A friend mentioned this to me when I was back in Hong Kong: Young professionals, after overworking themselves far past midnight, gather in McDonalds armed with… PSPs and Nintendo DSs.

Even though they are strangers to one another, they will get together for a good multiplayer game of, say, Monster Hunter. It’s popular enough that one local gaming magazine published a list of McDonalds to play.

They even offer 20 whole minutes of free Wifi! (Free Wifi is not easy to find in Hong Kong.)

Siliconera and Kotaku have more on this topic. Image taken from this post.

And I checked the website, which said they were co-hosting “over 800 events nationwide spanning art, design, cuisine, culture, science, business, technology, education and sport [that] will capture the imagination and advance the UK public’s understanding of China.”

Their lineup seems pretty impressive, and includes these works:

Above by Chen Shaohua, 1992

Above by Ji Ji, 2006.

There is, in addition, an educational component:

Lastly, they even conjured up a clever marketing ploy: To put paper pigeons in Leicaster Square that act as discount coupons:

For more information, see the HSBC Cultural Exchange website.

Question: Are there similar corporate program(me)s in the US?

From PFSK:

“While single-use chopsticks may be a convenient option for restaurant owners and patrons alike, there is a small group of Chinese DIY designers and young environmentalists who are taking initiative to counter their use. One such group called ‘Unigreen’ has made an open offer online to hand-stitch a free chopstick / soup spoon holder for anyone who pledges to only carry reusable chopsticks.

Original post on PSFK. More pictures of chopstick bags from Unigreen’s blog.

“The ecstatically romantic story of Madi Ju and Patrick Tsai (Pat Pat)
tells you everything you need to know about the inspiration behind
their gleeful photography. Taiwanese-American Pat Pat was raised in
California and schooled in New York. Jolted by the Iraq War, he packed
up and moved to Taipei to seriously pursue photography. Three years
later, he met Madi, who lived in China, on the internet. They
rendezvoused in Hong Kong, fell in love, quit their jobs and struck out
on a pan-Asian adventure together…”

And presenting, the photographing duo known as My Little Dead Dick.

http://mylittledeaddick.com

i

“Wifi available here,” it says

Unfortunately, it’s just a convenient place for the telecom company to advertise that they are offering wifi… for a fee.

Correction: From a comment by Alex:

“Actually this is not true.  PCCW had been offering paid Wifi access at more than 400 access points across the city, a majority of those are from PCCW phone booths! (including all the ones with this wifi label)
They actually have AP built into the phone booths like this one which the company owns.”

Today there’s a piece from the World Bank’s Country Director for China and Mongolia, David Dollar, on possible scenarios for the rest of the year in China.  There are more jobs in places outside of the southeast, which is a good thing; but food costs too much, and a US recession and more expensive yuan could hurt Chinese exports. The Chinese government is trying to channel FDI into non-export-oriented projects.

Dollar’s most recent post is on a meeting he had with a group of economists in which they discussed possible optimist and pessimistic scenarios for what is happening in China right now, particularly the shift from exports to domestic consumption as a form of economic growth.  He writes:

The pessimistic scenario is that there is a sharp drop in investment as 2008 develops as firms and banks become aware that future profits in exports and industry more generally are not so promising.  Banks discover that some of the loans they have made in the boom years are not being serviced.  If these sectoral problems feed into generalized pessimism and consumer caution, then the overall slowdown could be quite sharp.

Another World Bank economist, Luis Kuijs, responds in a long comment with a slightly different opinion:

The expected slowdown of exports later this year will have an impact on domestic demand. I would think this impact will mainly be via an adjustment of investment plans of businesses in the tradable sector. Employment in the export sector will be hit. However, the importance of the export sector for job creation should not be exaggerated. In recent years, the “non tradable” sector (services and the part of industry catering to domestic demand) has created many more jobs than the export sector.

Inside: Tons of illustrations used without permission, and texts ripped straight from the Little Chimp Society site.

The offenders are listed as being from Hong Kong (see here for full details), but when the offended parties tried to contact them, they found out that the phone number was for an air filter manufacturer and the ISBN number was faked.

Are they really from Hong Kong then? Probably, but I hope not.

Via Drawn!

1
Famous Chinese Journalists Oppose the Carrefour Boycotts

“I would like to tell those friends who are sending SMS to call for the boycott of Carrefour that I happened to go into that supermarket yesterday and everything that I bought was made in China. This supermarket provides employment to several hundred Chinese employees. Behind the tens of thousands of products on the shelves, there has to be several million Chinese workers. If this boycott should work, China will be the first to experience the chaos!”

…he told the reporter that blind boycott of foreign countries will only harm China. This is the era of globalization, so why can’t we accept that point?

See full article from EastSouthWestNorth.

2
Being a Chinese, something I want to say

1) Most people, Chinese, American, French, whatever.. the ordinary ones, are not interested in political details. They just want to lead a normal and happy life. So it’s really a bad idea to say that “all the French people are evil” etc.

2) Due to some complicated reasons, we’ve met kinds of trouble. The Attacks to the Olympic Torch Relay in Paris really disobeyed the common goal of the majority. It’s not a good idea to mix sports and politics. If you are not a politician then you need to figure out enough truth before attacking the others or spamming everywhere on Internet. I have to admit that there are some Chinese people doing so in this post from my personal blog. I really feel sorry to see that all.

3) To boycott the western media / western companies is NOT a shortcut(in Chinese) for the Chinese people to be richer, NOR a shortcut for the China being stronger. As I will say later, to make our motherland be stronger and our people more richer, we’ve got a lot of things to do.

See full article from ifgogo.

(Latter link via Punk Planning.)

The story goes that an officer within Chong Qing city administration (城管) looked up 城管 (city administration)”on Baidu Baike (= Baidu’s Wikipedia competitor) and found the following:

“City administration… A mafia (黑社會) that bullies storekeepers unable to pay their rent or economically challenged groups with problems with their licenses… Adjectives: Cruel, bloody, frightening… Verbs: Beat, smash, rob…”

This entry obviously distressed the poor officer, who himself was part of the city administration. It only hurt him more that Baidu Baike is supposedly written with the consensus of the greater netizen population.

What he may or may not know, however, is that he’s a victim of the greater egao (恶搞: spoofing/pranking) movement that is making its rounds on the Chinese internet.

Yet why did they egao city administration in particular? 王清 suggests on his blog that it’s a manifestation of the tension created by past incidents involving the city administration and small merchants. 王清 even goes as far as to say that it’s a call for reform and regulation on the role of city administration across the country.

And what happened to the entry in the end? Since the entry was first egao-ed on April 3, Baidu Baike has fixed it and erased the evidence of the egao edits (see deleted entries in their revision history)… but not before screenshots were captured for a Netease article.

Original story, sources and excerpts translated from 玩聚 on ju690.

Cool: TBWA’s Olympic ad for Adidas.

Makes sense? I don’t know — yes, there are many people in China and so I’m guessing the theme is something grandiose along the lines of “standing on the shoulder of billions.” But it’s looks a bit like they’re competing somewhere in hell — not my idea of a good brand association. (Would any of my account planning readers like to chime in here?)

Maybe they’re tapping into some sort of macho thing — see my previous post on a GM car ad.

Via the Longyin Review newsletter.