Cup of Cha
This is China

Ever since young suburban taxi drivers started pushing out the hutong resident older generation, cab rides have been getting gradually less interesting. But there’s always the exception.
A couple days ago I was going about my business, on my way to meet some friends for dinner, when my taxi driver and I pulled up to a [...]

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My favorite Chinese sitcom “家有儿女” (actually the only one I watch) switched actresses on me. In a proud tradition that started on the “Jeffersons,” continued on “The Fresh Prince,” and most recently appeared on “Roseanne,” the show canned the original actor and pretended like nothing was odd. In the latter case they replaced the daughter, [...]

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China announced that it removed 200 million ‘harmful’ pieces of information last year from websites. The article is really short (the harmful bits were removed before publication) so here it is in its entirety:
China removed more than 200 million items of harmful online information last year, according to the National Office for Cleaning Up Pornography [...]

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If you’ve ever studied Chinese and then tried to understand someone from Sichuan, or Xinjiang, or pretty much any city, you know that for most people there is not a single language called “Chinese.” Standard Chinese, known as Mandarin in English, or Putonghua (普通话）in, uh, Mandarin, became the official national language of China in 1912 [...]

Continue reading “Are China’s Dialects Dying?” »

This year I’m spending Spring Festival in Ningbo (about three hours from Shanghai). I was a bit concerned that I was going to get stuck in those horrible toasting dinners where everyone is forced to drink baijiu (grain alcohol), but fortunately, most people here seem to prefer red wine. There are still a lot of toasts, [...]

Continue reading “Moving Past Baijiu (Thank God)” »

The Year of the Rat is here, and that can only mean one thing: two weeks af constant firecrackers crackling outside my window. China once banned fireworks in the big cities, but now they are back with a venegence. Kids fire them off, and so do adults. It’s a constant barrage.
Outside of stadiums people set [...]

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American politicians love to lament the fact that so many US manufacturing jobs go to China, but they less often talk about the service-sector growth that trade encourages. Based on my experience in China, the US will never lose much of this economic activity to Asia’s economic dragon.
Simply put, the service sector in China is, [...]

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Most of my friends in the States, and indeed, most of the mainstream media outside of China, is under the false impression that news only trickles into the the Mainland. Historically this has been true, and there are still remnants around, but if you can read or understand English, as many young Chinese can, things [...]

Continue reading “China’s Domestic Media Closed, but Gateway Open” »

One of the amazing theories many Chinese hold about foreigners is that we are somehow promiscuous and sex-obsessed. The not-that-subtle phrase that people use is ‘open,’ or kaifang (开放), literally meaning ‘open door.’ You might think that this would not have a negative meaning, especially since the Open Door Policy (改革开放) uses the same two [...]

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The common man in China, laobaixing, seems really mad, and it’s left me wondering why. In the last week I have seen two fist fights break out of the same subway station at 8:50 AM. The first one left one man severely bloodied, while the second led to an arrest.
This is anecdotal evidence, but I [...]

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