Confucius rolled in his grave yesterday as the media trainwreck surrounding the peace prize given in his name culminated for the year with a quiet ceremony honouring this year's winner, Russian prime minister (and soon-to-be president) Vladimir Putin. more ›

We'll admit it -- this whole Confucius Peace Prize business has got us nothing but confused. You may remember that the Ministry of Culture disbanded the original organisers of the award and anointed a group of professors from Tsinghua University, Peking University and Beijing Normal University to put together the "new“ award. It appears now that the awarding of the prize to Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin is the handiwork of the old guard and has absolutely nothing to do with the new group blessed by the ministry! more ›

The Confucius Peace Prize public relations trainwreck continues with the announcement of Russian prime minister (and soon-to-be president) Vladimir Putin as the winner of the 2nd annual Confucius Peace Prize. Known around the world for his dictatorial ways, forcible silencing of his critics, and for being the "Butcher of Chechnya", the Russian beacon of peace (according to the judges anyway) beat seven other nominees -- Gyaltsen Norbu (the "Chinese Panchen Lama"), Bill Gates, South African President Jacob Zuma, former UN chief Kofi Annan, Yuan Longping, a Chinese agricultural scientist known as the "father of hybrid rice", German chancellor Angela Merkel, and Taiwanese politician James Soong (宋楚瑜) -- to clinch the highly-uncoveted title. more ›

It would have been so much easier if China had put a full stop to the sordid affair of the Confucius Peace Prize, but nope, authorities have decided to charge ahead with their public relations trainwreck. Apparently, a rival group calling themselves the "Confucius Prize for World Peace" quietly emerged on September 21, the International Day of Peace -- that's one whole week before we found out the original organisers had been disbanded. more ›

The Ministry of Culture has removed the Confucius Peace Prize away from its erstwhile organisers, the China Native Art Association's Traditional Culture Protection Bureau, and ordered for it to be shut down, saying it had never been given official permission to run the awards. more ›

China's Confucius Peace Prize, unveiled hastily last year after a bunch of cantankerous Scandinavians had the nerve to award the Nobel Peace Prize to a Chinese citizen, is back! Among the shining beacons of peace in the running for the highly-uncoveted prize this year is Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin, known around the world for his dictatorial ways, forcible silencing of his critics, and for being the "Butcher of Chechnya". more ›

Really now, if there's one thing that isn't talked up enough, it's the parallels between patriarchal cultural systems and theoretical physics: "Talks on bringing an Albert Einstein exhibition to Shanghai have broken down after a Chinese museum suggested merging it with an exhibition on Confucius. The 'Albert Einstein (1879-1955)' exhibition is on display at the Hong Kong Science Museum until August. It has previously appeared in Beijing and Guangdong. A director at the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum said Tuesday that there were discussions with the Historical Museum Bern about hosting the exhibition, but the sides are no longer talking. The director gave only his surname, Zhang. He says he did not know why the talks ended. He says the Shanghai museum had an idea to merge the European physicist's exhibition with one on the Chinese philosopher, who lived more than 2,000 years earlier." [Associated Press]
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The rehabilitation of Confucius, the ancient sage whose ideas were once denounced by Chairman Mao as feudal ideology, continues. On Tuesday, a larger-than-life bronze statue of Kong Zi (孔子) was unveiled at the northern entrance of the newly-reopened National Museum, not far from where the Chairman's portrait is situated on Tiananmen Square. Hailed by China Daily as "the latest sign of the philosopher's comeback amid the country's efforts to promote him as a symbol of traditional Chinese culture", the statue was created by Wu Weishan, a sculptor from Nanjing, who has created over 20 statues of Confucius in different sizes and styles. With over 320 Confucius Institutes are located in 96 countries worldwide, one wonders why the sage isn't already on the square itself. Maybe that day will come yet. more ›

More photos on the Shanghaiist Contribute page. To see your photos on our Contribute page, use Flickr and tag your photos “shanghaiist”. Or you can email your photos to photos@shanghaiist.com and they will automatically appear on our site (and here). more ›

Ever since the China Media Group's uber-unpopular decision to pull out uber-popular Avatar from 2D screens for Confucius, there have been multiple rumblings about the philosophical implications of Chinese audiences abandoning the centuries-old sage for blue-skinned aliens. While we won't completely dismiss the "Avatar = nailhouse troubles" argument, based on our recent viewing of Confucius, we think there's a much simpler reason people are avoiding it: It sucks. more ›

Unsurprisingly, it seems like a lot of people are pretty upset over the fact that Avatar 2D was kicked out of theaters to make room for Chow Yun Fat's new Confucius biopic. Even though the State censorship committee is making excuses like "Avatar 2D box office sales are declining" and "we didn't formally do anything to force Avatar off screens" (i.e. there's no proof), it looks like nobody believes them: In fact, some netizens were so angry that they're thinking of boycotting Confucius. Needless to say, that's not very Confucian of them, but since we're pretty annoyed ourselves, we're in support. more ›

Add this to the growing list of reasons we're not down with the old sage, Confucius' Chow Yun-fat starring "patriotic biopic" is coming and the film ministry is using that reason to shove Avatar out of theaters. Apparently, all that talk about analogies between the Na'vi and nailhouses, and perhaps all that whining from the Chinese film community, has caused the Central Publicity Department to determine that the millions theaters are raking in from the James Cameron smash hit just aren't worth it. They'll keep the 3D versions open for now (since there's so little 3D options, its influence will be "limited"), but the 2D version will end its run on January 23. Then anyone who wants to watch the film without the fun special effects can run to their nearest fake DVD store instead. more ›

Well, at least no one can say that he isn't versatile. After years of playing bad-ass gangsters and Kung Fu masters, Chow Yun-Fat has most recently popped up in Pirates of the Caribbean 3 and the soon-to-be-released, anime-turned-movie Dragonball Evolution. Soon, however, he'll have all eyes on him in a movie chronicling the life and times of Confucius. more ›

Photo from 2 dogs more ›

A BBC report (proxy needed) talks about the Confucian schools that are now thriving across China. And why are parents sending their kids to such schools?:

"Traditional culture has many advantages that cannot be learned by modern education," says Yu Fang, the mother of a three-year-old pupil. "It emphasises virtues like kindness and self-discipline. It is very good for my son and very good for Chinese society as well." Another mother, Wang Ching, agrees: "This is a material world, people want a higher standard of living and they are focused on material things, not spiritual ones." Modern China, with its headlong rush for growth, needs more balance and more of the social order and courtesy extolled by Confucius, she says. Confucianism and Communism have never been happy bedfellows... [read more]

PLUS LEE KUAN YEW AND HIS ROLE IN SINO-SINGAPORE RELATIONS The last week has seen top leaders zipping between China and Singapore to cement ties and sign new deals. Let's take you through the high-profile visits one by one before diving deeper into more detail (Warning: Long article!): Goh Chok Tong visits new Shanghai party chief and the Singapore-Suzhou Industrial Park Last week, Singapore's Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong swung by Shanghai to visit her... more ›

One of our favorite Chinese sites seems to have run afoul of the net nanny: vip.bokee.com has been on again off again, but perfectly viewable with a proxy. Using the proxy we saw an article about a list published in a Chengdu newspaper of the top-grossing authors in China, at least based on royalties from the sales of their books. At the top of the list was a Guo Jingming, a young author (born in... more ›

Via China Net Investor, this interview of the founders of Shanghai-based dot.com Tudou.com, Gary Wang and Marc van der Chijs, serves up one very juicy tidbit of information — that Tudou.com is already streaming more minutes of video content every month than YouTube (15 billion minutes per month versus 3.5 billion)! Then in a self-deprecatory turn, Wang turns around to say that those numbers are never really accurate. more ›

Ooooh yeahhh, crab lovers rejoice for it is that time of the year again when Suzhou's Yangcheng Lake (阳澄湖) hairy crabs go on sale! Thank God the algae that bloomed in Lake Tai in Wuxi and Dianchi Lake in Kunming decided to spare the Yangcheng Lake so we can still have crab this year. more ›

People who have made the news this week more ›

You might have recently have heard of Yu Dan (于丹), a professor at Beijing Normal University (北师大), who has recently become the it girl when it comes to popularizing ancient Chinese philosophers. Her books on Confucius' Analects and more recently, the Zhuangzi, offer a breezy exposition and bite-sized nuggets of ancient wisdom for China's spiritually beleaguered moderns and have catapulted Yu Dan into a writer-intellectual cum best-selling cultural critic category unto herself. more ›

Celebrated American writer and critic Gore Vidal was interviewed by former New South Wales Premier Bob Carr on Sunday at Glamour Bar before a full audience as the opening speaker for the 2007 Shanghai International Literary Festival. Over his career which spans more than 60 years, Vidal has produced novels, plays, screenplays, and numerous essays and pamphlets, and most recently, he published his memoirs, Point-to-Point Navigation. more ›

DNA technology has lead many to ponder what could actually be in the world. For some of us, our links with DNA technology stays closer to a key tool in the endless variations of CSI and as a means to revive lost species in Jurassic Park. more ›

Beijing is holding a human rights exhibition, the first of its kind, from November 17-26. The exhibit features all kinds of human rights related materials, such as documents, white papers, multimedia and interactive stations, as well as sculptures and other artistic works. more ›

Even as the ladies rush to be registered as descendants of Confucius, and as churches -- both state-sanctioned and underground -- continue to swell and burst through the seams all across the land, China is becoming the most unlikely birthplace of progressive Islam, if this highly enlightening Asia Times article entitled "Islam with Chinese Characteristics" is anything to go by. more ›

• Officials in Beijing deny ing rumors that 1 million migrants would be expelled from the capital during the Olympics. However, as we mentioned earlier, 50 of the 239 schools for migrant workers have been closed down recently -- in some cases by the police, en masse. On the brighter side, those that get to remain in Beijing will have a spiffy new light-rail system by 2008 to whisk them around from place to place!
• The 8th Yunnan province Minority Games has been kinda of a mess: male athletes using wigs to dress up as women, people fighting, and athletes that only speak with donbei (northeastern) accents.
• After a recent BBC undercover investigation into illegal organ transplants in a Tianjin hospital, Chinese officials replied by sayingthere was no such thing happening.

Our favourite news agency reports that for the first time, women are to be recognised as descendants of Confucius in a new family tree of the ancient Chinese philosopher. This fifth update of the family tree, according to Reuters, will add more than 1 million "registered" descendants of Confucius. more ›

Americans, and the American northwest in particular, have caught the China fever -- for why else would they decide to construct a Chinese pavilion in Des Moines, Iowa? OK, we don't really consider that a big deal, but then again we've spent some time in places like Richmond, BC (OK, let's include Canada) and Rowland Heights, California -- Chinese enclaves where you could go days without hearing English -- so perhaps we shouldn't take the pavilion for granted. more ›

We reported earlier on an elementary school in the Songjiang District whose focus was having its 12 pupils memorize Chinese classics such as the Analects (Lun Yu) and the Book of Changes (Yi Jing). Well, that school has been closed down by the authorities, who claim that this school contravenes the “compulsory education (yiwu jiaoyu)” laws. The Shanghai Daily reports that the school will be punished for charging high tuition fees (30,000 yuan a year), not having a government license, and because children are required to get nine years of compulsory education. more ›

In this week's edition of "Shanghaiist Trashes the Media" we have an article from the Sydney Morning Herald. Here's the premise: more ›