From Quora, response written by Dashan (Mark Rowswell), the Canadian man that appears in all sorts of Chinese advertisements and TV shows with a mouthful of fluent Mandarin.

The original question:

Why do so many Chinese learners seem to hate Dashan (Mark Rowswell)?
He seems like a nice guy. Does he secretly eat children or something?

Excerpts from his reply:

Thanks for the question, which I’ve followed for some time but thought best to let others speak first. In fact, this question has come up many times in my 20+ year career in the Chinese media.

Very early on, only a few months after my first television appearance in 1988, I was in the university cafeteria line-up when two American students in front of me started joking to each other by saying “Hey, are you Dashan?” and “You’re Chinese is almost as good as Dashan” etc. I laughed along and explained, “Yeah, I actually get that one myself a lot, really annoying.”

“You think it’s annoying? Hey, at least you ARE Dashan! Imagine how annoying it is for us?” the American student exclaimed. I realized he was right.

Many years later, Kaiser Kuo wrote to the effect (I’m paraphrasing) that: “Dashan seems like a nice enough guy, but for some reason every once in a while I have the urge to punch him in the face.” I thought that was a pretty fair statement. There has always been something of a Mr. Rogers quality to the Dashan character – he’s such a nice guy you sometimes wish he’d make a cameo appearance in a horror movie just so you could watch him get ripped to shreds, and then replay it over and over on YouTube.

I often say that being a celebrity or a public figure is not who I am, it’s just what I do. So it’s important to be able to stand aside and analyse your public image as objectively as possible. That’s why I often speak of Dashan in the third person; he is me, yet he isn’t.

…

And, no, I don’t eat children (human children, at least).

Read the rest of his incredibly long and articulate response here. (Via Micah Sittig.)

An Xiao Mina (aka “An Xiao”, her artist name) is an American design strategist, new media artist and digital community builder. She uses technology to build and empower communities through design and artistic expression. Her work has been featured in venues internationally, from the Brooklyn Museum to Shanghai’s Xindanwei, and in publications like The New York Times, The Guardian, Art in America and the Global Times Shanghai.

You can find out more about her here, or read more from her at the Design Observer or Hyperallergic. For the social media savvy readers out there, she’s @anxiaostudio on Twitter and Weibo.

1. From the Standard, “Versace’s crossover with H&M hit town yesterday causing chaos at several stores and landing two security guards in hospital…Just before the shop opened, a South Asian woman was involved in an argument with two security guards after others in the line accused her of queue-jumping. Minutes later she returned with four muscular South Asian men who beat up the guards and fled. The guards were taken to hospital.”
2. From M.I.C. Gadget’s coverage of the iPhone 4S launch in Hong Kong, “According to a witness mentioned about the dispute between the Hong Kongers and the South Asian, there were two Hong Kongers were warned by a South Asian man (whom believed to be a boss of the gang of South Asian) that everyone else to leave the queue or he would call hundreds of South Asian men to chase them away. Some queuers were frighten by the South Asian, and a queuer finally called the polices.”

(Via @penguinsix. Also check out his coverage of the “cattle pens” set up for those lining up for the launch of the iPhone 4S in Hong Kong.)

Jin Ge aka Jingle is a writer, documentary filmmaker, and NGO organizer based in Shanghai. Jin does sociological research and produces multi-media content on the subjects of Internet subcultures and grass-root organizations in China. Jin has been making a living off the bubbles created by the financial market and he finds the meaning of life in irony, parody and dark chocolate.

Tricia introduced him to me as one of the people who broke the World of Warcraft gold farming story (documentary here), and from his first post (which you’ll see shortly) and his recently established China Bubble Watch, his work is definitely top notch.

Welcome Jin!

Despite the worlds most sophisticated monitoring and filtering software arrayed against them, tech savvy Chinese jump the Great Firewall with ease. For those less computer literate, pirated porn DVDs and VCDs are easy to buy if rarely on display. Porn is big business on the black market. In one 2008 bust in Shanghai authorities confiscated over 8,000 DVDs on their way from Guangdong. Internet crackdowns are frequent; the most recent was launched in 2009, with over 60,000 websites confiscated and shutdown by the authorities. Pornographic materials remain easy to acquire however, through p2p services, torrent sites and numerous websites that have escaped the censors. The futility of the authorities’ attempts to police this area was illustrated by the Edison Chen scandal that broke in early 2008.

Read the full article by James Griffiths.

No explanation needed. Witty. Succinct. (Kind of cheesy.)

See their group buying deals here.

Yang Lan is often called “the Oprah of China.” The chair of a multiplatform business empire, Yang is pioneering more-open means of communication in the communist nation.

Yang Lan’s rise to stardom in China has drawn comparisons to Oprah Winfrey’s success in the US. It’s easy to see why: Yang is a self-made entrepreneur and the most powerful woman in the Chinese media. As chair of Sun Media Investment Holdings, a business empire she built with her husband, Yang is a pioneer of open communication.

Yang started her journalism career by establishing the first current-events TV program in China…

From CNN.com:

“They don’t know how to respond to my show but then they will start to enjoy themselves. Sometimes they will just sit and listen, sometimes they will sigh. They will shed a tear or two, they will laugh, they will clap their hands,” says TV host Chen Lu Yu.

“Basically if I can get a genuine reaction from them it is good,” she says.

Known as “China’s Oprah,” the 37-year-old TV personality decided 10 years ago on a trip to the United States to model her show, “A Date With Luyu,” on the American TV star Winfrey.

Chen watches Oprah’s show almost daily and while she finds the comparisons to her flattering, says it “much easier to be yourself than try to be someone else.”

From the WSJ.com:

The term China’s Oprah has been used for several female media personalities, but Hung Huang may be the one that comes the closest.

Ms. Hung, chief executive of China Interactive Media Group, runs a fashion magazine, has hosted several TV talk shows, starred in a movie, published three books and writes a personal blog that’s attracted roughly 112 million hits and a microblog that’s followed by some 832,000 fans.

It seems that any Chinese woman with a significant presence in media, whether on a talk show or at the head of a company, will get labeled by the Western media as a “Chinese Oprah.” (This ignores how the real Oprah Winfrey succeeded in spite of a really rough childhood and an environment of pretty serious racial prejudice.)

Image sources: 1, 2, 3

First, a warm welcome to ethnographer & sociologist Tricia Wang for joining our team here. As you may have noticed below, she’s already started on her first post. You can read more about her on her website or her work over on Bytes of China. I first ran into her work back in 2005 at YouMeiTI 有媒体 , and Lyn’s known her for even longer than that.

Secondly, as we’ve passed our third birthday (though it’s approaching six years if you count our previous Virtual China blog), we’ve expanded our About section to include a more comprehensive mission statement and history section.

Lastly, we’ve updated our left sidebar quite a bit – there’s now a much belated Archives section, a Twitter feed of updates and an email newsletter of updates, so you don’t need to rely on RSS anymore.

I’m extremely excited about the change, and we may have more good news to share soon!

In my recent trips to China, I’ve spotted various instances of Angry Birds merch and kids from all over playing the game on their PCs. According to their CEO, they’ve been downloaded (through official channels) 50 million times in China already. It seems that the phenomenon has not gone unnoticed at the head office. From TNW:

Angry Birds are officially going to roost in China after Rovio opened an office in Shanghai, which becomes its first ever international base.

…

Just last month the company took the unusual step of teaming up with an unofficial Angry Birds theme park which had opened in China, while all manner of fake items have sprouted up across the country – like this 7 inch tablet on Geek.com - demonstrating the huge appeal and potential profits that the company could make in China.

Don’t sue the pirates; work with them. Love it.

(Photo from CNNGo by Ye Xiumei.)

LEAP has a great article by artist Bai Xiaoci (who is responsible for the photos above) on the architecture of government edifices in China. An excerpt:

As material manifestations of Chinese political principles, China’s city- and county-level government buildings have also developed their own architectural aesthetics. State-owned design institutes are primarily responsible for the design of these structures. The skill level of these designers and the aesthetic preferences of local government policymakers have rendered these buildings of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century to appear as pastiches of bygone fashions and contemporary trends. The various government edifices I have photographed all employ some neoclassical elements: horizontal symmetry, decorative pillars, and lots of marble and granite. In the coastal provinces with relatively developed economies, some buildings feature glass curtain walls, but many others employ ethnic-style glazed tile roofs, emphasizing the political correctness of the nation-state.

With designs that emphasize order, these government edifices are always symmetrical in arrangement and cavernous in volume, providing a solemn sense of protocol to denizens and visitors. An individual wishing to enter a government edifice must first traverse a massive plaza, then ascend a massive set of stairs. From a bird’s eye view, the individual resembles an ant crawling in solitude across a taupe granite dish.

Read the full article.