When it comes to toadying up to authority, you can’t beat foreign business. While smog comes and goes like a dissident in the night, its legacy lives on -- for example, in the missive below from Savills, the London-based real estate agency, which wins our coveted Beijing Cream Corporate Whore of the Month Award with “Twelve tricks to protect you from haze.”
China is officially (politically, that is) an enthusiastic supporter of the Sochi Games, which is why Chinese athletes walked out at the opening ceremony waving both Chinese and Russian flags. To no one's surprise, then, the pro-government media here is peeved by all the negative coverage in "Western media." Speaking for them all, Global Times has just published an editorial headlined, "Booing Sochi only shows West's bigotry."
Louis CK was in Beijing in June 2012 to film the (wonderful) finale of (the wonderful) third season of his show Louie, and apparently he got enough material to tell stories for years. He was recently on David Letterman, where -- for whatever reason -- he was prompted to relive his experience.
"The smog has become so thick in Beijing that the city's natural light-starved masses have begun flocking to huge digital commercial television screens across the city to observe virtual sunrises..."
-- lied The Daily Mail in an article last week
Jimmy Kimmel held a "kid's table" a couple of weeks ago and asked blah blah blah, and it was all pretty boring until some young'un said we should "kill everyone in China." If you're interested in the context, read up on it here. "Kill everyone in China" isn't the best joke, even out of the mouth of a young child -- it's certainly not the best thing* Kimmel's done with kids -- but whatever, it's Jimmy Kimmel, it's late-night comedy, who really cares?
The Telegraph, reporting from across the pond on a senseless tragedy, i.e. yet another mass shooting in the US, has apparently thought it worthwhile to use the first 12 paragraphs of an 18-paragraph story describing how Aaron Alexis -- the Navy Yard gunman who killed 12 people on Monday in Washington DC -- had a "string of failed relationships with Asian women." That's in the headline of this "exclusive," by the way: "Aaron Alexis: Washington Navy yard gunman had string of failed relationships with Asian women."
"Mr. Kim Jong Un! Channel 4 News, UK!” yelled the journalist at the back of Kim Jong Un’s head.
The Great Marshall stopped. He slowly turned and smiled, his visage a million shining suns. The room, which had been full of raucous cheers, came to a hush. In perfect English he replied, “Yes? How may I help you?”
Just kidding. That last part didn’t happen.
Today, barbarians of the unruly and unruled Internet are less dangerous. Today, your sleep will be sounder, your dreams more colorful, your future freer. For today, Britain, you are one step closer to achieving China's harmony-promoting, children-protecting Net filtration system, which we lovingly refer to as the Great Firewall. And how great it is: no porn, because it can be eradicated like rats; no discussion of historical events, so as not to offend the sensibilities of certain mothers who would prefer to forget those things ever happened; no YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, New York Times, or Bloomberg, because screw 'em; and no dissent (and why would there be dissent?). Hadrian's Firewall, we'll call it. You'll love it, as we do.
On Tuesday, Tsinghua University law professor Yi Yanyou wrote on his Sina Weibo, “Raping a chaste woman is more harmful than raping a bar girl, a dancing girl, a sanpeinu or a prostitute." Because you know, in this world, some people just have it better than others, and deserve to be treated better because of it.
That Yi's statement was in relation to the Li Tianyi gang rape case quickly became lost in the outcry and massively loud sighs against Yi. How could a law professor -- at one of China's most prestigious universities, no less -- say such a dimwitted thing?
This fuckface. This fucking piece of shit is the new frog-eyed creepy rapist avatar for every foreign English teacher in China. I fucking hate him. As a reformed Catholic, I reserve vast reservoirs of contempt and genuine vitriol for authority figures who abuse their power at the expense of children. With all of my private and... Read more »
