Virtual China

taking karaoke online: singing cute songs in China

If you like Chinese teens singing online, or if you just want to see what a lot of young women seem to be using the Internet for in China, you'll want to check out Mingming1986's YouTube channel. It makes sense, of course, given the Chinese love for karaoke. 

Mingming86 is a Hong Kong video collector who specializes in webcam karaoke by Chinese young women, mostly with enormous eyes and girlish voices.  She has over 3,000 subscribers and has uploaded almost 800 videos. Mingming86 also has some video collages of still photos of similar looking girls set to music, and a random smattering of humorous videos from the mainland and Japan.  It looks like she's pulling these off of random Chinese websites, since she has a note that says: If you see yourself in any of these, let me know and I'll delete it immediately!  Here's a typical one titled Chinese girl [Hebei girl - Kungfu (with eyes that pull you in)]:

Mingming86 has hundreds of these things, with girls identified sometimes by name and mostly by region.  Here's a "Gansu girl."

video chatting: foreign girls and chinese boys

OK.  This is just...where things are going.  Ten minutes of nasty American pop music, teenage hormones, voyeurism, and sheer curiosity, raging in broken English.  From an Internet cafe in China to a bedroom in some (I'm guessing) Eastern European country.  "You make me vidio/I kill you" and "I have this photo in my home. You give me."  They make plans to talk on 56.com.  Where does the music come from?  How do they know each other?

Foreign girl VS China boys (Online Communication:QQ)

chinese/english youth street culture mag

My colleague Jason Tester found this on CoolHunting.com: it's called Rack Magazine.  It appears to be going for a young male audience and has a half-dressed woman kneeling down and...looking into an open oven (an oven! very "chinese street")...on the homepage.  Ａdidas is a prominent advertiser, but aside from that there's no sign of who's behind it.  Clearly I'm not the demographic they're aiming for, but what's with the different English opening pitch and the Chinese opening pitch? Here's the English:

WANT TO KNOW WHAT'S COOKING IN ASIA?/THEN OPEN YOUR EYES AND FEAST ON RACK/ FOR THE LATEST IN STREET CULTURE, FASHION,/ CULTURE, DESIGN, MUSIC, GRAFFITI, AND GENERAL MAYHEM/BILINGUAL/HOT/FITS RIGHT INTO YOUR BACK POCKET SO YOU CAN/EASILY TAKE IT HOME AND STARE AT IT FOR AS/LONG AS YOU WANT.../EVERYTHING A RACK SHOULD BE.../ASIA.THE WORLD.THE RACK

And here's the Chinese, translated:

RACK IS A CHINESE-ENGLISH BILINGUAL MAGAZINE COVERING GLOBAL STREET CULTURE, WITH AN EMPHASIS ON ASIAN-INFLUENCED YOUTH CULTURE. RACK IS THE ONLY MAGAZINE THAT CAN FIT IN YOUR JEANS' BACK POCKET OR IN AN LV BAG. SURVEYS HAVE SHOWN THAT ANY OBJECT THAT FITS IN A POCKET IS A GOOD THING. CHINESE BROTHERS SHOULD PAY SPECIAL ATTENTION, YOUR HANDS ARE TO BE USED FOR CARRYING YOUR GIRLFRIEND'S LV BAG.

huh? If it's all about chinese men, what's with the focus on the LV bag?

The first issue features a piece on a new kind of street funk from the Brazilian favelas (it will be interesting to see what the "asian influence" is); an interview with fashion photographer Klaus Thymann; an article on V-Nutz, a Shanghai hiphop producer; and the guy below, a TCM doctor who walks around all day with pearl-decorated needles in his face. 

Uncertain Reality, Uncertain virtuality:Cao Fei

Here is the impressive Second Life documentary by China Tracy, an 29 year-old alternative female artist, from Guangzhou, China, who was also invited by iCommons to give a lecture on iSummit this year in June. To watch the whole film, please check here.  You could also find this documentary on YouTube and many other websites. 

She runs a blog by the name of China Tracy's Second Life Blog, while she writes a Real First Life blog named Cao Fei's Blog. For more on her SL life, there's an interview with her in English at New World Notes. Besides spending time living a Second Life in a virtual World, she pays attention to the Real world as well.

Here's an interview (in Chinese) with her about some of her work, which was recently included in Yunnan New Film Series. In this interview, she discusses the fact that almost all of the directors taking part in this film series project are women, and most of them don't have much experience in making films. Maybe it's a signature of the revolution of new Chinese film and art period under the background of Creative Commons?

political sustainability of Chinese inequality

A very smart, balanced, readable report, "How Much Inequality can China Stand?" has just been issued by Nick Young at China Development Brief.  The report relies on Chinese scholarly and government data to give a succinct summary of some of the key areas of inequality in China today: gender, income (including intra-rural inequality), access to basic services and social protections such as education and health care, exposure to "externalities" such as the effects of urban congestion and pollution, environment and proximity to pollution, and land use deals. 

The report argues that market forces are unlikely to create greater income convergence in the short-term, that state involvement is necessary and that it does exist:

...the predominantly urban NGOs that have emerged over the last decade, the “public intellectuals” who have voiced their concerns and the more adventurous media that have reported those concerns, by no means constitute a coordinated, united or oppositional force. There are, to be sure, some angry individuals who denounce abuses in ways that invite confrontation with the authorities.  But the characteristic form of civil society advocacy in China is to call on government leaders to “pay more attention” to this or that social issue, to “hear the voice” of  this or that social group, and/or to consult more extensively with NGOs, intellectuals, and the general public....The central government has recently introduced a number of social, economic and fiscal policy measures to alleviate rural hardship. It is too soon to judge the effect of these palliatives but they do at least appear designed to address what was, by the turn of the century, beginning to look like a crisis in the countryside.

BBS girls: mainstream voyeurism

Yesterday I came across a Tianya BBS forum called Tianya Myself 天涯真我 (Roland Soong of ESWN translated it as True Self Community Forum...I'm just using the Chinglish version from the website itself). It's the place where February Girl first posted her photos, and I guess what I'm writing about here is just the latest version of that: pretty girls posting pictures of themselves and having what seem to me fairly odd conversations with what appear to be strange men. Voyeurism in Virtual China. [Update: see ESWN recent translation of a fascinating article on the new profession of "Internet Promoter"--creating and promoting Internet stars).

"Chaseaini" is the post with the longest thread at the moment.  Her Tianya profile says she's a 21 year old college student in Fujian province.  On Jan. 3 she posted her first photo under the title "My first time posting photos, hehe." It was a kind of Chinese Britney Spears-esque/anime schoolgirl picture.

Since then there have been almost 6500 comments (including her own) and over 124,000 page hits.  It's still going strong.  It reads something like this:

Beautiful! Do you have any more?

Chaseaini: I hope everyone will use civilized language, otherwise, will the BBS moderator please delete them.

MM [meimei/little sister], I'm waiting, keep going.
What a beauty!
I've been on Tianya for 5 years and this is the first time I've ever commented on a post. 
Keep posting photos!
Basically, as long as you're female, after PhotoShop every one is a beauty.
Where is she? I still want to see more!
Where do you live in Xiamen? I can be there in half an hour!
She's really extraordinary!
I've been on Tianya Myself a long time, but this is the first time my heart has been moved.
You could kill a man with these photos.
After coming to Tianya, I'm not going to porn sites anymore.  The girls here are much prettier!

Over the next few days Chaseaini reveals a bit more about herself: she is not studying at Xiamen University, she's into writing, she likes to write essays and poetry, she'd like to get published and wonders if anyone has any suggestions.  At this point you start to wonder?  Is it written by some Tianya editor to hook in male readers?  It just sounds a bit too much.  Then she actually starts posting some poems.  Readers discuss what kind of role she would play if she went into acting. Several weeks and 6,000 comments later, Chaseaini writes:

Before when I posted my photos I was kind of naive, and just posted them for myself. Now I feel I'm posting them for my "you."

Just yesterday a new post appeared, posted by a girl called "Land of Happiness," followed by her QQ number and titled "I'm a 17 year old student. Photos inside. Please evaluate."

The first comments were very direct: "More angles. Full body. No PS. No heavy make-up."

online, films not "underground"

No filters for the word "underground 地下," apparently, in virtual China.  A Baidu search for "underground films" 地下电影, for instance, reveals Chinese language pages such as Underground Film Forum, a partial list of Chinese underground films from Xici Hutong (which includes Zhang Yimou's "To Live", strangely), a review of selected underground Chinese films, and a Baidu Knows question: "what is underground film?" with the following quite direct answer:

Underground film refers to films that have not gone through state censorship, cannot be publicly screened inside China, and can only be shown at film schools or "underground" sites such as bars.  

One underground film, Green Hat《绿帽子》, written and directed by Liu Fendou, offers an example of how the Internet provides a platform for the dissemination of materials that are not officially sanctioned and could become widely known in no other way. Green Hat won multiple awards at foreign film festivals, but only a fraction of Chinese film-watchers would have been paying attention to that. Today, Green Hat is available for download online, has multiple online reviews on sites like Douban and blogs, and even has a Baidu Post forum where readers openly discuss "green hat" situations (when a woman is cheating on a man), and the film itself. Even without any official media reviews or marketing, films like Green Hat can flourish because of online piracy and online word-of-mouth buzz.   

Chinese adolescent humor: "Her First Time" video clip

What are Chinese video viewers watching?  "Her First Time" 她第一次做鸡 can currently be found on Youtube-esque sites across Virtual China.  Since being posted on Nov. 12 it's been viewed over 444,444 times on Mofile, one of the top sites, for instance.     

It opens with a young couple and a voice-over in a high-pitched operatic style:

Young people today, love is sweet
but buying a house is beyond their reach
educating their child, beyond their reach
caring for elders, beyond their reach
buying a car, beyond their reach

The young couple is visited by a magic "artist" who shows them the way to get rich: 做鸡, which in spoken Mandarin Chinese sounds like "be a prostitute."  The young man suggests that his girlfriend do it, and she reluctantly agrees.  Together they visit the magical artist, who invites her into his room, leaving her boyfriend in the waiting room.  "Oh my god," we hear from behind the door (in English and in Chinese, by the way).  The boyfriend finally can't take it anymore so he batters away at the door, and when he finally gets in he finds...you'll have to see for yourself.  It's a pun that you knew was coming. 

It says the clip was made by the Video Spoof Studio 影视恶搞工作室 for 500 yuan (about $80).  However, a Baidu search for the Studio takes you to the VideoDVNet, a website run by the Video Spoof Studio, but on which I can't locate "Her First Time". 

Renmin University Graduates

ESWN reports on a set of controversial photographs, involving a group of female RenMin Univeristy Graduates, that made their way onto the internet.

Netizen's initial clamor: "Whores!"

Southern Metropolis Daily's rebuttal: "Nobody should criticize these female students who are brave enough to set themselves free."

My take: "Looks like they're having fun, whatever."

Link to ESWN post.

Chinese blogging beauty contest: 美女博客大赛

The confluence of girls and blogs, a kind of Chinese Idol/blogger beauty pageant, took place April 13- May 13th in Beijing.  Sponsored by China's largest blogsite, Bokee 博客网, the girls were judged on number of votes they received online, the quality (creativity, originality) of their blog posts, blog traffic and blog comments.  Sounds reasonable.  The top 20 contestants were then brought to Beijing to receive two days of make-overs, photos shoots, and etiquette classes.  In the final staged, live competition they were somehow scored on appearance, body (evening wear, swimwear? I don't know) and talent. 

The overall winner, a student at Beijing University's eMBA program, took home 20,000 RMB (~ US $2500); Most Sexy, Most Popular, Most Fashionable, and Most Talented (click on the blue links to see their blogs) got 10,000 RMB each.

Update: I couldn't resist: photos of the live competition itself can be found on Miss Most Fashionable, Zhou Yuxing's blog, here (can't find a permalink; click on the 5/17 post).

According to 中国文化网 Chinaculture.org, the contest garnered over 3 million votes. 

Via a BBS post on Chinaren.com, where you can find even more photos of the lovelies on the day of the contest.