:: for more from QQ Zhao on NeochaEDGE, link here.  // AjS

This post was originally published on NeochaEDGE, a site I regularly contribute to. To see more of my posts on NeochaEDGE, link here.

NeochaEDGE is a daily-curated, bilingual website and discovery engine dedicated to showcasing leading-edge creative content and emerging youth culture in China.

:: here are five more examples of the fascinating Chinese Internet slang and memes that today’s local netizens are all about. This installment ranges from memes inspired by government-speak (“pressure difference”) and the depressed economy (“to be found a job”), to imports from Korea and Japan. Two examples trace the progress of a meme from its use as an inconsequential piece of Internet fluff to its roll in larger commercial or charitable endeavors.

brother chun / brother zeng (春哥 / 曾哥) ::
Li Yuchun and Zeng Yike, both tomboyish Super Girl stars whose androgynous style is a key factor contributing to their popularity. When Li won the competition back in 2005, she appealed to many female fans because she seemed like a liberator who cast off social constraints, and she gave confidence to women who fell short of the cultural ideal. On the other hand, there are those who think “she looks like a man.” The Brother Chun meme is due to this second group. The initial catchphrase was “Brother Chun is All Man, A Real Iron-man” (春哥纯爷们, 铁血真汉子) and sparked an online explosion of photoshopped images that combined Li’s head and men’s bodies. It soon transformed into a parody cult, with Li’s head ’shopped onto the bodies of the icons of various religions, all captioned with “Believe in Chun brother and live forever” (信春哥，得永生) Since then, there have been other variations in a more materialistic vein: “Believe in Chun brother and you will not fail your exams (新春哥，不挂科), and “Believe in Chun brother and make a fortune” (信春哥，发大财).With an Internet culture in China that seems able to turn everything into entertainment, these memes spread quite fast and also extended their influence to the offline world. “All man” (纯爷们) or even just 纯 (pure) has gone on to be a general reference to “male quality” with a humorous undertone (the term was notably used by mincing comedian Xiao Shenyang at this year’s Spring Festival Gala, the biggest annual mainstream media / entertainment event in China). Brother Chun even has been exploited for commercial gain: an expansion released in June for the Chinese edition of the video game MapleStory (冒险岛：骑士团的逆袭), run by Shanda, echoed the meme in its advertising: “Help Brother Chun: Exterminate the Spring Dove and Gain Eternal Life” (助春哥，灭春鸽，得永生). Zeng Yike had her own set of fans and slightly obsessed anti-fans who copied the Brother Chun phenomenon wholesale – “Brother Zeng,” male body photoshops (particularly Stallone), slogans, a parody cult, and an ugly undercurrent of misogyny.

jia junpeng, postcards, & loneliness (贾君鹏 / 明信片 / 寂寞) ::
On July 16 a post appeared on the Baidu World of Warcraft Postbar (魔兽贴吧) that read simply, “Jia Junpeng, your mom wants you to go home for dinner” (贾君鹏你妈妈喊你回家吃饭). The short post – nothing more than the title, and no clue as to the identity of Jia Junpeng – highlighted the intensity of gaming culture on the Chinese Internet: eating and sleeping in web cafes without going home to eat. By the end of the day the postreportedly had more than 4 million views and 300,000 comments. A Beijing-based media company later claimed that the phrase was a viral marketing ploy, although there are other competing theories as to its origins. Jia himself was never found (see ChinaHush for more). Like other memes, Jia Junpeng has been Photoshopped extensively: Saddam Hussein, films stills, and comics, among other settings (see chinaSMACK for more images). It was also harnessed for other causes: “Taiwan, your motherland wants you to come home for dinner”). The Jia Junpeng meme, with its mention of “dinner” and a reference to the non-loneliness of being with family, was a natural complement for an earlier WoW meme, “Brother’s not eating dinner, I’m eating loneliness” (哥吃的不是面, 是寂寞), which appeared accompanied by a picture of a young man and a bowl of noodles after WoW suspended operations on June 7. Without a game to play, online groups sprang up: the “Loneliness Group” (寂寞派) and the Loneliness (Political) Party (寂寞党), and the catchphrase structure gave rise to many variations, such as “I’m not posting a post, I’m posting loneliness” (我发的不是帖子, 是寂寞). Jia Junpeng took on another dimension when the Amoiist, a blogger from Xiamen, was detained by police in July 2009 for posting an appeal video about a rape and murder. After his arrest, other netizens got involved to save the blogger, whose real name was Guo Baofeng (郭宝峰). They twittered “Guo Baofeng, your mum wants you to go home for dinner” in Chinese and English, and organized a drive to send postcards bearing that message to the Mawei prison where Guo was being held. He was eventually released, and whether or not the postcards had anything to do with it, the campaign captured the attention of the major mainstream media (See The Time Weekly 时代周报). And both Jia Junpeng and loneliness have been appropriated as t-shirt slogans. Mengtoy, a T-Shirt and plush toy company with a shop on Taobao.com, features t-shirts bearing the slogan “WoW: your mom wants you to go home for dinner,” and “MoM: I’m not eating dinner, I’m eating loneliness,” cleverly inverting the WoW into MoM.

passive actions: 被 ::
被 (bèi) is a passive marker in Chinese language, but when it’s used with verbs that aren’t normally thought of in passive terms, it represents futility in the face of external circumstances beyond your own control. It’s a familiar linguistics structure – remember back to last May when donations were being solicited for the Wenchuan Earthquake recovery effort, and 被捐款 (bèi juānkuǎn), “to be donated”, indicated that a “voluntary” contribution was automatically (sometimes unwillingly) deducted from many people’s salary. But involuntary donations apparently take place all the time, and they’ve been on the rise following the damage wrought on Taiwan by typhoon Morakot. This June, recent graduates exposed a dodgy strategy that some colleges use to inflate their successful employment statistics: they require students to provide proof of employment before they can obtain a diploma, or they cook up fake employment contracts and recruit graduates into non-existent jobs. The term 就业 (jiùyè) means “to find a job”; made passive, 被就业 (bèi jiùyè) indicates that the job-seeker finds themselves with an employment contract without actually having any of the benefits or responsibilities that come with a job: work and a salary, for example. In July, 被增长 (bèi zēngzhǎng, “to be increased”) hit the net. 增长 (zēngzhǎng), means “gain”, and is used to describe economic gains, increases in satisfaction rates, and other rising trends. When it’s applied passively, “to have been increased” indicates that someone is part of a statistical group whose numbers have risen without any actual gains being made. (This happens more than frequently in China.) The term seems to stem from a blog post made by commentator Xia Yucai, who wrote “My income has ‘been increased’ by the State Statistics Bureau” (我的收入在国家统计局那里“被增长”了). Finally, in late July and early August, 全勤 (quán qín), “perfect attendance,” has also been taken passive, 被全勤 (bèi quánqín, “to be perfect attendanced”), to describe workers who don’t take any vacation, not of their own volition, but because they are unable to take time off. Originally an isolated observation, the term took off in popularity because “perfect attendanced” workers form a significant group online. The question “Little white-collar, have you been ‘perfect attendanced’ today?” notes the demographic group affected by “perfect attendance” and many of the other passive memes.

Korean and Japanese affectations ::
思密达 (sīmìdá, also 斯米达) is a Chinese transliteration of a Korean honorific (하십니다) that is used as a sentence-ending particle in net-speak. It invaded Tianya’s Entertainment Gossip boards in 2008, to the point that people made posts asking people to please knock it off, and it’s spread across the net since then. There’s an undercurrent of anti-Korean sentiment to its use in some contexts (online jokester Chun Baba has the line “Everything belongs to Korea simida” 什么都是韩国的思密达), but it’s also used generally as a mark of sarcasm, or even simply a cute affectation that flies over the heads of many ordinary netizens. What’s particularly amusing about the mystery surrounding 思密达 is that when it shows up in the title of a web page (which pushes it to the top of search engine results), it’s most likely being used as the transliteration of Smecta, a diarrhea remedy for young children, so casual netizens who run across the term in forums remain in the dark, unless they take advantage of one of the many Ask sites, where the term is defined quite widely. There’s something similar going on for the Japanese sentence ending particle です, which has been taken into Chinese as 的说, most likely through soaps imported from Taiwan. It’s much less tied to Japan than “simida” is to Korea, and is mainly used as a cutesy, exclamatory sentence ending word. There’s a contentious Baidu Postbar devoted to the term where enthusiasts and denigrators fight it out through the use of other contemporary memes. And then there’s the meta-commentary: “The word desu was invented by the Koreans simida” (“的说”这个词是寒国人发明的思密达).

pressure difference: the Shanghai building collapse ::
On June 27, a 13-storey building in the Lotus Riverside development in Shanghai toppled over due to poorly-planned excavations for an underground parking garage. The building remained in one piece, and photos of the accident captured the attention of China’s netizens. Just as they had with the CCTV fire in February, netizens reimagined the scene in a series of Photoshops showing a Transformer attack, a number of Ultraman battles, and various other destructive events, including a visit from Brother Chun. The term 楼脆脆, “fragile building”, was the popular term used to describe the fallen structure. Just this month a building in Chengdu was discovered to have leaned sideways so the top was resting against the building next door, and it was given a similar name: 楼歪歪, “leaning building.” The official explanation for the Shanghai collapse employed the term “pressure difference” (压力差) to describe how the building was pushed over. The term was first mocked for seeming to indicate that the building itself was problem free (“blame it on the pressure difference”) and it now has been adopted for use in other areas of pressure (not just the physical ones of ground on building): A thread titled “India, be careful of ‘pressure difference’” was posted on Sohu’s military forums (印度，请小心“压力差”), and netizens have mixed the term with last year’s “Have you gone out for soy sauce today?” (今天你打酱油了吗) to create “Have you had pressure difference today?” (今天你压力差了吗？).

// AjS

[Friday 5 is the product of my work at Edelman Digital (China). Link here for the full Friday 5 archive. If you'd like to be added to the bilingual (English & Chinese) Friday 5 email distribution list, please send me an email at: adam DOT schokora AT edelman DOT com.]

:: Dominic Johnson-Hill, the founder of Beijing-based designer / hipster clothing-maker Plastered T-shirts, is now creating stained glass portraits of famous Chinese revolutionary figures. Five Chinese artists have been commissioned to create the pieces, and versions of Mao Zedong, Lei Feng, and Deng Xiaoping are already done – see below. Dominic says there will be more pieces, so watch this space or check out Plastered T-shirts’ blog. /// AjS

:: Chinese retro design has always fascinated me. Over the years I’ve bought more than a few 70’s and 80’s era Chinese books just for the cover designs. I recently saw some threads on MOP with interesting primary school language study book covers, so I thought I’d scour the Web for more examples from the 60s through to the 80s and share here, see below. It’s not only the images that get people nostalgic, there are a few dedicated souls transcribing the stories in these books.  // XD

[Xiao Du is a guest contributor on fifty 5]

:: in last week’s Friday Five, I focused on China’s “Post 90″ generation on the Chinese Internet. This week, I’ve decided to take a look at the other end of the age spectrum – China’s oldsters.

China’s Internet population may be dominated by young people, but Chinese seniors have a space of their own online as well. In fact, Baidu.com, China’s leading local search engine, recently launched a special senior-oriented search option that features large text, links to handy reference information like weather and stocks, and a categorized directory of major online destinations that oldsters might find useful. As nice as it is, it’s still a wrapper around a normal browsing experience, and to find individual Web sites specifically targeted at the elderly demographic requires a bit more effort. To that end, I thought it fitting to dig around and take a closer look at the Senior 2.0 scene in China. Below is a selection of senior-oriented offerings on the Chinese Internet.

general ::
The focus of China50Plus is pretty self-evident. It’s a news and information portal for people getting on in years, with a fairly extensive blogging platform and other forum tools as well. China50Plus bloggers post photos, reflections on life, and cheesy animations. And a blog purportedly by 99-year-old math professor Xu Xianyu (徐献瑜) contained posts about his interests, which included poetry as well as math, until he announced he was headed for the hospital in a March post. An English language about page explains that the service is supported by the Gerontological Society of China. Lots of BBSs can be found that target oldsters, but many of them are very low-trafficked and limited to a small community of users. China Seniors Forum (中国老年社区) is a moderately-trafficked discussion forum. The most active sub-boards are Making Net Friends (网友之窗) for new member introductions, and Learning for Seniors (老有所学), where members share information about computer-related topics like Photoshop, Flash, and HTML. “Setting Sun” (夕阳) is a gentle euphemism for aging, so many websites targeted at the elderly will include that in their names. The Red Sunset Forum is a space for seniors to meet people and chat; the most popular sub-forum is a virtual Tea House whose topics include word games and dialect exchange.

services ::
OldKids (老小孩) has blogs and forums, but its main mission is to offer training in computers and the Internet to the elderly. The Web site has a directory of off-line training sessions in skills like WindowsXP (in Shanghai), and offers video courses on the same subject matter. OldKid’s archives also feature entertainment offerings like classic movies and games. Seniors, get ready to experience Super Mario! (well, Luigi’s Revenge). Other websites help seniors with more immediate concerns, like finding places to spend the rest of their years. Older99 is a directory of retirement communities and nursing homes, with a wide range of other categories of aging-related information. Health is another concern, and God of Longevity manages to provide wellness information relatively unscathed by the flood of dodgy ads for drugs and supplements that cover most other health websites. God of Longevity has sub-sites for illnesses, healthy living, emotional life, and friends-making.

nostalgia ::
The Zhiqing (educated youth) sent down to the countryside in the 60s are getting on in years, and there are a number of online forums for them to look back on their younger days. Beijing Zhiqing BBS is aimed at former zhiqing from Beijing and receives a few thousand posts a day. The most popular sub-boards currently are Yan’an, which connects people who spent time in northern Shaanxi province, and Mountains and Gardens, which organizes outings for members. There’s a similar BBS for Shanghai-based zhiqing, which is more art-oriented, and for zhiqing based in other major cities throughout the country. For participants in an earlier period of Chinese history, Love Old Soldiers is ostensibly a website for veterans of the anti-Japanese war, although current active members seem to be mostly younger people. One of the site’s missions is to provide stipends to elderly veterans in need of financial support, as in the case of 58th Division veteran Duan Wenzhou (段文周).

offline activities ::
The Jianchen Cup, an annual exercise competition for seniors, hosts an active BBS on its website. The Cup is co-organised by the Chinese Health Education Association and is sponsored by the Shenzhen health products company King Soldier (深圳市金士吉康复用品科技有限公司), which means a lot of the off-line activities promoted on the site are also in Shenzhen. The BBS, too, is mostly about activities in the local area, such as this post about a the Guanhai Tai dance group. According to rankings listed on the site, the top three interest groups at the moment are Food, Morning Exercise, and Social Issues. (More Jianchen Cup info on Baidu Baike.) Old Cadres Home (老干部之家) is associated with the print magazine of the same name, and provides forums and information, as well as travel planning, products, and outings. And like other age groups, seniors get together through QQ groups set up for organizing dancing and other activities (one for Guangzhou).

companionship ::
Seniors need love, too. Old People Love is a website for senior singles in search of their other half. Users can search by city and availability. Another match-making site In Search of a Spouse is fee-based: VIP members can upgrade to send messages and add friends for 200 yuan for six months or 300 yuan for one year. A thorough help section explains how to log in and register for the benefit of old people who don’t know how to use the Internet (and other information about sending and receiving messages and check private contact details). The Web site also features a BBS. Oldster (夕阳夜话) is a BBS targeted at gay seniors. A photo sub-board is the most popular forum on the site, but photos only show up for registered users. ChGay, a website aimed at a wider age range, has a section for seniors as well as a group for May-December romances.

// AjS

[Friday 5 is the product of my work at Edelman Digital (China). Link here for the full Friday 5 archive. If you'd like to be added to the bilingual (English & Chinese) Friday 5 email distribution list, please send me an email at: adam DOT schokora AT edelman DOT com.]

:: anyone who reads 56minus1 regularly knows I love sneakers and that I’m a Ray Lei (雪磊) fanboy. So, there was no way I wasn’t going to like this collaboration. I’m just surprised it took me so long to find these. See below for two excellent productions by Ray, an extraordinarily talented multimedia designer based in Beijing.

The first one was for Nike’s Innov8 (创意沙龙) campaign and, I think, in support of the brand’s 706 interactive / multimedia exhibit last year in Beijing’s 798 art district. The 706 exhibit showcased – in a way only Nike can shamelessly pull off – 100 of the company’s most innovative accomplishments in footwear and apparel design. Pretty cool actually.

The second one, titled Moon Landing Plan, was shown at the Nike Dunk art exhibition in Shanghai last March. See Ray’s blog for some photos from the event, link here. Ou Ning, who also showed work at the exhibition, did a post on it too, link here.

Both works are great, and further examples of brands successfully engaging China’s creative community. Bravo, well done.  // AjS

:: meeting people online is not hard: online acquaintances can be made in general-interest BBS forums, through SNS websites, or over IM software. But finding love in these online relationships might be a little awkward, so a wide range of websites have sprung up to help Chinese netizens meet a special someone to spend the rest of their life with, or just to get together for a quick roll in the hay.

general match-making ::
Baihe is the premier online personals site in China. Founded in 2005, it claims to have reached 13 million registered members at the end of 2008. From its motto (“soul mates finding a happy marriage”) to the services it offers, Baihe is geared toward bringing people together for traditional marriages, not casual dating. The website provides a Soulmate tool that performs a personality quiz and tries to match users up with compatible mates. With its sizable membership, Baihe has large local sub-groups in cities across China so people can find possible matches close to them. Other matchmaking websites are job-specific. 91Fate is aimed at white-collar workers; the website specifies that members must have achieved at least a vocational college level of education. And at Central Meetup (央务鹊桥), the Chinese government has set up a website for single civil servants and party cadres. Aspiring members apply through the government and party employees committee and can then take part in special singles events organized by the website and related organizations. And Shanghai-registered gay portal BoySky has a personals section (阳光交友) that has profiles from men across the country, along with a BBS, chat rooms, and video chat services.

hook-ups ::
Some people may not be interested in long-term relationships. For them, there’s 9yiye (就一夜交友), whose name translates to “Friends for a night.” This matchmaking website is devoted to bringing people together for one-night stands. Newly-registered users are given 1,000 free credits, and the website encourages users to reveal their real personal information and participate in community-building activities by rewarding them with extra credits — 300 for uploading a personal, 40 for revealing a phone number, and 2 for posting a comment — which can be used toward typical SNS services like buying virtual gifts and sending phone messages. In terms of privacy protection,  the website allows users to send emails or text messages to others without revealing their addresses or phone numbers. Anticipating that one-night-stand registration could be used as a tool for harassment, 9yiye threatens to report people who fill in false information to the police. Currently, users are predominately male. There are countless other dodgy BBS forums that get thousands of comments a day in forums devoted to hookups. A random example is Avi4, which divides hookup requests by region and has other sub-forums for adult content and other, restricted boards for edgier stuff like partner-swapping and bestiality (how much of this is more than just for show remains unknown — entrance requires VIP status on the website). The site claims to be registered with the Ministry of Industry and Information in Guangzhou, but its registration number which isn’t in the database, and it’s hosted in the US. This and other sites like it (search Baidu for 一夜情论坛) form a part of the Chinese language Internet unwelcome by the authorities but that seems to satisfy a certain need on the part of netizens.

fetish ::
S&M site SMNei is an SNS aimed at people into S&M. Currently there are 25426 members who can join various interest groups, like “bondage and dripping wax” sex group, which are only open to members. Like other Facebook / Xiaonei knock-offs, SMNei profiles include a discussion board, a message board, a photo album, and functionality for users to seek other people who share their same S&M interests, such as seen in user Zuqiandai’s profile.

non-traditional relationships ::
Asexual Marriage (无性婚姻网) is probably the most well-known website devoted to bringing people together for marriages in which sex does not play a part. It’s been covered in the mainland media as well as in a 2006 Reuters article. The site mentions various reasons for which people may be seeking asexual marriages – no sex drive, a desire for purely platonic companionship, or for medical reasons – but judging from the articles posted on the front page as well as the links bar at the bottom, the website is largely geared toward homosexuals who are seeking a traditional marriage as demanded by heteronormative Chinese society.

video chat ::
Love65 (65经典社区) is a social network site that offers games, stories, and discussion groups but is mostly devoted to video chat. It’s fee-based, and features “dancing,” “KTV,” and “private chat”. A warning banner on video pages says that the platform is solely for making friends, and that members should not tempt video presenters to do anything obscene or pornographic. Similar restrictions appear on other mainstream video chat sites, such as Liaoliao (聊聊语音聊天网), particularly after anti-filth campaigns. Nonetheless, there are lots of dodgier sites, many of which seem to be outright scams, that promote sex chat services. 3ren.com, a platform for building special-interest SNS websites, hosts a recently-launched Naked Chatroom (裸聊社区) to connect people for sex chatting. However, judging from the QQ numbers that get exchanged on other BBS discussion forums, and screenshots that circulate on adult image websites, most naked chatting and cybering probably takes place outside the browser, in IM software applications.

// AjS

[Friday 5 is the product of my work at Edelman Digital (China). Link here for the full Friday 5 archive. If you'd like to be added to the bilingual (English & Chinese) Friday 5 email distribution list, please send me an email at: adam DOT schokora AT edelman DOT com.]

:: a slideshow of illustrations by Neocha.com-user Raindrops. // AjS

[full disclosure: 56minus1 is a partner at Neocha.com]

:: bridge bloggers, who cross linguistic and cultural divides to further cross-cultural communication, play an important role in the Chinese Internet. There are quite a number of major projects that translate English-language content in Chinese, and countless other individual bloggers doing the same thing on their own. Below, we take a look at the other direction: Chinese bloggers who are writing in English about a wide variety of topics.

Although a number of these bloggers mention improving their English skills as one of their goals in running an English-language blog, that’s not the focus of bridge bloggers (pure English-for-English’s-sake blogging can be found on niche SNS Web sites like Dio English and on isolated blogs that people seem to be keeping just for fun). Bridge blogs are being written for an audience unable to read Chinese, one that’s possibly unfamiliar with Chinese culture, both online and off, with the goal of mutual understanding and information exchange between countries and cultures. Here are five categories of bridge blogs that range from straight-up translation, to original writing, to corporate tie-in blogging.

journalism ::
Some bridge bloggers work in a familiar format reminiscent of the mainstream media. Josie Liu’s China in Transition blog presents well-crafted articles about various contemporary issues in China. Liu has worked as a journalist for a number of news outlets, and brings a journalist’s perspective to the blog format. She’s also guest blogged at China Digital Times. Seagull Reference, a blog run by a “government IT employee working in Beijing” who calls himself Big Brother Chang, also focuses on newsy topics. He often mixes his own viewpoint into his summaries of the news. In a practice widespread across the Chinese-language Internet, Seagull Reference is spotty when it comes to providing source links, so while Big Brother Chang is pretty quick off the mark, readers have to do a little digging to find the original Chinese articles. The author keeps another infrequently updated blog, Rotten Intellectuals in China, which features short profiles of professors caught in academic dishonesty scandals, or who have made public statements that are particularly galling, such as Sun Dongdong’s suggestion that 99% of China’s petitioners are mentally unstable.

filters ::
Many of the most constantly fascinating bridge blogs translate Chinese netizen voices into English. Global Voices Online aggregates and translates blog posts from all over the world, and China is one of their biggest areas of coverage. GVO authors are a mix of nationals and foreign observers of the countries covered; for China, translators are drawn from Hong Kong, the mainland, and other parts of the world. Currently, Bob Chen, whose bio says he’s a Chinese student, posts quite frequently on hot topics of conversation among China’s netizens. Topic selection leans toward social issues and online reactions to corruption. ChinaSMACK is run by Fauna, a resident of Shanghai, with other contributors based in China as well as overseas. The site’s stated mission is to translate daily content from China’s Internet forums. ChinaSMACK pulls and translates a high volume of comments from a variety of different BBS portals (Tianya, KDNet, PCHome, etc), and captures a side of online public opinion that is not as weighty or angrily nationalistic as may be implied in other English-language outlets. The treatment is typically “tabloidy,” even when ChinaSMACK addresses the same themes as GVO and other bridge blogs. There’s an extensive glossary of Chinese web-speak which helps new readers get up to speed quickly. At the Youku BUZZ blog, Steven Lin (a former journalist) and Kaiser Kuo (a Chinese-American writer and musician) distill the most popular videos from one of China’s top video hosts.

life observations ::
Other bloggers present their own ideas directly, without a translator serving as an intermediary. Ifgogo, subtitled “Chinese in English,” is a collaborative blog for ethnic Chinese writing in English, the vast majority of whom live on the mainland, with a few other members in Singapore, Canada, and the US. There’s no grand mission here; the blog’s about page reads “It’s just a blog in English. It’s about everything.” Topic range from discussions of cultural differences, to reports on excursions, to relationships, to tech and Internet topics. Other individual bloggers sometimes start out consciously to be bridge bloggers. Monica Cai, an undergrad studying international trade in Beijing, launched her own bridge blog after hearing a presentation by Rebecca MacKinnon. It’s a fairly new effort, which the author says will focus mainly on the lives of Chinese students. Wang Jianshuo, a Shanghai IT professional who’s been blogging since 2002, also falls into this category. His posts deal with life in Shanghai, travel, his various hobbies, and general China issues. He tends to stay away from sensitive issues, and his posts and comments sections seem designed to foster mutual understanding rather than heated debate.

specialty ::
There are also specialty bridge blogs devoted to a particular topic. China Web2.0 Review covers developments in the world of China-produced and China-oriented new technology Web sites. Current authors are Luyi Chen, an information systems PhD at Shanghai Jiaotong University, and Tangos Chan, VP of China Growth Capital. (Link here for a 56minus1 interview with Tangos Chan.) China Web2.0 Review reports on the latest moves by established Web2.0 sites and the implications those moves may have for the mainland’s Internet. It also introduces new Internet startups. The blog of the Shao Foundation covers the foundation’s various cultural and social events and exhibitions. It features video, slideshows, and summaries in English of Chinese-language content. It’s arty, sometimes cutting-edge, and tastefully laid out.

corporate ::
Bridge blogs may also be useful for companies that are themselves engaged in cross-cultural businesses. China Travel 2.0 the “official blog of www.SinoHotelReservation.com,” is kept by Winser Zhao, who writes of the blog’s motivation on the about page: The debates are interesting. The difference is quite huge. I thought I should tell more about China to Foreigners.” Posts introduce various scenic attractions in China, discuss aspects of Chinese culture, and from time to time touch on current events. Winser is joined by Seasky, who is based in Shanghai, and Katie Yao, a student at Xi’an International Studies University. The “travel 2.0″ concept promoted by the blog and Web site refers to guideless travel, where all arrangements are made through a network of friends, similar to an online social network. The China Youth Watch blog, run by consulting company China Youthology, pulls back the curtain on Chinese youth culture and profiles young creative and trendsetting types. It’s kept by Lisa Li and Zafka Zhang (who are also in a band together), with ethnographers Helen Yu, Summer Xia, and Candy Yang. There’s quite a bit of depth in the posts, if you’re looking for a window on Chinese youth today. Link here for a 56minus1 interview with Zafka Zhang.)

// AjS

[Friday 5 is the product of my work at Edelman Digital (China). Link here for the full Friday 5 archive. If you'd like to be added to the bilingual (English & Chinese) Friday 5 email distribution list, please send me an email at: adam DOT schokora AT edelman DOT com.]

:: taken at a middle school in Chuzhou, a small town in Anhui province. The first photo below is the wall that surrounds the school’s running track; 人人都说普通话 means “everyone speaks Mandarin.” The second photo is of two classroom doors. The door on the right reads 请说普通话 with pinyin (QING SHUO PUTONGHUA) for standard pronunciation, meaning “please speak Mandarin.” The door on the left reads 请写规范, meaning “please write standard (Chinese) characters.” The third and forth pictures are just close ups of the second.

I am glad to see educators in lower-tier Chinese cities at least making an effort to push Mandarin. I’ve spend some time at middle and high schools in Shanghai where Mandarin still seems to only be an occasional thing. Sigh.  // AjS

:: I’m a TED.com fanboy – always have been, always will be. It’s some of the best content on the whole of the world wide wide, and It’s just gotten better.

With the support of NOKIA, TED.com is rolling out a major open source translation project aiming to present TED talk videos in 40+ subtitled languages, including simplified and traditional Chinese. There are already four videos subtitled in simplified Chinese (1, 2, 3, and 4 – many more coming soon), one of which is probably my all-time favorite TED talk: Jill Bolte Taylor’s Stroke of Insight. Enjoy, and share with your Chinese friends that perhaps wouldn’t watch without subtitles.

Related, TED.com is holding it’s first ever official event in China next month: TEDxShanghai. (Full disclosure: I am a member of the TEDxShanghai advisory board). Also, link here to check out TEDtoChina, a Chinese-language TED fan / community site.  // AjS

:: firstly, in case some readers don’t know, what does RSS stand for? Simple, RSS = Real Simple Syndication. Moving on.

With the wealth of information available online, it can be handy to have an easy way to aggregate and organize this information in one place via subscriptions to news sites, blogs, search results, and other frequently-updated Web sites that syndicate their content – an “RSS reader” can help u do that. Just to be crystal clear, an RSS reader is simply a program that helps a user read their subscribed RSS feeds by aggregating and organizing them in one convenient locations. Although many people choose standalone RSS readers, a Web-based reader is useful for keeping all your feeds (or subscriptions) accessible regardless of what computer you happen to be using (just as long as it connects to the Internet).

is a powerful reader that’s popular in the English-language sphere, and also works well with Chinese feeds. It is widely-used by more technically-oriented Chinese bloggers and netizens, but a lingering uncertainty over whether it will always be ‘reachable’ from the mainland makes local China-based RSS readers a reasonable alternative.

In China, RSS is a more mature area than other Web 2.0 technologies like social networks and microblogs; local RSS readers have been around long enough for several shakeups to have occurred in the marketplace, leaving names like Gougou and Topim nothing more than dim memories.

Here are five of the top Chinese players in the local RSS game:

Zhuaxia (抓虾) ::
Zhuaxia (“Grab shrimp,” a homonym for “grab it”) has been the leading Chinese RSS reader for a few years now. It features an attractive, responsive interface using AJAX technology and a full-text search of all feeds / subscriptions aggregated by the site. Zhuaxia’s administrators keep a blog where they introduce new features and occasionally present interesting observations they’ve made by surveying all the feeds in aggregate – when a worm or virus strikes certain blog providers, for example.

Xianguo (鲜果) ::
Xianguo (“Fresh Fruit”), launched in 2007, is a more recent entry into the RSS game. One of its innovations in the Chinese RSS reader market was to implement keyboard shortcuts for common actions. It has an AJAX interface like Zhuaxia that’s very Web2.0, and it offers a blog post ranking system (vote up / vote down) in the style of Digg.

Feedsky (飞递) ::
Feedsky is a Feedburner-like tool for managing feeds you generate yourself, and for finding feeds that other users generate. Since Feedburner is currently blocked in mainland China, this is a useful alternative. The system keeps statistics about subscription volume and reader activity and supplies a Firefox toolbar plugin. It doesn’t offer any reader functionality, but it supports feed searching by tags and categories.

POTU (周博通) ::
This Web-based reader started out as a standalone software program, which it still offers for download. It features search by tag and category, and supplies OPML files (indices of all feeds on a site) for a number of popular news and industry Web sites.

Feedou (飞豆) ::
Feedou (“Flying Bean”) is a combination RSS subscription / feed reader, collaborative tagger like the social bookmark system del.icio.us , and article / post vote system (like Digg). Other readers have these functions to some extent, but Feedou’s homepage is a list of the top-rated articles of the moment, which can be very handy when trying to keep your thumb on the pulse of online news.

// AjS

[Friday 5 is the product of my work at Edelman Digital (China). Link here for the full Friday 5 archive. If you'd like to be added to the bilingual (English & Chinese) Friday 5 email distribution list, please send me an email at: adam DOT schokora AT edelman DOT com.]

:: I received an email today from Woody Fu (a producer at MTV | iggy) introducing me to a couple segments he recently did with a gentleman named Christoph Niemann. I found them to be quite interesting.

Christoph is an illustrator / designer who created a children’s book called The Pet Dragon. The book also functions (unintentionally) as a 101 to learning Chinese language through its fun anthropomorphization of the a characters.

In the first video below, Christoph discusses the trials of making the book (he’s German, and English is his 2nd language – he has zero formal Chinese education).

In the second video, Woody tries stumping Christoph with increasingly difficult Chinese characters to make images out of.  // AjS

:: …first came the original, Huili / Warrior (回力), priced between RMB 30 – 65…

…then came the, also original, Feiyue (飞跃) sneaker, priced between RMB 30 – 65…

…now there is The People’s Shoes (人民牌), a modern, higher-quality and more comfortable, hybrid version of the above two, by Anton Brandt (who, by the way, is cool enough to donate a portion of the brand’s profits to The Starfish Project, a Cambodia-based humanitarian organization), priced at USD 42 (RMB 285)…

…similarly, there is also OSPOP. (One Small Point of Pride.)’s Skywolf sneaker line by Ben Walters, priced at USD 76 (RMB 520)…

…which is essentially an indie-hipster remix version of Tianlang’s (天狼, literally “Skywolf”) classic revolutionary-flavored Chinese military / migrant worker “liberation shoes” (解放鞋), and also the timeless Chinese electrical workers’ “boot,” priced between RMB 10 – 35…

…and of course, let us not forget about the recent return of traditional Chinese “cloth shoes” (布鞋) to the modern fashion scene, priced between RMB 10 – 30…

…and last but not least, my favorite, a shanzhai’d NIKE version of “liberation shoes,” by a young man who actually wears them during military training exercises, priceless.  // AjS

:: from this TechCrunch post it appears Stanford’s “iPhone application programming class” (CS 193P) has released a free Chinese language learning / dictionary application called “Qing Wen” (as in “请问”). Qing Wen is described by developer / student Karan Misra as “an extremely focused and streamlined Chinese-English and English-Chinese dictionary designed with the Chinese reader in mind. Lookup is meant to be fast and easy. There is just one search field which accepts anything you throw at it – Chinese characters, Pinyin, and English – and figures out the most relevant results. Since Qingwen is meant for students of Chinese, you can also easily add words to word lists for future reference and discover relationship between characters by seeing which other words they occur in and which other characters have similar sounds. Qingwen uses a modified version of CC-CEDICT as its dictionary.” Click here (direct iTunes link) to download the application from the Apple App Store.  // AjS