Twenty minutes past time, and no sign of Xi Jinping, Li Keqiang, et al. But don’t freak out: join in on the fun. Twitter is at #WhyXiJinpingIsLate, and it’s lively. Featuring… Andrea Yu Mikhail Gorbachev The ghost of Mao Zedong The ghost of Jiang Zemin — even though he isn’t dead George W. Bush Clint Eastwood... Read more »
The Party Congress is, mercifully, over. For those of us here in Beijing, it feels good, like a massive cold-water colon cleanse. Now with the brown-nosers out of the city, we can reflect.
Now that it’s over, I mourn the loss of the banners.
The propaganda rags had a few different roles to play during the Congress. 1) Don’t report bad news. 2) Make sure everyone loves the Congress. 3) Love our dear leaders. 4) Publish editorial rimjobs about the Party Congress. 5) Convince people that change will happen gradually, after they die. 6) Hate the US and their pussy-ass elections. 7) Bang on about the Party Congress, no matter how boring and un-news-like, until you kill yourself, go on, do it, just kill yourself. Do it. You pansy. Go on. You don’t have the balls, do you? Do it. DO IT!
This story just gets more interesting by the minute. Via @fightcensorship, we've learned that Andrea Yu will be appearing on the cover of the November 16 issue of Oriental BQ Weekly Magazine. The red letters read: "Australia watches the 18th National Congress," and on the second line, "Andi," which is the Chinese rendering of Andrea. "Hodgkinson" is Yu's real (given?) surname.
Yesterday, while writing about an Australian reporter who had become somewhat of a Chinese Internet star because of her Mandarin-speaking ability, I was most struck by something she said in English. At a press conference inside the Great Hall of the People, she mentioned she was representing "Global CAMG Media International." I googled that phrase and found no results on the first page. The closest match was "CAMH," which is completely different. That should've sent up a red flag, instead of a yellow one. But this was still the early stages of the story, and the news seemed to be the question itself, not the identity of the questioner, so I went ahead with the post.
Back in September, Alicia snapped a picture of about 100 Audis, black, parked next to Tiananmen Square, a reminder to everyone that Ferrari may be the new kid on the block, but the Audi remains king. It remains so. The pictures above were taken outside the Great Hall of the People by China correspondents Tom... Read more »
Last September, Liu Shu-jen got the notion, somehow, that David Petraeus, the four-star general who was then still the CIA director, was going to fly to Taiwan to marry her. She transferred, in total, $50,000 to Petraeus’s “offshore band accounts,” and then found herself in jail after trying to cash 37 fraudulent traveler’s checks. As... Read more »
As China promotes up-and-comers to its approximately 350-member CPC Central Committee, culminating in an announcement (we hope) of the all-powerful nine-member Central Politburo Standing Committee, the place you should be keeping an eye on today is @XHNews, Xinhua’s official Twitter account. Not only will it probably break the news of the new Standing Committee —... Read more »
The Sunday Times, in its now-famous (or infamous) piece on Neil Heywood (still paywalled, but it's here if you want to purchase), alluded to a certain Channel 4 documentary on the man. Quote: "After a year-long investigation for Channel 4's Dispatches, based on numerous conversations with friends, business colleagues, diplomatic sources and a Chinese contact who knew both Heywood and the Bo family intimately, we can reveal the real Neil Heywood."
On Saturday, a record 4,000 people took part in an LGBT rights parade in Hong Kong themed “Dare to Love.” The above image — and several others after the jump — is via NetEase. A few videos are embedded after the jump as well, while chinaSMACK has a round-up of mainland Chinese reactions to the... Read more »
A man walking through the street almost had the misfortune of having a car fall on his head. Or look at it this way: he was lucky enough to have not been killed by a car falling on his head.
See? So much better to see the glass as half full.
