Right after the earthquake struck, Olympic officials maintained that the torch relay would go on as planned as "the epicenter is not along the route of the torch relay". In fact, one day after the earthquake, China Daily was still offering this really happy and harmonious image of the torch relay. That, unfortunately, did not go down well with people, and after a huge outcry on the Internet which saw Olympic organisers roundly lambasted for......

Following their somewhat bizarre picture last month of Obama and a "dapper" donkey, the latest person to grace Baidu's homepage gives a slightly clearer message. The picture is of "Wheelchair Angel" (as she's been dubbed in some sections of the press) Jin Jing clutching the Olympic Torch to her chest, a position she adopted when pro-Tibetan protestors tried to snatch the flame from her in Paris last month. Clicking on the picture takes you through......

Search for Carrefour's Chinese name 家乐福 on Google.cn right now and you get a blank screen with a one-liner (screenshot on the right) telling you that you can't access the results for your search term, and please go back to Google.cn to search for something else. Funnily enough, the same search term on Google.com is not blocked within China and returns 6.2 million results. In related news, ISP's across China received orders last week to......

Graham Webster of CNet blog Sinobyte reports that William Chang, chief scientist for Baidu, told the WWW2008 conference in Beijing yesterday, "'There's in fact no reason for China to use Wikipedia, a service based 'out there'... It's very natural for China to make it's own products," and hence all of us should be good boys and girls and use Baidupedia instead. He of course conveniently forgot to mention Chinese Wikipedia remains blocked.HiPiHi, the Chinese clone......

Danwei informs us that Carrefour.com.cn is currently "undergoing a website update and maintenance", but CarrefourS.com.cn is alive and hopping with nationalist messages and other "user-generated propaganda". Crazy times.......

Hot off the press: a CNN-affiliated website The Sports Network (also http://sport.si.cnn.com) has just been hacked by a group called HackCNN, and this was the message placed by the hackers on the website: The Sports Network seems to have regained control of the website in the meanwhile, and here is the message we now find on their homepage:Please Note The Sports Network website and other major news sites have been hacked by a political entity......

Picture from forum thread on military.club.china.com. Thanks to Stephen Frost of CSR-Asia.com for the tip.......

Since we broke the story on CNN's site outtage in China yesterday, the story was picked up by top US blogs such as Mashable and Gawker, although mainstream media continue to be strangely silent blissfully unaware of what happened. CNN's PR machine has since leapt into action as it seeks to explain what happened. This morning we received an email from CNN Worldwide's Director of Public Relations, Jennifer L. Martin, directing our attention to their......

Since we told you about the MSN (L) China campaign yesterday, the mainstream media in China has lapped it all up. Shanghai's Dragon TV today claimed a whopping 5 million MSN users. And just as you're wondering where the hell they plucked that figure from, Xinhua today quoted a paltry 2.3 million MSN Messenger users, and even has a very authoritative source to back that up:MSN China spokesman Feng Guangshun released the figure on Thursday.......

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......

digg_url = 'http://digg.com/microsoft/L_China_Nationalists_on_MSN_Messenger_heart_China'; Like Wang Jianshuo and Eric Hu, we were pretty surprised to see that this is what our MSN messenger looks like at the moment. Says Eric:Over half of my Chinese-Chinese friends on MSN have put the badge on their contact names, in defiance of all the anti-China bullying that they’re undoubtedly reading about in the Chinese newspapers, watching on the Chinese news, and scouring over on the hundreds of blogs and......

April 1st marked the birth of Comme à la maison, the new French online magazine based in our beloved city. Directed to a young (half of it between 25 and 40 years old) and growing readership (more than 6,000 baguette-eaters are said to amble their way around Shanghai these days – compared to 5,000 Germans and 3,500 English), this new online publication clearly defines its aim as dealing with “art de vivre” (the art of......

digg_url = 'http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Is_Chinese_search_engine_Baidu_endorsing_Barack_Obama'; Or is Barack just fishing for the Asian American vote? (Get it? He's throwing a net? Nets are sometimes used in fishing? Ah, f*ck it. It's late.) Anyway, when we first saw this, just minutes ago (thanks, Sage) we went, "Huh?" Odd, no? Check Baidu out for yourself. Pacific Epoch tries to explain: Baidu has chosen US presidential candidate Barack Obama as the sixth face to grace its homepage logo. Following......

Sam Flemming, founder of the Internet word-of-mouth research firm CIC Data observes in his latest blog entry that while some of the brands that had used the stars involved in the Edison Chen sex photo scandal as spokespeople were scrambling for help (by calling up his company of course) when the scandal broke out, some netizens were “more interested in the brands in the background of the photos than the people themselves". He points us......

Jonathan Watts, the China correspondent for The Guardian, has recently put in his year so far article about the internet here. It covers a lot of familiar ground and quotes Zonaeuropa and Danwei.org, among others, as sources. One of the most quoted facts in these kinds of articles is the world’s most read blog being “Lao Xu”. Lao Xu is the Sina.com blog of actress/writer/director Xu Jing Lei 徐静雷. So what’s going on at the......

As the Financial Times reported, April 1 was the day that China Mobile started trials of its homegrown 3G wireless technology in eight major cities, with about 60,000 customers. A more recent Chinese reports suggests that the trials may only involve ">20,000 people. Another Chinese media report says that China Mobile offers three very attractive discount packages to people testing out 3G. For one, the regular voice telephone charges are less than what we 2G......

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......

Shanghai Securities newspaper came out with an article that claimed that they had a contact that says that tax authorities are investigating Google China for tax evasion. Moreover, they are not just looking at the company's taxes, but individual income taxes as well — including those of Lee Kai-Fu, Google's man in China, who is rumored to owe more than 5 million RMB in unpaid taxes. The report says that there is a several month......

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......

The boxer shorts rebellion [Mara Hvistendahl, The New Republic] "You'd think that the younger, Internet savvy generation of Chinese twenty- and thirtysomethings would be the ones guiding China into better relations with the West. Instead, they seem to have glanced toward the rest of the world and turned back, appalled."Avoid tall buildings [Adam Minter, Shanghai Scrap] "Half the steel material sold at wholesale markets and now being used in construction has failed quality tests."Shanghai-Hangzhou express......

A few weeks ago it came to our attention that what appeared to be a large price tag-shaped sign was affixed to the front of a building under construction across the street from Zhongshan Park. The sign was under wraps, but the shape alone was enough to conjure up images of Best Buy and many high school hours spent searching in vain for movies and music that they don't keep in stock. Now despite......

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.......

It can be hard work sometimes trying to find decent home grown bands in China. That’s not to say that there aren’t plenty out there, just that — as we’ve discussed before on these pages — the country generally, and Shanghai in particular, still has a way to go before a proper ‘scene’ is established. You can thank your lucky stars, therefore, for the good people over at Neocha. Already the leading website in China......

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......

The 10 Australian survivors of the Xi'an hostage incident have left China from the Pudong International Airport yesterday. Unconfirmed reports say one member of the group has already employed the services of a celebrity agent to sell her story.The controversial extension of the maglev line will not happen this year, Mayor Han Zheng tells reporters on the sidelines of the National People's Congress.After the long-standing ding-donging of the Disneyland project, it has also been confirmed......

Landscape lights switched on again in Shanghai [Xinhua] "Shanghai switches on its landscape lights on Friday night after a lapse of more than four weeks. "Shanghai Cancels Art Exhibition [NY Times] "An exhibition of works by the artist Zhang Huan, right, was canceled by Shanghai’s local government just before it was to open this week at the Shanghai Art Museum. The Shanghai Cultural Bureau, which oversees the museum, declined to comment on Friday, as did......

Shanghai will always be a step ahead of the capital, Beijing, when it comes to some things. Like freeways — Shanghai got the Huning Freeway first (back in 1988!). And now, wifi freeways. Jiading Wireless City will be reality no later than May 2008. Mesh Wi-Fi and WiMAX technology will make this part of Shanghai just that bit more wireless. And the good thing is — this is free. Want to get online now in......

We've been here before so don't get too excited, but it seems that blogspot sites are once again accessible in Shanghai. Photo from China Daily Good news for Olympic athletes who have recently been (sort of) granted permission to blog (but not podcast) at the Olympic games by the IOC. Any media-savvy athletes however, will be registering their own domain names in order to avoid a blanket ban. We notice that www.LiuXiang.com has already been......

China currently has no privacy laws, but that may change, if lawyer Yu Guofu from the Beijing-based Internet Society of China has his way. In an interview with the China Youth Daily 《中国青年报》, Yu made the following comments:There is no privacy protection law in China so far, nor is there a single item in any laws and regulations that covers privacy protection... The only mention of privacy is in a judicial explanation by the Supreme......

Jolin Tsai (蔡依林) has been in the news quite a bit lately, and for all the wrong reasons. Last week, pictures of a woman with an uncanny resemblance to her surfaced during the Edison Chen scandal and this time, she refers to Hong Kong as a foreign country (国外), and talks of how she wants to gain glory for the people of Taiwan (“为台湾人争光"). Her Chinese fans are not finding it funny, and she is......