An exploration of virtual experiences and environments in and about China.
Presenting Hong Kong’s most famous graffiti artist and typographer…
And it’s true — I do see his work around town, when I am home. Unfortunately, he passed away in July.
See the Chinese Wikipedia entry about him for more details.
Photo taken by Frank Chan. Kudos to bad taste but smell good for reminding me about him.
Though to be fair, someone’s also done this in the US (in San Mateo):
Found at Paul Saffo’s journal.
OK. This is just…where things are going. Ten minutes of nasty American pop music, teenage hormones, voyeurism, and sheer curiosity, raging in broken English. From an Internet cafe in China to a bedroom in some (I’m guessing) Eastern European country. "You make me vidio/I kill you" and "I have this photo in my home. You give me." They make plans to talk on 56.com. Where does the music come from? How do they know each other?
Suezanne Baskerville is tracking both Second Life and HipHi (China’s own Second Life-like game) on her blog.
The latest entries surround HipHi’s hype in Newsweek International that led to a public beta, and before that various resources (forums, screenshots, walkthrus) on how to get around in HipHi in English.
And of course, some experiential posts such as, "How do you delete a fire in HipHi?"
Linked to from her posts, I found:
A great quote from a post on an English HipHi forum, written by the administrators, asking visitors to vote on HipHi policies:
"The genesis of HiPiHi world has gone through three development stages, ‘Sundering the Heavens and Splitting the Earth’, ‘Nu Wa creates Humankind’, ‘The Heavenly Duke Creates the Things’. During those phases, we witnessed great changes in this world, and now we are stepping into another brand new era where the economic transaction system and social systems will be introduced, that is the ‘Mirage’ and ‘the advent of the social organisms’."
Also linked from her blog, a great Newsweek International article photo:
With an interesting concluding paragraph:
"Netizens looking for raunchy sex will be disappointed—HiPiHi’s avatars can’t even strip nude. But Xu says there’s still a chance for romance; indeed, it’s already blossoming. One resident, ‘Wen Xi,’ the avatar of a woman from Hangzhou, apparently has several love interests—and she’s built a hip, bamboo-lined virtual bungalow for entertaining pals. She’s just the type of creative resident Xu and his investors hope will populate HiPiHi—but pioneers like her are scarce. Xu and Zhao have built a world. Now they can only wait to see if the Chinese will come."
Link to Sue’s blog: Unable to Connect — SuzeanneC Baskerville
"Send your location in by SMS at any time to 106920052131"
Wozone 我族网 is a free online social networking service that can also be used on your cell phone. You SMS your location and it tells you who is nearby that you might want to meet. It adds location to the usual online China features: chat rooms, BBS, photos and profiles, different "tribes" 部落 that you can search among including everything from geographic region to military interests. Most popular are fashion and feelings. Of course this kind of thing depends on a critical mass–the more users, the more valuable it is to other users–and there are no numbers on the site telling us how many people are using it. The locations themselves are quite broad areas within the city, such as "the zoo," or "Sanlitun" in Beijing. Presumably users could then SMS one another with more specific information if they were interested.
Here’s a screenshot of one Beijing user who has input his location at Tiantan and Dongdan over one evening in Beijing.
[Note: this post written by Nan Yang in Shanghai: we're hoping she'll become a regular on Virtual China! --Lyn]
I know three middle aged/old Chinese persons using internet, not only for fun.
Here are their stories.
The first story is about my mother and her internet lovers.
My mother is an English teacher in middle school, and she bought the first computer in autumn, 2002, because I was supposed to introduce an American man I met on internet to her. He was always online most of the time everyday, I got to know him when I was surfing internet in the computer center in city library in summer, 2002.
They started chatting in English on MSN since then….and now, with the time went by, though this man tried to visit China, but failed, my mother got to know many more men on the internet, most of them were strangers from social websites, such as www.hotornot.com, www.chinesekisses.com etc. She could insist on hunting for a boyfriend under the support of me, or I should say, because she really found internet hopeful and helpful.
She would rather having dinner in front of the webcam, just to show Chinese home cooking, and I asked her to come back to the dinner table, but she insisted on having dinner in front of the computer and chatting with her friend. One day, we went shopping and she bought a new coat, and when she got home she couldn’t help showing her new coat in webcam to her American internet friend. It was just like a fashion show, and the man overseas always praised her. Another time, the man in the US showed a cheese cake he made by himself, and ate it in front of the cam. I even saw him drank a whole bottle of juice!
But during that period of time, she had just one American friend I introduced to her, and just chat with him on MSN ( sometimes she used Skype to contact my aunt in Germany, and chatted with her sometimes). For the rest of the time online, she just visit some most famous website and clicked here and there without any purpose.
In the summer of 2005, I happened to find a very interesting website by accident. And then I realized it might be attractive for my mother as well. So I helped her register and uploaded her photo on Hotornot, and then her photo started to be checked and scored by people. So did I. And we even competed on our scores! She uploaded a picture in which she pretended playing my piano at home, http://scoreboards.hotornot.com/julin and during the first week she got 8.6 on Hotornot which it was not a bad score! She was very excited and got quite a lot of messages, and some of them from the people with stars( star means the people can create the content of the message by himself.). Then she could keep in touch with these people by Email or even added them on MSN.
Those days on Hotornot, she got to know some people and chatted with them on MSN everyday, since most of them were from America, she often stayed up late at night to chat with them. Last winter when I went home for the Spring Festival, I found a very interesting scene on her computer desk and it reminded me of the scene she was using computer at home…One computer in front of her, one TV set on the left handside, and one notebook with poems she copied long time ago for the purpose of quoting some sentences when she was writing to her internet friends. One of our biggest joys was marking people on Hotornot.
One day she told me, all the people on Hotornot were not real persons, and what they wanted wasn’t serious relationships…and she got frustrated but she happened to see another ad on Hotornot…which was Chinesekisses. And again she registered by herself and waited until people who was interested in her profile clicked on her and wrote to her…
Now she’s got two steady male friends she likes very much, for the first American man, she felt a little bit despair since we had helped him to come to China, but he was not able to make the schedule…Recently she talked with a lot about how she felt to her two men, and she told me it was painful for her to make a choice between these two men since she likes them both. This summer she’s going to visit Australia first and try to make a decision there, to stay with him or to go on hunting for another man on the internet…
The second story I want to tell is about a middle-age man in Shanghai, who’s a big fan of photography. I got to know him through a website http://shanghai.kijiji.cn/ and then we chatted on MSN. He told me that he was keen on taking pictures of young girls, and he has a website to show these pictures.
http://www.cdd.cn/home.asp?m_id=90827 Sometimes he would show me the new pictures he took, and chat about art sometimes. He goes online every early morning, and sometimes says hello to me in the early morning. But he doesn’t write blog.
The third story I want to share is about an old retired man in Shanghai. He has a blog, which I think it’s very cool and elegant.He describes himself as an old, just retired man with a wide range of interests. http://blog.voc.com.cn/taozengyan/ He showed a flower show in one of the biggest park in Shanghai recently. I was impressed by his positive attitude towards life and his energy on taking and sharing these beautiful pictures with other people.
That’s the end of these three stories.:-)
Kissing contests are spreading throughout China, with one popping up every few months. They’ve already hit SiChuan, NanJing,QianWei, and most recently Shanghai!
A kissing contest involves couples who compete to see who can hold their kiss the longest. The latest winners from Shanghai hit 5 hours and 40 minutes. And of course, the contests are documented on blogs and BBS’s. From 走走看看—赵静的BLOG:
And there’s even a Flash parody of it:
Original info via PostShow.
One of Sina BBS’s "HOT" threads last week: "People’s Congress Delegate Advocates Repealing Concept of Illegal Cohabitation, Do You Support?" It was posted by "eastinred," who kicks things off with a long response titled, "This People’s Congress delegate’s proposal puts the incidental in front of the fundamental," some of which I translate below. Eastinred reads a bit like a hired Internet commentator trying to influence public opinion.
The main post notes that a People’s Congress delegate, lawyer Han Deyun, recently pointed out that unmarried cohabitation only became seen as illegal in 1989 and is not actually against the Marriage Law. Since that time, according to Han, people have seen the practice as both immoral and illegal. Eastinred then responds to this news with a long, reasoned, essay. Selected excerpts:
"eastinred": As seen by the common people (note, I’m not talking about legal experts), cohabitation can be divided in the following ways: 1. Both parties are single; 2. One party is single, one party is married; 3. Both parties are married, but are not each other’s spouse; 4. Other kinds of unusual situations….Situations 2 and 3 are clearly going against our current law, and are already deemed illegal by the current marriage law because this kind of behavior is harmful to society…My personal opinion is that situations 2 and 3 must be defined as illegal cohabitation! What’s more, it should be cracked down on by the law!…As for situation 1, two single parties, we must focus on whether it’s voluntary. If one party is being forced it appears to be illegal behavior. Mostly it is men who force women, and here we must continue to fight against this kind of behavior.
Now I will discuss two single parties who are living together voluntarily. In this situation there is basically no harm to society, in fact it could play a stabilizing role…Some people are even just about to go through the marriage procedures…I think that the People’s Congress delegate was probably talking about these kinds of people when he said we should not label them [as illegal]. But our marriage law also protects common-law marriage, that is to say, although the couple may not have a marriage certificate they are still protected by law in many circumstances. This kind of situation used to be very common in the countryside, and has to do with tradition and educational level, and one thing about this kind of situation is that people surrounding the couple all see the couple as husband and wife, without any suspicion.
Because society is changing too quickly, the intensity of work (mostly the intensity of intellectual labor) is increasing daily for city people, especially in large cities, and there’s a huge volume of information. Marriage becomes a question of choice (people can’t make up their minds), dread increases (the fear of failure); add in the increasing mobility of the population and some pessimists adopt a kind of "having it once is better than never having it at all" 曾经拥有、别无所求 attitude. The two parties don’t care about the past and have no specific plans for the future (actually this is a kind of distrust in society), which naturally means an increase in casual husbands and wives. There’s something we feel sympathy towards in these kinds of people. At present we should increase safeguards and later lead them in the right direction. Increasing social safeguards will decrease the numbers of this group and this kind of precarious lifestyle, so that living a true married life will be more than just a dream for them.
Some of the over 200 comments had more to say:
My personal opinion? This kind of delegate is useless.
Second Life has no Chinese port yet. Welcome to HipiHi, a China-produced and Chinese language version of Second Life.
There’s been some buzz about it over at Second Life Insider, and at various blogs in Virtual China: LaoBai has written a post about it, and a Chinese blogger who reports heavily on Second Life was hired by them just recently.
Screenshots and a demo clip (where you can watch the female commentator’s avatar change into a more provocative outfit as her first task, get it here) reveal a rather unoriginal take on Second Life, though their website claims that they will later provide Flash & cell phone interfaces to the virtual world.
They’re still in private beta right now, so there is time yet for them to define themselves as merely more than a "Chinese Second Life."
They’re hiring too, in Beijing, if you’re interested.
Yesterday I came across a Tianya BBS forum called Tianya Myself 天涯真我 (Roland Soong of ESWN translated it as True Self Community Forum…I’m just using the Chinglish version from the website itself). It’s the place where February Girl first posted her photos, and I guess what I’m writing about here is just the latest version of that: pretty girls posting pictures of themselves and having what seem to me fairly odd conversations with what appear to be strange men. Voyeurism in Virtual China. [Update: see ESWN recent translation of a fascinating article on the new profession of "Internet Promoter"--creating and promoting Internet stars).
"Chaseaini" is the post with the longest thread at the moment. Her Tianya profile says she's a 21 year old college student in Fujian province. On Jan. 3 she posted her first photo under the title "My first time posting photos, hehe." It was a kind of Chinese Britney Spears-esque/anime schoolgirl picture.
Since then there have been almost 6500 comments (including her own) and over 124,000 page hits. It's still going strong. It reads something like this:
Beautiful! Do you have any more?
Chaseaini: I hope everyone will use civilized language, otherwise, will the BBS moderator please delete them.
MM [meimei/little sister], I’m waiting, keep going.
What a beauty!
I’ve been on Tianya for 5 years and this is the first time I’ve ever commented on a post.
Keep posting photos!
Basically, as long as you’re female, after PhotoShop every one is a beauty.
Where is she? I still want to see more!
Where do you live in Xiamen? I can be there in half an hour!
She’s really extraordinary!
I’ve been on Tianya Myself a long time, but this is the first time my heart has been moved.
You could kill a man with these photos.
After coming to Tianya, I’m not going to porn sites anymore. The girls here are much prettier!
Over the next few days Chaseaini reveals a bit more about herself: she is not studying at Xiamen University, she’s into writing, she likes to write essays and poetry, she’d like to get published and wonders if anyone has any suggestions. At this point you start to wonder? Is it written by some Tianya editor to hook in male readers? It just sounds a bit too much. Then she actually starts posting some poems. Readers discuss what kind of role she would play if she went into acting. Several weeks and 6,000 comments later, Chaseaini writes:
Before when I posted my photos I was kind of naive, and just posted them for myself. Now I feel I’m posting them for my "you."
Just yesterday a new post appeared, posted by a girl called "Land of Happiness," followed by her QQ number and titled "I’m a 17 year old student. Photos inside. Please evaluate." 
The first comments were very direct: "More angles. Full body. No PS. No heavy make-up."
What are Chinese video viewers watching? "Her First Time"
她第一次做鸡 can currently be found on Youtube-esque sites across Virtual China. Since being posted on Nov. 12 it’s been viewed over 444,444 times on Mofile, one of the top sites, for instance.
It opens with a young couple and a voice-over in a high-pitched operatic style:
Young people today, love is sweet
but buying a house is beyond their reach
educating their child, beyond their reach
caring for elders, beyond their reach
buying a car, beyond their reach
The young couple is visited by a magic "artist" who shows them the way to get rich: 做鸡, which in spoken Mandarin Chinese sounds like "be a prostitute." The young man suggests that his girlfriend do it, and she reluctantly agrees. Together they visit the magical artist, who invites her into his room, leaving her boyfriend in the waiting room. "Oh my god," we hear from behind the door (in English and in Chinese, by the way). The boyfriend finally can’t take it anymore so he batters away at the door, and when he finally gets in he finds…you’ll have to see for yourself. It’s a pun that you knew was coming.
It says the clip was made by the Video Spoof Studio 影视恶搞工作室 for 500 yuan (about $80). However, a Baidu search for the Studio takes you to the VideoDVNet, a website run by the Video Spoof Studio, but on which I can’t locate "Her First Time".
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