Virtual China

Suezanne Baskerville is tracking both Second Life and HipHi (China's own Second Life-like game) on her blog.

The latest entries surround HipHi's hype in Newsweek International that led to a public beta, and before that various resources (forums, screenshots, walkthrus) on how to get around in HipHi in English.

And of course, some experiential posts such as, "How do you delete a fire in HipHi?"

Linked to from her posts, I found:

A great quote from a post on an English HipHi forum, written by the administrators, asking visitors to vote on HipHi policies:

"The genesis of HiPiHi world has gone through three development stages, 'Sundering the Heavens and Splitting the Earth', 'Nu Wa creates Humankind', 'The Heavenly Duke Creates the Things'. During those phases, we witnessed great changes in this world, and now we are stepping into another brand new era where the economic transaction system and social systems will be introduced, that is the 'Mirage' and 'the advent of the social organisms'."

Also linked from her blog, a great Newsweek International article photo:

With an interesting concluding paragraph:

"Netizens looking for raunchy sex will be disappointed—HiPiHi's avatars can't even strip nude. But Xu says there's still a chance for romance; indeed, it's already blossoming. One resident, 'Wen Xi,' the avatar of a woman from Hangzhou, apparently has several love interests—and she's built a hip, bamboo-lined virtual bungalow for entertaining pals. She's just the type of creative resident Xu and his investors hope will populate HiPiHi—but pioneers like her are scarce. Xu and Zhao have built a world. Now they can only wait to see if the Chinese will come."

Link to Sue's blog: Unable to Connect -- SuzeanneC Baskerville

"music for buying dark landscapes": The Contractors

Check out one of Beijing/San Francisco artist Rania Ho's relatively new projects: The Contractors.  The group makes music, videos, photos, concerts, and apparently can even lead a mean art tour (see their latest video). Their MySpace page is not to be missed.

We are inspired by other superstar building contractors, high-ranking government officials, housing bureau officials, land management officials, special interest lobbyists, investment bankers, venture capitalists, media moguls, real estate investors, internationally renown architects, construction crews, welders, plumbers, electricians, bricklayers, cement mixers, stone cutters, various migrant workers.
Our aim is to rule them all.

"Fuc* GFW": coming to a t-shirt near you

From Chinese IT guru Keso's Flickr stream, a t-shirt with the latest rallying cry against Chinese Internet censoring, most recently of Flickr itself: Fuck GFW (Great Firewall).  Above, in Chinese, followed by "Please use Tor".  Tor is an anonymity network -- a free service that, according to Tor's website, works like this:

The idea is similar to using a twisty, hard-to-follow route in order to throw off somebody who is tailing you—and then periodically erasing your footprints. Instead of taking a direct route from source to destination, data packets on the Tor network take a random pathway through several servers that cover your tracks so no observer at any single point can tell where the data came from or where it's going.

Tor is also where you get taken when you click on a "Fuck GFW!" button on IT blog Herock:

Herock has apparently been hosting either a FuckGFW proxy or a link to a proxy for awhile now, as you can read here. No doubt the term has a long and glorious history.  But according to a Jeremy Goldkorn June 8 post on Danwei, this latest round was started by Keso's June 8 response to the blocking of Flickr, Fuck GFW post, which Danwei translates as:

In the global Internet, the better the website, the more likely it will get GFWed. This is the sorrow of all Internet users in this country. In the past it has been Google, Blogger, Wikipedia, Wordpress.com, Vix.com... Now it's Flick's turn ...

... 

I just have one character to tell those bastards: Fuck!

Memedia's Strawberry Weekly issue 5, in English

See Nan Yang's extraordinary English translation of memedia's Strawberry Weekly, issue 5, now at GVO, for a roundup of content in Chinese-language blogosphere. So much interesting content, there's really no way to excerpt it.  It's quite a bold publication. 

非常真人's photo-comic blog

非常真人，非常娱乐 (Very Real People, Very Entertaining) is a blog that posts short, amusing photo-comics of every day life in Beijing. Whose life? In most cases it's the middle-class youth. Even though I don't find every comic funny, the photography and the postures employed in each scene are pure gold.

Here's an example of an entry I found particularly funny (translation in maroon):

And here's a link to a post where 小胖 (Little Fatty, blogged here and here).

Go to the 非常真人，非常娱乐 blog.

Chinese blog collective, in English

Memedia is a Chinese blogging collective that, as I noted last month, is a project of Isaac Mao's among others.  It's going strong with its 6th issue (looks like the longest yet!) put out on 4/22.  What Memedia is doing is a quantum leap into opening up dialogue and understanding across the Chinese- and English-language blogospheres and other virtual environments.  Not only does it give readers a taste of what's top of mind for some of China's top bloggers, it gives us access to their thoughts on technology and society in China and around the world; and it then gets translated into English at GVO (by Nan Yang, who manages to capture the tone of what must be very tough translation work).  Of course, the blog posts that Memedia references are in Chinese and still unaccessible to non-Chinese readers, but this could have an ESWN-level impact if they can keep up the momentum and the translation.  There simply isn't anything else like it.

Issue 6 looks at everything from Twitter to the GFW censorship of Baidu Japan, from the number of Chinese sex workers to buying tickets to the 2008 Olympics opening ceremony.  Great stuff!

Blog analysis of 花花世界

Two interesting features I noticed on 花花世界 (roughly translated as "Beautiful World"), the blog of 原小娟, a well-known food critic and magazine editor:

1. As she was diagnosed with cancer, her blog's focus went from food & drink to her illness. Interestingly enough, some of the new posts meld the two topics together -- for example, a post about a herbal remedy.
2. Her blogroll includes "Husband's blog" and "Son's blog", shown below:

Unfortunately the child's blog doesn't actually seem like his own -- I assume his father ghostwrites it for him as he's referred to in 3rd person. It's interesting to see common posts that thread the three blogs together (sadly, these usually have to do with 原小娟's illness).

Via PostShow.

when re-posting becomes a crime

In case you didn't see it, Roland Soong at ESWN has translated a news item on a Hainan pharmaceutical worker who was detained for nine months on charges of re-posting an essay online.  The facts are not in dispute--on a pharmaceutical industry discussion forum, Zhang Zhijian had reposted an essay that he found online describing alleged fraud between another pharmaceutical company and the State Food and Drug Administration.  He'd heard rumors about the situation, and indeed company and state officials were eventually arrested.  But all Zhang did was search online, locate a relevant essay (we never find out who wrote the essay), and re-post it. 

What happened next indicates the fragile legal status of basic online activity in China, and how that legal ambiguity can result in the criminalization of pretty much anything.  Zhang became the target of the subject of the article, Kongliyuan Enterprises, which dragged him into legal and media battles, accusing him of deliberately seeking to damage their commercial reputation. Kongliyuan made three extraordinary demands of him: that his parents travel across the country to apologize in person to Kongliyuan; that he personally admit fault on the Internet; and that he compensate them with 100,000 RMB for their expenses!  What's even more extraordinary is that these charges resulted in Zhang being formally arrested and detained for nine months while the allegations made their way through court. 

start visiting startdrawing: chinese art

As my Institute for the Future colleague David Pescovitz likes to say, if you're trying to understand the direction of change, watch what artists are doing. That's why a site recently pointed out by another IFTF colleague, Mike Love, is helpful and intriguing. Startdrawing.org is curated by Singaporean artists Josef Lee, a designer / illustrator and JunMing, a cartoonist. They describe their site as:

a web resource portal for Asia's artists and drawings.This site was started with the aim of showcasing and sharing drawings from talented artists in Asia, and in the process, promote the joys of drawing. Our motto: Drawings from Asia. Drawings by Asians.

You can search by categories, including news, illustrations, concept art, fine arts, comics, architecture, products/toys, and motion.  Or search regionally: click on the China link and luxuriate in images by Chinese artists, some of them well known outside of China.  For instance, images from oil painter Zhang Linhai's latest exhibition, described as

almost surrealist oil paintings explicitly articulating feelings such as sadness, fear, a need for escape, bemusement, and even more disconcerting, the vapid glare of shock or even possession.

Chinese lifehack website

For Chinese folks experiencing information overload, there is lifebang -- a Chinese lifehacking site that contains mostly translations of productivity and Getting Things Done literature, such as Networking for People who Hate Networking or Ten More Ways to Create a Breakthrough in Your Life (from lifehack.org).