This week is the screening of the seventh segment of the first round of The Voice of the Silk Road – a show that hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs watch every Friday night at 8 pm local time on Xinjiang TV Channel 9. People like the contest because they can watch their favorite performers joke around with each other; they can see people they know perform or imagine themselves performing in their place. Uyghurs see themselves trying on a performance mode popularized by mainstream English and Chinese-language versions of the show, but instead of English or Chinese pop ballads and American and (largely) Han stories of unrecognized talent, on this show they see the reverse. They largely see Uyghur folk songs, classical muqam and pop music; and they mostly hear Uyghur stories of personal triumph. Read more »
The amazing folks over at the North Korea news and analysis website NK News are back with the second edition of their (hopefully annual) NK News Calendar, with pictures by award-winning photographer Eric Lafforgue. You can buy the calendar here -- and get $5 off by entering beijingcream as the coupon code. Read more »
Back in June, we brought your attention to the adventures of Ivan Xu, a Chinese youth who planned to bike alone around Europe for 100 days for Ultimate Frisbee and charity.
He ended up cycling across 14 countries and visiting 11 high-level Ultimate Frisbee clubs* from June 18 to September 25, beginning in Brest, Belarus and ending in Berlin.
His adventures have been profiled by media around the world, including CCTV-4, Estrepublicain.fr, Pärnu Postimees, Belarusian CTV, Russia-Belarus TPO TV and OHT TV, so what follows is hardly an exclusive. But here's an update anyway. Read more »
Our beloved China, the new social-political-economic butterfly on the scene, wowed at APEC before jetting off for the ASEAN East Asia Summit and the G20 Summit.
Hosting APEC for the first time since 2011, Beijing did things 大气, spending $6 billion on a lakeside campus, a new elevated expressway, and a no-costs-spared spectacular opening complete with fireworks. But how did they really do? Read more »
On any given weekend in China you can find a Uyghur band playing flamenco. It has not always been this way. It wasn’t until the late 1990s that a young man from Qarghiliq in Kashgar prefecture discovered Turkish variations of Spanish flamenco. Over the next decade that man, Arken Abdulla, along with other early flamenco guitarists such as Qehirman and Tursun (see the above video), introduced flamenco to the Uyghur world. Read more »
While China's domestic media reels over the threat of ebola, praising the government's efforts in fighting a cold it hasn't caught, tuberculosis (TB) remains by far the country's deadliest disease, having claimed the lives of approximately 45,150 in 2012, according to the World Health Organization. Read more »
I didn't want to like this -- and I probably still don't -- but I will say: watching it, it gets better. If your goal in a music video is to out-weird PSY and the Ylvis ("The Fox"), you probably should go all out like Rolling Wang Rong did and do stuff like this: Read more »
Chinese social networking sites have been swamped with discussion of the latest scandalous topic: “Escort for Travel.” Purportedly the work of an 18-year-old woman, the posts advertise job openings for “temporary boyfriends” and include photos and videos of the woman sleeping with random men on her trips to Nanjing, Wuxi and Suzhou. Read more »
With his co-host in England for the month, the news comedy show C4’s Stuart Wiggin took a trip to the Shaolin Temple and returned with a travel diary that has gone viral in China. Why? There's an interesting story here... Read more »
