Category Archive for ‘Photos’ at Virtual China

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citizen journalism: outside a hospital’s doors

Published

on June 12, 2007

. 2 Comments

From citizen journalism site Moobol.com, this glimpse of parents and caretakers sleeping outside the doors of Beijing Children’s Hospital. Translated text and selected comments below:

Late night, June 12 2007, over 100 parents of sick children, and some children themselves, sleep on the ground in the underground parking garage and on the disabled ramp outside the doors of Beijing Children’s Hospital. In order to save the 20 RMB nightly cost of staying at the hospital, the underground parking garage has become a residence for the poor families and children who have come from around the country. The temperature in the underground parking garage reaches 35℃.

Selected comments:

Who would put up with this if they had enough money? Medical costs are expensive enough that taking a child to the doctor basically empties the family coffers, so the adults have to save when they can.

The Chinese medical system seems strong, but if you look closely it only addresses a certain group of people. It’s only the rich who can see the doctor, and those without money just have to take it. Exorbitant medical costs make the common people shrink and the high cost of medicines drives the common people crazy. Could it be that in the future the common people will just die on the street? The medical industry has so many dark sides.

Better not to have kids at all.

The long travel to Beijing to see to the child’s illness means that savings are long gone. The hospital only has beds for patients, why would they have beds for caretakers?

Why do people have to go to Beijing to cure sickness? It can’t be that there are no local hospitals? Of course they won’t be able to handle the high costs of Beijing. Even if people follow others blindly, they still have to consider their own economic strengths. Outsiders coming to Beijing is like Chinese going to the United States, it’s definitely difficult.

China’s healthcare system reform is being reformed daily, but there seems to be no affect; at any rate medicines cost more and more! It’s harder and harder to see the doctor!

Every big hospital in Beijing is the same situation. Last year I saw a couple who came to Beijing to seek medical treatment for their child. The mother stayed in the room with the child but the father couldn’t spend the 20 RMB for the bed and slept in a chair in the hospital hallway every night. For his own meals it was just two steamed buns, but he didn’t forget to buy his daughter some grapes or an apple each day. Pity the parents’ heart.

Shanghai’s foreign themed satellite cities

Published

Lyn Jeffery

on May 3, 2007

in Design, History, Photos, Translation and Travel

. 0 Comments

Shanghai’s One CIty Nine Towns program and foreign-themed New Towns are strange and wonderful things. All are collaborative efforts between Chinese and international design teams.

Shanghai urban planners are trying to preserve the center of the city by not building any more new highways, and by setting up 9 satellite cities, or "New Towns" far out in the Shanghai suburbs. But they need to attract people out of the city, into the outskirts–a tough job, unless you can create an atmosphere and lifestyle that one can’t find downtown.

Thus the nine theme-cities, seven based on the architecture of the UK, Italy, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Holland and Canada. The remaining two cities will be "Chinese," and one of those will a sustainable, eco-friendly city on the huge Chongming Island. You’ll find a short slide show of many of the towns as part of a recent BusinessWeek article on Shanghai. Fengjing is to be built in Canadian/North American style. Anting, with a race track, is the German town. The Italian area, Pujiang, is to be the largest of the nine cities with a planned 15 sq km and 80,000 residents.

British-themed Thamestown covers 1 square kilometer in Songjiang District, about 1 hour from downtown Shanghai. It has a lake, a river, a golf course, a Gothic church, a town square, and villas with names like WindsorIsland. Here is the Thamestown official website in English, with news about the latest commercials and movies that were shot there, among other events (boat racing). Thamestown officially opened October 20, 2006; here you can see the opening ceremony festitivities–Chinese dance performance against the backdrop of First Vision Creativity Square.

Thamestown photo gallery. I especially love the shots that took advantage of an unusual snow in Shanghai:

Luodian is the Swedish town. In a great post on Luodian and its original source, the Swedish town of Sigtuna, graduate student Ada Fredelius points out an irony: you can find more ancient authenticity, and even similarity to the original Swedish buildings, in Luodian’s old town, constructed in the early Min Dynasty. Luodian’s old town on top, Sweden’s Sigtuna on the bottom, below:

If you are in Shanghai, go on a FAR tour of the New Towns!

1/12/07 Financial Times article: Alien Satellites, here.

Cross-cultural analysis of MySpace profile pictures

Published

Jason Li

on April 29, 2007

in Photos, Portals and Translation

. 7 Comments

Let’s do a fun little exercise.

Let’s compare profile pictures of MySpace.cn’s China and international users.

Note, however, that we hold the international users classification on MySpace.cn suspect — the one profile link that DID work (for me) in the international profiles section led to a white American woman who’s profile didn’t hint at any interest in China.

First off, let’s take a look at the international lineup:

Myspace_profile4
Myspace_profile5
Myspace_profile6

We’re going to dub these as:

Vacation Cool,
Hot Or Not,
I Have Friends.

Next up, the China lineup:

Myspace_profile1
Myspace_profile2
Myspace_profile3

And we dub these:

Photoshop,
Webcam Candid,
Photoshop + Webcam Candid.

Granted, I refreshed the page a few times to select ones I found interesting but we can already draw some generalizations about profile pictures:

Chinese users do not feel compelled to present a "realistic" glamor shot. That is, they have little hesitation in using image manipulation programs to augment their picture. (This augmentation being different from using Photoshop to doctor up an existing picture within the bounds of realism.)
Chinese users have lower standards for their glamor shot — blurry and what i called candid webcam shots are in.
Closeups are in in China. Staring at the camera, however, is not.

Source: MySpace.cn–友你友我

Chinese MySpace: strange crosscultural platform

Published

Lyn Jeffery

on April 26, 2007

in Photos, Translation, Virtual China and Web 2.0c

. 5 Comments

Can NOT resist. Myspace.cn has just opened up and you must take a look if you haven’t already. It’s almost worth creating a MySpace page.

The front page shows 3 mainland Chinese users and 3 international users, and they can all friend each other. How do they choose who gets on the page as international users? Unclear. But Tom is every Chinese MySpace user’s first friend, as usual. Seems like there might not be that many Chinese users…or maybe not that many writing in English. Unclear.

Myspace_cn

Maybe Chinese users will pick up on it in order to meet people from other places; or maybe there will be a Chinese-language only group that doesn’t interact at all with people outside China. If the numbers pick up in China, this could skew most popular blogs, videos, and so on on MySpace. Hard to say what will happen. Some thoughts about what could be:

MySpace users outside China get to expand their friends list by…exponentially. Expect contests for most friends to move to the next level.
Chinese MySpace users get to make friends with some really different kinds of people than they’ve met before, like Barbie Gangsta Bitch, for instance, in the US. They’ll talk in English mostly.
Non-Chinese MySpace users get exposed to a wide variety of Chinese people: from serious as in DIck, 24, in Chongqing who wants to meet "the president of every country
the famous economists" to sassy like Kiki Lee, 24, in Shanghai. Chance to practice Chinese for all those kids in the US now studying Mandarin; chance to meet Chinese people before your next trip to China.
Chinese pages are for the most part uncustomized at the moment, but that will no doubt change. Everybody gets to see what the others like, listen to, and think is funny. Perhaps some trading and remixing might go on, new fads, new widgets, etc..
Indie music outside of China gets exposed to the Chinese market; and vice versa. Possibilities there.

old-school chinese cars

Published

Lyn Jeffery

on April 25, 2007

in Design, History and Photos

. 0 Comments

Came across this during my car roaming yesterday. The China Motor Vehicle Documentation Centre, founded in the Netherlands in 1972 and currently located in France, publishes a series of what look like wonderful books on automotive history of China and North Korea. They have, for instance, a book on the history of the Hongqi (Red Flag) limousines, made by the First Auto Works in Changchun, China, once the favored ride of top Chinese officials. The oldest cars in this book are the Dongfeng CA 71 (1958), the Da Hongqi limousines (1958- 1995), and the Da Hongqi inspection cars (1958- 1999).

Hongqi

Then there’s the just-out book on North Korean trucks and cars. From the website blurb: Trucks made by the Sungri General Auto Works, Heavy dumper made by the March 30th Works, Cross country vehicles made by the Pyongsang Auto Works, Trolleybuses made by the Pyongyang Trolleybus Works, Buses made by the Chongjin Bus Works, The Pyonghwa Auto Works

Northkorean_car

Also, Shanghai Saloons from the Artisan Era, describing all cars (production models and prototypes) made by the Shanghai Auto Works in Shanghai from 1958 until today.

The books are pricey, ranging from 55-69 euros, but they look beautiful!

非常真人’s photo-comic blog

Published

Jason Li

on April 23, 2007

in Art, BBS, Blogs and Photos

. 1 Comment

非常真人，非常娱乐 (Very Real People, Very Entertaining) is a blog that posts short, amusing photo-comics of every day life in Beijing. Whose life? In most cases it’s the middle-class youth. Even though I don’t find every comic funny, the photography and the postures employed in each scene are pure gold.

Here’s an example of an entry I found particularly funny (translation in maroon):

And here’s a link to a post where 小胖 (Little Fatty, blogged here and here).

Go to the 非常真人，非常娱乐 blog.

“day in my life” photo contest

Published

Lyn Jeffery

on April 20, 2007

in Photos, Portals and Virtual China

. 4 Comments

Citizen journalist site Moobol.com 直播客, which is run by China Daily, is running a "day in my life" photo contest that will be over on Wed. April 25. As described on the site:

Record the most real day in your or someone around you’s life. Is your current life busy or leisurely? A riot of color or boring you to death? Full of gratitude or complaints?

Here’s a day in the life of a Han soldier in Tibet, here, at the end of the day, listening to his selection of Yunnanese folksongs.

Tibet_soldier

Here is "my dinner: a can of beer and a half a cucumber":

Chinese internet old aged users: three stories

Published

Nan Yang

on April 16, 2007

in Dating, Photos and Virtual China

. 0 Comments

[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.:-)

shanghai + bladerunner

Published

Lyn Jeffery

on April 10, 2007

in Photos

. 2 Comments

Apparently my IFTF colleague Mike Liebhold isn’t the only one who thinks Bladerunner when gazing across the Shanghai skyline, especially Pudong. Flickr has 16 photos tagged Shanghai + bladerunner; Google images has over 4000.
Enjoy.

Bladerunner_shanghai
Pudong’s Jinmao tower in the fog.

(Tokyo is still the bladerunner grandfather: on Flickr there are 104 photos tagged with bladerunner + tokyo and 25 tagged with bladerunner + nyc and 29 with bladerunner + london and 23 with bladerunner + hongkong)