Douchebag Chinglish talkshow host Yang Rui (杨锐) is the gift that keeps on giving. Last week, the CCTV News anchor shocked the world with anti-foreigner remarks so needlessly incendiary that even the Global Times had to tone it down by juxtaposing his diatribe against comments by critical Weibo users. Well, apparently he not only has a problem with foreigners -- the people he is supposed to have a Dialogue with -- he isn't a great fan of Jews either. more ›

You know you've made it in life when those guys from Next Media Animation devote an entire episode to you. Congratulations Yang Rui! For more NMA hilarity, click here. more ›

Are you a native English speaker with 10 years of media experience and desperate for a job? If so, you might want to consider joining the international arm of CCTV News because they're hiring news editors for Dialogue, now the favourite talkshow of China's expatriate community. more ›

This clip from "Accidents That Should Never Happen," an allegedly instructional bit from Beijing TV's show Traffic Light, makes us wonder two things: if the people are going to be okay, and how their genes survived this long with that level of decision-making. Via beijingcream.com. more ›

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Uyghur circus performer Aygul Memet performs hoola hoops at Canada's Got Talent, and not only does she wow them, she also educates them about her homeland which -- as Josh Summers of Far West China astutely observes -- she refers to as "Uyghur", not "Xinjiang" or "East Turkestan" and which she says is "occupied by China". more ›

Chinese university students rejoice! Perez Hilton reports that China will see their own version of Gossip Girl soon, and it will be set at "Shanghai International University" (Shanghai International Studies University has campuses in Songjiang and Hongkou, though it's unconfirmed if this is what's being referred to), rather than the elite Manhattan private high school featured in the original. more ›

Contrite showhost Dapeng has gone on his latest show without his usual opening sequence -- yes the one he ripped off from Conan O'Brien -- and apologised to the American talkshow host for stealing his stuff, promising to never use it again. He also apologised to his audience for "losing the face of the Chinese people," and jokes "My ex-girlfriend sent me a text saying how she regrets dumping me and how she saw me on American television. Now, I'm international." Watch with English subtitles here. Thanks TeaLeafNation! more ›

Conan O'Brien was shown footage of a Chinese TV program ripping off his opening sequence graphics, and responded in kind (with help from Andy Richter!) with his own take on the shanz-tastic show at the heart of the mild Conan controversy. The footage has now come full circle, after being uploaded on Sohu. more ›

New York Knicks point guard Jeremy Lin may be the first Asian-American in the NBA and the first Harvard graduate to play in the league for almost 60 years. But he's also quickly gained a reputation over the last week as the NBA's #1 Jesus Freak hands down. Recently, Lin -- who wants to become a pastor when he grows up -- appeared together with his mom on Taiwanese evangelical Christian channel GoodTV and showed the world how he's got his guanxi with God all down pat. more ›

US billionaire Warren Buffett may have appeared on this year's chunwan (春晚), CCTV's Chinese New Year gala show, but even that wasn't enough to turn around the long-standing decline of the annual affair. Barbara Demick and John Lee of the Los Angeles Times write that increasingly heavy-handed censorship has caused several heavyweight celebrities to drop out of the show and driven viewers away: more ›

And here it finally is -- the video that Warren Buffett sent in to CCTV to be played at the spring festival gala -- in all its 45-second glory! To send his new year's greetings to 1.3 billion Chinese, the Berkshire Hathaway chairman strummed on his ukulele and sang "I've Been Working on the Railroad" in front of a room-sized model railroad. more ›

What the what?! Apparently Warrent Buffet has already sent in a video of himself singing and playing guitar for this year's CCTV Spring Festival Gala, to be aired on a special web broadcast on New Year's Day (January 23.) more ›

The State Administration of Radio Film and Television (SARFT) may move to ban all cut-in advertisements during soap operas on all TV channels, including CCTV. more ›

CCTV5, China's national sports channel, decided to cease coverage of the country's best-supported pro sports league towards the end the 2008 in response to a disorderly occurence which took place during a Beijing Guoan - Wuhan FC match. CCTV bigwigs, and presumably all those tuning in at home, were left spluttering into their teacups in disgust when a fracas broke out between Wuhan's big money signing Li Weifeng and Beijing's Lu Jiang. The on-field rumpus which ensued led to the Hubei province-based team pulling out of the CSL in protest at the CFA's decision to ban Li Weifeng for eight matches as punishment for his misdemeanours. more ›

An “Entertainment Restriction” (限娱令) has been issued by the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) to impose further restrictions on entertainment shows of provincial TV stations, Netease reports. Dating and other 6 kinds of programs will be restricted, and only 2 entertainment shows will be allowed to air during prime time (7:30pm to 10pm) on one provincial satellite channel weekly. more ›

It's been two months since Li Yang, the self-styled evangelist of the English language and founder of the Crazy English franchise, was accused by his American wife Kim Lee of domestic violence, but Li has not only NOT been hiding in a hole, he's been going around China talking about the episode to just about anyone willing to interview him! Li was recently in Shanghai for a talkshow where he was unlucky enough to meet the sharp-tongued Jin Xing, the dancer who was unceremoniously booted off a Zhejiang reality show as a judge recently, just because she was transgender. more ›

Jin Xing (金星), one of the foremost figures in Chinese contemporary dance and a judge on the reality television singing competition Fei Tong Fan Xiang 《非同凡响》says she has been kicked off the show by order of the Zhejiang Province Radio, Film and Television Bureau because of her transsexual identity. more ›

Sohu Vice-President Liu Chun (刘春) laments in a post on his Sohu Weibo profile about the anti-Japanese propaganda productions that are shown every September 18, anniversary of the Mukden Incident in 1931, which subsequently led to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria:

September 18 -- I'd like to plead with China's film industry workers. Please stop making those obscene, mythological anti-Japanese films where a child destroys a dozen (Japanese) devils, a farmer hundreds, and a guerilla thousands. Are the (Japanese) short-legged or brain-damaged? Each scene requires hordes of cameos to act as (Japanese) corpses. Please, pay a bit of attention to history. Stop turning a 14-year-long brutal war which caused the death of tens of millions into a game. more ›

Allan Wu, the American-born Chinese host of The Amazing Race: China Rush, the reality television series now airing on International Channel Shanghai (ICS), has received flak for comments he allegedly made in the Shin Min Daily News, a Chinese-language broadsheet known in Singapore for its trashy tabloid content. more ›

Elyse Ribbons shares with us this cute little video featuring snippets of Outlook English, an English-language talent competition organised by national broadcaster CCTV for young people, where she appeared as a "celebrity judge". Which "talents" are your favourites? more ›

China's Got Talent ended its second season with a grand finale at the Shanghai Stadium yesterday night attended by a crowd of 80,000. Zhuo Jun, a 19-year-old self-taught dancer from a small village in southern China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, pipped 55-year-old "Auntie Sweetie" Cai Hongping to become the champion. Zhuo wowed audiences with his self-choreographed robotic dance, while Cai, a vegetable seller who has been touted as China's answer to Susan Boyle, sang "Nessun Dorma", the popular aria from Puccini's opera Turandot. more ›

"NETIZENS will get a chance to choose a new temporary judge for "China's Got Talent," in place of songwriter Gao Xiaosong, for the program's new episode recording on May 19, officials of the TV reality show said yesterday. Gao was detained for drunk driving in Beijing on Monday and he might face detention of between one to six months. Producers of the show temporarily appointed Antonio Chen, a Taiwan music producer and composer, to fill Gao's slot on the judges panel for the recording on Tuesday. But the recording for the next episode on May 19 will have a new temporary judge, selected largely based on online votes on the program's Sina microblog by May 18. The 10 candidates are mainland film directors Lu Chuan and Feng Xiaogang, singer/composer Wang Feng, actress Xu Jinglei, pop idol Faye Wong, Hong Kong music producer Harry Hui, Taiwan singers Jonathan Lee, Lo Ta-yu and Fei Yu-ching, as well as Antonio Chen." [Shanghai Daily] more ›

Shanghaiist reader Andy Shum sent us the following screengrabs from a 1st season episode of Criminal Minds, a CBS police procedural drama that premiered September 2005, that also happens to be one of the most popular US TV series on Tudou. "This, being episode 20," says Shum, "would have aired in May, 2006. Coincidence?" more ›

The Amazing Race's China Rush is returning for a second season, and for all of you in China, here's your once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be a part of the show! more ›

Move over, "Little Fatty". China's new singing sensation comes in the form of a farmer from Zhulou Village in Shandong Province by the name of Zhu Zhiwen (朱之文). Zhu became an instant celebrity after clips of his audition at a talent show on Shandong TV, "I'm a Big Star", went viral on the internets. Like Susan Boyle, Zhu arrived on set poorly dressed, and had most people in the audience thinking he was just another nutcase. But they changed their minds as soon as he opened his mouth: Zhu's rendition of the theme song of the movie drama “Romance of Three Kingdoms” had the audience up on their feet by the time he was done, and judges on the show were so shell-shocked by his voice that they had to make sure he wasn't a shanzhai farmer putting on a lousy coat. more ›

We like it when China gets play on the Colbert Report, especially when he interviews people who know things about stuff. Last night The New Yorker's China correspondent Evan Osnos went on the show for his second time to face Colbert's wit-laden badgering (or as Osnos describes it on his blog, to play the role of "informative tackling dummy".) more ›

How did we miss this?! China's Got Talent finally began auditions for its second season yesterday, and they started with Shanghai! Reports about the number of registrants who showed up in Zhabei district yesterday vary - Sina says around 9,000, which is three to four times the number of participants last year. more ›

Sopranos and tenors are a fixture at every year's spring festival gala show on television, but what happens when show producers, in their overzealousness to connect with younger audiences, make them sing songs that were never meant to be sung by them? The result, ladies and gentlemen, is a CATASTROPHE, as you will see in the following clip from Beijing TV's show: more ›

The Chongqing Broadcasting Group has just announced its plans to send ratings for Chongqing Satellite TV, one of fourteen channels in its portfolio, down the toilet. And what revolutionary plans they are (trying to be punny here) -- all prime-time drama serials between 7.30pm and 11pm have been cancelled and replaced with such inspiring shows as Liberating the Southwest《解放大西南》, Moving Ahead for New China《为了新中国前进》, Sounds of Gunshots on the Plains《平原枪声》, Everyday Red Songs《天天红歌会》and Liberation《解放》. more ›