Recently in On the lighter side Category

By BBC World News
April 28, 2008

Police in southern China have discovered a factory manufacturing Free Tibet flags, media reports say.

The factory in Guangdong had been completing overseas orders for the flag of the Tibetan government-in-exile.

Workers said they thought they were just making colourful flags and did not realise their meaning.

But then some of them saw TV images of protesters holding the emblem and they alerted the authorities, according to Hong Kong's Ming Pao newspaper.

Tibet independence

The factory owner reportedly told police the emblems had been ordered from outside China, and he did not know that they stood for an independent Tibet.

Workers who had grown suspicious checked the meaning of the flag by going online.

Thousands of flags had already been packed for shipping.

Police believe that some may already have been sent overseas, and could appear in Hong Kong during the Olympic torch relay there this week.

>> Read complete news 

Although Meizu has been stealing from the iPhone left and right, at least they have the courtesy to deny it. This other iPhone clone, however, makes no such attempt--they even plaster "Think Different" all over their ads. Check out the video after the jump, taken by geekmatica, to see what kind of tech you're getting for 1990RMB ($270), which includes the ability to shake the phone to answer it.

>> Origionally posted on Gizmodo

By REUTERS | via (uncensored) yahoo!news
July 27, 2007

A Chinese lawyer has sued McDonald's in China for using mostly English, not Chinese, on its receipts, violating his right to information, media reported on Friday.

The lawyer, identified only as Shan, decided to take legal action against the world's largest restaurant chain after he ate at two McDonald's restaurants in Beijing in May and June.

"McDonald's offers food service in China, but it does not use Chinese, which violates the consumers' right to know," the Beijing Youth Daily quoted Shan as saying.

Shan has asked McDonald's to apologize in newspapers and give him symbolic compensation of 1 yuan (13 U.S. cents), the newspaper said. The case began on Thursday.

The newspaper quoted McDonald's as saying it was not fair to accuse the company of not using Chinese as its advertisements and menus were all in Chinese and its staff all spoke Chinese.

The receipts had changed into Chinese since July, it said. The company was not immediately available for comment.

>> Read the complete article

By Howard W. French | The New York Times
April 07, 2007

WHEN Qiu Xiaolong reflects on his life, the path has an air almost of inevitability.

The arc includes an inquisitive childhood in Shanghai during the Cultural Revolution; studying poetry in Beijing, where he translated the complete works of T. S. Eliot; traveling in the early days of détente to the United States, where he eventually became a professor; and finally his status today as perhaps the most successful author of detective stories set in China.

Nothing, of course, seemed clear or preordained at the time. Not even, he says, for a single moment.

Life for Mr. Qiu (pronounced Cho) has been a series of accidents, though for him often very fortunate ones. At 54, like most Chinese people of his generation, he has been through an awful lot. But in telling his own story, there is a particular grace about this optimistic man, who pauses at the mention of great coincidences and laughs deeply at the mystery of it all.

Mr. Qiu, who teaches at Washington University in St. Louis, was ostensibly visiting the city of his youth to attend an international literary festival here, and to promote his latest book, “A Case of Two Cities.” This too, however, would be a gross oversimplification.

Shanghai is much more than his hometown. It is his muse, and it has been the one consistent subject of his fiction, the four Inspector Chen detective novels he has written so far, which have sold over 700,000 copies and have been translated into 16 languages, including Chinese.

Chinese? Yes, since leaving the country at the age of 35 in 1988 on a Ford Foundation fellowship, Mr. Qiu has written in English instead of his native language. The choice, which today sometimes displeases Chinese authorities, he said, has been forced upon him by circumstances in his own country — from the bloody antidemocracy crackdown at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989, to the many restrictions on speech, especially anything construed as political speech, that have followed.

He was reminded of these restrictions during his current visit home, when he wrote an article in homage of Yang Xianyi, an aging and infirm translator of Chinese classics into English. Mr. Yang became a hero to his generation of intellectuals for his decision to resign from the Communist Party over its handling of the pro-democracy demonstrations at Tiananmen Square.

When Mr. Qiu approached Chinese magazines to get it published, they were unfailingly polite but unyielding. “We’re sorry,” he said editors would announce with a smile. “It’s very interesting, but for certain reasons, we’re afraid we can’t publish it.”

Mr. Qiu’s first inklings that he might be able to write date from an experience that still looms large in his life: the hounding and humiliation of his father, a businessman who was labeled a class enemy, or tagged “black” in the language of the Cultural Revolution.

While his father was hospitalized for cataract surgery and temporarily unable to see, he was ordered to write a self-criticism. Mr. Qiu, who was in his early teens at the time, stood in for him, writing the document.

>> Read the complete article

By Craig Simons | Cox News Service | twincities.com
March 11, 2007

It's a Chinese form of "truthiness" that might make Stephen Colbert proud.

China's Southern Metropolis Weekly magazine recently reported this shocking news: The central government created universal health care for the country's 1.3 billion people, wiped out bribery and reduced the country's wide income gap.

Migrant workers in the southern city of Guangzhou, notorious for its sweatshops, were "happy" and "respected," the magazine reported in its print and Web editions.

Of course, it was political parody and all untrue.

Virtually unheard of several years ago, such blatant satire is part of a radical shift sweeping Chinese culture as Internet use spreads and citizens increasingly evade censorship by couching criticism in sarcastic humor.

China has become so awash in a new wave of sarcastic — and often subversive — media that the trend has spawned a name: egao, literally, "evil work."

The word describes "a subculture that is characterized by humor, revelry, subversion, grass-root spontaneity, defiance of authority, mass participation and multi-media high tech," said a recent editorial in the government-run China Daily.

While the government tightly controls traditional media channels including television, radio and print, "the Internet has given people the chance to express themselves," said Guo Xinghua, a sociologist at People's University in Beijing.

"Egao is a term for how average people are seizing back the discourse," he said.

Last year, the Chinese government issued a list of "Eight Honors and Eight Shames" as part of a campaign to promote morality within the Communist Party. The list included such instructions as "Love the country; do it no harm."

Chinese Web users quickly posted their own lists on the Internet.

One parody included the couplet, "Love your Mercedes and BMW; do not ride a bicycle," which some readers considered an attack on rampant official corruption.

Despite government attempts to limit access to many Web sites, the number of Chinese Internet users has quadrupled since 2001 and reached 137 million last December, according to the China Internet Network Information Center.

>> Read the complete article