The missing context that plagues tech reporting about China

July 5, 2021 by An Xiao Mina

An Xiao Mina writes in the Columbia Journalism Review:

One problem I see is that many journalists reporting on Chinese technology have limited experience reporting within and about China. They might not fully understand the economic and media aims of the Chinese Communist Party, the Chinese language, or the underlying logic of global capitalism. China has a population of…

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Hong Kong Book Fair 2017: mainstream supermarkets persist as indies find their own voice

July 24, 2017 by Jason Li

A motley crew of publishers, booksellers, NGOs and education companies descended in Hong Kong this year for the 2017 Book Fair. This odd mixture is nothing new (as we noted in 2015 and 2016), and if anything this year’s fair was a more muted affair with fewer dazzling displays, only one large-sized English-language booth, and a rather…

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Our very own job board for tech/media/design in Asia

July 2, 2015 by Jason Li

88 Gong screenshot

We’ve been pretty quiet about it, but a while back, Tricia and I got together with our friend Adrianna to launch 88 Gong – the world’s first job board for tech/media/design gigs in Asia. Since its inception, we’ve had over 400 postings featuring jobs from not only China but also India, Singapore, Malaysia and countless other places. Plus, we’ve been…

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Ethnography of Tech · Multi Entry

Three Moments With WeChat

May 13, 2015 by Christina Xu

On the morning of his wedding day, my cousin’s fiancé waited impatiently for Likes so that he could retrieve his bride.

Inside the apartment building, he and his groomsmen would have other trials to face: drinking vile concoctions of vinegar and wasabi, doing pushups, and liberally bribing everyone for hints to impossible trivia questions. But…

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What the internet users in China thought about the China-themed Met Gala

May 5, 2015 by Christina Xu

Weibo users applauded Rihanna’s choice of a Chinese designer (Guo Pei) for her dress, but there were also a lot of joking comparisons of her dress to an omelet or egg crepe...

This year’s Met Gala had the unfortunate theme “China: Through the Looking Glass”, which was, according to their curators, “not about China per se, but about a China that exists as a collective fantasy.”

Um. Oookay.

But what did the 600 million or so internet users in “China per se” think about the…

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Support citizen journalism around the environment in China

April 28, 2015 by Jason Li

Check out chinadialogue’s Kickstarter campaign to set up this year’s Citizen Journalist Award for environmental reporting in China.

Father-child reality TV show also a hit in China

December 30, 2013 by Jason Li

Where Are We Going, Dad? (爸爸去哪儿) is a reality TV show starring celebrity fathers and their kids, the latest Korean import that’s a huge hit in China. In it, father-child duos compete with one another on tasks assigned by show organizers. We get to watch as awkward fathers try their hand at parenting, a practice that, in China and in South Korea, typically…

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Decoding the ‘voice of China’ through media reports

September 5, 2012 by Graham Webster

As U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wraps up meetings today in Beijing, it’s hard to say how her most recent Asia-Pacific trip has gone. And that’s partly because interpreting media reports from the Chinese side is more art than science.

When Clinton was in the Cook Islands, Voice of America captured media consensus with the headline “U.S. And China Soften…

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Black market pornography is big

November 22, 2011 by Jason Li

From Danwei’s A brief history of Chinese porn:

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…

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There are three “Oprahs” in China

November 10, 2011 by Jason Li

From TED’s speaker bios:

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…

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八八吧 · 88 Bar

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