In China, if you can’t beat them, call upon your buddies in a high-ranking ministry to bring them down to your level. China Telecom, China Unicom, and China Mobile, three state-owned telecom enterprises, apparently feel so threatened by Tencent’s free Weixin (WeChat) program — specifically its ability to allow users to text and send voice... Read more »Read more »
Boy they do start young, don’t they? Hart Hagerty, who runs the blog Shanghai Style Life, was celebrating Easter in Shanghai’s Fuxing Park yesterday when she saw this. More pictures are posted over at her website, where she writes: My jaw dropped when his pajama-clad mother handed the tot a cigarette… then lit it for him... Read more »Read more »
This is how escalation works. First there are 900 dead pigs in a Shanghai river. Then there are 16,000 dead pigs, plus a thousand or so dead ducks. Then there are dead humans… aaaannd this game is over. The government of Lanzhou, capital of Gansu province, announced on March 28 that “around 100 bodies on... Read more »Read more »
A People's Liberation Army Air Force jet, a double-seat Su-27UBK fighter, according to Global Times, crashed in Rongcheng, Shandong province yesterday afternoon, killing both pilots.
GT reports that the pilots apparently had ejected, making it "unclear why they did not survive." Read more »
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 against the law. Read more »
Ah, music festival season in China. With the balmy climes and fluffy white cottonwood pollen comes the annual rumor mill about which bold-faced recording artists are slated to perform at the summertime’s numerous annual kickoff events, which have been denied performance permits, and general conspiratorial grumblings about why this is and who's to blame. Read more »
Move over, H5N1. There’s a new strain of bird flu that can infect and kill humans — though currently it does not appear to be contagious. Xinhua reports that three humans came down with H7N9 avian influenza recently in Shanghai and Anhui province. The two from Shanghai are dead, while the other, a 35-year-old woman from... Read more »Read more »
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, of which Morgan is the chief editor, was the best expat website of its kind. Read more »
