It’s been about 15 hours since Xinhua released news of Bo Xilai’s ouster from his Party posts — released at just the time when no domestic media would be able to turn it around until the next morning, we should note (luckily, BJC keeps late hours). We’ve given the original Xinhua release another look, and... Read more »
Over the past month, there’s been a lot of smoke regarding Bo Xilai, some of which we’ve been happy to fan here, but when it comes to Chinese politics and media, you know there’s definitely a fire when that smoke is being blown by none other than Xinhua. A little more than an hour ago, the... Read more »
Xinhua reported today that Nanning police seized 80 homemade firearms in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region in their “war on crimes involving guns and explosives to safeguard social stability and public security.” Crimes like the son of a county cadre shooting a street vendor to death, we can only assume they were thinking. But in all... Read more »
Isaac Stone Fish over at Foreign Policy has a fitting tribute to Mike Wallace, journalist, with a post titled "Is Mike Wallace the reason Chinese leaders don't give interviews?" To Wallace, who passed away on Saturday -- and to any journalist, really -- I can't think of a better compliment.
Wallace's genius was the ability to unblinkingly chastise power. Even during the aired pleasantries, Wallace looks unimpressed with Jiang [Zemin]. During minute 2 of the hour-long interview, aired days before Jiang's 2000 U.S. visit, Wallace tells Jiang "shorter answers, please. More concise" and a touch of panic breaks through Jiang's placid smile.
The story in its entirety: A Shenzhen-based condom company must stop branding its products with “Baidu,” Beijing No.1 Intermediate People’s Court ruled yesterday, in favor of the condom’s namesake search engine company. The court found the condom manufacturer, Yelaixiang, violated Baidu’s right to the name because it deliberately used the well-known brand to attract attention,... Read more »
Confession time: I’m petrified of Anonymous. As someone who is hopelessly clumsy when it comes to web hosting and IT, I know how easy it can be for an experienced hacker to ruin my day. But then again, I have nothing to hide. I — unlike Fang Binxing — did not engineer a “Great Firewall”... Read more »
A poster on Reddit recently saw the above in a restroom and assumed it was a public service announcement. And why wouldn’t it be? The peeing about as accurate as a Tim Tebow pass, the squatting on the rim of the toilet, the doggy-style whizzing, the blowjob… all worthy of a public reminder: AVOID. Couple wrinkles,... Read more »
Here’s how shitty China’s Ministry of Censorship is: instead of doing its one job — which is shitting over everything popular and good in the world, smearing puppies and daffodils with the excrement of its values, and shit — it outsources this one responsibility to private companies, and when said private companies fail to shit... Read more »
At first, the kids at this daycare/kindergarten seem excited about the idea of Purple Panda from PBS Kids' Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. (Purple panda, you should know, is just a purple version of the national symbol of China.) And then, something goes terribly, terribly wrong -- Purple Panda actually shows up. Much crying ensues, because we're dealing with kids, and kids are stupid.
Via University of Arizona Fang Lizhi isn’t best known for his seminal paper on the Big Bang theory, however. As the New York Times’ obituary states: Fang Lizhi, whose advocacy of economic and democratic freedoms shaped China’s brief era of student dissent that ended with the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and his exile, died on Friday... Read more »
