Results tagged “race”

The past couple of days, traffic to China Sports Today from people searching for "Ding Hui" has seen a little uptick. Could it be a coincidence that a recent story in The Guardian said that Ding Hui, the Chinese national volleyball team's first black player, was booted from the national team last year, implying that it was because Ding Hui is black? But If you came to find out about the volleyball player who was kicked off the Chinese national team for being black, you won't find what you're looking for because it didn't happen.

We're too much of pansies to navigate the Shanghai streets by bike ourselves, but if you're an avid city cyclist with a penchant for competitiveness, check out this crazy little race we came across: Shanghai Alleycat.

China Hush has published its translation of a Netease interview with Lou Jing (娄婧), the half-black Oriental Angel contestant who was the subject of a lot of online netizen character attacks, most of them extremely bigoted.

The controversy surrounding Lou Jing, the half-black Shanghainese girl who recently appeared on DragonTV's reality show "Let's Go! Oriental Angel" made actually curious about the show. We mean, we were curious about the show before, when we first stumbled upon its auditions at the Channel One mall, but now we actually wanted to check it out.

We hope everyone's readying their tv sets to watch Shanghai Rush, China's first English-language reality show, which premiers tonight at 8pm on ICS. While others have taken a sneak peek at the first episode - in which we're introduced to the ten teams of two that will be gracing our televisions for the next twelve Sundays - we decided to have a chat with the man behind the scenes: Eric Ransdell, director.

The Olympic torch moves today to Qinghai Lake in the Northwestern province of Qinghai, after making a one-day cameo in Lhasa. The Saturday visit to the Tibetan capital was carefully monitored in light of March’s uprising, and tight security continues in the province that was another sight of spring unrest. As the torch makes its way through China’s heavily-minority sections, several pieces of interesting news and commentary have surfaced covering the situations of various ethnic minorities in the PRC:
• The LA Times explores tensions in Tibet far more complex than just pro-China, anti-China struggles — the region also has strained relations between Tibetans and Hui Chinese, a minority ethnically identical to majority Han Chinese, but Muslim. The historic friction flared up last summer in the town of Guojia, when a Tibetan women alleged that she found a tooth in the soup she had ordered in a Muslim restaurant across town. Violence erupted against the neighborhood’s Hui restaurants, many of which have now gone out of business as proprietors flee the area for their safety.
• Blogging for China brings us a translation of a post on a Uygur forum describing one Minkaohan’s (ethnic minorities raised and educated alongside Han Chinese) discovery of his own, inevitable “racial complex,” and the importance of setting that polarizing emotion down in favor of national and local peace, cooperation and unity.
• Earlier today, we mentioned that China has released over 1,000 involved in Tibetan unrest, but The San Diego Union-Tribune reports that arrests are still occurring in other areas of Asia. Three Tibetan activists were jailed for three months in Katmandu, Nepal on Saturday, while hundreds of exiles from the region were detained for protesting inform of the city’s Chinese Embassy.

As China rapidly climbs to world economic power, some enterprising individuals are emigrating here in the hopes of finding a new version of the American Dream. Blogging For China translates an article from the Southern Metropolis Daily on African traders who move to China (notably the city of Guangzhou, which currently holds an estimated 100,000 Africans) with the same burning desire of an earlier generation who emigrated to America: a better life. Many of them face strong prejudice against blacks in China and struggle to integrate themselves into their villages. The reporter follows one Liberian trader as he greets Chinese store-owners in his neighborhood:

He’ll loudly greet them, “Friend, how are you recently?” His “friends” don’t respond. Some pull out a cell phone and intentionally ignore him. Others impatiently wave at him, and say in a combination of Chinese and English: “If you’re not buying anything, then go… quickly GO!”

Continue reading "The Chinese Dream?"

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Photo of a Shanghai demolition site from Montrasio International

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  Shanghai wants 50 top minds every year
  
  
  “Local authorities are offering lucrative packages to lure leading academics to the city under a new scheme to help boost its competitiveness.”
  
  


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  Shanghai to launch int’l channel targeting foreigners
  
  
  “The ICS programs, covering news, information, fashion, entertainment, foreign TV shows and movies, will be aired in English and Japanese, with Chinese captions, for 19 hours a day.”
  
  


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  Shanghai GM to launch Buick LaCrosse hybrid prior to Olympic Games
  
  
  “The move will make Shanghai GM the third joint venture automaker to deliver a hybrid vehicle in China following Toyota and Honda. Toyota Motor Corp is currently the only carmaker that builds a hybrid car in China.”


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  China Eastern to resume Shanghai-Saipan flights
  
  
  “China Eastern will resume its twice weekly Shanghai-Saipan flights starting Jan. 11, 2006, close to five months after the charter flights were suspended because of the decline of tourists coming in from China.”
  
  


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  China to survey dialects to better protect them | World | Reuters
  
  
  “A focus will be the Shanghai dialect … ‘As more and more young people in Shanghai use the dialect to communicate online, and as its vocabulary expands, it will be standardised and promoted as a distinct local language.’”
  
  


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  China’s New Bestseller: The Bible
  “Amity has churned out 41 million Bibles for Chinese believers at its plant outside … Nanjing, including more than 3 million copies last year. (About nine million copies have been exported to Africa, other parts of Asia and Central Europe.)”
• 5 nabbed in whisky sting
  “Police have arrested five people alleged to have duped a Swedish man into paying nearly 5,000 yuan ($680) for coffee and whisky during a recent business trip to the city.”
• Cyclists to race to top of city’s tallest tower on December 31
  “One contestant, Zhang Jincheng, the Guinness record keeper, is a 23-year-old from Wenzhou City, Zhejiang Province. His two challengers are 28-year-old Andorran Xavi Casas and 34-year-old Colombian Javier Zapata.”


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  City tightens protection for historic buildings
  
  
  “The city government issued new rules last week banning road expansion on most of the 144 downtown roads lined with historic houses. The rules also ban tall buildings from being built in conservation areas.”
  
  


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  blognation China
  
  
  China tech blog worth checking out.
  
  


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  China Web2.0 Review
  
  
  Another China tech blog.


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  China: Pollution map of China released
  
  
  “Just over a year since their first mashup was released, the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, headed by journalist-environmentalist Ma Jun, has just released its Air Pollution Map, complete with its own BBS and space for feedback forum.”
  
  


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  Todd Crowned China’s Sole Survivor
  “The 22-year-old flight attendant and world-class schemer outwitted, outplayed and outlasted his competitors for 39 days to be crowned the $1 million winner of the reality show’s 15th edition and the youngest winner in the series’ history.” 15!
• Three Beijing buildings on Time magazine’s best list
  “Three architectures in Beijing are on the list of 10 best architectural marvels (new and upcoming) selected by the Time magazine to be published on the Dec. 24.” None from Shanghai.

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...

WINOPETE AT THE RACE TRACK: MELBOURNE CUP DAY PARTIES

Locals cynically call him "papa," or praise him as their "king." Some expats, meanwhile, call him "big head." Whatever the moniker applied to him these days, Tajik President Imomali Rahmon is showing himself to be a man full of surprises.

Excitement is palpable among the crowd as China launched its first lunar orbiter, the Chang'e One satellite (named after the goddess of the moon 嫦娥), half a century after the Russians became the first to set out to space.

... and the rumor-mill is running in overdrive. Recent reports suggest that Shanghai Party Chief Xi Jinping's (习近平) recent entry into the race - apparently at senior leader Zeng Qinghong's (曾庆红) insistence - has shaken things up; forcing Hu Jintao to make some last-minute maneuvering.

Right: Walk down Asia's longest and busiest shopping street (did you know it was in our city?) with the guys from The Shanghai Show. Yes, Nanjing Lu remains as psychedlic, mesmerising and frenetic as ever.

The Shanghaiist Weather Center is 100 percent sure the answer will be yes (although is Shanghai Circuit really in Shanghai?). It's dry now in the French Concession, but the dark clouds above suggest it won't stay that way for long. Here's the latest weather update from the official Formula 1 website: Thus far Sunday has been dry with a little wind, but no sign of the edge of Typhoon Krosa, which is sweeping through the...

20 year old Cuban Dayron Robles stole the show yesterday at the Shanghai Golden Grand Prix yesterday with an impressive 13.01 sec at the 110m hurdles event. Together with Anwar Moore of the United States, he trumped Liu Xiang who disappointed a highly expectant home crowd.

Shanghai is back in Beijing's good books. Or so an article published by the People's Daily two weeks ago indicates, claims the Associated Press. The article, titled "Glad to hear the new good tidings from Shanghai", lavished praise on Shanghai for it's recent successes. "A golden breeze refreshes Shanghai; one important, auspicious event after another" gushed the lead article. It is a sign, claims AP, that the fallout from last year's pension scandal has started to settle. As AP points out:

...such propaganda is a cue that top communist leaders have come to a consensus that the scandal was confined to a few "bad elements" and that China's biggest and richest city has Beijing's support.

Calling all Shanghai entrepreneurs! Come meet new faces and get to know other like-minded individuals at this week's NextStep event which features Tony Mustafa of Essential Finance. All are welcome, no membership required, and no cover charge.

The Youtube video shown here produced by Chinese Malaysian student Wee Meng Chee, 24, triggered torrents of invective from Malays, and support from some Chinese in Malaysia.

OK, we all know about the Great Wall, the Great Firewall and the Great Green Wall. All that is old news now. Get this: China is now building a 6 million yuan, 40-kilometer (25-mile) long, 1 meter (3.3 feet) high wall around Dongting Lake in Hunan Province to guard against the 2 billion field mice that have been on the run from the flooded Yangtse River. Already, the mice have destroyed about 520,000 hectares (1.3 million acres) of crop land when rising water drove them from their burrows. And even the enterprising businessmen in Guangdong who sought to help by bringing the mice en masse to the dinner table did little to mitigate the situation.

Gold, silver, bronze? Nah. According to Bloomberg.com athletes the world over have smog on their minds when it comes to the quadrennial Olympics competition next year in Beijing. Gunn-Rita Dhale, Norway’s reigning world champion for women’s mountain biking had this to say about her future host city,

They're looking for foreigners, and they want blood. Especially if it's RH-negative.

Anhui Television has uncovered the story of Tao Xing (陶星), a 16-year-old student from Yueyang, Hunan Province, who has recently come under the spotlight for his loving care of his mother.

This time we will go back to our roots. Volume 6 will be held at the Yangshupu Creative Center. This converted factory complex with its romantic industrial gardens is the perfect place to get away from Shanghai´s concrete jungle… [For more information about Yangshupu Creative Center, see FAR's column in Shanghai Talk this month.]

Shanghaiist needs a massage. On Saturday we took part in the 2007 Great Wall Marathon, a race of 42.195km (26 miles), including two stretches of about 9km each on the Great Wall itself. The rest in the countryside. About 1,300 runners — a lot of Americans, some South Africans, Australians, Mexicans, Dutch, Danish, British, a few French ... and even four goats and an Olympic female mountain biker from New Zealand — took part in the marathon. We all started at 7.30 am ... and seven hours later, Shanghaiist completed the race, with sore legs and sunburned shoulder. But how proud we were!

Image of Yang Huiyan, now China's richest person, from China Daily.

For those expats out there who've ever wondered what it might be like to get behind the wheel of an automobile here in Shanghai, this is your lucky day. Thanks to the USA Today, that bastion of impartial journalism and cutting-edge video game development, you can now race the streets of Shanghai on 10 circuits in one of five super charged hot rods—all for the low price of only US$19.99. Think of how much money you will save on gas and hospital bills not having to brave the actual motorways; the roads in virtual Shanghai can cause no serious physical harm. Unless you brave them for 72 straight hours in a net cafe, that is.