In a December interview on a Phoenix TV talk show, Jackie Chan made comments that Western media have recently described as "anti-American" -- ...really? I think his comments regarding America are immature, but they're not without reason. What a lot of reporting has ignored is that Chan was speaking in Chinese on a Chinese television channel, and the message he was delivering to a Chinese audience was this: “Yes, China has flaws, but if you talk about our country's shortcomings with foreigners, they'll misinterpret the message.”
Not every kitten in this story survives, so just go ahead and click away now if you don’t want to read about it. Amid tragedy, however, we also have a tale of human compassion in the form of a spontaneous, group effort to rescue all that could be rescued. Yesterday, a truck carrying more than... Read more »
Foreign commissioning editors get a lot of pitches like this: “The Chinese are now watching Homeland / eating caviar / behaving like us.” These activities usually owe to the fact that a few ultra-wealthy Chinese have found some new, pointlessly expensive Western habit — like high-end gold hi-fi aficionado clubs, or bottles of purified Moon water... Read more »
Holy-shit video time. Last Thursday in Zhengzhou, Henan province, surveillance cameras caught a driver running over a couple on the street — and then continue to run over them, and run over them, and run over them. (Viewer discretion is advised.) The good news first: the pedestrians who were run over will survive, though they... Read more »
It’s hard to ignore giant killer smog when it descends on your nation’s capital – and also as Hurricane Sandy proved in Manhattan and Brooklyn, it’s hard for the media to ignore it when it affects many of your nation’s top journalists. It’s not just coverage of killer smog, though, that’s taking over the news,... Read more »
No Pants Subway Ride, the annual event launched in 2002 by New York City-based Improv Everywhere, has spread to more than 60 cities, in which subway commuters strip off their pants on January 13 just because. Thousands participated this year in New York, hundreds in Mexico City, and, um, maybe a dozen or so in Shanghai?... Read more »
The above video of an unnamed young woman pole dancing in a Wuhan subway carriage recently hit the Internet, and as you can imagine, it’s well on its way toward viraldom. A Chinese journalist did some digging and discovered that three weeks ago on Sina Weibo, some netizens were calling for exactly this type of... Read more »
We don't really get how a reading that theoretically should max out at 500 can spit out a number like 755, but look at the above. It got so bad last night that Beijing's official air-quality index conveniently went "out of service" from 10 pm to 10 am this morning. When it came back, it featured this warning:
