Everyone says sex makes the Internet go round; maybe it’s just a little more obvious in China? Sandwiched in between Tianya photo posts on Qing dynasty-era embroidery and government officials planting trees is one of Tianya’s most popular ongoing photo threads of the year: an adult industry exhibition in Las Vegas. Over 400,000 have viewed the pages in the last three months (one suspects many of them are return visits), almost 3,000 have written comments. Lots of conversation about how big the photos should be in order to get the maximum effect but not to slow down the load rate too much; some requests for specific porn stars, by name. The author has promised to slowly display his treasures from the 2006, 2005, and 2004 show, and readers are eagerly awaiting. This about sums it up:
If you’re curious about how the new Five-Year Plan compares with previous Five-Year Plans, you can browse China Mapping Out the 11th Five-Year Development Guidelines, which reminds us that the 1st Five-Year Plan’s (1953-1957) goals were pretty different than today:
to concentrate efforts on the
construction of 694 large and medium-sized industrial projects,
including 156 with the aid of the Soviet Union, so as to lay that the
primary foundations for China’s socialist industrialization; to develop
agricultural producers’ cooperatives to help in the socialist
transformation of the agriculture and handicraft industries; to put
capitalist industry and commerce on the track of state capitalism so as
to facilitate the socialist transformation of private industry and
commerce.
Okay, so I don’t know why these are so fascinating to me, but I couldn’t help but spend ten minutes comparing the lovely photos Jason blogged below (you really should see the whole set at PCAuto), with their counterparts from a map of Beijing that Rania Ho has on her Flickrstream, and which I blogged last year. Aren’t they gorgeous?
A growing facet of Virtual China: Maryann O’Donnell’s Shenzhen Fieldnotes has a great post on her thoughts about finding out that her local hospital in Nanshan is a leader in alternative stem-cell therapies for foreign patients. O’Donnell compares China stem cell blogs and
China adoption blogs. These two sets of online resources are major
contributors to understandings of China, outside of China. In both
cases China is seen as a source of miracles: a child, a recovery.
So if you want to get a different view of China, check out the growing number of blogs written by foreign patients who have traveled from around the world to get treatments at Nanshan Hospital and at Dr. Hong Huangyun’s Beijing Xishan Institute for Neuroregeneration and Functional Recovery. You can find a blogroll of such blogs at China Stem Cell News,
a savvy, well-produced English language website that introduces readers
to the companies, hospitals, and people engaged in the stem cell
treatment market in China.
A bit of background on the phenomena. A June 2006 Boston Globe article describes the most famous of the stem-cell therapists, Dr. Huang Hongyun:
Hundreds of patients from across the United States and around the world
have flocked to his Beijing surgery practice, where Huang implants
cells with what he says are amazing healing powers...Huang says he injects his patients with "olfactory ensheathing cells."
These cells are thought to help nerves repair themselves by releasing
growth factors. The cells have been shown to repair nerves in animals,
but there is no evidence they help people. Working at Chaoyang and West Hills (Xishan) hospitals, Huang’s team
extracts these cells from aborted fetuses and then opens up a hole in
the patient’s brain or spinal cord, injecting the cells.
The first Western scientific evaluation of Huang’s work was published in the journal Neurorehabilitation and Neural Repair, and concludes: No clinically useful sensorimotor, disability, or autonomic improvements were found.
Continue reading ‘China’s stem-cell therapy blogs’
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The Bus Uncle meme has made it onto a song by a HK group called 軟硬天師 (Soft Hard). The song is called 拍膊頭 (Shoulder Pat), and the CD is called "Long Time No See."
Yahoo HK’s page for the album.
Buy at YesAsia!
Thanks Josh for the tip!
P.S. Those are the two members of Soft Hard, and yes, their costumes are meant to be silly (and satirical of Ultraman and Masked Rider ones).
Update: The costumes were created for this McDonalds commercial, also featuring HK popstar Eason Chan.
Do you translate articles from Chinese into English regularly? Have you translated half of an article only to suddenly see that blogger XXX just released a translation? Do you want help on your translations?
If you identify with these concerns, then the chinesecontent community is for you. Its members include A-list China bloggers such as Roland Soong of ESWN fame, Oiwan from Interlocals.net, and of course, our very own Lyn Jeffrey.
Here’s my two cents: If you’re a devoted blogger, and wish to tap into the greater community of China bloggers, throw your name on the wiki (it’s an open membership).
Why haven’t I joined? I usually don’t translate anything newsbreaking that anyone else is looking at, and I don’t really have the spare time to delve into the community.
http://chinesecontent.wikispaces.com/
Via the Asian Studies WWW Monitor, this set of 1940s Tibet photos taken by an American army expedition sent to Tibet from India to see about getting supplies to the KMT. The collection of over 200 black and white photos is maintained by Dr Rob Linrothe, Associate Professor and Director of Art History at Skidmore College. A few were published in the early 1980s but many remain unidentified.
This photograph by Tolstoy is published in Tibet: The
Sacred Realm (p. 101) where it is captioned: Dancers in Cham dance,
1943." It also appears in Tolstoy’s National Geographic
article, where the caption mentions that it was taken at Gyantse.
Presumably, the other photgraphs of masked and unmasked dancers were
also taken at Gyantse.
Something to keep an eye on: Ultimate Springboard 3D Virtual Community 终极跳板３D 虚拟社区, a new community site for Chinese virtual world residents and creators. Its slogan, written along both sides, is "Your world, your dream. Virtual community helps you grow up." The site has articles and tips on how to make money, how to create objects, and so on, mostly for Second Life. But there are also photos and the latest flash clip from the Chinese virtual world, HiPiHi–here’s a HiPiHi interior that looks uncannily like so many Chinese bars, for instance, don’t you think?!
See also Kaiser Kuo’s Feb 28 post on Ich Bin Ein Beijinger, where he ruminates on HiPiHi: Also really curious to see what kind of scripts people write. Who
knows? Someone might do good business making paired marble lions for
people can flank their doorways with. Or selling a two-handed namecard
hand-off script.
(via Zafka’s bookmarks on del.icio.us)
I like going to Google Video and Youtube every now and then and doing some searching in English and Chinese for different China-related topics. You never know what will turn up, and the randomness is the fun of it. Today I checked out the variety on Vimeo, a sort-of hipster’s Youtube. Searching "China" reveals 17 pages of videos, everything from slice-of-Beijing Beijing night market and Tian’anmen kite-flying, to Meet a Chinese (self-intro of a young Chinese guy at an American prep school). These kinds of videos let us experience certain kinds of places that we might not want to visit in real life, such as this crazy amusement park-style supermarket in Shenyang, or inside this Wuhan nightclub.
Most seem to be made by non-Chinese folks, visiting or living in China, except for a series by Hangzhou blogger (and Lost fan) Vincent Du, who treats us to a group of Bosch friends singing for one another at a dinner–a great Chinese custom, if you ask me, even though it can be painful if you’re not used to singing in public.
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