Welcome to Three Shots with Beijing Cream, where local personalities spill their beans 1.5 fluid ounces at a time. Produced and directed by Gabriel Clermont and Anthony Tao. Our guests this week aren't local per se, but Beijing honararies by virtue of their attendance at last month's Bookworm International Literary Festival. Writers from around the world converged on the Bookworm from March 8 to 22, but two ...

Welcome to Three Shots with Beijing Cream, where local personalities spill their beans 1.5 fluid ounces at a time. Produced and directed by Gabriel Clermont and Anthony Tao. Our guests this week aren't local per se, but Beijing honararies by virtue of their attendance at last month's Bookworm International Literary Festival. Writers from around the world converged on the Bookworm from March 8 to 22, but two ...

The Stand-up Showcase portion of the Beijing Improv Festival took place this past Friday. Here's my takeaway after watching the five finalists: It turns out that there's an honest-to-goodness, thriving stand-up scene in Beijing. If you're a closeted comedy nerd who'll only risk coming out to see live shows in Beijing when big name comics fly in from the States, I hate to break it to you, but Louis CK isn't ...

Neil Robinson is wanted by the Surrey police "in connection with the distribution of indecent images of children and the rape of a child," according to BBC's Crimewatch. This bit of info was posted to Reddit China by user gaiushe yesterday, who claims he has known Robinson for the past five years and is certain that he worked at an international school in Beijing. That's Beijing got in touch with gaiushe vi ...

A residential building fire on Monday near Yuegezhuang Bridge in Beijing forced one particularly desperate man scurrying out of his fifth-floor window and onto a very thin ledge, where he held on for several white-knuckle minutes. Then, at the 5:07 mark of the above video, he falls — simply falls. People gasp, then scream. Throughout all this, a woman behind the camera can clearly be heard asking, “What’s t ...

We've seen our share of Gangnam Style dances and remixes, from the good to the bad to the political to the Ai Weiwei, but nothing quite as weird as this. Our friends over at That's Beijing tweeted the above video, titled "Beijing Dancer (Mr. Fabulous)." It was uploaded to YouTube on Sunday by Michaeljava, who writes: ...

The 2013 Beijing Improv Comedy Festival is taking place right now. Here's what you need to know and what you don't about this premier comedy event: Who? Improv troupes from all over the world, including the Philippines, Australia, and comedy hotbed Turkey, as well as throughout China. But does it really matter? All you care about is whether or not they are funny. When and Where? It's happening right now, at ...

It was only a matter of time, and it's somewhat surprising it's taken this long. Xinhua reports that a seven-year-old girl in Beijing was infected with H7N9, confirmed earlier today after a test by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention. The girl reported symptoms on Thursday, but after checking into the hospital, she is reportedly in stable condition. ...

According to Sina Weibo user @血一刀, the premiere of Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained at the Sanlitun cineplex in Beijing was interrupted just one minute after it began: Staff members came in and said SARFT called and told them to postpone!! Who can tell me what the fuck is going on? @血一刀's post, from 10:34 am today, was forwarded by Li Kaifu, he of the 36.6 million Sina Weibo followers. Most people are n ...

Like the most quintessential of Americana, chili is not complex -- a stew of beans and tomatos, ingredients that fill the stomach, kick the tongue -- yet it's only with such a square, hearty base that we can sign our culinary art into the slight variances that elevate mere provision into the estimable domain of gastronomy. It is possible for chili to achieve morphology, where degrees of difference are plain ...

Hot on the Iron Man 3 promotional trail, Robert Downey Jr. was in Beijing on Saturday, and basically showed everyone what publicity done right looks like. Reports People's Daily (Downey's quotes, all): I have been longing to come to China an it's a dream that has come true. In the West we think we understand China but we don't. What we see on TV, what we get from news, we assume that's our experience, [but] ...

What the heck? A series of interesting photos have surfaced on Chinese social media on April 1, without much accompanying info. Here are two Sina Weibo posts, via @bjshi (Beijing News) and @dskbhz (Chengdu Bulletin), from which we learn these facts: 1. This happened at 3 am on April 1. 2. In Wangjing, a neighborhood in Beijing. 3. A naked man is being chased by a naked woman. He is holding a sex doll. ...

Yan Yinan, co-host of China Radio International's daily program China Drive, died in an apparent suicide on Friday when she jumped off her apartment building, sources say. Some of her colleagues were seen crying inside the CRI office on Friday. A source said CRI management has emailed staffers asking them to keep news of Yan's death off social media out of respect for her family, and that there is an intern ...

This piece is republished with permission from the Anthill. ~ I don't generally post news on the Anthill, as it's designed for narrative writing and there are too many China news aggregators anyway. But this is breaking news I discovered myself and have to share: the municipal authorities for the Gulou area of central Beijing have, as of midnight last night, made riding fixed gear bicycles in the area again ...

Three Shots With Beijing Cream is weekly series in which local personalities are interviewed over shots. New episodes are posted every Sunday; if you would like to nominate a future guest, please get in touch. Produced and directed by Gabriel Clermont and Anthony Tao. We caught wind of Morgan Short's imminent arrival to Beijing last summer, with our informant adding without equivocation that Smart Shanghai, ...

Ed's note: Welcome to BJC's newest weekly series, Three Shots With, in which we interview local personalities over shots. New episodes are posted every Sunday; if you would like to nominate a future guest, please get in touch. Produced and directed by Gabriel Clermont and Anthony Tao. George Ding, the Beijinger's backpage columnist, catapulted to notortiety last fall ...

The concept is pretty simple -- set tripod in front of Tiananmen every day throughout the Two Sessions; snap picture -- but Wei Yao, the photographer for Beijing Review who got the shot you see above (along with this one), explains on Reuters's Photographers Blog that it still took a lot of work: Having the idea of how to do my project, I encountered some difficulties. Unlike the midnight sun in which shoot ...

If you haven't yet, read Matt Sheehan's story about Frank Turner, a British musician who plays at MAO Livehouse at 9 pm tonight. The above picture was posted on Turner's Instagram yesterday. It's almost as good as Sheehan's post. Almost. ...

The rain began yesterday afternoon, turning into ice by the late evening, continuing through the night as snow. And behold, the above picture via BJ Reviewer. Josh Chin is also calling for photos at the hashtag #BeijingSnowWSJ / #BeijingSnowWSJ# (for you Weibo users), so do that if you want to see your picture on Wall Street Journal, maybe. This is our favorite so far, by Hudson Lockett: ...

I daresay it might be the best thing Sina/Beijing Review/China.org has done. Go give them some love. UPDATE, 3/27, 2:15 pm: Photographer Wei Yao explains how it was done. (H/T Malcolm Moore) ...