizarre, or yet another fake news story? We'll leave it to you to decide for yourself!

Sri Lanka is fighting against the threatened beheading of a teen maid in Saudi Arabia over the death of an infant. Saving her from beheading has become one of the most urgent issues in a country where nearly everyone has worked abroad or had a relative employed overseas.

Disgruntled Shanghaiist critics will have a fit when they realize that the prison in question is in the Philippines. To which I reply, "Black or white, Chinese or Phils: Jack-o knows no borders."