In March, a young, male driver crashed a Ferrari in snowy conditions, killing himself and wounding the two female passengers.
The Beijing Evening News posted a short story, complete with a picture of the wrecked car, but deleted it a short time later. A new story was put up a short time later, apparently without the picture of the wrecked car, but
terms related to the crash were blocked from the micro-blogging site Sina Weibo (
blocking on Weibo, previously). The news of the crash, and the subsequent (partial) cover-up were
further marks against the Rich2G, the second generation of China’s moneyed class. More recently, Ferrari held an event to celebrate twenty years of the luxury car maker in China,
spending $12,670 to rent a section (and drive a special edition "Marco Polo Red" 458 Italia) on top of
the City Wall of Nanjing. The driver was
caught on film driving tight circles on the ancient wall, leaving tire marks and
further souring the public against Ferrari in specific, and the wealthy at large.
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on May 10, 2012 -
52 comments
On Tiger Moms: "What the controversy surrounding Chua demonstrates, however inadvertently, is that parenting techniques are always grounded in basic assumptions about the way things are and what matters to us. And they are always guided by some answer to the most fundamental of ethical questions—how to live?"
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posted by the man of twists and turns
on May 7, 2012 -
52 comments
Australian billionaire Clive Palmer has commissioned a Chinese shipyard to build
Titanic II, a modernized replica of the unsinkable
Titanic.
posted by swift
on Apr 30, 2012 -
98 comments
The Previous And Current Lives Of A World-Class Joke "At first, it was limited only to the Chinese-language Internet. More recently, it has appeared among foreign media. I just watched a clip of director James Cameron being interviewed on a talk show during which he said: "They were afraid that the Chinese men will reach out to touch the screen." When Cameron emphasized that "This is true," I knew that this is one of the most successful fake stories in recent years."
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posted by Kirth Gerson
on Apr 21, 2012 -
19 comments
Gu Kailai, the wife of senior Chinese party leader
Bo Xilai, has been
arrested for the murder of an English businessman. Bo, until his
sudden fall from power this year, one of the most popular politicians in China, the leading figure of the
Chinese New Left and Party Committee Secretary of the megacity of Chongqing, has completed his downfall by being expelled from the politburo and stripped of all party positions. The collapse started in February, when his top lieutenant, Wang Lijun,
was suddenly demoted and then fled to the US consulate for a day - supposedly, either attempting to defect or to give incriminating evidence on Bo and Gu to the Americans for safekeeping.
[more inside]
posted by strangely stunted trees
on Apr 10, 2012 -
38 comments
The files of the God of Gamblers case can be read as a string of accidents, good and bad: Siu’s run at the baccarat table; Wong’s luck to be assigned an assassin with a conscience; Adelson’s misfortune that reporters noticed an obscure murder plot involving his casino. But the tale, viewed another way, depends as little on luck as a casino does. It is, rather, about the fierce collision of self-interests. If Las Vegas is a burlesque of America—the “ethos of our time run amok,” as Hal Rothman, the historian, put it—then Macau is a caricature of China’s boom, its opportunities and rackets, its erratic sorting of winners and losers.
Evan Osnos on a real-life
"God of Gamblers" and the rise of Macau, The New Yorker
posted by jng
on Apr 6, 2012 -
13 comments
" Thus in today’s China one confronts the paradox of a communist regime that is at ideological loggerheads with left-leaning intellectuals, but which finds pro-Western, liberal intellectuals on the whole quite congenial." Richard Wolin is
Dreaming In Chinese...
posted by artof.mulata
on Mar 26, 2012 -
12 comments
Bo Xilai, former Party Secretary of Chongqing and current Politburo member, was
recently sacked by Chinese leadership. He is well known for his economic success at growing Chongqing, and his flamboyant leadership style which included the revival of “Red Culture”[
previously].
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posted by HabeasCorpus
on Mar 26, 2012 -
20 comments
It’s a very specialized set of sports that the Chinese focus on but they simply kick absolute ass at them. ... If you look at the 2008 Olympic weightlifting results in Beijing... the women didn’t just squeak by to win a medal; most were simply so far ahead of their competition that it was a joke. In most cases, the Chinese women took their first attempt after everyone else had already finished lifting for the day. And they came out and just dispatched their weights in perfect form, setting new world records and winning medals with abandon. [more inside]
posted by Trurl
on Mar 4, 2012 -
52 comments
He leaves his cellphone and laptop at home and instead brings "loaner" devices, which he erases before he leaves the US and wipes clean the minute he returns . In China, he disables Bluetooth and Wi-Fi , never lets his phone out of his sight and, in meetings, not only turns off his phone but also removes the battery , for fear his microphone could be turned on remotely. He connects to the Internet only through an encrypted, password-protected channel, and copies and pastes his password from a USB thumb drive. He never types in a password directly, because, he said, "Chinese are very good at installing key-logging software on your laptop." -
Travel precautions in the age of digital espionage.
posted by Artw
on Feb 13, 2012 -
125 comments
“You need a thousand rubber gaskets? That’s the factory next door. You need a million screws? That factory is a block away. You need that screw made a little bit different?
It will take three hours.” Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher of the NY Times give an in-depth report on Apple's migration of electronics manufacturing to Asia and its impact on middle class Americans.
posted by Blazecock Pileon
on Jan 21, 2012 -
158 comments
Dashan represents or symbolizes something very powerful to a Chinese audience...[the] Chinese have a very complex and conflicting view of themselves and the world at large...Dashan represents a Westerner who appreciates and respects China, who has learned the language and understands the culture and has even become “more Chinese than the Chinese”. It’s a very powerful and reassuring image that appeals to very deep-rooted emotions.
Mark Rowswell, aka
"大山" Dà shān, the massively popular, Canadian-born
相声 xiàng sheng performer and celebrity in China,
offers his own thoughts on his persona (mostly referring to it in third person), why the Chinese public is enamored with it, and why his fellow Western expats tend to resent it.
[more inside]
posted by stroke_count
on Jan 10, 2012 -
33 comments
In March last year, the unmanned
X-37B US military spaceplane launched from Cape Canaveral on mission
USA-226, to "demonstrate various experiments", sensors and technology. Its original 270 day mission was
extended in November "as circumstances allow" for "additional experimentation opportunities", but a dedicated group of optical tracking specialists in the US and Europe believe that the X-37B is in fact
spying on the Chinese space station
Tiangong-1.
[more inside]
posted by adrianhon
on Jan 5, 2012 -
59 comments
