Say you're a Chinese company wishing to appear more global and well-to-do without all the messy hubbub of hiring a foreigner. What do you do? Drop $44 and
rent a white guy.
posted by griphus
on Jun 29, 2010 -
90 comments
A Minute and 100 Metres Down the Road. The soldier outside the station had one hand on the barrel and the other on the butt of his shotgun. There were two military trucks by the bus stop and two soldiers in the back-right seats of every bus leaving Urumqi station... I arrived via long-haul train, 40 hours and just under 4000km in a hard-seat, from Beijing, where rumours were circulating about the extent of the military presence, needle attacks, Uighur and Han street gangs, and the validity of the reports coming out of Xinjiang. After four days I left with more doubts about why ethnic tensions in Urumqi arose and how they could be resolved. [more inside]
posted by KokuRyu
on Jun 27, 2010 -
2 comments
Andrew Shane Huang is a 35 year old hardware hacker, known to some as
bunnie, and others as that guy who
hacked the Xbox and went on to
write a book about it.
Finding the hidden key to the Xbox was
an enjoyable distraction while he worked on getting his PhD in Electrical Engineering from MIT as
part of
Project Aries. Since then, he has
written for (and
been written about) in
Make Magazine, has
giving talks on the strategy of hardware openness and
manufacturing practices in China, as experienced with the development of the opensource
ambient "
internet-based TV" called
Chumby. When he's not busy on such excursions, bunnie writes about
hacking (and more specifically,
Chumby hacking),
technology in China, and even
biology in exquisite detail on
the bunnie studios blog (
previously).
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on Jun 17, 2010 -
36 comments
Last year, Yang Youde learned that his land had been requisitioned. Since the compensation terms for breaking the contract had not been settled, he has refused to move out. "The evictors said many times that they will move on me." Earlier this year, Yang took measures to protect himself. He took a hand-truck and removed the front. Then he put in a set of rockets for use as an artillery battery.
posted by Artw
on Jun 8, 2010 -
34 comments
We've had
excerpts before, but this is the full performance.
Nixon in China, with music by John Adams, libretto by Alice Goodman and choreography by Mark Morris. Directed by Peter Sellars, conducted by John DeMain, and presented by Walter Chronkite. Houston Grand Opera, 1987. Parts
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17
posted by Navelgazer
on Jun 7, 2010 -
17 comments
"
The multifunction folded shovle (sic) boasting a happy combination of a spade, pickax, trowel, hewing, knife, saw, scissors, hammer, operner
(sic), shield, anchor, and oar is perfect design and refined making, making a pioneer in tools family!" I can guarantee you that never before (or, likely, again) will you be
so inspired by a multifunction shovel commercial. The music is exhilarating! (PS: This shovel does freaking
everything.) (SLYT)
[more inside]
posted by GatorDavid
on May 7, 2010 -
78 comments
A Glimpse of the World All across Africa, new tracks are being laid, highways built, ports deepened,
commercial contracts signed -- all on an unprecedented scale, and led by China, whose
appetite for commodities seems
insatiable. Do China's grand designs promise the transformation, at last, of a star-crossed continent? Or merely its exploitation?
The author travels deep into the heart of Africa, searching for answers.
[more inside]
posted by kliuless
on Apr 26, 2010 -
20 comments
The
National Labor Committee, a watchdog group that investigates working conditions at foreign factories producing goods for US corporations, has
released a report on the KYE Factory in Guangdong, China. KYE manufactures outsourced products for Microsoft (their biggest customer), HP, Best Buy, Samsung, Foxconn, Acer, Logitech, and ASUS. The report
focuses heavily on the workers producing Microsoft products. In response, Microsoft says they will
investigate the allegations, as their
vendor code of conduct (pdf) bans much of the abuses uncovered by the report.
Photo Slideshow / NLC report summary [more inside]
posted by zarq
on Apr 15, 2010 -
55 comments
"In preparation for the 2010 World Expo opening in May in Shanghai, city officials have been busy making sure the metropolis and its inhabitants are presentable. The World Expo is a ‘Big Deal’; ... The government is determined to whip the city into shape, even if it stretches the very fabric of society, which in Shanghai happens to be …
cotton and silk pajamas!"
posted by stratastar
on Apr 3, 2010 -
18 comments
The Free Art and Technology (F.A.T.) Lab is an organization dedicated to enriching the public domain through the research and development of creative technologies and media. You may know them from such projects as
How to build a fake Google Street View car,
public domain donor stickers,
internet famous class, the
first rap video to end with a download source code link, or their numerous
firefox add-ons (such as
China Channel,
Tourettes Machine, or
Back to the future). FAT members have been hard at work standardizing various open source graffiti-related software packages, including
Graffiti Analysis,
Laser Tag,
Fat Tag Deluxe and
EyeWriter [previously] to be
GML (Graffiti Markup Language) compliant.
Fuck Google.
Fuck Twitter.
FuckFlickr.
Fuck SXSW.
Fuck 3D. FAT Lab is
Kanye shades for the open source movement.
posted by finite
on Mar 13, 2010 -
8 comments
Once upon a time, before boats had motors, the only way to move vessels up the Shennong River (a tributary to the Yangtze River near Badong, Enshi) was for labourers, known as River Trackers, to haul them by hand using heavy ropes along a dangerously narrow ledge hacked from solid rock.
And while naked (slightly NSFW).
[more inside]
posted by bwg
on Mar 9, 2010 -
27 comments
Asia Snapshots "is a blog that examines topics in Asia through the perspectives of interesting people interviewed by a group of bloggers in Mainland China, Vietnam, Taiwan, and more." Meet
Gao Qingrong and family, who along with seven other households are part of
an organic farm co-op in Anlong Village, Sichuan. Or there's
the tale of how one of the bloggers met Jun Jun, a male prostitute in Beijing; an encounter with
Silang Laji, a road maintenance worker in Kham, a Tibetan region of China; and
Gege, an enterprising journalist in Chengdu.
Via
posted by Abiezer
on Feb 28, 2010 -
4 comments
Official Google Blog:
In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. However, it soon became clear that what at first appeared to be solely a security incident--albeit a significant one--was something quite different ... ... we have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists ... ... We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all.
posted by memebake
on Jan 12, 2010 -
227 comments
Fascinated by the Orient An exhibition of the letters, photographs and maps bequeathed to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences by the great
explorer, archaeologist, geographer and
Sanskritist Sir
Marc Aurel Stein. Journeyer
in the footsteps of Alexander,
explorer of
Central Asia and
West China, surveyor of the
antiquities of India and
Iran; after a long life of journeying through and studying central Asia, Aurel Stein found
his final rest in Kabul. He is also remembered for rediscovering the oldest dated printed book still in existence, a copy of the
Diamond Sutra in
the caves at Mogao. That the latter and many thousands of other manuscripts collected by Stein now reside in the
British Library is of course, like his other
'treasure hunting', not without
controversy.
posted by Abiezer
on Jan 4, 2010 -
4 comments
Man from the Margin: Cao Cao and the Three Kingdoms You'll perhaps have
read or
watched reports that archaeologists believe they have found the tomb of Cao Cao (曹操) (of course,
not everyone agrees with the identification). Warrior, strategist, statesman and
poe
t, Cao Cao lives on in the cultural memory of China, a
by-word for cunning and of course a central character in the great historical novel
Romance of the Three Kingdoms and hence also recent John Woo blockbuster
Red Cliff. To understand the man in his historical context, there's little better in English than the 1990 George Ernest Morrison Lecture in Ethnology given by now-retired Professor
Rafe de Crespigny, one of the foremost Western scholars of the Han Dynasty and Three Kingdoms periods of Chinese history. He makes several of his vastly erudite essays on Chinese history available at the
ANU's website.
posted by Abiezer
on Dec 30, 2009 -
21 comments
