Virtual China

Robot Soccer World Cup China 2008

"We are very pleased to announce that 13th FIRA Roboworld Cup China 2008 will take place in Qingdao from 22-25 July, 2008. We would like to invite you to take part in the FIRA Cup and Congress.

13th FIRA RoboWorld Cup China 2008
Date: 22-25 July 2008
Venue: Shinan Software Park, Qingdao China"

From FIRA.net.

(Image from Reuters/China Daily Information Corp .)

Sabrina's Beer Chicken recipe-diagram

Fun finding of the day -- a recipe-diagram for cooking chicken with beer! (Rough translations given in maroon.)

Go to original post (currently down) or photo on Yupoo.

Via Global Voices Online's Memedia translation (an old issue). Thank you tian for fixing my translation.

张小盒 (Boxy Zhang) wishes you a Happy Chinese New Year!

Happy Chinese New Year!

P.S. I really like this set of characters from 张小盒 (Boxy Zhang), but...

They do resemble these guys from Japan alot...

China's Hello Kitty talks about the internet

From a post on billdsue:
"According to this article, UUpark intends to make Leon the next Hello Kitty, and Sequoia and SIG invested $1.5M into the company in late 2006."

And so I went to check out some clips (not bad, not great) and then found some comic diaries, like this one (translations in maroon):

Cute. See more.

can we get someone like him? The Paul Potts story in China

I recently received an email from a young Chinese friend who mentioned being inspired by amateur Welsh opera singer Paul Potts, who won a British idol singing contest last summer.   I'd never heard of Potts, but a quick Baidu search turned up a wealth of Paul Potts videos on Baidu video and elsewhere.  Apparently the story of the nerdly amateur with a heart captured the imaginations of the British and American press as well as the Chinese (it can't have hurt that he sells mobile phones!).  Here's an excerpt from a blog post written by a Canadian Eastern European blogger:

with his hobbit-like pudgy figure, his crooked front teeth and his misty-eyed sadness, he personifies everyman. His talent is not propelled by surgically-altered, photoshop-ed good looks; his stories of low self-esteem and being bullied in school ring true to all of us who have been there. As a true underdog, he is one of us; he represents the millions of average looking people who go about their mundane days, secretly harbouring talents that they do not believe would ever take them anywhere.

Everyone loves an underdog, but as with many things from abroad that show up in China, the Paul Potts story lingers on in Virtual China as a cultural reference for Chinese netizens to explore their feelings about their own country.  In this case, some of what the story is about is the horror of China's popular "idol" TV talent contests and some distrust of how "open" a television show can really be in China today.  As my friend wrote, "many Chinese expressed their recognition for Paul Potts and meanwhile disappointment toward similar Chinese shows, declaring that Paul can never make it the same way in China."  Some online comments:

这才是选秀的真谛，中国的选秀，拼的都是背景和后台。

Now this is the real essence of a talent show.  China's talent shows are all based on background and what goes on behind the scenes.

中国的选秀是国情决定的，出不了这样的人。

China's talent shows are determined by our national conditions. Someone like this could never emerge from them.

...人家选修选出来的是paul potts,我们选出的是李雨春，多大的差距啊...要是英国人看我们选出的李愚蠢，只会觉得我们中国人的审美观和兴取向都有问题

...They elect Paul Potts, and we elect Li Yuchun, what a difference!...If British people saw our Li Yuchun the only thing they'd think is that we Chinese have problems with our aesthetic standards and orientation.

对！这才是平民选秀，因为这不是在中国。。。

Yes!  THIS is what you call selection by the people.  Because this is not taking place in China...

有谁认为国内的选秀节目能比上这个“胖子”？？？ 我认为国内所有选秀节目的冠军加起来也不如他
不仅仅是震撼人心  更重要的是他的那种精神 那种坚持不懈的精神……  、Paul Potts    厉害！！！！

Who thinks that our Chinese contestants could compete against this "fatty"??? In my opinion, all the Chinese idol shows' contestants all put together aren't as good as him, not only in terms of sheer impact, but even more importantly it's his spirit, that never give up spirit.  Long live Paul Potts!!!

LiLei and Han MeiMei

LiLei and Han MeiMei were the two main characters from a series of middle-school English textbooks used by Mainland Chinese students in the early 80s. I've unearthed a small wave of nostalgia about them online, including speculations on their love triangle with Englishman Jim Green and an annotated cast of characters.

Then some artists converted retro nostalgia into modern art, kitsch and a roadshow:

Interestingly enough, they also gave named them  李磊 and 韩美美 as they described in one of their first blog posts:

"他们没有中文名，我就先这样叫他们。试试看反响如何？大家有新意见么？ (They don't have Chinese names, let's call them this for now and see what the reaction is? What do you think?)"

Via Bigik.cn.

Dafen fine art factory district

James Fallows has a wonderful little post up on the Atlantic entitled, "Workshop of the world, fine arts division." Mostly his post has some great photos (like the one below) of his trip to Dafen, a fine art reproduction village outside of Shenzhen.

An artist and his "works."

For more, see original post.

Featured artist: Mayming

Featured art!

Mayming (= Semay Wu and Seaming To, two British-born Chinese musicians) collaborated with Michael England (who did the visuals) on "a short movie to a virtual film festival presented by Toshiba in Second Life":

Michael describes these as stills from an improvisational audio piece: "...I treated it as a game almost, with each of the artists entrapping each other with spells. At each stage as they ascend to various levels, the characters face spirits or witch versions of each other, hypnotising themes through music, trapping them in prison balls, et cetera. The piece submitted is the trailer for a live composite performance piece that we’ve been applying for funding for. Hopefully, it will be a large-scale, live cinematic piece."

Via PingMag's feature on Michael England.

You can also check out mayming's MySpace page for two sample soundscapes.

A pseudo-realistic photograph at the frontier of photo sharing

I was clicking through news portal Daqi and noticed this obviously fake yet incredibly evocative photograph:

The author is 麦田精灵 (wheat field fairy), and the picture seems to have been hand-picked from a non-Daqi forum: the 云南信息港 (Yunnan Information Port)'s photo sharing forum. The user profile doesn't yield much information about the picture's creator, except that she has contributed to over 20,000 posts on the Yunnan forum and that she can be reached at [email protected].

A Daqi editor picked up these photographs off of the Yunnan forum and created a feature out of it on Daqi's new photo sharing section (大棋图海). In this section you can check out the original source of the picture (a feature which is actually often missing on other sites), comment on the picture (actually links to the original Yunnan forum), and vote on the picture in two ways:

1. 送鲜花 = give fresh flowers
2. 拍砖头 = hit [with?] a brick

So far, the votes for this set is 28 flowers to 2 bricks.

How is all this relevant?

• This is another example of how China's internet employs many content editors or seekers to discover "hot" content to bring it to main portal sites.
• The trackbacks (being able to find the original post) is a sign of a maturing internet, in case this, at Daqi.
• American sites would use a thumbs up/thumbs down rating system, but the Chinese version is more graphical, and has more personality -- it's entertaining, just the way most Chinese people like it when it comes to the internet.

Coca Cola campaign in Hong Kong

A 7-minute video of a year-long ad campaign 可口可乐365快乐天（Coca Cola 365 Days of Happiness), created by McCann Worldgroup's Hong Kong Branch (香港麦肯广告). It's an interesting case study of what advertising/marketing looks like in different mediums (or as some may call it, "multi-channel marketing").

Warning: The "trendy" beat in the video drove me nuts.

Via Long Yin Review

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