The talk of the day has been Mark Griffith and Andrew Dougherty's brilliant music video Beijing State of Mind, a tribute to this city of ours, set to the beat of Jay-Z's famous homage to New York. The Brooklyn native's Empire State of Mind has, of course, inspired countless spin-offs, about Chinese cities other than Beijing, too. Read more »
-- Hey, everyone, look! A grandmother is trapped underneath that bus!
-- Ooooooh.
-- Say qiezi!
-- Qieeeeeee-zi!
-- Great. Now get one of me! Read more »
We desperately don't want this to be true, but Tsinghua's famous three-year-old cat, who had been adopted as the university's unofficial mascot, may have been brutally killed last week.
This is bad. Read more »
A paragraph in a recent China Youth Daily article about the two victims of Asiana Flight 214 seemed to take undue pride in extolling a Chinese government official, which makes just no sense at all. Read more »
In March, China began regulating the number of properties families could buy, prompting couples around the country to file for divorce so they could buy more properties. In Nanjing, the schools available to children were tied to household registration, causing another wave of divorces in that city (we wrote about this one, citing Louis CK). So what's a poor government to do in the face of that terrible loophole to its policy? Read more »
Torrential rains in Sichuan province have caused flooding in several cities in recent days, leading thousands of militia and reserve troops to be dispatched to the hardest hit areas.
The rains actually began last week, with the worst of it coming down in the last few days. Exact numbers regarding loss of life and property aren't available yet, but the rains have given us two vivid image of the destruction. Read more »
Drop what you're doing and watch this, Beijingers. Mark Griffith, a photographer and videographer who used to live in Beijing, has just released the fruit of 15 months of work, "Beijing State of Mind," set to Jay-Z's Empire State of Mind. The project was the brainchild of Andrew Dougherty, an expat who'd lived off and on here for five years. Rapping alongside Princess Fortier (in the role of Alicia Keys), the duo take us on a trip from the Forbidden City to the hutongs to the Great Wall to The Place, and so many other places in between that make our Beijing experience what it is. Read more »
Someone doesn't enjoy his job. Reports The Telegraph, Zhou Shengxian, who is China's environment minister, was "quoted by state media as saying: 'I've heard that there are four major embarrassing departments in the world and that China's ministry of environmental protection is one of them.'" Read more »
